Mershayn lunged at Sym, but the rope that bound his hands pulled him up short, sending spikes of pain up his arms.
Sym watched him struggle. “But I’m thankful for your base nature,” he said. “If not for your indiscretions, Collus would still be on the throne.” Sym grabbed Mershayn’s chin, forced his gaze up.
“You’d best kill me,” Mershayn growled. “Or I’ll make you sorry you didn’t.”
“Oh, you’re going to live. You’re going to live a long life without your balls.” He grinned, showing teeth. “I intend to parade you in front of the witty, breathy, vivacious Ari’cyiane once I’ve castrated you. I’ll show you to her, every missing part of you, and you’ll see how much she favors you then.”
Mershayn fought down his fear, the knowledge that he was helpless in the hands of this jackal of a man.
“I don’t know how you escaped me before,” Sym hissed in a low voice. “But this time, you’re out of friends. This time, you’ll stay where I put you.”
Sym stood. “Get him up,” he said to the guards. Sym’s soldiers dragged Mershayn to his feet. The guards guided him to a door behind the throne.
“What should we do with her?” one of Sym’s soldiers asked, nudging Mirolah’s ruined body with his toe.
Sym did not even look back as he followed Mershayn. “Throw her out the window. Let the gulls and the surf dragons have her.”
“No!” Mershayn pulled against his guards. They wrenched his arms, and he fell back in line. One of them punched him in the gut.
He doubled over. Through watery eyes, he looked up at Sym. “Please...” he said. “Bury her. She deserves that. Please...”
Sym smiled at his desperation. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then leaned down close to Mershayn’s face.
“No.”
As they hauled Mershayn to the door, the guards dragged Mirolah’s body to the window. With a grunt, they shoved her through it.
“Mirolah!” He shouted. His shoulder screamed in agony as they yanked him back around and forced him through the door.
“And get someone to clean up this mess,” Sym said, following closely behind.
50
Bands
Snow fell softly, and Zynder huddled low, backed up against the edge of the cliff. He had dug a deep groove in the snow when he’d crashed to the ground, and his sinuous neck bent awkwardly where Bands had scored on him a moment ago. Blood coursed down his white scales to his chest, falling in a dripping sheet, staining the snow black in the moonlight. He’d managed to rip himself free of her and plummet this far, but his wings were ruined. Her last spell had seen to that. They curled into his body, pitiful melted gray nubs.
Bands folded her wings gingerly against her body. The left was injured, but not badly. What she truly worried about was the savage bite Zynder had given her foreleg. Avakketh’s elites had poison on their teeth, a gift from their god, and that poison was not easily healed. The wound oozed, leaking between her scales down to her claws.
She crept forward, leaving bloody claw prints on the snow. Her vision blurred from his last spell, but she was still able to keep her focus. She’d identified it in time to counter most of the effects. She couldn’t see perfectly, but it was better than being blind.
That attack had been Zynder’s kill strike. Simple and powerful, he’d intended to blind her and bite her neck in two.
She had lured him in, making him believe she was blind, and then she had struck. He hadn’t been expecting that.
Zynder, like so many of dragonkind, considered humans lesser beings. Zynder would compare the convoluted spells of Zilok Morth to the low cunning of a weasel. He would call Daylan Morth’s achievements an aberration. He would call Difinius’s intricate stylings a branch of human insanity. He thought human threadweaving was laughable compared to the power given by Avakketh. Therefore, Bands couldn’t be a true threadweaver now that she was cut off from the dragon god.
Arrogance. Overconfidence. It had cost him.
He was wounded badly in several places, much worse than her, but he would fight hardest at the last. He did not fear death, only the shame of failure.
She crept forward, alert.
His breath came out in white plumes. They had been fighting for days in these snowcapped mountains. Zynder tried over and over to break free of her, to escape north to Irgakth. Each time, she had stopped him, corralled him back to these peaks. They were both exhausted, but Bands had the upper hand now. This battle was almost over.
Zynder mumbled quietly under his breath. Bands countered, speaking three words and twisting the threads.
The wind whipped Zynder in the face, scrambling his words and shaking his concentration. He sneered, bloody teeth clenched. “Traitor,” he growled. “Human-lover!”
“I am.” She tried to pretend his words didn’t sting, but she wasn’t just an outcast from dragon society now. She was an enemy. Zynder’s words were the same words that would be spoken by any dragon she would encounter now, even her parents. She would live and die in Amarion, no matter what came next. Irgakth, the company of her own kind, these would be forever denied her. The human lands were her only home now.
“What you do to me does not matter,” he breathed. “Avakketh will crush you. He will turn the lands upside down to find you. He will make you suffer. Your screams will last for an age.”
“Maybe.”
He snorted. More blood flecked the snow. “You are nothing without him!”
“What were you doing in Teni’sia, Zynder?” she asked calmly.
He sneered. “Ask the snow. Ask the sky. You will get more from them than you will from me. I will gladly die for Avakketh.”
