Savant & Feral (Digital Boxed Set): Books 1 and 2 of the Epic Luminether Fantasy Series

by Richard Denoncourt

  “We almost missed you, too,” her brother said. “If the message had come a week later, we would have been on the other side of Valestaryn. You would have had no means of finding us. All air travel is prohibited. Phasing is punishable by death.”

  “We’ll have more time for explanation later,” Artemis said, motioning to a soldier standing nearby. “Gather our scouts, Elon,” he told the man, who gave a quick nod before leaving the room. “It’s time to go.”

  This set the others in motion, and the room filled with activity as everyone began packing their belongings. Lance gave Calista’s arm a gentle squeeze before turning toward his personal area in the corner.

  She was about to follow her brother, in case he wanted help packing, when Artemis stopped her by extending an arm across her path.

  “Hold up now,” he said. “You remember our training, right?”

  “Of course I do.”

  How could she forget those two years of sessions that had left her exhausted and sore every other night? She and Artemis had dedicated themselves to the practice of hand-to-hand combat, sword wielding, knife throwing, and archery. Calista had mastered all four, though she had stopped practicing them at Ascher’s ranch out of fear that he and Coral might send her away. Her skills were probably rusty from so many years of disuse, but time had failed to erase her fond memories of learning them.

  “It’s been years,” she added. “I don’t know how effective—”

  Artemis stopped her. “Don’t worry about that. Lance and I will help you get back up to speed. We’re all going to need extra training to pull off this mission, so you won’t be the only one.”

  “Artemis, where are we going? What mission?”

  The baker gave her a stern look much like the one he had given her in his attic years earlier. It made her feel like a child again, a fledgling student with zero understanding of what was to come.

  “That tower Kovax is building on the coast of Erath?” Artemis said. “We’re going to blast it to pieces, so pack light and bring your steel.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Emmanuel instructed the Wingvan to wait for them, saying it wouldn’t take long.

  “Don’t get too wet out there,” the driver said. “You’ll ruin my seats.”

  He dropped them off in a pentagon-shaped park, where narrow footpaths made of gray stone branched off in every direction, dividing the grass into sections. Wooden benches lined the footpaths, and Milo imagined people sitting and relaxing in nicer weather. Today, thanks to the rain, the place was empty.

  “I’ll get umbrellas,” Emmanuel said after Andres and the orphans had gathered on the sidewalk beneath an awning, shivering in the cold.

  He entered a nearby store and came back carrying a small bag. Reaching in, he brought out several thin batons that didn’t look like umbrellas at all. Emmanuel passed them around and demonstrated how to turn them on by slapping his palm against the tip, which caused a bluish marble of light to shoot out of the opposite end and stop two feet away. Instantly, the glowing orb spread into a translucent, bowl-like shell. Whenever Milo swung the baton, the projection swung with it. The orphans played around with them, sticking the umbrellas into the rain and watching in fascination as the seemingly detached energy fields deflected the water.

  “Guys,” Owen said, the first to drop his fascination, “after all the magic spells we’ve seen, are these really that cool?”

  The mood was somber enough that no one could think of a reply.

  “Let’s go,” Emmanuel said, swinging the umbrella above his head and stepping into the rain.

  He led the orphans across the street. They entered the park and walked along one of the footpaths toward the main attraction, a strange, fountain-like apparatus in the center that Milo had trouble understanding. Never, not in any of the vault’s archives, had he seen such a thing.

  The fountain was huge, with a bowl big enough to fit all the orphans if they had wanted to swim—only it didn’t hold water, but some sort of radiant plasma that shot up from the fountain’s central pillar and rained back down in frothy streams. The essence, obviously magical in nature, was like blue cotton candy, spun from light instead of sugar.

  He approached the fountain to touch its mist, but his uncle stopped him with a grunted command.

  “Don’t.”

  Milo stepped back, studying it instead. Something about it made his body tingle with the urge to dip his hands and face, if only to quench a thirst he had never felt until his moment.

