Warbringer
Centuries ago, the world fell.
From the ashes rose a terrible new species—the Tangata.
Now they wage war against the kingdoms of man.
And humanity is losing.
Recruited straight from his academy, twenty-year-old Lukys hopes the frontier will make a soldier out of him. But Tangata are massing in the south, and the allied armies are desperate. They will do anything to halt the enemy advance—including sending untrained men and women into battle. Determined to survive, Lukys seeks aid from the only man who seems to care: Romaine, the last warrior of an extinct kingdom.
Meanwhile, the Queen’s Archivist leads an expedition deep beneath the earth. She seeks to uncover the secrets of the Gods. Their magic has been lost to the ages, yet artifacts remain, objects of power that could turn the tide of the war. But salvation is not all that waits beneath the surface. Something else slumbers in the darkness. Something old. Something evil.
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Extract
Chapter 2 – The Archivist
Erika paused as she leaned backwards over the void, the darkness beckoning below. Only the corded rope looped around her waist held her in place. A shiver touched her, but now was not the time for second thoughts, and with a last look at her two assistants, she kicked off into the chasm. The rope slid through her fingers as she descended, the pitch-black reaching up to embrace her.
Soon the oil lantern clipped to her backpack became the only source of light, as the opening above shrank to nothing. The air grew colder, damp with the breath of the earth, and she shivered again, her eyes searching the absolute dark below for sign of the bottom. The lantern flickered and the black seemed to press closer, as though trying to repel her, to keep her from the secrets that had lain hidden from human eyes for centuries.
There were those who said these places were haunted, that they were the sacred sites of the Gods, or the birthplace of the Tangata. The details changed from story to story, but all agreed that entrance was forbidden, that to step foot in these hidden places was to call death down upon the human race.
As if that weren’t already coming.
Erika ignored such superstitions. The small-minded who believed such fancy had held back humanity for long enough. They could no longer afford such ignorance. Flumeer needed every weapon it could find for the war to come.
Fortunately, the Flumeeren queen had finally come to see her point of view. Now Erika just had to discover something of use in these lost places, something that might change the tide of the war.
So far though, her search had proven fruitless. The other sites had been empty; whatever secrets they’d once contained long lost to the passage of time.
And the queen was not known for her patience. She had taken a gamble, supporting Erika in the face of resistance from nobles who preferred to leave the past buried. What would happen if Erika came back empty-handed a third time?
“This is the place,” Erika whispered to herself, breath now fogging in the lanternlight. “This time I will find it.”
The magic of the Gods.
Those had been the words that had convinced the queen. Erika had spent most of her life studying their long-lost deities, whose magic had once been shared freely with humanity. What wonders had her ancestors witnessed in those glorious times before The Fall? Before the traitors amongst their ranks had grown jealous of the Gods and stolen the forbidden powers?
Only legends told of that time now. The traitors had sought to use the stolen magics to reshape themselves, seeking to join the Divine. But when the Gods had discovered the violation, their rage had been terrible, and instead the thieves had been cursed to madness. They had become the Tangata.
If only the anger of the Gods could be so easily sated.
All humanity had been equal before their omniscient gaze, and so all humanity had been cast down.
A hundred years of darkness had followed.
Fools!
Just the thought of that ancient betrayal caused Erika to tighten her grip about the rope. The Tangata had ruined everything, sentenced humanity to crawl amidst the dirt like common beasts for their avarice. Even when the light had finally returned, humanity had found the Gods gone, returned to their citadels amidst the clouds.
But the Tangata had remained.
Surely there was a design in that, some divine plan. Erika was convinced it was a test, a trial to see whether humanity could put right the mistakes of their ancestors. The Gods would not have left them alone to face the beasts, not unless there was a reason, a chance for victory.
And so she searched in these ancient places, searching for what had been forgotten by the mind of men, for a power left to them by the Gods to defeat the Tangata.
She had dedicated her entire life to it.
Thunk.
Erika stumbled as her feet struck solid earth. She would have fallen, but instinctively she had stopped letting out rope and now it brought her up short. Getting her feet back under her, she straightened.
Overhead, the entrance was little more than a pinprick now. Unclipping the lantern from her pack, she held it high to make sure she was truly at the bottom. On three sides the shaft was hard rock, but on the fourth a tunnel led into the darkness. She swore at the sight of water dripping from the walls. That was as the other sites had been, their contents rotted away long ago.
Not this time, please, Gods, not this time.
Her lantern illuminated walls of white limestone. Stalactites had begun to form in the ceiling, young yet, while water and the relentless passage of time had carved grooves in the stone beneath her feet. Silver threads criss-crossed the air, reflecting light from her lantern, but she saw no sign of the arachnids that had spun them.
Satisfied she had reached the bottom of the shaft, Erika set the lantern on the ground beside her and unclipped herself from the rope. Three tugs signalled to her assistants it was safe to descend. It would not pay to venture too far into this place alone.
She looked again at the walls. So much had been lost to the passage of time, but Erika knew for herself that some powers had remained from the time of the Gods. Her mother had…become a scavenger, digging in the dirt for scraps of metal that she could sell to the local blacksmith.
Their poverty in her later childhood stung Erika even now, though at least her mother’s occupation had given birth to her fascination with the Gods. The woman had collected trinkets found during her digging—pieces of glass and strange, bendable materials that were of no worth to the local tradesmen. Most had been inert, remnants of a time long lost.
But one had been different.
Erika had found it amongst her mother’s collection—a smooth, round piece of glass. It had seemed no different from the others, but for an impurity at its centre. Some mistake in its crafting, her younger self had thought.
Until she’d squeezed it between her fingers, and a brilliant light had burst forth.
She’d dropped it, so great had been her shock. The artefact had struck a rock and cracked in half, its light dying with a final flash. Half-blinded, Erika had scrambled to put it back together, before she’d smelt the burning.
Only as her vision cleared did she see the tiny drop of moisture that had been expelled from the glass. Solid stone had dissolved at its touch, leaving a smoking hole in the rock. Frozen in terror at what she might have unleashed, her younger self had sat frozen as the house filled with a terrible, molten stench. The stone had burnt for an hour before whatever magic had been hidden within the glass finally consumed itself. It had left a hole almost the size of Erika’s fist in the unadorned floor.
Erika had not soon forgotten the beating she’d received for the incident, though today it was the loss of the object she regretted. Who knew what power it might have possessed? She’d found other objects over the years, but none had retained their magic. At least, not yet.
Author Bio
Aaron Hodges was born in 1989 in the small town of Whakatane, New Zealand. He studied for five years at the University of Auckland, completing a Bachelor’s of Science in Biology and Geography, and a Masters of Environmental Engineering. After working as an environmental consultant for two years, he grew tired of office work and decided to quit his job and explore the world. During his travels he picked up an old draft of a novel he once wrote in High School (titled The Sword of Light) and began to rewrite the story. Six months later he published his first novel, Stormwielder, and hasn’t looked back since.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 