Depths of Madness - Book 1 by Eric Scott de Bie

Author:Eric Scott de Bie [Unknown]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast

She knew she was mad to show spine to a sharn. But Twilight was simply too tired and heartbroken—too worn—to care. She struggled onto one knee, looked it in the eye—an eye, anyway— and said, in a tone that would brook no argument, "What have you done with my friends?"

Silence reigned in the chamber.

One warm afternoon, Lilten had told her a legend of a sharn who turned a cabal of mighty sorcerers to toadstools and fed them to a gibbering mound—which it had summoned with a gesture much like what mortals use to stifle a sneeze. This was simply for pausing, confused, when the sharn asked for goblin pelt tea. Then it annihilated an unseen servant that delivered the noxious brew, on the grounds that it tasted bad.

In short, questioning a sharn was madness.

The sharn laughed. Rather, its central head laughed. The head on the right muttered homicidal promises in a long forgotten language Twilight only understood with the talisman. The third serenaded her with an ode to a desert posy in some ancient dialect of Elvish that predated the Crown Wars.

"Very well," it said. "Prisonerssss."

"Release them," she said, then quickly amended it to, "such I desire. Name—"

The sharn just laughed. "You dessssire, detesssst, dessserve nothing!"

The declaration rippled through the air, and the golden ooze caked on the ceiling hissed with a thousand spells and memories flooding through it.

Twilight found herself prostrate on the ground. Betrayal lay beneath paralyzed fingers. "Test me, then," she said.

The sharn did not pause, as though it expected this, and immediately shouted at her again, this time in a sort of half-mad, half-ordered poem. "Child of liessss, liar in love, lover of children," the sham's three heads said, each beginning at the last's final word, eerily like a roundsong. "Do you know your mother, father, daughter?"

"My lord Sharn, this is not what I ask," Twilight said, rising to her feet.

For the first time, Ruukthalmuramaxamin turned all of its eyes upon the shadowdancer, and Twilight sank to her knees with a cry. Her head burst into flame within and she screamed, pressing her palms to her temples. This wasn't the mind-scream. It was reading her thoughts, tearing deep down into her memories. It took all her willpower not to tear out her own eyes to get at the agony or crush her own skull, much less resist. Tears poured down her face and she whimpered. She could do nothing else.

"He emptiessss you firsssst and fillssss you after," Ruuk continued unabated. "Chokessss with blood and ssssoakssss with laughter, but give him up you will, leading him to the kill."

"My lord, I do not under—" Her head felt as though it would rip itself free if her hands didn't tear it off first.

"Are the applessss in sssseasssson? Issss your essssence broken, assss is mine? Hassss the inquissssitor come? Where issss the ssssword that wassss sssstolen, the life it took, the life it killed, the life it definessss?"

"My lor—"

"For whom would you fall, child? Who would feel the blade

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