“The humans are ready to attack, Meherya.” Umber’s glow reddens, her disgust of our Martial allies palpable. Our parting volley in Marinn before I send the Martials south to join the rest of Keris Veturia’s army. It is the last settlement in our campaign. Though it is mostly identical to other hamlets we’ve destroyed, it has one distinction. Umber inclines her head and we regard the village below us, a hodgepodge of stone homes that can withstand fire, adorned with wooden shingles that cannot. “He forges weapons in the port city of Adisa. “Have the ghuls seek out Darin of Serra in Marinn,” I say. Neither she nor the Blood Shrike has been seen for weeks.” “We await your orders.” She grips a glaive in her left hand, its blade white with heat. “Meherya.” Umber’s sun-bright eyes are the vermillion of ancient anger. I will make my new home upon the bones of my foes. My old home is the Waiting Place-known to humans as the Forest of Dusk. My name drags me out of the past to a rain-swept hilltop in the Mariner countryside. Would that I had unearthed no magic, loved no wife, sparked no children, gentled no ghosts. Would that I had not learned to cherish it, my home. The voice of Mauth, who is Death himself.Īrise, child of flame. The voice that spoke was laden with millennia beyond my ken. I awoke in the glow of a young world, when man knew of hunting but not tilling, of stone but not steel.
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