Dusk - Sneak Peek

Violet lightning streaked down from the dark, cloudless sky, surging forth from the magical weave that surrounded the world; bringing its power into view of even the weakest of the Elonesti Dominion’s citizens. Normally invisible and inaccessible to most, it swelled into the visible spectrum like a glowing net made of lightning, stretching across the sky to the horizon. The display was brief, but frightening, and sent all manner of draconic creature fleeing for cover as far away from the point of impact as they could manage.

The magic descended upon the outstretched bone palm of a single figure, standing on the roof of a four story building at the northern edge of Nokara. Of all the beings Queen Mordessa could have selected to send north to the Talaani Empire, Lord Whun was the most terrifying to behold. He was completely aware of how his appearance made others feel, and had no qualms about leaning into that persona and leveraging it for his own purposes; it was an image he’d carefully curated, after all. He often had no need to show his true power, or cast any spells beyond simple conveniences. However, it was far beyond time to take action, and he was done waiting.

As he pulled the power he needed from the weave, the spectacle of his first spell in their presence had sent the citizens of Nokara fleeing in terror, scurrying through the streets below. Their flight suited him just fine. He was not concerned with their lives, or their safety, but he also bore them no ill will. They were inconsequential to his plans, but their absence would make his task easier to accomplish.

The white robes of the Ambassador of Baan’Sholaria would no longer suffice. In order to don his own robes, he had to summon the power to rip a hole in the fabric of reality and access the pocket dimension in which he’d stored them before accepting the Queen’s assignment. As the power coalesced in his palm, he let his robes slide from his shoulders; little bits of silver and gold that adorned them clanking onto the slate tiles below his feet. His black skeleton glistened in the light of Ayrelon’s two nighttime moons, Provoss and Aygos. The blue, purple and black runes etched into, and dancing across the surface of, his bones seemed to spring to life, as if thriving in the darkness that surrounded him.

A black heart hung suspended from rusted barbed wire at the center of his ribcage, bursting into purple flame as fresh air kissed its surface. He’d kept himself covered for too long, and decided in that instant that he’d never confine himself for their benefit again. He looked down at his ineffective legs, rendered useless long before he could remember. They hung motionless beneath his exposed hip bone, slightly akilter, with his feet curled feebly beneath them. He could have repaired himself at any time, had he chosen. However, that wouldn’t have had the same visual impact as permanently levitating three feet above the floor, and floating from place to place in horrifying silence. Had his lower jaw still been attached, he would have smiled at the thought.

Still holding the power in his right hand, he extended his left palm toward the crumpled pile of robes on the floor and willed his jaw to return to him. Though he’d long ago chosen to keep his jaw concealed within hidden pockets, for the benefit of his counterparts among the Talaani, he saw no need to persist the ruse. The blackened jawbone burned through the cloth robes, floated upward, and clanked into his outstretched hand with an eerie echo, the smell of burnt linen filling the air in its wake.

Small bits of rusted barbed wire dangled from the two ends of the jaw, identical to the wires that held his black heart in place. Smiling to himself in his mind, he reached up and hooked the wire over his clavicles, then willed them to twist into place and hold fast, allowing the jaw to hang, teeth outward, at the top of his chest.

Lord Whun stretched his right arm to the side and pushed the violet powers into the air, spreading them outward in a slow spiral until the magical force became a ring encircling a black void. A crackling filled the air, the sound of cavern winds echoing far in the distance, calling out to him from beyond the mortal world. Without looking, he reached into the void and retrieved a crown rimmed with tall iron spikes, with an ornate embellishment on its front. As he placed the crown onto his head, the gray stone at the center of the adornment cracked and slid open like a pair of lids, revealing a large eye slightly obscured by a swirling purple haze. The eye blinked twice, sending waves of power rippling through Whun’s head, neck and upper chest. He had missed the enhanced vision the crown granted much more than he’d thought. As ultraviolet, infrared and magical vision filled his sight, he questioned his past self’s decision to hide the crown.

‘No more hiding,’ he thought determinedly.

He reached into the void one more time and retrieved his ancient robe. Made from black dragon skin, and adorned with black scale pauldrons and dragon tooth spikes, it was sure to raise the ire of the Talaanians. Their draconic overlords had long since vanished, and though he could not remember the war, he was certain to be accused of participating in their slaughter; an accusation he was confident was accurate.

Purple and black runes sprang to life across the robe’s surface as he slipped his arms into the houppelande-style sleeves, and settled the inner shoulder pads over top his old joints. He reveled in the feeling as eons-old enchantments sprang to life at his touch, filling him with vigor, and making him far stronger and more durable than his skeletal enhancements alone could accomplish.

