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Games of the Powerful

Page 17

by William E Samela


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  The wraith moved through the carnage oblivious of the death and destruction around it, passing the heads of children and adults alike impaled on the ends spears sticking up out of the ground. The miasma of death is everywhere but it could not have cared in the least. What the evil wraith was searching for was not here. Passing the bodies of humans and orcs alike it cared little for the death and carnage visited on this once peaceful and prosperous place. Moving through the rubble of the burned out trading post, it glided through the smoke from the fire lazily drifting slowly across the ground like fog.

  Suddenly, it sensed a feeble life in the rubble so it floated toward it. Lying on the ground next to the wheel of a broken down wagon is a human child with a savage wound across its chest. By all rights, the child should have already died and the wraith wondered unconcernedly why it had survived. Floating closer the wraith wondered yet again, why the child is alive. Is the child here for it to take its spirit, or is it happenstance only that the child is still breathing, either way the wraith is thrilled immeasurably at the thought of taking its tiny spirit. This time it did not bother to try to understand why.

  Gliding to the child as if floating in the wind, the wraith's passage is silent as death, its darkness briefly settling over the child enveloping it consuming the child's tiny spirit leaving nothing more than a dried husk of a human being. The wraith did not glean much satisfaction from this feeding but it knew there would be others. The one it waited for would come here in his travels and it would feed on power the likes of which even its masters could not conceive, again it wondered how it knew this was so.

 

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