Ascending Shadows by Everet Martins

Author:Everet Martins [Martins, Everet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-09-18T23:00:00+00:00

Twelve

Debts

“With the deepest of sorrows, laws become meaningless.” – The diaries of Nyset Camfield

It was cool and peaceful for a time. It was a precious few moments that Isa hoped would never end. He was relieved to finally be clean, to have escaped a painful death by dehydration. The blistering heat returned with the rise of the sun, the cart hammering away at the wounds on his back. He found a new appreciation for the brick roads in New Breden and around the Tower. The bleeding had stopped, and they healed a bit, but most of all, he was glad they were clean. Infection was his gravest worry. Granted, his wounds weren’t as clean as they could be with Ribwort oil, but you had to choose your battles. His cuts had formed a matted layer of pus, his shirt and scabs bonded as one. It’d be a painful day when he would have to separate the two. They were healing though, and that was what mattered.

He had nightmares about the Tigerians they saw last night. Sleep came in disjointed spurts. He saw and felt their fearsome mounts tearing into him, sinking their claws into his back and finishing him with those grisly fangs. He imagined trying to fight back but being pinned down by their equally fearsome riders. He thought they might have been exceedingly lucky that those were only merchants. He couldn’t imagine how their warriors might have looked. He thought of how terrifying it must have been for Midgaard to defend against their siege over five-hundred years ago, known in Zoria as the Trial of Devastation.

The sky ignited in bands of orange, yellow, and bleeding pinks. It was glorious and strangely unexpected after last night’s torrential rains. Last night, he thought the old Shadow Realm itself might have opened above them, the purified Shadow Realm rising up with the sun. He watched the sky change at a barely perceptible pace, the strips of color blown away in the sun’s violent heat.

There were murmuring voices at the front of the carts ahead of theirs. Devyn and Greyson cast him curious glances as if he might know what was happening. The forest finally broke away, showing rolling hills on their right, dotted with swaying grasses, the likely source of the clamor. Everything was so stunningly beautiful here. It was relieving to be out of the choking forest, out of the world where towering vegetation was all you could see. He almost never wanted to live near a city again. The land became expansive plains after the hills, the occasional tree that had escaped the forest casting clawing shadows across the road. It wound like a snake in the distance, up and down between rolling valleys swathed in squat greens and bright red flowers.

The forest was a murky strip of green in the distance. Behind them, it stopped abruptly as if there were some force preventing it from growing here. There wasn’t a natural thinning of the trees, not unless you counted the odd solitary tree standing like a sentry over the grasslands.

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