Ashwalker (The Emberfall Trilogy #1)
Chapter 1
Chapter One
“We’re going to die today, aren’t we?”
I scale the last of the crumbling rocks at the top of the hillside, coming to stand beside Briar, and I immediately understand why my best friend is questioning the possibility of our demise.
The Gallows Run is looking particularly ruthless today.
From our newly-summited vantage point, I can see for what I suspect is several miles—though I can’t say for certain; judging distance is difficult with only one functioning eye.
But I don’t need perfect vision to know we’re about to descend into a hellscape.
I worked this route often enough before my injury that many of its horrors are clearly, permanently embedded in my brain.
Old maps label this road as Mercantaras, but like so many things in the Kaldran Empire, that word is a hollowed-out shell, gutted of the meaning it once held.
We know it as the Gallows Run because it’s deadly on a good day, full of cratered paths and pockets of strange, noxious fog that often conceals bandits and wild beasts alike.
Today is not a good day.
Today, a storm billows in the distance, edging closer and threatening to spin the toxic air into something even less breathable than usual. Unnatural winds—winds that seem to come from every direction at once—try to rip at the scarves we’ve pulled over our mouths.
Worse still, the clouds above it all are tinged in red and orange, puffed up like they’re filled with just-barely-contained fire.
It’s been some time since actual fire rained down upon this stretch of land, but it seems like the kind of day where it could happen.
I’m more sensitive to these things than most, so I can’t ignore the sense of violence in the air, the scent of smoke and hot metal…
Signs of dragon activity, in other words.
Something seems to have pissed the beasts off this morning. Any sane, sensible person would abandon every thought of trying to complete any jobs that required them to take this route, at least until things calmed down again.
But it might be weeks before things calm down again.
And we have supplies that need to be transferred—and money that needs to be made—now.
Not to mention, both my sanity and sensibility are questionable, at best. So I grin at Briar, even though my mouth is covered, and I offer her a reassuring pat on the shoulder.
“Today? No. Dying is not on the agenda. We’ll be too busy successfully delivering our cargo to Lastlight; no time for anything else I’m afraid. ”
The clouds pulse to a brighter shade of red, and I swear the air gets ten degrees hotter in a heartbeat.
I clear my throat. “…Are we going to die early deaths compared to most of our peers? Yes. Probably.”
Briar snorts out a laugh, leaning into my touch as she often does to reinforce our point of contact, making me feel stable in spite of my partial blindness.
Stepping away and into the line of my good eye’s sight, she readjusts the quiver at her hip, running her fingers over each arrow it holds, counting them for perhaps the tenth time since we left home.
She’s deadly quick at drawing her bow, and she can strike even the tiniest, most vulnerable targets from a ridiculous distance.
Good, helpful things when dealing with dragons.
They’re more or less impossible to kill with the weapons available to us, yes—but it’s not really about killing.
It’s about showing them we aren’t afraid.
That we aren’t going anywhere, no matter how hard those beasts and their masters try to destroy us.
“Well, I suppose it’s fine as long as it doesn’t happen any time soon,” Briar says, shifting the choppy strands of short, dark hair from her eyes with a casual toss of her head.
“I have plans for tomorrow evening that I’m rather looking forward to, and my gruesome death would really put a damper on them. ”
Grinning wider, I run a hand over my own sheathed weapon, a short sword that once belonged to my mother. The purple gems in its handle are flickering in response to the dragon magic the wind carries. “Plans with Koen, I assume?”
She swipes for me—as expected—but she only hits air; I’m already halfway down the hill, my good eye scanning the landscape for places where we could take cover at a moment’s notice, if necessary.
Briar follows closely behind me. Now that we’ve scouted the area from a proper vantage point, we return to the horses we left hidden in one of the few clusters of trees among the desolate landscape.
We take a minute to inventory the precious packages in the saddlebags, and then we quickly mount up and gallop onward.
The winds continue to batter us while the increasingly hot air sears any inch of uncovered skin to a bright, angry shade of red.
