The Godborn by Paul S. Kemp

Author:Paul S. Kemp
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, Epic, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780786963737
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Published: 2013-09-30T14:00:00+00:00

Zeeahd’s satiety unnerved Sayeed almost as much as his appetite. Having spat his pollution into the young girl, Zeeahd seemed almost giddy. He whistled as they plodded over the plains, saturated by the rain. The cats seemed gleeful, too. Their bloodlust temporarily sated, they fairly pranced around Zeeahd, tails held high.

For his part, Sayeed could not rid himself of the foul taste of the devourer’s flesh, the memory of the girl’s screams of terror, his brother’s wet grunts as he expelled the evil in him.

“Her name was Lahni,” he said to himself, not understanding why he felt the need to say her name aloud.

“What’d you say?” his brother asked, looking back, his voice high-pitched, irritating.

“Nothing,” Sayeed said, knowing Zeeahd would not understand. “Protesting the rain.”

The cats eyed him suspiciously, their fang-filled mouths more devilish than feline.

Zeeahd held his hands out, palms up to the sky. “I like the rain. Renews the spirit.”

Sayeed said nothing. He feared he had no spirit to renew. He feared the Spellplague had stripped him of his soul and left a moral vacancy filled now by only his brother’s ambition and his own resignation. He lived, but he did not live. And so it would go, forever. He swallowed down the despair evoked by the thought.

Zeeahd stopped. “I smell wood smoke.”

The excitement in his voice made Sayeed nauseous.

Sayeed smelled it, too, the faint hint of a chimney’s exhalation. Breakfast fires, maybe. Once, the aroma would have made his stomach growl with hunger. Now, he barely tasted the food that passed his lips. To the extent his senses let him perceive anything with acuity, it was invariably something foul. Like devourer flesh.

“Come, come!” Zeeahd said, and picked up his pace. “A village is near.” He chuckled. “Perhaps Lahni’s village.”

Hearing his brother speak the girl’s name sharpened Sayeed’s irritation. He stared at his brother’s cloaked form, Zeeahd’s soul as distorted as his flesh, and wondered how it was possible to love and hate the same person so much. He flashed on an image of his sword driven through his brother’s back, the blade exploding out of Zeeahd’s chest in a spray of blood or whatever foul ichor now flowed in his brother’s veins.

“Come on!” his brother called.

Sayeed came back to himself to find three of the cats sitting on their haunches before him, slit eyes staring at him knowingly. They lifted paws to fanged mouths and licked at the mud on their pads. Their eyes never left Sayeed’s face.

“Out of my way,” he said, but they did not move and he walked around rather than through them.

The smell of breakfast fires grew stronger with each step they took. And by the time they reached the village, the rain had sputtered to a stop. A dozen or more ancient elms sprouted from the plains, noble looking trees with vast canopies lost to the shadowed air, giants compared to the meager broadleafs that predominated elsewhere on the plains. They must have been saplings when the Spellplague struck.

Within the circle of the elms was a large pond and the village whose breakfast fires they’d smelled.

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