  Why was his uncle being so cautious? If the fountain was out here in public, then it must be safe to approach. The least he could let Milo do was dip a single hand into the bowl.

  “Whatever you do, don’t touch it,” Emmanuel said. “Not until we know more.”

  With a quiet, frustrated sigh, Milo turned away from the fountain and listened to the rain. Everyone else was staring at the misting, tumbling energy with their mouths agape, barely blinking at all. Were they as thirsty for that blue energy as Milo?

  “This is the invention the Archon told me about,” Emmanuel said. “It’s known as a Fountain of Joy. That was his name for it, of course. Politicians,” he added disdainfully.

  The rain made a pattering noise against their umbrellas, accompanied by the muted roar of thunder in the distance. That name, “Fountain of Joy,” reminded Milo of the name “Tower of Light,” which Kovax had given to his deadly tower. The thought was a chilling one.

  “What does it do?” Emma said.

  Emmanuel was about to explain when they heard a shout from a nearby street. Shoes slapped against pavement. From around a corner, a heavyset man wearing an apron appeared, clutching one hand with the other. He shuffled in a panic up the street toward the park. It looked as if he were wearing red gloves and a red-and-white apron, until Milo realized he was covered in blood.

  “Oh no,” Emma said. “He’s hurt.”

  “Are you all right?” Emmanuel shouted to him, as the man entered the park and nearly slipped on the wet grass.

  The man nodded, eyes wide and alarmed, his thinning hair matted to his scalp from the rain. His skin had turned a deathly pallor. He held up his hands. The blood was coming from his left pinky finger, which was missing. A lot of blood has splashed against his apron, but Milo saw older, more faded stains that had probably come from an animal. He figured the man for a butcher.

  The group approached him in a hurry.

  “Chopped off one of the old digits,” the man said breathlessly as he slowed to a walk, approaching the fountain. “I’m always doing that these days. My hands don’t work like they used to, I guess.”

  Always doing that? Was the man implying he was in the habit of chopping off his own fingers? Milo didn’t notice any others missing from either hand.

  “Did you bring it?” Emmanuel asked him.

  “Sure did.”

  With his good hand, the man dug into his pocket and brought out the severed pinky finger. Milo winced at the sight of it. Next to him, Emma gasped and looked away.

  “It’s all right, kids,” the butcher said, panting. “It’s not my first time.”

  He ambled over to the fountain, held the severed finger to the bleeding stump, and dipped both hands into the bowl. Another peal of thunder broke out in the distant sky.

  Lily joined Milo under his umbrella. She was shivering. He put his arm around her, vaguely aware of how their umbrellas had joined into a single, wider shield instead of bouncing off each other.

  “The energy in the fountain,” Lily said. “Can it be what I think?”

  “No,” Milo said. “It can’t. But…”

  Thunder clashed overhead. A bolt of lightning tore across the sky, illuminating the butcher’s blood-spattered features as he lifted his wounded hand and held it up in a gesture eerily similar to that of a priest offering a sacrifice to appease an angry god.

  The blood on his hands had been washed off. With a grateful smile, the butcher flexed his fingers—all ten of them.


  “There’s no way…” Milo said, stepping forward.

  “Good night to you all,” the butcher told the group with a nod and a smile. “Come by for meat poppers if you’re ever hungry. Gilly’s. That’s my place.”

  Milo almost gagged at the thought of eating meat from a shop where the butcher was constantly chopping off his fingers and bleeding everywhere.

  Ecstatic now, the butcher gave a whooping cheer, then broke into a bumbling sprint toward his shop. Milo shook his head in wonder. He studied the fountain again. It didn’t seem possible—not unless there was a team of Acolytes underneath it, casting healing spells up through a hole in the center. That was ridiculous, of course, but the rule was simple and uncompromising: only an Acolyte could heal another person. Their magic was too special—too spiritual, Emma would say—to come from any other source.

  There was yet another mystery to consider. The amount of luminether it must take to power a device like this, and to keep it running all day, had to be incredibly vast. Most of it was being wasted, too. He couldn’t imagine how expensive the device must be for whoever was paying the bills.

