Total pages in book: 204
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
As well as the way I wanted the cook dead and how I killed that officer.
With my vengeance.
It was in the visions that I saw with such clarity as I looked down the lane of the ruins.
It was especially in the nightmares that have stalked my sleep.
It has been with me all along, driving my urgent need to keep my face covered … so that those around me, who were born and matured and died in the normal course, wouldn’t notice that there was an immortal in their midst, stashed in the pub of their little village, overseen by generations of the same family until the night came when fate was a tide that could be dammed up no longer.
And here and now, the beast of truth within me is released, no more mental wall to hold it in. With horror, I realize that I’ve had it wrong all along.
Hide.
That voice, which I have always minded, to the point where for years and years I have covered my face and kept to myself in spite of my loneliness, wasn’t warning me about other people.
It was keeping me away from him, from this face that emerges out of the black sand, the contamination.
That voice is not mine. It is my mother, the Savior, who has spoken to me.
And she’s commanding me to stay away from he who she imprisoned within the Fulcrum she created … from the other half of me, the half that has always simmered below my surface, powerful, vengeful, and angry.
The Dark King.
The source of all evil, the commander of demons, the scourge who seeks to be free, once again.
Who we must battle to survive.
My … father.
Eighty-Seven
The Beginning and the End, at Once.
The rest of the trip is a blur. I do what I can to respond to Merc in a way that’s appropriate, but he’s not stupid. He knows I’m somewhere far off from him, even as I travel in his wake. Except I cannot speak any of this to him. The implications are too epic and awful, and maybe he wouldn’t believe me.
I know I didn’t. I know I still try to mount pathetic, hedging excuses.
But now I know the why of me, and having seen the truth, who I am cannot be buried in my mind once more.
So caught up in my own head am I that I fail to notice that the landscape is becoming familiar, that we’re entering the trees I grew up with, and passing by the plants I foraged for, and crossing the streams I visited back when only my daily life was complicated, not all of Anathos and my legacy, too.
What finally brings me back and grounds me in the present, as the afternoon light tilts well toward the horizon, is the smell of burning wood.
It’s subtle at first, but gathers increasing saturation, until the insides of my nostrils tingle and I sneeze. Through my relentless, crushing introspection, a warning registers, but it’s not before I feel wrapped in the stench that I realize there’s only one thing that could be causing this.
I glance around in a frantic twist, and recognize our precise location.
“Stay sharp,” Merc mutters. “There’s something wrong—”
And that’s when the trees part and the horror is presented.
My village has been burned to the ground.
I release a primal scream and heel Lavante forward, as if I could do anything, as if it weren’t far, far too late.
Plumes of gray and black smoke rise out of the protective wall, as if the whole of it is a chimney. The bridge is down, but even the great planks of that crossover have been cindered, and indeed, dead, bloated balas, boiled by the heat, float on the fetid surface of the moat, which is much, much lower than it has ever been.
A stew cooked down by an unholy stove.
Lavante balks at my attempt to get him to go across the bridge, so the next thing I know, I’m dismounting and leaving him there, without regard to whether he’ll run off or where Merc is. I stumble down the planks, jumping from solid part to solid, while keeping my eyes on what’s ahead.
Ashes. Ruins. Cinders still smoking.
Bodies.
As I break out into the village proper, I pass the two large SP symbols that have been painted in blood on either side of the archway, and skid to a halt in front of the Gauntlet. The pub and lodging house is a burned-out shell, and still I step into the charred remains, reconstructing out of the destruction what once was, overlaying the memories of the bar and its crabby tender, and the working girls, and Mr. Lewis holding court at his table up by the door.
I even remember how it stood just as I left, the chairs upturned as I was searched for, Mr. Lewis sitting with a satchel and a box, untouched ale at his elbow and a lantern in front of his drawn, pudgy face.