The Shadow Realm (The Age of Dawn Book 4)

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I
t was
the type of evening Senka most cherished. The sands of the Nether were icy between her toes, the night chilled, and the dry wind soothing. The amber glow of the setting sun slashed through the needles of the cacti, glinting from a burner secured to her workbench with iron nails. The waning light reflected reds and oranges through the precious flasks and tubes. She had saved her marks for years to acquire them. There were few things more enjoyable than working out here on a night like this. If she had any mishaps, the noxious vapors would be less likely to kill her outside. She could never be too cautious—those in her profession were most often put back into the sands by their own chemicals. Besides, her father wouldn’t be too proud if she went like that.

Senka was born into the Scorpions as a bastard. They were not well known through Zoria and their secrets—and more importantly their existence—were closely guarded. There were some who chanced to meet their midnight eyes, shortly before collapsing into the arms of the Phoenix.

Now the sect’s numbers paled against their vibrant past. Their art and their family were dying a slow death. Inbreeding was making them weak; babies coming out of their mother’s womb broken. They still practiced the ways, passing on the craft, but contracts for murder were rare in the Nether.

The Scorpions had vowed to the Tower witches to guard the Black Furnaces from anything and anyone, including bold wizards and curious adventurers. Someone had to do it after the seal marking the Age of Dawn was erected. The Scorpions never broke an oath, even one that should have died generations ago. Here they were, desiccating in a wasteland where men weren’t meant to live.

Senka grinned at the sputtering burner, eyed the bubbling vapor condenser, and hummed along with the boiling Acontium petals. The murky water became an intense violet as the petals broke down, their bright swirls reaching through the water and grasping at the flask’s bottom. The hissing steam praised her for her good work, knowing full well, her father never would. His old eyes watched her, warped behind her glassware as he pretended to inspect it for cleanliness.

He had a handsome face, she thought. Rigid cheeks and a hard jaw, the type most women would spread their legs for. It was a nonthreatening face, one that would easily pass you by without any unwarranted attention, much like hers. They would be hard to remember, average looking in the throng. When in public, they wore simple robes, covering loose leather armor allowing for maximal mobility.

An amethyst droplet collected at the end of the vapor condenser, growing like a cactus cherry in the wet season. It glittered from the glass, tumbling in the dry air, pattering into a small vial.

“Should’ve used a little more Lican oil,” her father said, groaning as he stood, staring down at her bubbling configuration.

Senka gritted her teeth, her hand twitched towards her dagger. She forced it back. Would she ever be enough?

More droplets followed the first. The scent of lilac filled the air and a tiny glob of violet formed at the bottom of the vial. It was a scent city folk found strangely attractive. To the Scorpions, it only meant death. A drop on a dagger, a scratch on the skin and minutes later, you’d be as rigid as a hewed log.

It was an insulting task, as useless as digging holes and pushing the pile of sand back in. But she had to preserve the art, go through the motions. Even if she never had a chance to use it, her father had said.

She was old by her own standards, just over her twenty-third birth year. As she grew older, she felt that the fewer years she had left, the less she feared losing them.

“Time to sup, Fire Lizard’s almost done. Finish up and bottle it with others in the cabinet,” her father said. He strode towards their hut, footfalls hardly a whisper.

Theirs was the greatest of all the huts, her father being the village elder. It was simply designed, octagonal walls with a dried Belching Ivy roof to keep the mid-day heat out. The leaves were wide as a torso and thick as boiled leather. There were no doors, no locks; everything was shared among the tribe. The twenty or so other huts surrounded the elder’s in the configuration of a nautical star.

She crossed her spindly arms over her narrow chest and sighed as the cascade of violet drops stopped at the precipice of the condenser. She reached out with a bony hand, her knuckles scabbed and flicked the condenser, producing a faint ring. The droplets complied, streaming out and gleaming like diamonds. Her father always knew how to ruin her good mood and tonight had been no different than any other. There had to be more than this. More than just making poisons only to dump them in the sands weeks later.

There was a scream in the distance. A hyena, maybe a Sand Wolf. Then there were others now, fearful and distinctly human. She whirled around from her workbench, knocking the partially filled vial from under the condenser.

