Author: JS Groves

In the morning, we all dug through our stores, searching for warmer clothes. Derrek and I, with our wizard’s chests, had the advantage. We all reclaimed our heavy, compact-style boots, and Derrek revealed a truly prodigious stash of heavy socks, which he distributed generously. “I lost three toes to frostbite as a child,” he said. Read more

My life was unravelling. Every day, every mile, every step we took northward, another thread pulled loose. Not today, not tomorrow, but sooner rather than later, it would all come undone. It was inevitable. Looking back, it had always been inevitable. The wonder, in retrospect, was that it had held on so long. Three years Read more

Elana sulked for a few hours, much as she had when Derrek had tried to reassure her that the Usurper’s rise had not been her father’s fault. I had tried to soothe her, then. This time I had no stomach for it. We had been in the wilderness for months. Hunting was plentiful, now, but Read more

It had been weeks since we had fought Lynqxaemass. That her friends and allies were still waiting for us spoke either of the degree of their enmity, or of their certainty of our survival. I suspected the latter, which meant that they had diviners, which we should have assumed, given Lynqxaemass’ citing the stars. That, Read more

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