Blazing by Nancey Cummings

Author:Nancey Cummings [Cummings, Nancey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

Ertale

Watching Lucie proved more challenging than Ertale had anticipated. His attention had been divided between her taking apart her broken box, and Sarsen and Asche bickering. Sarsen wanted to sift through the heartstones and separate the helplessly damaged stones from the repairable and the intact ones.

The heartstones on the bottom of the pile were the first tossed into the vault. They landed hard on the stone floor, cracking with tiny fissures. As more stones were added, the combined weight crushed the most damaged stones.

Those valos were lost.

Other heartstones had cracks and might be repaired. Sarsen wanted them placed in a tray designed to prevent movement. Asche constructed the trays easily, but his brothers disagreed on how to reach the heartstones at the bottom without disturbing or damaging the stones on top.

Asche wanted to sort from the top down.

Sarsen insisted the ones on the bottom were the most critical and likely to die entirely if they wasted time tending to perfecting intact heartstones.

They were both correct, but no one asked Ertale his opinion.

When he left the vault, Lucie had wandered off. Again. She seemed incapable of staying in one place for long, always moving, always thinking.

He liked it. She was alive in a way he had not felt in a millennia. She made him feel alive when he held her in his arms.

Her scent was easy to track; cool water and grassy green banks of a river. She didn’t stray far, only going to the Plaza of the Creators. Lucie, however, was not alone.

The foul stench of ferix polluted the air, along with an unknown element, but it was the ferix that concerned him. Unnatural creatures, ferix were formed when toxic runoff from the forge mingled with the magma. Its form changed, based solely on whatever poor creature plunged into the magma last. Normally small creatures, they lumbered out of the toxic slurry of their creation, hungering despite not being truly alive or even having a stomach. Always hungry.

Ferix were kin to the valos in the broadest sense. They were both born in a toxic soup, but only the valos retained their sense of self. The ferix were near mindless brutes.

And one of those brutes prowled after Lucie.

Ferix hunted in packs which meant the others were close. He could handle two without trouble but more and he would not be able to defend Lucie and defeat them. He needed assistance. He needed to call out to his brothers.

The ferix closest to Lucie caught her attention. It imitated her bipedal posture. He knew this ploy. With Lucie distracted, the rest of the pack would attack.

Frustration welled within him. After a thousand wasted years, he had a bond mate. He could not lose her. He would not be alone. Never again. His head tipped back, and the force of his will tore sound from his useless throat for the first time in countless seasons. A great bellow echoed off the walls of the volcano.

Ertale stomped his foot, cracking the paving stones, and propelled himself forward.

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