A Guardian of Shadows (Revenant Wyrd Book 4)
Read A Guardian of Shadows (Revenant Wyrd Book 4) Online
Authors: Travis Simmons
Tags: #high fantasy
Sneak Peak of On Wings of Chaos
TRAVIS SIMMONS
Copyright © June, 2014 by Travis Simmons
The Revenant Wyrd Saga Book Four:
A Guardian of Shadows
Published by: Wyrding Ways Press
Cover Design by:
Najla Qamber Designs
Formatting by:
Wyrding Ways Press
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or in any means – by electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without prior written permission.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used factiously. Any resemblance to actual places, events, and people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Joya hummed with power, with wyrd. She gazed into the sinister fogbank of the Shadow Realm and desired nothing more than to step into it, be enveloped in its darkness, and become one with its borders. The shadows called to her, and her heart answered in turn. She shivered.
How could she be so drawn to this accursed land, after all she had learned about it in her childhood? This was the land of dalua, of chaos hounds, of alarists. This was the land of the cursed, of the damned, of the negative side of spirit. The people within the Shadow Realm hated those from the Holy Realm. She was from the Holy Realm. Why did Joya ever think it was a good idea to come this way?
She closed her eyes and braced herself against the lure of the shadows. She had to be strong; this was a test. This was the Shadow Realm. But if she thought about it too long, Joya could feel the shadows licking out of the border between the Realm of Earth and the Realm of Shadow to caress her skin: calling her, welcoming her home.
“What do you think we’ll find inside?” Jovian asked, more than a slight quiver of fear and anticipation in his voice. It broke Joya’s communion with the swirling abyss before her.
“Come on, Jove, you know what we’ll find there,” Angelica said breathlessly. Her eyes gazed straight ahead, as if her sight could penetrate the darkness, see what lay beyond. But there was nothing to see beyond — only more darkness.
And occasionally a shape,
Joya thought. At times she could see something skirting under the surface of the shadows, swirling against the boundaries of the darkness, rippling it like water. She shivered again.
Most of her life people had assumed she was from the Shadow Realm, due to her dark hair and features. Joya’d had to persuade them she wasn’t by showing the white stigmata on her palms, marking her as one from the Holy Realm. But she reserved her judgment about what this realm was actually like. She’d heard stories, and none of them good. How could they survive, she wondered? In the Shadow Realm there was never any trace of light. The fogbank that stretched up to the heavens also blackened out the sun, it was said. She figured there would only be one way to find out.
Through the fogbank, Joya could barely make out some source of illumination. It was milky, almost like clouds strewn over the expanse of their sky, casting about an intermittent, ghostly light. She could also see flashes of lightning.
Is it storming, or is that natural?
“But the stories can’t be all true, can they?” Jovian asked.
“Use your eyes, Jovian,” Joya said. “What do you see? Do you think anything good could come out of there?”
He swallowed hard.
Angelica shook her head.
“But it tempts us,” Joya said. “It wants us to come inside.” Her palms itched where the white stigmata marked them. She tried to push the thought from her mind, but when she ignored the itching it only grew worse. Rubbing and scratching wouldn’t make the sensation go away, and she cursed silently.
“What do you feel?” Jovian asked.
Joya shook her head.
Can’t they feel it?
she wondered.
“Where do you think Grace and the others are?” Angelica asked, looking behind them. How she could turn her back to the shadowy fogbank Joya couldn’t imagine.
“Probably a long way behind us,” Jovian answered. “The Shadows Grove brought us here; Goddess only knows how far we’ve traveled.”
They were still in the Sacred Forest, that they knew, because the Shadows Grove couldn’t travel outside the forest and it had deposited them here moments ago. But if Joya had to guess, they were on the edge of the forest, because the trees were thinning down to saplings and brush.
“Is Grace okay?” Angelica asked again. “What happened to her?”
“She’s possessed,” Joya told her simply, rubbing her hands on her gray riding dress. She gave a look back to where the horses were tethered, but they didn’t seem to be fazed by their proximity to the Shadow Realm.
Their fairy guide, Tegaris, flitted about above the horses, and the Germinant Gob stood silent sentry, watching the LaFayes at the border. Their entourage wouldn’t be coming into the Shadow Realm. Their guidance ended here. But Uthia had said she would come along with them. The dryad made mention of something she needed to do in the Shadow Realm, as if she traveled there regularly.
“How do you know?” Jovian asked their older sister.
“What other option is there?” Joya asked. “She certainly isn’t acting like herself, she was using wyrd proficiently enough to shame a sorcerer, and she
attacked
us.”
“Do you think she’ll be okay?” Angelica asked her.
“How am I to know these things?” Joya asked. “I do know that we’re stalling. Where we need to be is home, and either we travel all around the realms, bypassing the Shadow Realm, or we go through.” She pointed at the fogbank, as if her finger was a compass directing their way home. The prospect of going through the Shadow Realm finally sunk in for Joya, and she felt her heart quicken, thundering through her ears.
Joya didn’t want to go around, however — she wanted to go through. Every fiber of her being wanted to sink into the embrace of the shadows, and that scared her more than the fleeting faces she saw rippling the surface of the darkness. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
Angelica nodded.
“Jovian, can you get the horses?” Joya asked.
At the sound of a struggle Joya looked behind her. The horses wouldn’t budge.
“They don’t want to go,” Uthia told them, stepping out from the thicker forest. The white of her bark skin was near-dazzling to the eye after so long staring at the Shadow Realm.
“What do we do with them?” Angelica asked.
“My shepherdess sisters will tend to them,” Uthia answered. As if her proclamation had summoned them, more of the dryads stepped out from deeper in the forest, their bark-like skin dappled in morning sunlight. Joya watched the tree-women surround the horses, like a forest come to life in pines, oaks, and hemlock, coming to care for the creatures.
“Joya?” Jovian asked.
“They’ll be fine,” she told him. “We need to get home, and we can’t be fighting with horses every step of the way.”
Reluctantly Jovian relinquished the reins to three separate dryads. He stepped back, a lump in his throat. For some reason it felt like he was giving up the last thing he had that tethered him to home, to his old life. A life before he had found out he was half angel, a life before he found out his mother, who died in childbirth, was the mythic Sylvie LaFaye, who’d given up her life so that he and Angelica could live.
Angelica placed her hand on his shoulder. No doubt she was feeling the same way. Who knew if these were his emotions or hers? Ever since their single-minded joining in the Mirror of the Moon, they had been growing closer. Their time in the Shadows Grove hadn’t helped that at all.
But it was strange. They didn’t need to talk to each other mentally any longer, because often their thoughts were so seamlessly matched that there was no need for words.
“It’s hard for me too, Jovian,” Joya said from behind them, her gaze fixed on the shadows. “But we can retrieve them as soon as we find Amber.”
She still clung to that hope, but Jovian wasn’t sure he could any longer. It was nearing winter. Even now snow was starting to fall, melting into the mud of the forest floor and making it a soupy mess.
No, it had been too long. Amber wasn’t in the care of Porillon any longer, but they hadn’t seen her for months now, and he could almost believe that Amber was nothing more than a figment of their imagination, a part of their past lost to them just as the horses being carried away now.
He steeled himself and turned away from the horses, leaving Angelica to watch their retreat. Along with the dryads, the Germinant Gob left with little more than a nod of farewell, and Tegaris faded up into the growing daylight, seeking some home in the trees where he could go into suspended animation for the duration of the day.
