Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1 - The Academy
Chapter 2 - Contrary Connections
Chapter 3 - Unlikely Force
Chapter 4 - Storm Clouds
Chapter 5 - The Camaraderie of Abnormalities
Chapter 6 - The Nareon Narcotic
Chapter 7 - It Begins and Ends with Pain
Chapter 8 - Inheritance
Chapter 9 - Humanity
Chapter 10 - Duplicity, and a King's Plea
Chapter 11 - Monster of a Different Sort
Chapter 12 - Mortal Dangers
Chapter 13 - The Mark
Chapter 14 - Offensive Training
Chapter 15 - Treading Reality
Chapter 16 - Breaking Apart
Chapter 17 - Shafted Warning
Chapter 18 - Shifting Fellowship
Chapter 19 - Higher Powers
Chapter 20 - Terrible, Terrible Truth
Chapter 21 - Flowering Supremacy
Chapter 22 - Revolts
About This Book
Coming Soon
The author has provided this ebook for your personal use only. It may not be re-sold or made publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law.
* * *
The excerpt provided at the end of this book is for the upcoming sequel ‘The Soulstoy Inheritance’, provided by Jane Washington. It may not reflect the final edition, only as it stands at the time of this publication.
For Madison, my first reader.
* * *
My father used to walk with me every morning, back when I was young and blissfully naïve… while I was a part of a family isolated in its perfection, and perfectly isolated because of it. We would leave the cottage without my mother—while it may have been safe for us, it certainly wasn’t for her—and would skirt the northern side of the high, stone walls that encompassed the Market District of the Read Empire. And every single day, he would give me the same riddle.
What is the one thing that will never change?
Never once did I take the question seriously. I answered him differently each morning, challenging myself to come up with something new, something funny, something tragic, and often in my younger teenage years, something bratty. One day it was his snoring, that may have altered in pitch and intensity, but never failed to shake the cottage and keep me awake. The next day is was my mother’s total inability to produce edible food. On days where I was feeling particularly philosophical, it could have been the sun, which rose in varying degrees of splendour, but rose each day all the same. With every answer I provided, he would shake his head and tell me to try again the next morning. In the end, it wasn’t even my father who taught me the answer… it was my mother. A week after she died, we went on our last walk, as father had just been awarded his new position on the Black Guard, and we would not be able to maintain our recluse lifestyle any longer. There also wasn’t much reason for it anymore; not now that Caroline Harrow was dead.
Though we still walked that morning, it was the first time he had refrained from asking me the question, and it was the first time I had taken it seriously. I looked at everything differently that day. I looked at the blooming flowers that would soon wilt, at the fluttering of the leaves that fell before my eyes, and at the reliable sun that would retreat into darkness as it did every night, just as reliably. I had never seen his question for the lesson it was, because until that moment, I had never experienced death.
It might have been his way of preparing me, in some small part, for how difficult my life would be. I never really respected how hard it must have been for my mother, mostly because we had steered clear the other civilizations under the Read rule. Father had put off promotion after promotion to stay with us, knowing that it wouldn’t be safe for my mother, but after she passed, there must have just been too many bad memories in that little cottage, and he finally caved in and moved us into one of the bordering villages. It wasn’t as dangerous for me as it would have been for her, not really.
He was worried at first that his new position would only make things worse for me. After all, the black guardsmen weren’t exactly knights in shining golden armour. Those were the men of the King’s Guard, and they had a commander of their own. Father’s dominion was a very different squadron of recruits. Assassin, I distinctly recall hearing someone whisper, as we passed a crowd of people near the gates to the kingdom one morning. I thought it was a horrible label, especially after I started training with them myself.
I never had ambitions of being a black guardswoman, or even a regular solider, but father had initially been scared to leave me at home alone while he was away. He had never really had much of a hand in raising me, and that barely changed even after my mother passed. He had always preferred to leave all the decisions up to her, and she had joked that even though he could take down five men at once, he was still scared-witless at the idea of disciplining his own daughter. That hadn’t been entirely true, of course. I had never needed disciplining, and I highly doubted that my softhearted mother would have been any more capable than my father, if it had ever come to it.
I don’t think he intended me to pick up a wooden sword and start mirroring the men through their morning paces, but there wasn’t much else to do in the barracks, and it saved me from going wandering alone in the forest the moment he turned his back.
It wasn’t the physicality of the training that drew me in at such a young age, but something less tangible. It was the unity of so many outcasts, a comfort that I found in these huge, scary men that snarled and spat and picked their fingernails with daggers. These people were hissed at by groups of others, meeting at the gates to the kingdom, just as I was. They were scared, feared, and often rejected in royal society, just as I was. Heck, they were scared, feared, and rejected in any society. They were the only people who didn’t stare at me, or whisper about me as I passed them, they treated me as one of their own, just as I did them. Of course, that didn’t stop them from laughing at my pitiful attempts with a sword, even when I graduated from a wooden tip to a steel tip. I’d like to say that I’ve gotten better over the years—and while I may be faster, leaner, and subtly stronger—I would still be lying.
