Cinders of Magic

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Smoke rose from the corpse of the battle. Far afield, Fiorian soldiers advanced upon the retreating enemy in the coming twilight. Rain could see it all from where he drifted high above the outskirts of the city of Orailse.

From so high up, they were little more than specs of sand on an ever-shifting shore, the tides of the two clashing armies sending the individual particles to be scattered about. The sand would surge with the ebb and flow of the two armies and eventually fall still in the mud to never move again. Rain imagined the bodies of men and women that he had left in his wake as mere sandbars piled high with grains of quartz. Those dunes reached into the sky like they might try to pull him from the air. Even still, it was a better alternative.

He gazed down. Past his hovering boots that planted themselves solidly upon nothing, Sloan necromancers that had sought to ambush the meeting lay still in the mud. It was just as Weaver had said it would be.

Her men moved among the corpses identifying the fallen. No doubt there would be a detailed report given to the rest of the adjudicators about the battle. Someone needed to answer for the losses.

Rain found his sight pulled to a woman below, waving for his attention. Adjudicator Weaver didn"t stand out in stature or beauty, which was uncommon in Novani. The short, gray-haired woman possessed something unfathomable lurking behind those green, iron-touched eyes that made most turn away from her. Rain gazed once more out at the falling sun, and with a thought, allowed himself to slowly drift towards the ground.

NovaniThe stench of death and dirt met him when he landed in the mud. The fighting itself didn"t bother him. Pitting oneself against another in the most dangerous contest was something Rain had enjoyed his entire life. These last few years had been more than that, and the contests always ended the same way; bodies of the enemy lying broken and twisted in the dirt for as far as a grounded man could see.

"We succeeded today," Adjudicator Weaver said as she slid up next to Rain. "It wasn"t without a cost."

Rain nodded. Just ahead, two men in dirtied uniforms were recovering the charred remains of Adjudicator Ronoa, a girl of eight. A dead girl, Rain reminded himself. With four of us, this shouldn"t have happened. Adjudicator Ronoa"s corpse was given all due respect by the haggard soldiers moving her off the battlefield before hefting it into the back of a cart. One of the little girl"s impossible white hands stuck out of the back of the cart, a single finger curled in Rain"s direction as if beckoning him to follow. Four, he thought with a shake of his head. If we needed four, we should have gotten a real four.

A dead girl,With four of us, this shouldn"t have happened. Four,If we needed four, we should have gotten a real four. He stepped forwards to kneel next to the body of the other adjudicator who had been brought along for the operation Weaver had thrown together. The man, almost into his third decade, stared up at Rain with blank, uncomprehending eyes. A spear of stone punched through his sternum to leave him propped awkwardly on the earth.

An envelope, marked by the man"s blood, peeked from the red adjudicator coat that he wore. Rain retrieved the letter before pulling the sacred artifact ring from the body. The letter was unsealed; he read it.

"What is it?" Weaver asked from his shoulder.

"A letter to his sister." Rain stared down at the ink on the page, reflecting the light of the waning afternoon where blood splashed over the black lettering. "It reveals too much. I don"t think we can allow it to be delivered."

"That is for the best then."

"Did you at least get what you were after?" Rain asked, not daring to turn to the woman for fear of his rage overtaking him.

"I did. We will get him back to the Ciruliam as quickly as possible to pry whatever secrets we can from him."

"Good." Rain knelt to gently lifted Adjudicator Ronoa"s crown from where it had fallen in the mud. The sparkling, black crown held all the beauty of the sky on the clearest of nights and had just an hour ago sat on the head of a precocious young girl full of life. "This wasn"t a victory, Edendae."

"As you say," she replied.

"We have lost too many recently. Today we narrowly avoided their shards being stolen away with that man they managed to capture."

"My men are on his trail. I expect him to come back to us quickly."

"You miss my meaning," Rain growled. He turned to face Weaver for the first time. "We are passing the shards on to those unable to fully wield their power and placing them too far in harm"s way. How many have we been unable to recover now? Three? Only the Highlord knows what tortures they are being put under. How the abominable necromancers of the Sloanish are rending apart their souls to turn them to their purpose."

"Would you have us leave our new blood safely tucked away in the South where they can destroy their sparring partners without a care in the world?" Weaver shouted. The woman raising her voice was enough to cause the soldiery around them to stop mid-step. With a withering stare, Weaver set them back to the task. She stepped forward and placed a hand lightly on Rain"s shoulder. "This is war, Solin. The final war. We cannot win it by keeping our most powerful weapons in reserve for fear that they will come to harm." For a moment, the veil of stoicism peeled back to show genuine concern.

"We will lose this war if we let the enemy take any more of our brothers and sisters," Rain answered.

"What would you have us do?"

"Call a meeting," he told her. "This is a situation that needs to be handled before any more life is needlessly given up." Rain looked down to the ring sitting in his open palm. The ruby set into its golden filagree burned with a pulsing light like a heartbeat; he knew it was truly the ebb and flow of an unfathomable rage.

"I can deliver their shards on my way back south," Weaver said, following his eyes down to the ring in his hand.

"No. I will do so. I am done with the fighting for now and am heading south as well. I will be relieving Asmodon from his position in the capital."

"He has finally decided to join the fighting?" she asked.

"He says he fears his skills are rusting. I won"t mind the time away and will gladly return when you have the war-winning information that you have promised."

Adjudicator Weaver turned, looking back to where her men were hauling the unconscious body of a man into the back of a wagon. His hands had been turned to calcified stone and were bound together in front of him. "I will get you that information Solin, I promise you that."

"I know you will," Rain replied. In the east, the last bit of light slipped from over the horizon.