Thunder rumbles—or maybe it’s dragon movement or magic somewhere high above, I’m not sure—but we don’t hesitate long enough to let any of this deter us.
We’re heading into the thick of the Ashlands now, and hesitation will get you killed in an instant out here.
Something my mare, Garnet, knows as well as I do.
Garnet was another legacy passed down from my mother, to pair with the sword at my hip, and she’s also the only horse I trust enough to ride these days. She follows Midnight—Briar’s gelding—without a single wayward step. We make good time, reaching our next waypoint in less than an hour.
The point sits at the edge of a long-dry lake, and other Ashwalkers have left markers here: various signs formed of sticks and stones; knife marks scraped into the trees; tiny symbols burned into boulders.
Things subtle enough to be overlooked by anyone not seeking them out.
It’s part of the code those in our profession have developed, meant to relay the conditions of the various roads around the area.
Tension builds in my muscles as I take in all of the new information. I stay on Garnet’s back but pull out my map to doublecheck our position, reassessing which of the three routes into Lastlight is the least likely to get us killed.
A gust of wind rips past, nearly yanking the worn parchment from my hands.
As I shove it safely back into one of my bags, a loud roar sounds from above, higher pitched than the occasional booms we’ve been hearing.
Clearly far in the distance, but also clearly a dragon this time, and so it triggers the usual response in me: A flash of light before my right eye, followed by a phantom pain burning through it, as if it’s being punctured all over again.
Briar draws her horse up beside mine. “You okay, Owyn?”
I clap a palm over that useless eye, waving her concern off with my other hand. “I’m fine.”
After a moment of pressing hard against my old injury while taking several deep breaths, the traumatic memories subside. I’m steady again, unflinching even as I lift my head and look in the direction the roar came from.
I hate dragons so viciously it makes me sick to my stomach.
But it’s still hard not to stare when I catch a glimpse of one—or a glimpse of two, in this case.
A pair of massive black dragons are diving and swooping among the turbulent clouds, their movements graceful even as they clash together hard enough to make the world rumble.
Locked in a battle, or a courtship dance—I can’t say which, and this is typical; all of the many, many stories our world tells of these horrid beasts paint them with equal strokes of violence and beauty, their magic capable of both chaos and creation.
Watching these two tangle together fills me with a similarly conflicted response, my disgust twisting around something uncomfortably close to awe.
Garnet prances nervously and tosses her head, reminding me we can’t linger out in the open like this.
I don’t need a second prompting. Without another skyward glance, Briar and I decide on our path and then set off again, moving even faster than before.
We don’t make it far before something else catches Briar’s attention.
She veers from the road, guiding her horse to a narrower, more overgrown path that provides some cover in the form of the twisting blackthorns lining it—one of the few kinds of trees that manage to thrive in the battered soil of the Ashlands.
When I catch up, turning my head to find whatever’s taken her gaze, I only see the tips of a few banners at first. But soon an entire company of soldiers appears, climbing a steep section of a road that runs parallel to us.
They’re far off. Heading in the opposite direction. But the sheer number of them makes my breath catch, as does the color of those banners they carry—deep crimson and gold.
“…Mouren soldiers?”
“And suddenly the heightened dragon presence makes sense,” Briar mutters.
Mouren is the only kingdom still truly flourishing in the once illustrious Empire of Kaldra—in no small part because they’re the only kingdom with some semblance of control over the beasts that rule its skies.
Once upon a time, there were four kingdoms of equal might in this empire, each one chosen, protected, and blessed by a powerful, divine-sent dragon, as well as the lesser dragons that eventually followed those divine ones.
In the beginning, Mouren wasn’t even a true kingdom; it was a relatively small, neutral territory, a domain in the center where the four kingdoms could meet for purposes of politics and trade, and even the occasional celebration of unity and peace.
It’s been nearly a century and a half since Mouren grew tired of merely hosting others and decided to seize power for themselves. Several generations since they rose up, somehow taking control of the dragons from each kingdom and using them to ignite a war that they ultimately won.