‘Never again,’ he decided as the power washed over him.

As he finished donning his robe, leaving the top half open to expose his heart and jaw, the void closed, and the sound of its presence blinked out of existence. It was time to reveal what the Talaani Empire was hiding. They’d carefully controlled what he saw, where he went, and who he met for decades. He had allowed them to as part of the game he’d been asked to play; determine their strength, and find out what they were hiding without raising their suspicions, or reigniting the war. Despite their best efforts, he’d discovered enough to know that one of their most protected secrets, which moved between the Dominions on an impossibly erratic schedule, was at the center of Nokara inside the Temple of Noktrusgodhen.

He could sense the hundred year cycle repeating. His Queen always grew more suspicious of the Talaani Empire whenever the patterns emerged. It was the reason she’d sent him as an ambassador, and quelling her fears was his primary mission. Everything inside the Elonesti Dominion that he could attribute to her concerns seemed centralized on the elusive guest they harbored within their temple. It was time to act, and diplomacy was guaranteed to be fruitless. He would have to use force. The game was over. His ruse had ended.

The dark of the night seemed to swirl and ripple in his wake as he drifted forward, off the side of the building, and slowly descended upon a cloud of black magic toward the street. A dozen Skaar ran toward him, brandishing twelve-foot-long spears in their humanoid hands, and snarling from their lizard-like, horned heads through ferociously fanged maws. They raced across the ground on their four hind legs, their serpentine tails writhing in the air behind them angrily. Rising six foot tall, and stretching nearly thirteen feet from snout to tail, they were far larger and stronger than Lord Whun could hope to be.

As he descended before them, coming to rest three feet above the ground, he peered at their leader through his lifeless, hollow eyes and laughed in their minds through the enchantment on his detached lower jaw. ‘All this? For me? You shouldn’t have.’

He clenched his right fist in the air between them, grabbing hold of their skeletal structures with his magic. Several of them tried to move, to thrust their spears toward him and end his threat. Their muscles strained from the effort, flexing and swelling, tearing against the resistance from within as their joints refused to comply. With a wicked laugh that echoed through their minds, Whun thrust his hand open, causing their skeletons to shatter within them. The twelve draconic soldiers crumpled to the ground, most of them blacked out from shock, the rest writhing and hissing in agony.

Whun drifted over the horrid mass, continuing along his path without a care. He repeated the process twice more before reaching the temple, leaving three dozen or more Skaar all but dead on the road behind him. A gigantic stone dragon was perched atop the eighty foot tall, polished diorite building. Large columns descended from above, providing support at the corners for the great petrified dragon’s massive front talons. He had seen the building from afar, but the guard had always kept him from approaching it. Seeing it up close put the sheer size of the dragons of old into perspective.

Though made of stone, the creature was as imposing as anything he could imagine. Standing upright on its fore and hind legs, its massive body and elongated neck held its head at an impressive sixty feet above its talons. Its wings were folded back, and its tail was coiled around its feet, so their exact dimensions were hard to deduce from his vantage point, but it appeared as if Noktrusgodhen had been over one hundred-twenty feet long, with a wingspan just as impressive.

‘It is no wonder Mordessa fears their return,’ he mused. He couldn’t remember the war Mordessa often spoke of when they met. Some unknown event had taken the whole world’s memories hundreds of years prior. It was such a significant anomaly to the eternal citizens of Dusk, they marked the years of their calendar with its occurrence as the starting point of all their recorded history. He’d spent most of his free time the past several hundred years seeking a solution to their great memory problem, only to find out after his arrival in the Talaani Empire that the affliction wasn’t isolated to only their Kingdom.

He knew the Queen was being truthful when she spoke of an ancient war; just as he trusted her when she told him he’d been a part of it. Even still, he could not remember the war, which meant it had concluded before their calendar began. As powerful as he was, he couldn’t fathom what it took to fight a nation such as the Talaani, when creatures such as the stone dragon looming above him filled the skies.

Whun had fallen victim to the true enemy of his people. Time. With so much at their disposal, it was quite common for them to get lost in thought without warning. He had allowed himself to be distracted by the statue of his Kingdom’s ancient enemy, and during that distraction, two dozen Skalaani guards had spilled into the courtyard and surrounded him. Unlike their six-limbed Skaar counterparts, the Skalaani were bipedal, could reach up to nine feet in height, had broad shoulders, and were noticeably muscular. Their tails were shorter than a Skaar’s, but deadly none-the-less. The only traits they shared were their lizard-like heads with a sharply fanged maw, two eyes facing forward, two eyes facing sideways, and the scaled, horned and spiked hide that covered their bodies. The ones charging toward him wore scale armor painted red, and brandished large serrated blades alongside blackened tower shields.

