Storm Front: Immortals Descending Book One by Iris Foxglove

Author:Iris Foxglove [Foxglove, Iris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Belladonna Press
Published: 2022-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

The camp was near a creek. Azaiah knew his sibling was there, could feel Ares’s influence like the hot wind coming off the fire. He could also feel the little spark in his awareness that told him Nyx was close, but as much as he wanted to see him, Azaiah instead sought out his sibling’s flame.

Ares was a ways away from the fire, watching soldiers play dice with their usual smile: fondness with a tinge of mania, the light turning their red-gold eyes the color of fresh blood. They waved at Azaiah, who wondered if any of the soldiers would notice him. But the men continued shouting and laughing and groaning over their game, and he was unseen as he went to sit by his sibling on the ground.

Thunder rumbled, and one of the soldiers at the fire glanced up but then shrugged and went back to the dice.

“Brother,” Ares said, pulling free the tie that kept their hair braided and letting the strands fell flame-like around their face. Their bright eyes seemed to look through Azaiah, to the cool, dark heart of him. “What troubles you?”

Azaiah sighed. Ares was not a kind god, not by any stretch of the imagination. They couldn’t be, not when their realm was strife … but they weren’t cruel, either. And Azaiah felt as close to them as Leviathan did to Avarice, the only one of them who had no name of his own. As Somnus had been to Pallas, before he’d lost her. They tended to move through the world in pairs, didn’t they? Chaos and Greed. Death and War. Dreams and Art. There had been more, once, Azaiah knew. Corrupted, perhaps, or gone beyond without choosing a successor. Immortality was not easy. Immortality with a purpose such as his, harder still.

“I am worried,” Azaiah said, lying on the ground, his head on his sibling’s thigh. He closed his eyes as Ares’s fingers, gentle though callused, carded through his hair, and he sighed. “I saw Leviathan, on a ship. He told me he’d locked away his empathy. It rained.”

These were disparate pieces of one picture, and Azaiah knew it, but he felt … tired, in a way he was not supposed to. The ache of being without Nyx was growing, an emptiness that he could not seem to fill. Perhaps it was how his brother Avarice felt, the gnawing hunger that could never be satisfied.

“That old dragon,” Ares chuckled, the sound like crackling logs in a hearth. “He did, yes. I don’t know how. I asked, but he wouldn’t tell me. He hid pieces of himself down in the caves, the ones near the mage island. You know he likes the water there.”

“I don’t want to stop caring about people,” Azaiah said. He turned his face toward Ares, looked up at them. “It is the end, if I do. Isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Ares said. “The pull of your power will be impossible to resist. You’ll take everything, everyone, until only you and the dragon are left.

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