Author: JS Groves

When we had all been purified, the curse and the depression of the miasma lifted, Rennin and I changed back into travelling clothes and saw that the party was fed. Hunting by twilight was never easy, but we found only a pair of lean desert hares, and that – combined with the magical waters of Read more

In a very material sense, the hard part was done. We had traversed the Wolfwood and crossed the Eastern Veil into the Holy Lands – fighting and, impossibly, defeating a literal dragon to do so. We had navigated the alien rainforest and crossed a cursed wasteland of black rock to the Tomb of Xadaer. Rennin Read more

Manipulating the Tomb of Xadaer had not taken much in the way of blood or power. I was not drained as I had been after fighting Lynqxaemass, or after helping Derrek part the Eastern Veil. But it had taken every iota of concentration that I could muster, sustained for hours on end. My exhaustion was Read more

My fascination with the Blade of Xadaer began when I was a child, learning to read under the tutelage of the priestesses. There were no other children in that enclave – the last of the most recent cohort, I learned later, had left the year before my arrival – so I was very much alone, Read more

I approached the Tomb of Xadaer an hour and a half after dawn. I was not feeling at all fresh. The ghosts howling on the night wind were soul-shuddering. The tension that had marked our crossing had abated only briefly, then become a deep and savage undercurrent that I was finding increasingly difficult to navigate. Read more

Our first days in the Holy Lands were a blur, a fact which I will regret for the rest of my life. These were the lands where the gods and their children had walked aeons before the first mortal life sprang into being. I should have been singing awe-struck praise-songs, pouring libations out on the Read more

Each of us had come with the prince knowing full well that we might die. But … what had befallen Veralar Tann? To forget who you were, who you had been, who you wished to become? That was a fate far worse than death. I wanted to wail and beat my breast and gnash my Read more

I might have made plans not to be seduced by Khanaarre of the Black Mask, if it had ever occurred to me that it might come up. In defense of my forethought, I don’t think that she had planned to do it. It had just … happened. And on a very immediate, personal level, I Read more

Of the six of us, only Veralar was seriously wounded, with three broken ribs and lacerations all over her body. Rennin and Orland were cut and bruised and battered and would look more like sausages than men for some time, and would be well served by several days of rest, but they were able to Read more

The city of Shii-sherah had been abandoned a thousand years ago, but before that it had been one of the crown jewels of the short-lived Illustrian Empire. Unlike the capitol, or Gyyria, or Anardokopolis, which were cities of state and trade and industry, well-placed in the heartland and the oldest of the new territories, Shii-sherah Read more