He didn’t recognize them as members of the Elonesti Dominion, which prided itself on its magical prowess and intellectual pursuits. If he was correct, they were Guardians from the Fiirnasi Dominion, likely sent to protect whatever, or whomever, was hiding inside the temple. He’d learned a great deal about each Dominion’s combat capabilities, and in those learnings he’d come to question one simple, but critical detail about Fiirnasi Guardians. They supposedly were chosen based on their magical resistance, and it was claimed they were immune to any attack spells the Elonesti magi could produce.

Whun was not an Elonesti magi, and he was happy to have an opportunity to put their legend to the test.

He pushed himself higher into the air on his cloud of black magic, rising twenty feet above his opponents; just in time for several to charge through the space he’d been occupying, the tips of their swords narrowly missing the trailing edge of his robe. He reached out both hands and clenched them, attempting to latch onto the Guardians’ skeletons as he’d done with the Skaar.

His spell would not take hold.

Frustrated, he called down purple lightning from the sky and covered the courtyard in its destructive power. When the blinding light faded, and his normal vision could catch sight of the ground below, he saw the leader of the Guardians cackling back at him defiantly, steam hissing across the surface of the Skalaani warriors’ scales and weaponry.

Angered, Whun turned his focus to the equipment the warriors carried. He took hold of the scale armor, swords and shields with his mind and drew another pulse of energy from the weave. A wave of purple smoke rolled off of him, gathering on the surface of their weapons and armor, increasing their mass and crushing the Skalaani into the ground. As he hovered above them and held them in place, he reached down his right hand and swirled it through the air toward the courtyard. The limestone began to crack, falling away into a black void that was forming beneath them. The Skalaani panicked, frantically fighting to break free of his magical grip, and avoid tumbling into the nothingness below.

Just as his spell was nearly complete, a sudden gust of wind crashed into him from behind, and a pair of large talons ripped him from the sky. Purple energy sprang to life at the bidding of his robe’s enchantments, shielding him from the impact of his attacker’s massive claws and the ground below as it cast his shielded body from its grasp.

He floated back into the air, resuming his normal three-foot levitation, and looked for his new assailant. A Wyvern dropped to its talons at the center of the courtyard before him, its sixty foot wingspan blotting out all light from the moons and stars. It craned its fifteen foot neck and brought its maw within inches of Whun’s chest, then issued a deep, resonating growl that shook the wall behind him.

‘You aren’t supposed to exist,’ thought Whun, pushing his words into the creature’s mind.

Instead of the fear the creature expected to smell, it could sense Whun’s sheer determination washing over it like an icy chill when his thoughts entered its mind. It reared back almost instantly, preparing to strike Whun’s chest and prevent him from casting whatever horrid spell he planned to use next, despite the searing pain that his robe’s magic shielding would likely cause.

“Wait!” came a call from a human voice near the temple.

It was an older voice, and one Whun recognized. He turned to face its source as the wyvern pulled back, allowing the man to approach. ‘You?’

“Not like this. There is a better way!” said the man, coming between Whun and the wyvern, his hands extended protectively.

Whun decided to give the man a chance to speak, relaxed the tension in his shoulders, and drifted a few feet back from his wyvern opponent.

‘Is she listening?’ thought the man, hoping Whun would hear.

‘Not at present. Mordessa knows nothing of this event,’ answered Whun.

‘Block her, so we might speak freely. Let me show you what we’ve been hiding, and why. It will all make sense!’ offered the man.

Whun peered back with his lifeless eyes and gave pause, letting it be clear that he was hesitant to comply.

‘The Noktulians have a way of restoring your memories. Isn’t that what you want? Your greatest wish? Let them help you, and you’ll know the truth of the war, and what your Queen has done. After that, if you still seek to destroy the Talaani, it’s clear none here could stand against you. Though the great Tuldaxx means well, she has never fought a creature as powerful the great Lord Whun. Give us a chance to show you the truth. That is all that I ask,’ thought the man.

Whun nodded and blocked Queen Mordessa’s view of them with a single thought. He floated across the courtyard, past the Wyvern that shouldn’t exist, beyond the frightened Fiirnasi Guardians, and followed the man who should have been dead into the temple, intent on learning the Talaani Empire’s greatest secret.