Path of Darkness (Memories of Madness Book 1) by C.M. Lackner

Author:C.M. Lackner [Lackner, C.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

It did not take long for the Celebels to show once she crossed the river Mor and triggered the ward. They burst out from the foliage around the road, drawing from their sources. Their ambush startled her, and she drew from her source, ready to destroy them.

“Hold!” shouted one man, raising a fist. “Release sources.”

The others reluctantly released their sources. Aelith followed suit, eyeing them carefully.

“Stranger, what brings you here?” asked the man who had to be their leader.

“Are you the Celebels?”

“We are.”

“I’ve been looking for you. I hear this is a safe place for sorcerers,” Aelith said, trying to look relieved and give the impression of someone who had been fleeing pursuit for weeks.

“Arcanists,” he corrected. “Be welcome here, sister. Khol Morrun is a safe shelter for our kind. You won’t have to run any longer. I’m terribly sorry for the fright we gave you.”

“I understand your need for caution.” Couldn’t they tell she was an arcanist?

He turned and gestured at one of his men. “Marvot! Escort the lady here to the mountain. Tell Corrian we have a newcomer.”

A man covered in freckles came forward. “Yes sir,” he said, his head bobbing. “Right away, sir.” He paused, ran back into the foliage and came out with his horse minutes later.

They rode together towards Khol Morrun. The mountain’s peak loomed in the distance, piercing the clouds.

“Name’s Marvot,” her escort offered. “What’s yours?”

“Aelith,” she replied.

“You know, we don’t get many Shadowlanders here. None at all, matter of fact,” he said.

Was he suspicious or just trying to be friendly? She couldn’t tell. “I never travelled this far before. I was desperate and heard this was a safe place for sorcery.”

“Arcanist,” he corrected. “We aren’t sorcerers. This is a gift, not a curse.”

“It doesn’t feel that way,” she said.

“Not when everyone you’ve ever known is trying to kill you, it doesn’t,” he said. “But when you have a safe place to hone your powers, to feel the world shift and respond to your will, how can it be anything but a gift?”

The final stretch of road to the mountain was a wide, open field littered with ruins, hinting at Khol Morrun’s past as the seat of a Shadowlord. The same pervasive sense of unease she had encountered at Tharune persisted here as well, although it was far weaker. She understood that the unease came from the aetherial elements running through the ruins, but it still remained a mystery to her.

The mountain entrance was two massive doors the colour of alabaster. Two statues only slightly shorter than the doors flanked it. The statues had the heads of bulls but the bodies of men. She remembered that the Kratovians called them minotaurs.

Someone had woven complex wards into each of the minotaurs. Their full purpose eluded comprehension from a quick glance, but from what little she glimpsed, she understood that they would make the minotaurs move. A frightening thought.

Marvot didn’t spare the minotaurs so much as a glance and knocked on the doors. To her disappointment, a wicket door revealed itself and opened, rather than the massive gates.

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