by S. M. Boyce
“Chill. Out,” she said rhythmically.
She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths to distract herself from the panic. Her chest rose and fell until the rush of her heartbeat faded from her head. When she could control her breathing again, she stared at the floor and debated her very limited options.
Something glittered from a gap in a desk drawer, so she hopped to the floor with a soft thud and knelt to get a good look. There was no handle on the drawer, but she was able to slip her fingers through the opening and drag it out of the desk. The rock groaned from the effort, and as it finally slid open, a sunbeam skirted around her and cast her shadow onto the book hidden inside. It was wrapped in thin silver chains, but there was no padlock that she could see.
The air in the small room stalled as it had before the storm: stagnant and suddenly heavy. The muscles between her shoulders tightened, and her neck tensed.
Hidden deeper within the drawer was a thick sheet of parchment paper which she set aside, covered as it was in an illegible, spidery script. The book’s faded red leather was porous and soft, its title written in gold lettering that had long ago begun to chip so that now, only spotted lines comprised the runic letters.
The chains wrapped around the cover like metal vines, and instead of a padlock, they had all been fused together in the book’s center. In this mess of iron was a small silver pendant, hung from a short chain and set into the fused metal like a key in a lock. It was the same symbol that had appeared on the door: a crude four-leaf clover comprised of thin crescent moons. A brilliant diamond glittered from its center.
Her hands inched along the pages trapped beneath the odd lock and brushed the silver vines in the process. The metal burned her fingertips at the touch. She dropped the book, which thumped on the desk. Pain shot through her arm.
Someone whispered in her ear.
She whipped her head around and held her breath, but the library was empty and quiet once more. Her shoulders tensed and her body told her to run, run! But there was nowhere to run to. The library had no door and one inaccessible window.
Maybe she wasn’t supposed to open the book. The thought alone made her want to open it even more.
She tore off a bit of her sleeve, wrapped it around her hand, and dug her thumbnail beneath the pendant. It shifted. The cold vines stung her thumb through the fabric, but she gritted her teeth and jiggled the pendant again. The necklace moved above her finger and finally popped. Something else clicked.
The sound of metal slithering over fabric made her freeze. The iron vines unwound themselves and fell from the book, and for the second time that day, she suppressed a scream as inanimate things moved. The metal twisted away, clattering to the floor.
The air thickened again, weighing on her neck. A shiver raced down her back. Her hips were pressed into the chair, as if someone was pushing hard on her shoulders, but she continued to stare at the red leather cover. Another whisper chorused in her ear, but even though her breath caught in her throat and panic made her hands shake, she didn’t try to find the source. She doubted anything would be there if she looked.
She slid her thumb under the now-unlocked cover, pausing for only a second before she flipped it open.
A gale blew through the room from nowhere, ruffling pages and tearing books from their shelves. It ripped around her, whipping her hair so that her face and neck stung. The pendant’s diamond glowed blue. Her veins boiled, scorching her from within. Pins and needles ravaged every inch of her body. Sweat dripped down her back until it was chilled by the gusting wind. The ripped shreds of her shirt stuck to her bruises. She opened her mouth, but the air was gone. She couldn’t scream.
Then, all at once, everything settled. The library was silent, the pain in her body dissolved, and all she could hear was that incessant ringing.
“Holy—!” She couldn’t even finish her thought. She wiped her face, her mouth, her neck. Something scratched her skin.
The little clover pendant glittered in her hand. She stared at it, gaping. Something started clicking. It was a steady noise: flick, flick, flick.
She gasped.
The flick sound came from the book, which was—well, it was—its pages were turning. The room was motionless, the air heavy and still again, but the pages flipped on their own, one after the other. After a minute or two, they finally stopped when the last page drifted slowly to rest on its brothers.
“Holy…” she whispered. She sat on the edge of the immobile stone chair and peered at the open book while keeping as far a distance from it as she could.
A drawing covered both pages. The loose sketch showed a cliff overlooking a lake, a river, and a valley, and on top of the cliff was a lush forest. She squinted at a familiar sloping path up the cliff face and saw, hidden in the overhanging branches of the trees, the lichgate’s roof. And there, at the base of the path, was the marble door. Beside it, a man draped in a blue cloak lounged against the rock.
He peered up at her from beneath his hood, his face draped in shadow while one of his hands pointed to something off the page. She looked to where he was pointing and found the little note she’d brushed aside earlier. It still lay on the desk, unaffected by the gale which had ripped books off their shelves.
She flipped to the next page, but before she could read more than a few words, the page shook itself free of her grip and settled once more on the landscape and the man.
She grumbled and turned the page again, but it once more wrenched itself free and turned back to the drawing of the cloaked man who pointed to the letter. She huffed and moved the book so that he was pointing at a bookshelf.
