Darkstone - An Evil Reborn (Book 4) (39 page)
Read Darkstone - An Evil Reborn (Book 4) Online
Authors: Guy Antibes
Not to be haughty, but to be naughty, thought a smiling Anchor, he gave his girl a long, passionate kiss.
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Dakkor
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T
he cold unyielding stone floor felt wonderful
as Vishan woke in darkness. He took a deep breath. How long had it been since he had done that? To what kind of hell had he been cast? He didn’t like being naked, but still he stood carefully, not knowing if his head would hit a low ceiling. Nothing. Daryaku’s voice had, at long last, disappeared from his mind.
He stretched and wriggled his fingers. At least being in control of his body felt wonderful. He happily faced any physical infirmity that hell might throw at him after decades of banishment in his own brain. He wondered when the demons would come to torment him.
He remembered Daryaku’s screeching as he jerked her hand, making her drop the Darkstone. The young blond man somehow had successfully resisted Daryaku’s sorcerous trap. Good for him. He deserved a kingdom for his act. Vishan remembered the man picking up the Darkstone and putting it in his other hand along with the other Warstones. Everything instantly became a smothering blackness and now this.
He found the wall and felt his way along until he came to a straight-edged seam. A door! He found a bar sunk into the rock and pulled. Light screamed into the room. He jammed his eyes shut, seeing brilliant red through his eyelids. Vish smiled. He could control his eyes! Wonderful. He squinted in the bright light as his eyes adjusted. He remembered this view. He stood in the Grand Emperor’s cave. Whatever power had captured him had done the favor of returning his body to the place where it had been stolen. He pushed the door open to let more light.
Another body lay on the cave’s floor. He remembered the flowing black hair. Fateem, just as he remembered her, except she, too, was naked. Vishan was consumed with relief when he could see her chest rise and fall. He spied her sack and pulled out musty clothes over two decades old. He looked around for something to cover his own nakedness. None of her pants fit him, but he found one of her skirts and wrapped it around him. He knelt and began to dress Fateem.
He felt her stir in his arms.
“A little forward aren’t you?” She sat up, putting a hand to her forehead. “What happened?”
“Uh, I think our bodies have been sleeping for a long, long time.”
She furrowed her brow. “The Darkstone—”
“Is gone.” Vishan smiled as he produced a sorcerer’s light. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. He had restored power and youth! He felt wonderful. He walked over to the stone bier. It sat empty. “The Empress is gone.” Perhaps the Darkstone had taken her back to the place where she had made it. Vish would be ecstatic if Ayrtan received the awful woman’s bones. He had the time to find out, but he really didn’t care. The woman had to have perished.
“Really gone?”
Vishan nodded. “You have nothing to obsess over now, except me.”
Fateem smiled. “That sounds like a good idea.” She drew her finger across his chin and looked at him, sleepily.
He led her outside. In the distance, he saw a village in the distance that had popped up over part of the ruins of Onkyr. “It has been twenty-five years since we last walked through this little valley,” Vish said as he picked his way, barefooted. At least Fateem had dry, cracked boots to walk on, although they didn’t look like they’d last long. “You might have slept, but I didn’t, not really. We have much to talk about while we trudge back to Baku. It won’t be an easy trip.”
“I don’t care, as long as I’m with you.”
Vish squeezed her hand. Fateem might have lost her purpose, but Vishan had gained his. He would find General Bishyar and Polymeer the Cuminee. He gazed at Onkyr in the far distance and wondered if his feet would last for the trek. Perhaps they could get horses, since she had hidden a goodly sum of dreks in the bottom of her pack. They would make it. Vish still remembered all of his scout survival skills. He laughed at the thought of being able to use them.
Vishan Daryaku would ascend the Throne of Three Hundred Eighty-Two Steps for the second time. To the many hells with all of the lies he had seen in his life. He would remake Dakkor into a land with as little ‘perspective’ as he could manage.
Fateem snapped her fingers. “You’re thinking too hard. Twenty-five years, you say? My Prince doesn’t look like he has aged a day,” she said.
Her comment drew him out of his reverie. “I’m happy to say the same to you,” Vish bowed to her and laughed. He threw his arms out feeling great. “The irony!”
“What?”
“The Grand Empress left the cave dressed as a man, and I leave her tomb dressed as a woman!” He twirled in his skirt. They both laughed and took each other’s hand, ready to walk back into the world.
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And so ends the Warstone Quartet.
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Copyright ©2015 Guy Antibes All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the permission of the author.