Looking back on our years in the old cottage, it always made me sad to think that my mother had never felt anything like what I felt with the black guardsmen. It wasn’t as though she didn’t try, even simply being near my father and I would have been painful for her, though she always denied it. And this was all because my heart-stoppingly beautiful, soft-as-satin mother was… quite simply, terrifically dangerous.
There are few races that the humans live in peaceful coexistence with, some being the elves and the fae, who actually make up almost a third of our population. Unfortunately, there are even more races that we have waged war against—those that we call the tainted creatures. The renegades are mostly only dangerous to us when under the coin of one of the more powerful dark races, and the vampires are always a sure choice when telling ghost stories to children in the dark, though some deny that they are nothing more than stories. But the worst by far, are the synfees. Even I can say that, which is a considerable feat, as my mother was one, and I—as an unfortunate result—am half of one.
The synfees are the pinnacle of evil. Creatures of monstrous destruction; they seemed to get the best of every race. They had the superfluous beauty of the fae, with the honed strength and sense of the rangers and sometimes even manifested the bender talents, though those powers were rumoured to have been bent into something else entirely. Normally, this would not be a bad thing. Normally, this amount of talent and ability would be practically worshipped. Unfortunatel
y, for each gift that they seemed to possess, there was a curse to accompany it. Their ethereal beauty had a seductive edge, something that drew people to them, even against their will. Their senses might have been heightened, but it made them animalistic, it made them want to hunt the weaker creatures of the world. And then of course, there was the appetite. For the synfees were supposedly cannibals.
Yes, cannibals. The kind that snack on their own young for breakfast, though—in truth—the synfees much preferred people their own age, people that they were attracted to, and people that weren’t synfees themselves. The only time my mother had ever spoken about it, she had deliberately not commented on the cannibalism aspect, instead saying that the reason synfees were so beautiful, so irresistible, was because they fed off the desire of the weaker races. Being young enough at the time that I couldn’t really understand the concept, I had revisited the issue with my father a few years after my mother died. He—not without some discomfort—told me that every nightmarish quality the synfees possessed, was a product of something pure, pushed past the boundaries of it’s own purity by the strength of their twisted magic. I don’t think he meant to insult my mother, and perhaps not wanting to insult her was the reason he refused to talk about it after that. But I had borrowed what books I could find, and while the information was limited, I did discover that my father wasn’t far from the truth.
They were awesomely powerful, and yet, that power was used in awesomely horrific ways. They were bewitchingly beautiful, but the desire evoked by their beauty was fed upon, preyed upon, used—if these books were correct—to sustain them, as might regular healthy food and exercise for any normal person.
My mother had been different. She must have killed at one stage; I assume they all do, but never in the lifetime that I knew her, never in the lifetime that my father knew her. She had lived a long life before she met my father, a life sustained on synfee magic, something that she gave up to have a family and be human. The synfee urges should have been impossible to resist, but somehow she managed it, and she also managed to survive off human food. Of course, refusing to use her synfee magic and acting in every other way how a human might, was essentially what killed her. Synfees were immortal, they survived off other people’s desire, and apparently once that was had, the bodies of the dried-out husks-for-humans that remained, were devoured.
This was the one defining characteristic of a synfee that hadn’t seemed to stem from something perfect and pure, instead it was the other way around. The ideal of immortality was the product, and the horrible appetite was the cause. So, when my mother ignored her terrible hunger, she was rewarded with the imperfection of mortality. She aged, she got common colds, and eventually, a common disease. She died, weak.
I wish that she were here now. I don’t know how she would manage to spin the task I had ahead of me into something good, but she would have managed it all the same.
I stared at the clothes tossed all over the small room. Up until now, I had been allowed private tutors, but after the sixteenth candidate walked out… well, I guess we were just out of options. The truth was, nobody knew what to do with me. My powers were completely out of control. Not in a too-strong-for-me-to-handle kind of way, but in the less glamorous, I-lack-the-finesse-of-control kind of way. One day I could summon an outpouring of water large enough to drown myself in, and the next I’d be sure to die of thirst if left up to my own abilities.
Up until my sixteenth birthday almost two years ago, they had been mostly doormat, only a few muted abilities, sort of like a sampler of each. But then, the day after I turned sixteen to be exact, they all just suddenly manifested. I didn’t know how to deal with the intensified sound and feel of the world; vines snaked out and tripped me where I walked, trying to connect to me, and without meaning to, I often managed to summon the elements while I was deep in sleep. A few times I woke up just as my blankets caught fire, or a gust of wind pushed me right out of bed.
