An abandoned boy, a grieving prince, and a reclusive sorcerer find themselves caught in a web of peril and mystery...
Domi, a young thief abandoned on the street at birth, just wants to save his dying foster mother. But first, he must survive the m...
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Valens ran through the endless night.
He didn't know what chased him. Not anymore. He spotted a swarm of clivias at one point, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Every bestia in the night-side seemed to be after him, now. He almost wanted to extinguish the promenia light hovering a few feet before him so he wouldn't see whatever horrors approached. Almost.
Sharp leafy protrusions sliced his cheek as he ducked under the cyan arm of a towering manicon. Great, now illusory magenta waves at the edge of his vision and the stench of cinnamon would plague him all day from the treelike organism's mild hallucinogen. Why must night-side life be poisonous or, more often, useless? Why not edible or at least pleasant for a change?
There was little to do but hunker down and wait for the creatures hunting him to pass. Thank the Eternal Radiance he wore his clivia blues; the silky tunica and paenula, woven from the fur-like filaments of the night-side bestia, ensured the heat-sensing creatures would not detect him. He hoped.
He dropped into a crouch at the base of the cyan manicon, careful not to scrape his face on the leaves again, and yanked his paenula's hood over his head. Valens would prefer a deep cave he could burrow inside to hide; the thin fabric separating his face from the air offered flimsy protection from the bestias that sought him.
He held the edge of the fabric up over his mouth and grimaced as vibrant pink waves began to lap at the corner of his eye.
Valens loved his job, but Eternal Radiance, he hated when his work took him out of the borderlands and into the true night-side. Why did every bestia seem ten times more intelligent here and the swarms of the creatures humanlike in their cooperation? Back home, beneath the light of the Trellis and the sun, they behaved like mindless beasts.
He grumbled under his breath, grateful night-side life couldn't hear, and reviewed his actions to figure out where he misstepped.
His plight started at supper. His meal—sweet corn and wild jicama root harvested under the Primus Trellis Isle before Valens returned with his food to the wilds and his work—had ground to a halt with a centumpeda's arrival. That had likely been his error; he should have enjoyed his meal at the waystation under the Trellis Isle's bestia-repelling light, but impatience overcame better sense.
Like all bestias, the centumpeda—a nightmarish cross between a snake, vine, worm, and centipede—lacked the ability to digest the day-side crops or, for that matter, him. Still, right around the point the creature wrapped one of far too many tentacle-like legs around his ankle and tugged him off his feet, he decided not to take any chances. So he had hacked at the slithering bestia with his machete and fled deeper into the night-side forest. Only the light of the glowing promenia he sent a few feet ahead of him had illuminated the tangle of crystalline not-trees.
Alas, other centumpedas soon joined the first, followed by a bestia he had never seen before, which resembled a flying obsidian torque. The creature pulsed with a green light, and soon all its friends joined it in the hunt. Then the clivias drifted near when he made the mistake of pausing to dissolve another patch of rogue promenia.
