Coming Soon, From the ‘Etherterrea’ Series …
Branches whip at my face in unforgiving lashes as I speed through the brush with all my might, darkness and shadow nipping ever closer at my heels. The festering marshland beyond Valtallon was unsanctioned land, the forest at the edge of it even more precarious still; none are permitted beyond the borders for weariness of the dangers beyond. None, that is, except those of the royal bloodline. And even then, it was still a foolish errand. Bitter, vengeful souls ravage the land, creatures born of hate and spite and war. Some of them were once Etherians or Evariants, changed by time, hardship and battle. Others, though … well, not even the royal bloodline has knowledge of what exactly those others are. All that is known of them is that they aren’t people, nor animals … something in between, or perhaps neither. I can hear the erratic breath of one of them behind me, snarling fiendishly as it chases closer and closer.
My legs burn from thigh to ankle with exertion, yet I barely feel them moving as my heart races even faster in my chest. It’s so dark here; a pitch blackness that pulses with death, swirling before the naked eye in unnatural patterns, whining out eerie, croaked moans. There are things, alive things indecipherable in so much darkness, watching me, clawing at me. Not that I can see them—no, I feel them, the ghost of their chilling breath on the back of my neck, tussling through my hair. I can’t make out the trees or bushes, only feel the sting of them upon my cheeks as I rush past.
It’s that feeling you get when you stare into an open black space for too long, the feeling that you’re being hunted by that blackness, that it encroaches upon you the longer you stare—except it was real.
It was all real, with a mindless lividity that hungers for everything in its path.
The creature’s footsteps pound the moist terrain closer and closer behind me, every sludgy splash making my blood rush louder in my ears. The closer it gets, the more chaotic its steps; one second they sound like heavy paws trekking through mud, and the next it’s a wretched dragging, scraping noise.
My breath seizes in my lungs. I am going to die. This is going to be my end.
I’ll be torn to pieces and swallowed up by whatever that thing is, or worse yet, I’ll become one of them, doomed to wander and toil for an eternity, all because I wanted to escaped another lecture. I’d had enough of it; the disdain, the belittling, the endless comparisons to my all too perfect sister. Now, though, a hair’s breadth away from death on ill-begotten land, I wish I was facing something as simple and tedious as a lecture.
The fates are cruel.
Considering my life up until this point, I should’ve realized it by now. I should have known that nothing good would come of running, just as nothing good has ever come from staying. Not for the first time, but perhaps the last, I curse the weak magic flowing through my veins that renders me so helpless. The Sun can’t be called upon here in Abyssian lands, not with the sky blotted out in darkness the way it is. Even if it could, I’m not strong enough to wield it as my ally the way other Sunseeded do. The way my mother, father and sister can.
I can’t skin change, can’t take flight.
I can’t even command the flames of our ancestors. Sunbane, I hear my sister sneer in that cold, haughty tone she always does. I am weak, flameless, and I am going to die for it.
A wave of frost sweeps over me and through me, turning my blood to ice. The force throws me onto my back, thrashing wildly as what feels like the embodiment of death itself bares down upon me with all of its weight. The ground oozes sickly wet, festering with stench as marshlands do—just as grim as and cloying as the creature above me. It soils my fine clothes, muddying my long braids with filth and grime. Death has black jaws, a gaping maw of obsidian teeth, sharp as razors, dripping with shadows and blood like saliva. Death does not roar—it growls with a venomous snarl, low baritone vibrating through my chest to rumble the earth beneath my back. My breath stutters out of me in visible puffs in the cold, the very cries leaving my lips freezing in the stale air between death and I. My limbs go limp, from chill or fear I don’t know, and a savage bite tears into the flesh of my ribs. When I scream, the sound comes from the creature’s mouth instead of my own, as if it eats not only skin and bone, but the soul itself. A horrid squelching noise covers my torso as it drinks steadily from me; I can’t see it clearly even as I know it’s rights before my eyes, a congealing black mass of limb and teeth and shadow. I feel the life slipping out of me with every disgusting mouthful it takes, the parts of my body that it touches burning and freezing all at once.
Sunbane.
It was only right that I would die in the deep shadows of Abyssian land. Still, my heart aches for the life I could have had if only I were better. Stronger. My eyes begin to flutter closed.