  “I don’t get it,” Emma said. “What’s so dangerous about this thing? It healed him, didn’t it?”

  “Emma,” Milo snapped at her, frustrated mainly with his own inability to comprehend. “Have you ever seen anything like this? Acolyte magic that doesn’t come from a living, breathing Acolyte?”

  “But a spell generator…”

  Milo gave her a chance to finish the thought. When she couldn’t, he tried to finish it for her. “…that recasts Acolyte magic spells, like the spell generators that kept the time dilation spell going at Uncle Manny’s vault.”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “Wouldn’t work,” Sevarin said. He had deactivated his umbrella and now stood soaking in the rain. Arms crossed over his chest, he didn’t look cold or uncomfortable in the slightest—one of the perks of being a Sargonaut. “Acolytes put themselves into the spell. It’s not just luminether and some kind of formula, or whatever. There needs to be that spiritual connection.” He glanced at Milo, then at Emmanuel. “It’s like a touchy-feely kind of thing, right?”

  “Brilliant, Sev,” Owen said with a roll of his eyes.

  “No, he’s right,” Milo said. “The only way this could work is if—and this is ridiculous—but there would have to be Acolytes connected to this machine, powering it directly. That would be too exhausting, and unnatural, and—”

  “And just plain weird,” Lily finished for him.

  Finally, at a loss for fresh ideas, the orphans turned to Emmanuel, who had remained perfectly silent through the entire conversation. The magician stood like a pillar beneath his umbrella, the edges of his long coat trembling around his boots. His lips squirmed as he chewed the insides of his cheeks in contemplation.

  “If there was low magic at play here,” he finally said, “then I would have sensed it. Somehow, Raston achieved this. I’m very impressed.”

  “But what does this mean for us?” Emma asked, fluttering her wings.

  “You mean us?” Sevarin said. “Or Acolytes?”

  “My people,” Emma said. “If this machine is so great, then who needs Acolytes?”

  Milo felt confident enough in his logic to play devil’s advocate. “Maybe it’s not as bad as you think. A machine like this has to come at a cost. I mean, this much luminether can’t come from just anywhere.”

  “Yes, it could,” Lily said. “It could come from deep underground. From the earth, if you had a machine that could harvest it…”

  “But we’re avoiding the main problem,” Milo said. “Maybe you could harvest luminether that way, but not healing energy that can do what we just saw.”

  “That’s true,” Emmanuel said. “Regardless, it’s time to get you kids to a warm, clean place where you can rest. We have a hectic week of onboarding ahead of us.”

  He lifted his arm to hail the Wingvan, but stopped at the sound of Oscar’s voice ringing out among the group.

  “Look at that,” he said. “The sign on that building. Emma was right.”

  Milo followed his gaze and saw what appeared to be a healer’s clinic across the street. The sign read: ALIARA’S FONDNESS CURE CLINIC. A white sheet hung inside, across the window, as if the place had been surrendered. Someone had scrawled a message in red paint across the glass.

  OUT OF BUSINESS. PROPERTY FOR SALE.

  “A healing clinic going out of business,” Sevarin said. “Guess that’s what happens when all the butchers stop coming in.”

  “Let’s go,” Emmanuel said. “We’ll figure this out later.”

  The Wingvan floated down to meet them on the street. On the jog over, Milo noticed a pillar supporting an arcade over a nearby sidewalk. A smattering of posters and flyers hung along the pillar’s length, their edges shivering in the wind. One of them read:

  Missing! Last seen on Sunsdawn 23rd.

  Beneath the heading was a color picture of a young woman’s face. A cheerful smile showed off perfect, white teeth. The picture glistened with rainwater, which might have explained why her smile appeared to be shifting slightly. But when Milo went to wipe the moisture away and get a better look, he realized her face was, in fact, moving.

  He slid a finger across the surface, turning her head and creating a side view.