According to the sixteenth tutor, I was developing ‘too many’ abilities, even for a synfee. I snapped back at him that he’d never even seen a synfee. If he had, he wouldn’t be alive. Of course, that’s what finally cost me my last tutor, and earned me a place at the Academy. I had agreed to the idea mostly because I had no real expectation that they would accept me. I thought my father would receive a flat-out refusal. So of course, I was taken aback to learn that they had not only accepted my application, but that they also wanted me to start right away.
The first, and strongest, of the abilities to manifest, has also been the most harmless so far, though it is apparently the most rare. Tutor number fifteen had believed it to be somewhere under the White Caste of non-race specific rarities, which was the Healer caste, and I could sort-of understand why. There was no real classification for this ability, and while it was also essentially useless, it was my favourite. It was—for lack of a deeper understanding—a connection to the energy in what flora surrounded me.
When I walked through the grass for instance, if I were feeling particularly happy, then it would not be uncommon for daisies to spring up in the places my feet touched. Likewise, if I were particularly unhappy, the grass would wilt. Sometimes, I even felt as if I had only tapped the surface of the connection, and that I could control the elements through it in a different way to how I did outside of the link. It felt as if the world darkened around me when I was upset, or that it overflowed with bubbling life when I was happy. The rains wept when I did, and the sun burned punishingly hotter as my temper flared. Of course, that’s why tutor number fifteen left. He simply thought I was insane.
I sighed again, and snatched the plain wrap-tunic atop the pile on my bed, pulling it over my head and turning to the mirror hanging down the inside of my wardrobe as I secured the buttons along the front. It ended below my knees, and was relatively shape-less. Exactly what I wanted. I usually avoided taking any kind of care with my appearance at all, but today I would need to do the best I could to discourage the synfee stereotype.
It was the same process that I went through whenever I had to go into the kingdom with my father. He thought that I was being ridiculous, because he didn’t know a single other person who had ever even seen a synfee, so where would they get their stereotypes from? Unfortunately, I knew only too well that people would be prejudiced against me, whether they even knew what a synfee was supposed to look like or not. They knew that synfees were evil, and tricked you into thinking that they were beautiful just so that they could drag you off to whatever dirty cave they lived in and start munching on your limbs. And that’s all they needed to know, to be sure that I couldn’t be trusted.
I continued to stare at myself, the expression on my face quickly turning to disgust, the unnaturally perfect, pinkish bow of my lips cringing down in a scowl. I was unadorned, my hair tugged into a boring ponytail, my face scrubbed clean.
It’s not enough. It never will be.
I had waist-length hair that looked as if it might have been curly, if it hadn’t been weighted down by sheer thickness. Instead it was almost wavy, and a shade of colour that constantly annoyed me, because even though it was glossy and silky-looking, the reddish tint to it made me feel garish and over-the-top on a good day, or positively lurid on a bad day. My mother had boasted hair of the most enchanting burgundy, and my father’s was a very human red, almost orange. So, lucky for me, I caught something in-between. The red was very dark, almost brown, and yet, in some lights, there were sections that shone golden. Several times I had tried to cut it all off, but only awoke the next morning to find that most of it had grown right back overnight. Coupled with the violet-blue tint of my eyes, and the golden tan of my skin, I was basically a walking, colourful freak-show. One who had no chance or ever being able to coordinate her clothes with all the different shades already adorning her body. The tunic, as if demonstrating that inability, was a bleak shade of off-white.
The walk to the Academy was agonisingly long, and if I hadn’t learned to control my first ability f
airly well by now, I am sure there would have been a trail of dead grass leading all the way from my village to the kingdom gate. Being who my father was, we were required to live inside the walls of the kingdom’s Market District, but once my powers began to manifest, I had been moved to a cottage much further away, though thankfully not as isolated as the one I had grown up in, as this one was still on the verges of one of the surrounding settlements.
The Read Empire consisted of eight main districts, including the Market District, and its two, connected cities, the King’s Blockade, and the Harem District. The Market District contained the castle itself, along with all the administration buildings, barracks, academy buildings, and as the name would suggest, it was also the kingdom’s main trade district. Further east were the Twin Tiered Cities, stepping down from the gradual incline that led to the kingdom gates, bordered to the East by the River City, and its bridged compadre, the Upper River City, as well as the Walled District. The mostly unmarked territory to the north and east had been divided up into four settlements, each of which boasted no official name. I lived in the third settlement, referred to by most of the locals as ‘Sparrow’s Settlement’.
The cottage I had inherited had belonged to a great-aunt who had since passed away, and whom I had never even met in the first place, as most of my father’s family had avoided him because of my mother. Sometimes my father stayed with me, but still technically lived in the Market District, not that it would have made much of a difference, as he usually was off on some mission anyway. I knew he was uneasy with me staying alone, with no protection, but I had been training with him long enough now that he at least had the peace of mind to know that I was able to protect myself.
“Name and purpose.” Asked one of the guards at the gate, sounding bored and breaking through the thoughts swirling around in my mind.
Hereditary Page 1
