A Snake's Path (A Snake's Life Book 2)
Page 28
“Tonight,” I started in my gameteller’s voice.
“This morning,” Elise interjected.
“This morning,” I started again without missing a beat, “we embark on a journey to defeat the Cursed Arborium. Who dares?”
“I dare!” Elise declared loudly in a low-pitched, gravelly voice.
Norah smiled, raising her hand. “I dare!”
“And me!” Piper finished, and we put our fists together over the table.
“Let the game begin!” I threw the two ten-sided dice onto the table to determine where we would begin our journey.
The dice came to a stop on four and eight. Twelve it was, though the dice trembled defiantly as if that was not what they wanted to choose. I grabbed the encounter booklet and looked up twelve in the starting combat spreadsheet: Shapeshifters in the deep. I scanned the highlights, being well versed in guiding our ragtag gang through many RPGs, then set the book aside.
“Outside of Terrasil, on the road to the next great city of Feldaust to begin a trade barter, our great Company is of high spirits. But danger lurks in the shadows of the tall trees, and creatures with poisonous fangs that stab deeper than any sword wait for us in the darkness.”
The dice on the table shook harder, then so did the picture on the wood paneled wall, and the antenna on the old TV. There was a rumbling coming from overhead. Was it a plane? We looked up to the cellar door as light, first deep red, then orange, then yellow, pushed through the cracks in the wood.
The table bounced from leg to leg, and I slapped my hands down to stop the game board from being upset. My stomach tightened as the chair trembled and shook my body. The TV wiggled off the stand, its glass face smashing on the carpet-covered concrete floor. Glass jars from the canning shelves shattered, splattering preserved tomatoes across the wall, and the rumble grew to a roar. The light outside the cellar pierced through the cracks and filled our little space with white.
“What’s happening?” Piper yelled as she reached out for Elise and Norah. Their hands found mine on the table, and my wide-eyed gaze jumped from terrified face to terrified face. It was hard to see them, and my eyes burned from the blinding light.
“Get under the table!” I screamed over the noise and slid down my chair. I remembered the training from school and followed through the motions with fear as my friends crowded around me at the center of the thick wood table. I wrapped my arms around them, putting our heads together.
“It’s going to be okay,” I whispered softly, knowing it wasn’t true, as the white and the sound swallowed us up.
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Copyright
A Snake’s Path is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Kenneth Arant and Shadow Alley Press, Inc.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, email the publisher, subject line “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the email address below.
JStrode@ShadowAlleyPress.com
About the Author
Hello, everyone. My name is Kenneth Arant and I like to pretend I'm a writer in my spare time. A bit about myself: I'm a retired martial artist with fourteen years' experience, six of which I used to teach others how to not knock themselves out with a pair of nunchucks.
Currently, I'm a full-time night owl with a minor caffeine addiction and a penchant for letting my imagination run wild. My dream is to write awesome books that people will enjoy for years to come.
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