  “Guys, check this out,” he called to his friends, noticing other Missing posters stuck to the pillar. There were at least ten more, each with a different face. He swiped his finger again and the woman stared forward. Her smile widened, and she even raised a hand in a happy wave that he found distinctly creepy.

  “Missing posters,” Emma said. “And look—here’s a Wanted poster, too.”

  WANTED!

  Masked Feral intruder kidnapping our citizens!

  This flyer was larger than the others and displayed a sketch of a man in a black mask that covered everything except his eyes, which burned bright orange. Beneath it was a line of dates and descriptions of places in which he had last been seen. Milo ran his finger vertically over the words, making them scroll as they would on a touchscreen.

  “Yes, that’s another thing,” Emmanuel said. “There’s a serial kidnapper on the loose. You all should be safe if you stay within academy limits.”

  Sevarin groaned. “That’s just great. Let’s all live in fear because of some masked coward who kidnaps kids.”

  “It’s for our own good,” Barrel said. “Now can we please leave this place? I hate it here. And it’s freezing,” he said with a shiver.

  “I second that,” Emmanuel said with a light shiver of his own.

  They filed into the Wingvan and took off, resuming their trip toward Theus Academy, where hopefully, it wasn’t raining as much.

  CHAPTER 10

  “C rossing the barrier now,” the driver said as he tapped the display on his dashboard. The panel brightened for a moment, and the word DENIED popped up, a 3-D hologram that stood like a tiny red wall blocking his hand.

  “Ah, damn,” the driver said. He pounded his fist against the dashboard until the words flickered and changed into a green ACCESS notification. “Thing has a couple of wires crossed where they shouldn’t be,” he explained.

  The Wingvan shuddered as it passed through the invisible barrier guarding the academy grounds. Emmanuel had explained that Theus Academy ran vast networks of spell generators in various secret hubs beneath the mountains. The machines powered the ever-present barrier that protected the campus from magical attacks. No low magic was allowed within the barrier, and any attempt to use it would alert the proper authorities. Even uncharged blood crystals were unable to pass—they would literally bump against the barrier as if it were made of brick. The students, faculty members, and staff called it “the ward.”

  “We’re in,” the driver said.

  Milo relaxed against his seat. A giddy sensation shot up in his chest. Before he could control himself, he began to chuckle. His friends would think he had
lost his mind.

  But soon, the orphans were giggling in nervous relief. Even Emmanuel had cracked a smile. Milo told himself this was the happiest moment of his life, and he meant it.

  Despite the oppressive gray clouds, Theus Academy was an amazing sight. Students walked in and out of dormitories carrying book bags, the winged ones taking flight while others walked in tight groups along stone footpaths that wove through the campus. Where there were streams, the footpaths turned into quaint wooden bridges that arched over the water. A boy and a girl lingered on one bridge, embracing the way couples do and smiling into each other’s eyes, their hair soaked like characters in a scene from a romantic film.

  I’m going to be late for class, Milo imagined the girl saying.

  I’ll walk you there, came the boy’s immediate response.

  The girl became Lily, dressed in uniform and pressed against Milo, whose arms encircled her waist. She was smiling.

  I’d like that, Milo. But first, give me a kiss. Quickly, before our friends see us.

  The fantasy vanished as Milo’s attention turned to the castle built into the mountainside, its three stone walls surrounding an ancient, moss-covered keep tucked in the back. He had seen pictures and studied videos and secret blueprints of Kenalight Castle in the computers back at his uncle’s vault, but now that he was up close, the place seemed as foreign and alien to him as a castle from another planet. It had stood there for over ten thousand years, since before Lightonia had become a nation; even before the first brick of Theus had been set down by its original founders. Lightonians believed their entire nation had been built around this castle. It was officially the oldest manmade structure Milo had ever seen.

  “Starpoint Station’s right over there,” the driver said, pointing away from the castle to a white tower nestled against the mountainside. An elevated track passed through the tower’s midpoint and ran in a wide arc around campus. It was fixed to the stone walls and formed bridges over some areas. More towers along the way served as stations where students could get on and off.