“Damn it,” she hissed, tightening her jaw, shifting the vial back into place ever so carefully with a set of polished tongs. She couldn’t let a mess befall her workbench, he’d never let her forget that. The tendons in her neck stood taut as the screams intensified, turning to face the dim lights hanging in the desert’s shadows, fanning out like a blade in the twilight. She sniffed at the odd scent in the breeze. It was like aged moisture trapped under a heavy boulder.

What was this? Had the Tower witches come to see if Scorpions held their oaths? A raiding tribe? A thousand possibilities raced through her mind. She felt a thrill course through her nimble legs and up her neck. Senka pushed her cropped, inky hair back, forcing it stand up from her sweating hands.

Her hands tightened around the two daggers dangling from her heavy Fire Lizard belt, scabs on her knuckles breaking open and pinching at her. Her eyes strained into the bobbing lights, tumbling shadows, leaving the merry hissing of the condenser behind. Things seemed to slow down, each step of her soft boots like crunching branches in her ears, screams pulsing and hanging on the still air.

Her father ducked under the door of the hut, the great sword, Heartstriker, lying flat across his broad shoulders. The sinuous text inscribed upon the blade shone with the reds of the wounded sun, its pommel gilded with obsidian. He blew out his cheeks, looked at her with distant eyes, lips drawn down into a scowl. “Get inside Senka.”

But she couldn’t move. Her feet were stuck in the sand, as if they had become impossibly heavy. Her fingertips felt sore, sinking into the leather on her dagger’s hilts. The lights drew closer now. They were torches, carried by creatures of the old legends.

The shadow ones.

One of them sniggered and turned to her. Its eyes were black as the iron on the furnaces, its armor pitted and moldering. It had a torch held high in one hand and in the other something long, barbs lining it from haft to tip. A spear with dark liquid on it.

“The shadow is not welcome here!” Sinred Graves roared, Heartstiker’s tip glinting pink. The wide blade chopped into the Cerumal’s arms, hacking through the torch arm at the elbow and the other through the forearm. Heartstriker hissed into the sand, black blood jetting from the severed stumps of the shadow. The shadow one fell to the sands, screeching in agony. Her father extracted his blade and held it to the side in a two-handed grip.

More shadow ones surrounded Sinred, their dark instruments dripping with wet. She swallowed, realizing the screaming of her brothers had stopped, the night holding only the gibbering of the shadows. They all paused before him, banging on shields, ugly swords clanging on armor, squawking with glee. She had never seen him fight before and now saw why the Scorpions put their hands in his command.

A looming shadow crept up from behind them, its slick leathery wings spread open. The creature had a hairless head, skin pale as city dweller’s, eyes porcelain white and head framed in by four curving horns. She wore a corset of overlapping plate that hardly prevented her profuse bust from spilling out. Her shoulders and arms were bare, covered in a stony carapace. A billowy black skirt obscured what Senka thought were disproportioned legs.

“Stop,” the horned woman said. Her footfalls thudded as she pushed through the squawking group, shouldering them out of the way, sending one sprawling into the sand. Senka’s eyes watered; her chest tight as a corked boiling flask. She managed to count eleven of the shadow ones. Eleven, something she could fix in her mind. Something to focus on. Could the two of them kill eleven? Doubtful. Eleven. Her night-vision honed and she could see a few wounded shadow ones in the distance, crawling for refuge with their living brethren.

The squawking shadows fell in behind the towering beast. The shadow ones cast their greedy stares at Senka, stripping her flesh to the bone with their gleaming eyes. The horned woman ignored Senka, her white eyes regarding her father with the anticipatory look of a wolf to a carcass. The woman raised her white arms, now streaked with blood from fingertip to elbow, and clapped.

“A cherished evening!” the beast hissed in the common tongue.

Senka’s hands drew her daggers, whispering from their scabbards. They were Dragon forged, blackened to hide their value, edges coated in Windroot oil.

“No,” her father whispered in Scorpion, rapping with his fist in the air to signal that she sheathe her weapons. She felt her guts drop. Were they going to surrender? Die on their knees?

The last of the light faded away, giving their unnaturally constructed weapons the silhouette of a nightmare. Their weapons twisted, barbed, blades and spikes mounted haphazardly. They were undoubtedly sharp, spoken by the blood pattering onto the sand.