His arm moved against the motion of the book so that he still pointed to the letter.
Kara gasped and grabbed the loose parchment from the desk, taking the hint and leaning as far back into the chair as she could.
The letter had been gibberish before, but she caught a word she knew as she scanned the page. Then another. And another. Her hand covered her mouth in horror as she read.
From the moment you read these words, you will be hunted. If you wish to survive what will come, you must pay attention.
Because you have found this Grimoire, you will come to know my world: Ourea. It’s a beautiful place, but its creatures are unforgiving and brutal. Ourea is a hidden pocket of the earth and has always been locked away, accessible only through the lichgates. Since you found this book, you have already discovered one of these portals. You can never return to the life you knew once you step through a lichgate.
Thousands of magical and non-magical species live here, but three are notable above all others: drenowith, isen, and yakona. Be wary of them all.
Drenowith are known in human lore as muses; they change form freely and don’t age. Isen are mostly evil, as their kind harvest souls to remain immortal and can don their prey’s appearance at will. But I believe that my people, the yakona, are far worse. We as a race have mastered magic, but we are divided and live in secluded, warring kingdoms. They will be the death of me, though all I ever wanted was peace.
To learn more, ask your Grimoire. It will always answer if you ask the right question.
You must be cautious. When you opened this Grimoire, you became its next master, and you will be known as the Vagabond. Only you can read these pages, and the vast knowledge held here is a coveted thing. I trust to you its secrets, its stories, and its fearful power. Though the coming adventures will daunt you, I hope that you discover the beauty hidden in even the most vile of things.
Tread carefully, Vagabond. You are the last of us. Guard the Grimoire as you would your life because everything you hold dear will one day depend upon what it tells you.
The lines in Kara’s forehead deepened, and she reread the short letter, holding her breath the whole time. A thought pulled on her mind, but her heart beat too quickly for her to pay much attention to it at all.
The Yakona
Braeden Drakonin ran his thick hands over a cavern wall he’d found deep
in the tunnels of some unknown mountain in Ourea. The yakona’s short black hair stuck to his olive skin, which was covered in sweat from the four days he had spent on this hunt. He was close.
He held up his hand and a gray fire erupted in the air above his palm, fueled by the magic that coursed through his body. The blaze flickered in the dark cave, casting its light across the glossy wall to give him a better view. Its white stone blocks were perfectly aligned without a single crack in the ancient mortar, and the fortification stretched across the cavern in an unnatural line that blocked off half of the cave. Its edges met the curved slope of the organic cave walls, the design bending to fill every possible gap in the rock with a white brick. Engraved into the center of the wall with thin, silver lines was a large symbol: a four-leaf clover the size of his head, made of four crescent moons that looped through each other.
This was it.
Finally, after twelve years of dead leads and the dying hope that it even still existed, he had found the Grimoire. It waited, somewhere behind this wall, for its new master. It waited for him.
He’d grown up listening to the legends of the Vagabond, as had every yakona child for the last thousand years. Most children daydreamed of finding the priceless treasures hidden in the Vagabond’s abandoned village; Braeden, however, had only ever dreamed of becoming a vagabond himself to escape having been raised to kill. He was a prince and Heir to the Stele: an evil kingdom filled with vile yakona that preferred torture to diplomatic negotiation. Becoming a vagabond was the only escape from that life. Though he’d escaped the Stele as a child twelve years ago—living another life while his kingdom thought he was dead—his luck wouldn’t last much longer. He needed to find the Grimoire before his father learned the truth.
Braeden stepped back, examining the cavern as he looked for a door. A sunken tower had fallen across two of the four entrances to the cave, but the worn stone blocks scattered on the floor were all that remained of it. Aside from the collapsed spire, the cavern was completely bare. The solid white wall didn’t have a trace of a hinge or a handle. His stomach twisted into a knot as a slow realization washed over him.
There was no door.
Dread made his palms sweat. “No. There has to be a way in. There has to be something.”
He ran his hands along the Grimoire’s clover symbol, hunting for a clue, but his search turned up nothing.
“No.” His voice shook as he smacked the wall with his palms. The stacked bricks shuddered, and the gray fire in his hand fizzled out. The room plunged into darkness once more. He pulled on his hair and repeated the word over and over, his voice growing louder as panic bubbled in his gut.
He finally lost all sense of self-control.
“No!”
Braeden’s fingers cracked as he lifted a nearby boulder that was easily half his size. He dug his hands deeper into its crevices to secure a solid grip and hurled the giant rock into the wall.
