An excerpt from something new. Also new Dahlia Bliss is coming as well.
Zephyros ran through the night, calling The Lightning until his head pounded with the effort of speaking it.
The thumping hooves of their horses and the joyous, terrified cries of men going to war.
As a sixty feet column of brilliant white and blue light sliced through the trees in a serpentine arc, Zephyros Barak prayed for Ansel Mercer’s men to give up their pursuit.
He had shared his circumstances of birth with Mercer over dinner that same evening. Hatched from The Divine Egg, stolen from a dragon goddess who was tricked into surrender by his father. Mercer had sputtered on his wine and sat back aghast.
Zephyros remembered the statutes in the hallway. The shard of diamond around his neck, hung on a length of cord. He believed they were affectations, not beliefs held without shame.
Zephyros put his hands up, spluttered something about being house trained.
Humour, he discovered, was another skill he lacked experience in.
When Mercer reached to slash at him, screaming the word, abomination, Zephyros realised he had been too honest about his circumstances. Taking a wound to his forearm had distracted him from the concentration used to Speak, so instead he had ran, relying on surprise to make it out of the chamber, and then the courtyard before Mercer could act on his outrage.
Zephyros remembered the papers he had left behind. A modest proposal to fund an expedition, researches and cataloguing the unknown lands to the south. He had planned to appeal to Mercers noblesse oblige but then he had plans for all sorts of things.
His left forearm was sodden with blood, soaking through the sleeve of his robe and each step made it sing with pain. The wavering edges of his vision spoke to a blood loss which would overcome him faster than the men at his heels.
Ahead, the forest was growing thicker, and he continued his frenzied retreat as he heard arrows fly ahead.
Zephyros prayed the assertions of a greater destiny were not his moment of ironic demise. Which was when the arrow slammed into his left shoulder and he cries out with shock. He reached out, tested the shaft where it had gone in and his fingertips were sodden with blood.
Each breath was a furnace in his chest, and The Lightning slipped from his acuity.
Zephyros tried to keep up his pace but his wounds were bold with exhaustion and soon, he was staggering and stumbling over his feet as the shouts grew muted behind him.
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