“By the Dragon,” he said, returning to common. Heartstriker trembled in her father’s grip. He re-gripped, the blade, his breath hoarse in Senka’s ear.

Sinred’s veins were standing out like cords in his muscles, no doubt his mind searching for a way out. It was fascinating to Senka that a moment ago her biggest worry was how to best please her father. Now it was how she would die. Life had a strange way of giving you what you wanted in the least desirable of ways.

“Show me to the Black Furnaces and your death will be quick.”

“Who… what are you?” Sinred dug the ball of his foot into the sand, creating a solid base of attack.

“I am Dressna, servant of the great lord,” the beast said, flashing a smile of broken teeth.

Sinred eyed her, considering. “Alright, under one condition.”

“Yes?” Dressna caressed a horn, leaving it with a wet sheen that reflected the surrounding torchlight.

“You’ll leave my daughter be and let her go unharmed.”

“Done.” Dressna’s wings fluttered and snapped against her back. She squawked at the shadow ones in their tongue and a fury washed over them, snarling in a rage. She screeched and clicked her tongue at them and fanned her arms. They relented, the brewing storm losing its edge. Whatever she said, it worked. “You will not be harmed, child.” Dressna regarded her for the first time, causing icy tendrils to race up and down her legs.

“Alright then.” The ferocity that had carved deep lines into her father’s eyes over the years seemed to drift away in that moment. He sagged with weakness, looking like a fool whose purse she’d want to cut and empty into hers. “Come this way.” He laid the flat side of Heartstriker over his shoulder, and started plodding towards the entrance to the tunnels at the back of their hut. He wouldn’t really show them, would he? It had to be a trick, one he’d never taught her. He was going the right way though.

“No! Father!” Not the oaths, they could not be broken.

His eyes snapped to hers and for the first time, she saw them wet with damp. He didn’t have to say anything else for Senka to end her protest. The endless sadness in his eyes could’ve housed all the Dragon fire in the world. “She comes with us,” he croaked. Almost like she was an afterthought.

Dressna stomped past the smaller shadow ones, stopping before her father. The monster slashed her arm to the side, blood droplets showering upon an ocher rock, and then beckoned Senka to follow. Senka forced herself to look into the face of the scoundrel who would make her father break his oaths.

She started to sheathe her daggers, but both of them fumbled in her sticky hands and hissed into sand. Dressna’s fallow eyes gazed down at her weapons, then back to her, looking at her like she was a maggot.

Senka snatched them up and sheathed them, blood coloring her face, the leather wrapped hilts caked in sugary sand. Senka’s calloused fingertips twitched at the heads of Acontium tipped needles, mounted on the underside of her leather bracer. She met her father’s eyes, sensing him trying to communicate with her. He knew all of her techniques, having taught her. He rapidly blinked his eyes twice to signal “no.”

Sinred pivoted and continued around towards the back side of the hut, the sand whispering secrets under his boots. Senka followed beside her father, certain that she was walking into her grave. She had barely started her life. Her father always said, “The reaper was but a bad rune’s toss away.”

Today the runes must’ve all shown Scorpions. She could feel the monster at their backs, its unwieldy form easily heard miles away in the worst of sandstorms. He walked directly to it, no attempt to fool the beast. What was his gambit?

He squatted down, started digging his hands in the right spot. Senka’s muscles were tight as a drawn bowstring, waiting for the moment when he would throw sand in Dressna’s eyes. No sand came. The round door creaked on rusted hinges as he drew it open, dust pilfering the moisture from her nostrils.

Dressna stabbed her torch into the opening, one arm braced at its edge. “Do not try to trick me. If you do, your daughter will endure unimaginable suffering until the end of her days.”

“This is where they are.” Sinred swallowed, jabbing Heartstriker into the sand. He rested his arms over its crosspiece as if he had just climbed a mountain.

“Go then.” Dressna rose up, thrusting her chest out and shook like a hound. She towered over Senka by at least two arm lengths. One of Dressna’s legs edged out from under her skirts, pale and heavily muscled, unarmored and vulnerable to poisons. Senka’s eyes narrowed in on the white flesh, so close, so easy to end all of this.