Release date: January 31, 2017
Subgenre: Epic fantasy
About Chronicles of the Last Days:
Myril doesn't need prophecy to see that her world is going to end – the
city is sinking before her eyes. Foreign ships fill Anamat harbor,
bringing traders bent on pillaging the city’s treasures – with help from
the governor – as its people flee to hostile lands.
Her guildmaster calls on her to help save the Chronicles of Anamat from the pillagers. Meanwhile, her old friend Darna needs healing, Iola wants to go to her death in the dragons’ realm, and the Defenders are airing their secrets at just the wrong time.
How will any of them survive when the waters rise again?
Her guildmaster calls on her to help save the Chronicles of Anamat from the pillagers. Meanwhile, her old friend Darna needs healing, Iola wants to go to her death in the dragons’ realm, and the Defenders are airing their secrets at just the wrong time.
How will any of them survive when the waters rise again?
Excerpt:
Darna looked out over the Anamat valley from a border shrine tucked
high in the mountains. She’d just glimpsed a dragonlet of Anara, or
rather, she thought she might have, but she wasn’t quite sure. With
dragonlets, you could never be sure. The scene spread out ahead of
her was a different matter. It had definitely changed since she’d
last seen it, less than a moon-round before. The sea shone in the
midday sun, just as it had then, but now it shone all the way up to
its new, muddy banks, far inland from where they’d been before. The
road into the city was mostly dry, but water encroached on it near
the West Gate Market. An inlet ran up to one of the larger
villages, where before there’d been only a stream. Boats moored on
its banks in what had once been pasturelands, and a few tents stood
nearby.
A quarter of the city was up to its ankles in water. “What have I
done?” Darna thought aloud.
“You haven’t done anything,” Sunna scolded her. Darna hadn’t meant to
speak aloud. “It’s the dragons, getting revenge on the Cereans.
Look at them.” She waved her hand at the tents and boats. “Crawling
all over us.”
“It looks more like revenge on us,” Raina said. “But Sunna’s right.
This is Na’s work, and he answers to no priestess, nor princes
either. Maybe the other dragons are all going wild. Even if you
moved some bits of stone out of place, you didn’t shake the earth;
only they can do that.”
Darna couldn’t explain to them why she’d felt her own hand in the
shift of the land, even if it had been a dragon’s force behind it.
She’d known where the power ran through the earth and she’d helped
to do something that she’d known was not quite right. Then she’d
called up the dragon, or at least given Salara strength on that
last day, the strength to do this. Salara had given her strength,
too, but it had a price. She was pretty sure that the cramps in her
gut were only the start of it.
The shift of the earth and the rising of the sea were echoes of
what had happened when she and her lover had given strength to a
wild dragon, strength to shake off the invaders – and to destroy
themselves, it seemed.
“We’d better go on, if we want to get to Raina’s place before
dark,” Sunna said.
It seemed absurd to worry about how far they had to walk that day
when the city was ruined, or at least well on its way to ruin.
“We won’t get there before dark, even if we could keep up a good
pace,” Raina said. They’d been traveling slowly so far because of
Darna’s cramps. “We could get in by midnight if we pushed through,”
Raina said. She was probably eager to get back to her house and her
mostly fosterling children.
The three women set out again, Sunna and Raina flanking Darna,
guarding her. The view of the city slid behind the trees for a
while. The change in the land had been different in Slaradun.
Terrifying there, too, except that she’d been beyond terror in
Salara’s embrace. Besides, the province had been so bleak and
barren to begin with that it felt almost like a mercy to destroy
it, like the death of her lover so soon after he had gone mad. He’d
said that he didn’t want to live that way, but she wondered if
death was what he’d really wanted in the end.
Amazon | B&N | Kobo | Apple iTunes | Google Play | Smashwords
The prequel Scrapplings is free throughout February.
About Amelia Smith:
No comments:
Post a Comment