Orphan: Book One: Chronicles of the Fall by Lee Ramsay

Author:Lee Ramsay [Ramsay, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, Magical Realism, epic fantasy, dark fantasy, realism, grimdark, coming of age, Adult, Epic, adult fantasy
Publisher: Lee Ramsay Publishing
Published: 2021-06-06T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 37

Darkness enfolded Sathra like a living thing, wrapping so closely that she struggled for breath as she progressed down a narrow, sloping hall. Her candle did little to illuminate her path; the smothering blackness threatened to snuff the feeble light and leave her without its guidance in avoiding a collision with the walls. Overhead, the mountain's weight pressed down and added to the claustrophobic sensation of being crushed within the bowels of the earth.

Everything about the passage to Ankara’s laboratory was loathsome to the young noblewoman. Condensed moisture glittered with reflected light, creating the impression that the walls were alive and breathing. In a way, the notion was accurate. Behind the dressed stones of the corridor’s walls, floor, and ceiling, set deep within the living rock of the mountain, lived wards summoned into being by the grand duchess. Ancient and complex, the magical constructs possessed a malevolent, low intelligence similar to a starving hunting hound – and she was convinced they did not like her.

Whenever her duties brought her to the buried network of chambers in which the grand duchess kept her greatest secrets and worked her most potent enchantments, Sathra was certain the living wards reveled in severing her from the weave of magic. She was not alone in this; her kinswoman had admitted that the defensive enchantments had strengthened over time and that she, too, was deprived of her ability to access the weave. Where the older sorceress delighted in such a development, the younger loathed the sensation of vulnerability she had not experienced since she was a girl of twelve.

It was not that the energies flowing from the world around her were absent. The wards prevented a nec’divinos – an ancient word for those born with the gift of magic – from manipulating the filaments of power. Ankara had designed the passage as a means of defense against anyone who tried to access her laboratory. Even she was unable to use magic while in the field generated by the construct.

Sathra hurried toward the door at the hallway’s end, a gray hornbeam barricade with no handle. She rested her palm on the wood and waited for the runic structure set into the panels to recognize her. A sigh of relief flowed past her lips as she slipped through the door’s widening gap, and her body reconnected to the weave of magic. To her mind, the sensation was as sweet as the first lungful of air after submerging in a cold lake.

The young noblewoman spared the room little more than a glance. The laboratory’s foyer had been furnished as a study; elegant furniture filled the chamber, and soft rugs covered the smoothed stone floor. Along the walls behind the desk dominating the center of the room were bookcases filled with arcane tomes and curios Ankara had gathered through her long life. A cold chill enough to freeze the marrow in her bones emanated from the night blue grimoires filling one bookcase; this was contrasted by smothering heat radiating from black-bound spellbooks lining the shelves of another.

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