Into the Untamed Lands: Book Three of The Last Eternal by Jacob Peppers

Author:Jacob Peppers [Peppers, Jacob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-12-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

The wanderer walked in darkness.

The night was near complete, the moon only a tiny sliver in the sky, its light weak and pale and ineffectual and scant little of it reached him beneath the thick canopy of the trees of the Untamed Lands.

It was a darkness so thick he could almost feel it, so thick it almost had weight, as if, as he walked, he pushed against a midnight curtain hanging over the world itself. Yet the wanderer felt more at home here than he had when speaking to the villagers of Alhs, the flames of their campfires so close.

True, there were countless dangers in the Untamed Lands, many of which his tutors had taught him about and many more that even they had never experienced, yet here, at least, he needed only to worry about himself. And while it might have been dark, the Rituals had left the wanderer with eyes better than a normal man’s. Not so that he might see in the darkness as well as some animals, but closer to it than any mortal man might, and he could see enough to give the shadows around him shape, to pierce some small bit of that veil of darkness.

So he made use of his heightened sight, as well as his other heightened senses, as he walked. First, he traveled farther south, past the gap they had cut in the undergrowth, hoping to find some way around the Whisperer’s territory, but he was quickly disappointed. For one moment he was walking through the forest and the next he nearly stepped into a great chasm, a giant rift in the ground that was a hundred feet across at the least. The wanderer stared at it in shocked surprise. He looked both ways and saw that the giant chasm extended as far as his heightened sight could see and beyond it to the east and west. No, he decided, there will be no going this way. Cursing, he turned around and made his way farther north, again passing the rent in the undergrowth and then, in time, the hill on which the villagers camped, as he made his way in the direction of the village of Alhs.

He walked down the small trail they had used as they’d journeyed here, picking places at random and pushing his way through the undergrowth, thinking each time as he walked that he had finally found the outside edge of the Whisperer’s influence, but each time being disappointed as the feminine voices began to murmur in his mind, and he was forced to return to the road once more.

After two hours at it he was covered in brambles and thorns, sporting dozens of scrapes and cuts along his arms and chest, proof of his efforts in pushing through the thick snarling undergrowth, and with nothing else to show for it. He had just started down the path again, following the ruts left by the wagons from when he and the villagers of Alhs had come this way, when his eyes alighted on something, and he froze.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.