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This is a work of fiction. The locations, places and characters it depicts are products of the author’s imagination including the use of fictitious names, places, and situations. Any resemblances to actual persons, locations, or places are purely coincidental.
Published by CasiePress in Salt Lake City, UT, April, 2015.
www.casiepress.com
Cover & Book Design: Kenneth Cassell
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ISBN-13: 978-1508642237
ISBN-10: 1508642230
With a lifelong passion for speculative fiction, Guy Antibes found that he rather enjoyed writing fantasy as well as reading it. So a career was born and Guy anxiously engaged in adding his own flavor of writing to the world. Guy lives in the western part of the United States and is happily married with enough children to meet or exceed the human replacement rate.
You can contact Guy at his website: www.guyantibes.com.
If you could, please leave a review of Bloodstone where you purchased this book.
†
Books by Guy Antibes
Quest of the Wizardess
Quest of the Wizardess
chronicles the travels and travails of young Bellia. After her wizard family is assassinated when she is fourteen, Bellia seeks anonymity as a blacksmith’s helper. When that doesn’t work out as expected, she flees to the army.
Her extraordinary physical and magical skills bring unwanted attention and she must escape again. After finding a too-placid refuge, she takes the opportunity to seek out her family’s killers. Revenge becomes her quest that takes her to a lost temple, unexpected alliances and a harrowing confrontation with her enemies.
FANTASY - EPIC/NEW ADULT-COLLEGE/COMING OF AGE
The Power Bearer
How Norra obtained the power and the extraordinary lengths she went through to rid herself of it.
What’s a girl to do when all of the wizards in her world are after her? She runs. But this girl runs towards the source of her power, not away from it. Along the way she picks up, among others, a wizard, a ghost, a highwaywoman and a sentient cloud. Through thick and thin, they help Norra towards her goal of finding a solution in a far off land that no one in her world has even heard of.
YOUNG ADULT EPIC FANTASY
Panix: Magician Spy
Panix has life by the tail. A new wife, a new job in a new land that has few magicians and none of his caliber. His ideal life takes some unexpected downturns and Panix finds himself employed as a spy. He has no training, but must make things up as he goes if he is to survive the politics, betrayal, war and, at the end, his own behavior.
FANTASY - ADVENTURE
The World of the Sword of Spells
Warrior Mage
The gods gave Brull a Sword of Spells and proclaimed him as the world’s only Warrior Mage. One big problem, there aren’t any wars. What’s a guy to do? Brull becomes a magician bounty hunter until the big day when he learns he not only has to fight a war with the magicians of his world, but fight the god that the magicians are all working to bring into being. He finds out if he has what it takes in Warrior Mage.
EPIC FANTASY
Sword of Spells
Read about Brull’s beginnings and earlier adventures as a bounty hunter of magicians in the Sword of Spells anthology.
EPIC FANTASY
The Sara Featherwood Adventures
Set in Shattuk Downs, a reclusive land in the kingdom of Parthy. Sara Featherwood could be a Jane Austen heroine with a sword in her hand. There are no magicians, wizards, dragons, elves or dwarves in Shattuk Downs, but there is intrigue, nobility, hidden secrets, plenty of adventure and romance with a bit of magic.
FANTASY ~ YOUNG ADULT/COLLEGE
FICTION ~ WOMEN’S ADVENTURE
Knife & Flame
When Sara Featherwood’s mother dies, her sixteen-year-old life is thrown into turmoil at Brightlings Manor in a remote district of Shattuk Downs. Life becomes worse when her father, the Squire, sets his roving eye on her best friend. Dreading her new life, Sara escapes to the Obridge Women’s School. Seeking solace in education doesn’t work as her world becomes embroiled with spies, revolution, and to top it all off, her best friend becomes her worst enemy.
Sword & Flame
If you were a young woman who had just saved the family’s estate from ruin, you’d think your father would be proud, wouldn’t you? Sara Featherwood is thrown out of her childhood home and now faces life on her own terms at age seventeen. She returns to the Tarrey Abbey Women’s School and is drafted to help with the establishment of the first Women’s College in the kingdom of Parthy. Now in the King’s capital of Parth, life confronts Sara as she learns about family secrets, which threaten to disrupt her life and about resurgent political turmoil back home that turns her scholarly pursuits upside down as she must take action and use her magic to save her family and her beloved Shattuk Downs.