The boulder smashed over the symbol and crumbled into powder from the force. The wall trembled, and the shock of the blow sent a roar up the mountainside that split the ceiling. Sharp sunlight dissolved the cave’s gloom with thin rays that beamed down from this new skylight above. He threw himself against the wall for support and took a deep, shaky breath, but it only made the loathing race faster through his veins. He dug his hand into a crack in the wall, using it as a brace to steady himself.
Pebbles drizzled from his palm and sprinkled onto the floor before he realized that he had crushed the rock in his bitter, absentminded rage. His chest heaved. His knees shook. He clenched his teeth and glared at the smooth, polished wall he had tried to smash open.
There wasn’t even a scratch on it. The Grimoire symbol’s silver lines glinted in the meager sunlight, taunting him.
Heat crawled beneath his skin like a swarm of beetles, spiking from where it smoldered in his gut before it slithered into his chest. His fingers twitched. He curled his hand into a fist and let the hatred take him.
He punched the rough bricks, bones cracking as he broke his hands across the wall.
The skin on his knuckles ruptured, spraying his black blood over the clover symbol in a thin shower. He cursed and spat on the floor, but the skin on his hands knit itself back together in quick stitches, repairing the broken veins and shattered bones almost as quickly as he broke them. His fist healed in a matter of seconds, but that was one of the few benefits of being a yakona prince: only those with a royal bloodline could heal so quickly.
He glared at the wall and punched it once more, throwing everything he had into the attack. Layers of black, bloody splatters covered the white stone and the symbol that proved the Grimoire was so, so close.
The searing sting in his hand forced him to his knees until he could heal again. He leaned his head against the wall and forced himself to take sharp, deep breaths that hurt his lungs, but at least the momentary calm cleared his mind. He turned and sank to the floor. Light blinded him from the new ceiling he had ripped into the roof, forcing him to squint into the shadows as he tried to think.
The slow, hollow echo of someone clapping broke across the cavern. He glanced up, searching the darkness.
A woman materialized from the gloom and finished her final clap as she came into view, her skin glowing with the warm tint of honey in the hazy light. Gentle brown curls nuzzled the soft arch of her neck, and the glint of a sword shone from around her waist. She let loose a disappointed sigh as she looked him over: a noise that reminded him to breathe. Her perfume clung to the air now that she was closer.
When he smelled a rosy combination of lilac and pine, he jumped to his feet. That meant she was an isen—a soul thief. She could steal his magic and trap his soul for centuries with a single prick from the barb hidden in her right palm.
“How did you find this place?” he demanded, drawing his sword.
His mind tensed. The familiar heat that fueled his magic raced through his body as he focused. Black flames erupted in the spaces between the fingers of his free hand.
“What with all the yelling and rocks smashing it wasn’t that hard to just follow you.” She spoke slowly, as if tasting every syllable before it was released from her pink lips.
The isen shifted her weight, examining her nails, and the golden glint of a cross around her neck caught his eye. Her white shirt billowed over her shoulders but clung to her waist, accentuating the curves of her body.
Sunlight reflected off of his blade, pulling his mind back into focus. This was an isen. This was the enemy.
“Well, I feel like killing something, so this is convenient,” he said.
She chuckled. “You’re more adorable than I thought you’d be, but I didn’t come for banter. I’m here to take you home. Your father wants to talk to you, especially since you let him think you were dead for twelve years. I’m fairly certain sons aren’t supposed to do that to their fathers.”
“I have no idea who you are or how Carden found me, but I will never go back.”
A hazy, distant memory of a square made from black thorns flitted through his mind. It was the Stele kingdom’s coat of arms, painted onto the side of the carriage that had smuggled him out of the castle and out of his father’s control. The isen’s voice drew him back to the present.
“Carden figured you’d say that.”
Braeden spun the sword in his hand. “That life is behind me.”
“I think I can make you change your mind. If not, though, I hear these gentlemen are very convincing.”
She gestured into the darkness and at her command, dozens of figures materialized from the shadows. Each uniformed soldier had dark gray skin and a wide face with eyes that had no whites to them. Smoke billowed from the pores on their arms and necks, snaking around the silver and black tunics of Carden’s army as they approached in a thickly knit formation. Braeden’s mouth went dry, and he backed against the wall. There were easily sixty of them. He was outnumbered.
“Steady, boys. Don’t touch him unless I tell y
ou to.” She shot a look to them over her shoulder.
“Do they know you’re an isen?” His grip on his sword tightened with the hope that they did not.
“Of course they know, peanut. That’s what makes us all such great friends.”
“How could Carden trust you? Has he gone insane?”
“Probably. Your father has become a little, well, eccentric since you left. Now come along. I’d hate to have to hurt you.”
She grinned. The smirk cast dark lines across her beautiful face and suggested that she would actually enjoy following through on her threat. He dug his heel against a small shelf in the floor. If this was his last fight, then he was ready. He had nothing left.
