A Dark Tide (Book of One) by Jordan Baker

Author:Jordan Baker [Baker, Jordan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2014-06-18T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Lying back on a luxurious bed of richly embroidered red and black, Calexis waited, listening and feeling with her power, trying to discern where he might be. Her soldiers had been out in force, searching through the night for the missing mage priest, and she could feel hints of other energies within the city that were not within her control, but they eluded her. It was aggravating, since she did not like being unable to see everything, to know everything. The other gods had always kept secrets and they guarded their power, making it nearly impossible to destroy them. She had come close once, when Stroma had devised his scheme with the books, but the god had lied, and the other gods had not honored their parts of the agreement either. Calexis hated them for their power and their arrogant trickery, her thoughts fully consumed by the memories of the god she had become.

As the early morning slowly turned to day, she slipped in and out of waking dreams of darkness, while, deep inside her thoughts, another part of Calexis watched silently in horror as her very essence was slowly consumed by shadows. She had begun to understand how the god had taken over her being, becoming one with her at her foolish invitation, then immediately overwhelming her will, but she could see that there was another power that seemed to be doing the same thing to the god. It was strange to consider that she was somehow able to exist within herself, and it reminded her of a set of dolls she had once owned as a child, made by a craftsman in one of the many lands to the east that her father had subjugated. The dolls were identical, except in size, each one smaller than the other, and they were hollow, like eggs and cut round the middle. Every doll that was smaller than the other fit inside it, and she felt like she was the smallest one, hidden under the many layers of herself that, unlike the dolls, no longer looked the same, especially from where she saw them.

Calexis had always been sure of herself, bold and calculating in every way, but now that she saw the sheer magnitude and complexity of the manipulation of the god and the dark shadow that had its tendrils woven tightly through that power, she felt small and weak, like a child's doll, as though she had only been playing at power over the years. Her own dreams of grandeur seemed so simplistic and foolish compared to what she now knew, but she was confused by it, for instead of embracing the magnitude of that greater power, she felt herself pulling away from it, finding it distasteful. Perhaps it was that she had come to realize that neither the god nor the power of the shadow pursued power for any true purpose. Even the seeming pleasures the god took in her glorification were only for passing moments of fleeting satisfaction, and the hunger for power always continued to grow.

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