Guns & Flame
At nineteen, Sara Featherwood has done all she can to help establish the first Women’s College in the kingdom of Parthy. That includes a pact with the kingdom’s Interior Minister, to go on a student exchange program as payment for eliminating opposition to the college. Little does Sara know that her trip to a rival country is not what it seems and as the secrets of the true purpose of her trip unravel, she utilizes her magic to escape through hostile territory with vital secrets, but as she does, she finds herself drawn back to Shattuk Downs and must confront awful truths about those close to her.
The Warstone Quartet
An ancient emperor creates four magical gems to take over and rule the entire world. The ancient empire crumbles and over millennia. Three stones are lost and one remains as an inert symbol for a single kingdom among many. The force that created the Warstones, now awakened, seeks to unite them all, bringing in a new reign of world domination—a rule of terror.
Four Warstones, four stories. The Warstone Quartet tells of heroism, magic, romance and war as the world must rise to fight the dark force that would enslave them all.
FANTASY - SWORD & SORCERY/EPIC
Book One:
Moonstone | Magic That Binds
A jewel, found in the muck of a small village pond, transforms Lotto, the village fool, into an eager young man who is now linked to a princess through the Moonstone. The princess fights against the link while Lotto seeks to learn more about what happened to him. He finds a legacy and she finds the home in her father’s army that she has so desperately sought. As Lotto finds aptitude in magical and physical power, a dark force has risen from another land to sow the seeds of rebellion. It’s up to Lotto to save the princess and the kingdom amidst stunning betrayal fomented by the foreign enemy.
Book Two:
Sunstone | Dishonor’s Bane
Shiro, a simple farmer, is discovered to possess stunning magical power and is involuntarily drafted into the Ropponi Sorcerer’s Guild. He attracts more enemies than friends and escapes with his life only to end up on a remote prison island. He flees with an enchanted sword containing the lost Sunstone. Trying to create a simple refuge for an outlawed band of women sorcerers, he is betrayed by the very women he has worked to save and exiled to a foreign land. There, he must battle for his freedom as he and his band become embroiled in a continent-wide conflict.
Book Three:
Bloodstone | Power of Youth
When usurpers invade Foxhome Castle, Unca, the aging Court Wizard of the Red Kingdom, flees with the murdered king’s only daughter, taking the Bloodstone, an ancient amulet that is the symbol of Red Kingdom rule. Unca uses the Bloodstone to escape capture by an enemy and is transformed into a young man, but loses all of his wizardly powers. Unca must reinvent himself in order to return the princess to her throne. Along the way he falls in love with the young woman and must deal with the conflict between his duty and his heart, while keeping a terrible secret.
Book Four:
Darkstone | An Evil Reborn
As the 22nd son of the Emperor of Dakkor, Vishan Daryaku grows from boy to man, learning that he must use his unique powers and prodigious knowledge to survive. He succeeds until his body is taken over by an evil power locked inside of the Darkstone. Now Emperor of Dakkor, Vishan is trapped inside, as the ancient force that rules his body devastates his homeland while attempting to recover all of the Warstones.
As the amulets are all exposed, the holders of the Moonstone, Sunstone, and Bloodstone combine to fight the Emperor’s relentless drive to reunite the Warstones and gain power over the entire world. The armies of Dakkor and the forces of those allied with the three other stones collide on a dead continent in the stunning conclusion of the Warstone Quartet.
The Guy Antibes 2014 Anthologies
The Alien Hand
An ancient artifact changes a young woman’s life forever. A glutton gladiator is marooned in a hostile desert. An investigator searches for magic on a ravaged world and finds something quite unexpected. A boy yearns for a special toy. A recent graduate has invented a unique tool for espionage. A member of a survey team must work with his ex-girlfriend in extremely dangerous circumstances. A doctor is exiled among the worst creatures he can imagine.
SCIENCE FICTION
The Purple Flames
A reject from a Magical Academy finds purpose. A detective works on a reservation in New Mexico, except the reservation is for ghouls, demons, ghosts, zombies, and the paranormal. A succubus hunts out the last known nest of vampires on earth. The grisly story about the origins of Tonsil Tommy. In a post-apocalyptic world, two mutants find out about themselves when their lives are in imminent peri
l.
STEAMPUNK & PARANORMAL FANTASY with a tinge of HORROR
Angel in Bronze
A statue comes to life and must come to terms with her sudden humanity. A wizard attempts to destroy a seven-hundred-year-old curse. A boy is appalled by the truth of his parents’ midnight disappearances. A captain’s coat is much more than it seems. A healer must decide if the maxim that he has held to his entire career is still valid. A fisherman must deal with the aftermath of the destruction of his village
.
FANTASY
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Guy Antibes books are available at book retailers in print and e-book formats.
