Prologue
The small child watched as the ferocious battle engulfed the shoreline. His mother scooped him into her arms and handed him to his father, who had untied the skiff and was already pushing it out into the bay. Others around them were doing the same, refugees from the senseless
violence that Hilkiah couldn’t understand beyond his own helplessness. There were skiffs and scows, sloops, and all other manners of vessels filled with frightened passengers.
Hilkiah was mesmerized by a towering man in a sharply defined black robe with batwing sleeves who seemed to be pulling lightning from the sky and hurling it at his enemies with frightening effectiveness. The robed man was huge, and not only from a small boy’s perspective. None of the other combatants were even half his size. But neither were they fully at his mercy.
The tall man and his companions were enduring their own onslaught, led by long, thin people who, when he could see their faces, reminded Hilkiah of skeletons, with deep hollow jowls and inset eyes. Thin arms protruded from old, dirty, and torn jerseys as they hurled spears perfectly
through howling winds with an accuracy only magic could accomplish.
The large wizard and his forces seemed to have the upper hand as Hilkiah’s parents made their escape. Above, the Vermillion Bridge, which led to the Wandering City, was overflowing
with more refugees scampering across the river. The wizard doubled down his efforts against his foes, lighting up the clouds above with multicolored flashes of lightning. The skinny ones were
screaming in retreat, many of them in flames as they ran into the water to escape their blistering fate. The wizard and his troops closed in and finished the slaughter then turned their attention to
the bridge as Hilkiah’s father rowed rapidly to the opposite shore, fighting choppy waterseffortlessly as if they were friend rather than foe to a rowing man.
Others were not so fortunate. Young Hilkiah wanted so badly to be able to jump into the waters and swim to the side of their boats and push them to the opposite shore, too, but he was
helplessly young. All he could do was watch and hope as the wizard directed his power to the fleeing refugees on the bridge above.
Massive bolts of lightning scattered across the sky and downward. Direct hits that shattered the bridge sent bodies falling into the bay far below to certain death.
The desperate rowing finally subsided. Hilkiah’s father pulled the boat to shore, lifted Hilkiah out, and helped his mother step onto the choppy water’s bank as others struggled to reach safety before the wizard might turn his attention on them. Hilkiah imagined how wonderful it could be if a great wave could rise from the depths of the bay to carry all the small boats to shore, away from the pursuit of their stalking predators. He wished it so desperately that he closed his eyes
trying to imagine it, squeezing them together so hard he could feel tears as he clenched his fistsand strained to think of such a thing.
Hilkiah’s father roughly pulled on his arm, then lifted him, and began to run, along with his wife, Hilkiah’s treasured mother, who had given Hilkiah the kind of love that made him long for her gaze upon each morning’s awakening. Hilkiah, who didn’t know why they were running with such abandon suddenly, tried to lift his head to look behind his father’s shoulder as he bounced in his arms.
Then he saw it. A massive wave, taller than anything he had ever seen, taller even than thehills of Moria, was curling onto the boats and ripping them out of the bay, sending people flying this way and that into the water. As his father continued running, Hilkiah could hear him urging his mother on, but he heard nothing from his mother, just the loud crash of the wave as it blasted the shoreline, crushing the docks and the boats and the moorings that lay along its length.
Then, instantaneously, the wave curled all the way back into the bay water, defying all physics, simply churning itself into the water and disappearing, leaving an endless line of bodies lying in its wake.
Hilkiah’s father stopped running. “Your mother,” he said frantically. “Where’s your mother?” His father called out her name to the howling winds and the remaining survivors who were also desperately searching for loved ones. “Rebecca!” he cried out. “Rebecca!” Then he caught sight of her, near the edge of the water, and he ran to her, Hilkiah holding on tighter because his father had loosened his grip in his distress.
His father set Hilkiah down, leaning deeply into his mother, who lay prone on the edge of the shore with its lapping waters. Hilkiah’s father’s sobs overtook the sounds of the bay. “Oh, please
no,” his father cried, burying his head into her back, pulling on her hair, one fist pounding and splashing and thrashing into the silt and water in agonized grief.
Chapter 1
Part 1
Aurilena commanded her horse toward the herd of buffalo blanketing the horizon, her friend Sherealla close behind. They were riding the Wildland Hills for the High Priest Hilkiah, who had sensed a Reckless. He had sent Aurilena, despite her youth, because she knew the hills, knew the buffalo, and knew the cadence of the kind of incendiary soul a Reckless must be.
“It will be,” he had said to her, “like sending myself. You’ll sniff him out in no time. After,”he had then chuckled, “the expected distractions.”
Aurilena’s tight, sleeveless hemp vest moved in unison with her lean athletic frame. Her head tossed back silky currents of black hair before she yelled, “Come on!” She softly kicked her
horse, whom she called Remembrance, her feet wrapped in tall leather moccasin boots pulled tightly with braided laces. Tucked inside the boots were canvas-colored jodhpur pants.
The two girls rode toward the immense herd, which was a sea of dark brown ink in the distance.
Sherealla wore a tightly woven, white cotton riding shirt and the same pants as Aurilena, butwith riding boots secured by a long strap at the top that held firm through the magic of two metal clasps.
After they rode awhile, Sherealla asked, “You really know what you’re doing, Lena?” not at all happy with the diversion their assignment was taking.
“A boy taught my brother and me how to do this . . .” Aurilena paused at the painful memory.
“My brother. He said he wanted to learn how to hunt.”
Sherealla thought about the way her own rich walnut hues and round ornamental cheeks combined with Aurilena’s dark olive skin and angular face to create a statuesque duo of hopeless visual entanglement for the hapless boys of Moria. Although Aurilena had shown little interest in Morian boys, she wasn’t unwilling to occasionally leverage her charms to learn the secrets behind prestigious spells or incantations from boys who craved her attention.
“Hunt,” Sherealla repeated incredulously.
“Yeah.”
Sherealla found it hard to imagine Aurilena’s brother, a spiritual prodigy who had once seemed destined for priesthood in the House of Legions, as a hunter. But she knew Aurilena’s brother had probably been quite young when he had expressed that desire, just the musings of a child.
“What’s cool is that you can go right up to them, and they don’t blink. Nothing scares them. You know? So, you just come up to them and do this.” With that, Aurilena conjured a rope and extended it from her hands. As the rope grew from her hand and rose slightly behind and above her head, a small loop emerged at its end. It then whirled and expanded, twisting with her wrists as she extended it in small increments upward. She snapped the loop toward a small dead piece of tree on the ground and drove her horse toward the target. She lofted the splitting bark upward as if setting a lure on a fish. The bark exploded into a dozen pieces as Aurilena drew the empty
rope loop back toward her.
“That’s what you want to do to the poor beasts?” Sherealla yelled over the sounds made by the galloping frenzy of the two charging horses.
“Yup!” Aurilena commanded Remembrance to move faster as she spread a distance between
Sherealla and herself. “Except maybe that last part!” said her fading voice.
“Hey!” Sherealla shouted. Sherealla kicked her horse into high gear, and they raced toward the herd. “What about the Reckless?” She doubted Aurilena heard her question over the sounds
of their galloping horses.
“The Reckless can wait!” came an answer in the wind.
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