The Endless War Box Set: Books 1-3 by D. K. Holmberg

Author:D. K. Holmberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ASH Publishing
Published: 2016-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

18

Jasn

I discovered a cadre of riders today. They claim the power to call the darkness. They celebrate that ability when they should fear it.

—Lren Atunal, Cardinal of the College of Scholars

Rens opened before Jasn like an oven, the hot ground baked by the sun and the heat stealing his breath as soon as his shaping lowered him to the ground. He’d been back in Rens since leaving the front, but he’d been so focused on what Alena was doing, he hadn’t been able to care about the way the heat tormented him. It had been earlier in the day then as well, when the sun hadn’t been out long enough to turn the hard, cracked ground into this place of torture.

Before that, he’d been here when Lachen had summoned him to the tower of Atenas before sending him to the barracks to train. Then, Jasn had been willing to sacrifice everything in his single-minded goal of destroying as much of Rens as possible. He still saw these lands as ugly and barren, but the hatred had eased.

These were the lands where Lachen thought to send shapers to find the draasin, and finally end the war. Maybe, if they were able to hunt and destroy draasin, they could.

“Tell me what you think you will do here,” Bayan said. Her lips pressed in a tight frown, and she pulled her dark hair off her neck as she surveyed the land around them. “Do you really think that you can find a different answer about why the draasin attack?”

Alena thought there was another reason, and as much as he wanted to trust what Lachen shared, he believed Alena. She had given him no reason not to. “There has to be something here. The draasin at the barracks are different than those we face along the border.”

“Calan thinks that’s because they are captives.”

He might be right, but Jasn suspected Calan had a different motivation, only he wasn’t completely certain what that might be. “Captive or not, why would it matter?”

He still wasn’t sure how much to share with Bayan, but she had come with him, and she had more experience in the barracks than he did. That experience made her valuable. “There is something different.”

“What do you hope to find?”

Jasn didn’t fully know. The last time he’d been here, to this exact place, he’d been attacked by one of the draasin. He remembered the way the creature’s wings blotted the fading sunlight, casting horrible dancing shadows across the land beneath it, just as he remembered the way the draasin breathed smoke and fire before tearing through the line of shapers facing it. How many had died that day, how many who could have been saved had he known what Alena did? How many could have been saved if she had been willing to reveal her ability?

Maybe that wouldn’t matter. Would it have helped had Alena revealed she could speak to the draasin? From what she’d said, she didn’t control them, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t reach them and convince the draasin not to attack.

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.