She crept closer.
His hind leg scraped off the edge of the cliff, and he pulled it back. He could not fly. He could not retreat. “If you kill me, your fate is sealed,” he growled.
“My fate was sealed when I fell in love with Medophae,” she said. “Avakketh is wrong. Humans are our equals.”
He hissed, showing his teeth. He didn’t understand. By the gods, she was not sure she understood.
She attacked. He pulled GodSpill from Avakketh, tried to harness the wind to blow her off the cliff. It was a desperate spell. She turned his hurricane blast into a breeze that circled around her, then looped her neck low. He raised a wounded claw, trying to block her, but he wasn’t fast enough. She dodged underneath it, kicked his face away, and sank her teeth into his neck.
He did not have the strength to tear away this time. She crunched down with all her might, killing him.
She backed away from the body, blood running down her chin. Shaking her head with disgust, she scooped up a mouthful of snow, chewed, and spat out red. She repeated this until she cleaned his taste away.
There was no going back now. No dragon had ever killed another in the history of the world. Only the elites were given permission to kill, and that permission only came from Avakketh. In Irgakth, she would be painted the most vile villain imaginable, the monster who had gone insane. Betrayer. Dragon-killer. Those would be her new names.
Her people were now humans. Zynder had been right about one thing—she wasn’t actually a dragon anymore. She didn’t think like them. She didn’t share their values. She couldn’t imagine returning to Avakketh’s dominance and passionless endeavors, where all certainty rested upon his word, and to challenge his lies meant exile or death.
No. Everything she truly loved walked on the ground in the human lands.
Snow swirled around her, heavier than before. She looked up. It was worsening.
She turned her great, sinuous neck towards Teni’sia and stretched her wings, testing. Her left wing was weak, but if the winds did not gust too strongly, it would hold. Still, she needed to start back soon.
She launched herself straight up and beat against the air, sending snow swirling behind her. She hovered over Zynder and murmured the words that guided her threadweaving. She unraveled the protections on his scales, spells that were
every dragon’s birthright, and that protected them from the flame of another dragon. In life, no dragon could undo those spells. In death, it was tradition, ever since Dervon the Dead had twisted the corpses of dragons into the vicious neila. It took most of her reserves to remove them.
Once she was done, she gave him the Death Blast. Orange flame shot from her mouth and engulfed his body. The flame turned blue, then white as it grew hotter. She kept it on him as long as she could. Snow hissed, turning to steam. Rock bubbled beneath him. When she had finished, Zynder was no more. His scales, flesh, bones were all burned to ash.
The cliff above Zynder’s body, weakened by the heat, rumbled, and an avalanche crashed down, erasing all evidence that there had ever been a dragon fight here.
She wheeled about and pumped her wings southward. Teni’sia was close. She lowered her head and raced to escape the growing storm.
Epilogue
The early afternoon turned to night as the first storm of winter set in, unseasonably early and growing in strength with every hour that passed. Throughout the city and the surrounding countryside, Teni’sians gathered wood into their houses for fires and closed their shutters. A few had seen fiery lights above the Corialis Mountains, and the word had spread through the entire city and beyond.
By the time the sun set, even the brave took shelter from the whipping wind and snow. The blizzard howled into Teni’sia as though furious. Some said they heard the voices of dramaths on the wind, whispering maniacally as they scrabbled against shutters and doors.
A single creature did dare the storm, though, and those huddled warmly within their houses wondered what kind of evil beast it might be. The howling began at midnight and continued until just before the dawn. It chilled every listener, raising the hairs on their arms.
It would later be told that Ti’lishden the cobbler’s son took a dare and went to capture the sad wolf. He ventured into the teeth of the storm and those teeth closed over him forever. In another part of the city, it was told that the bard Crystal Vander also sought immortality. She told the huddled group at the Hot Pot Inn that she would find the wolf, listen to its pain close up, and capture a song none had ever captured before. But the last note anyone ever heard from Crystal Vander was her musical goodbye as she stepped into the swirling white.
Sniff sat alone at the edge of the surf, crying over the broken body of his mistress. Early in the night, despite the storm, a few desperately hungry surf dragons came for the body. They each died in bloody conflict with Sniff, and he fed on them, tearing away large chunks of their scaly flesh with his jaws and swallowing them whole. He stood guard over his mistress, waiting for any others who would desecrate her. And he howled.
The pain of his loss drove him mad, and he howled until his throat was raw. Then he howled more. He did not stop. He would not stop, not until he died alongside her.
Sometime before dawn, limbs frozen and covered in frost, Sniff stopped howling. Something flickered over the body of his mistress.
The skin above his shoulders bunched, and ice cracked and fell from his body. He bared his teeth, ready to attack. Sniff smelled the GodSpill as only his kind could. He moved forward stiffly, standing over his mistress’s body, looking for the threadweaver who approached.
But it wasn’t an approaching threadweaver. It was an actual spell, swirling around. He growled and spun, but then sniffed again, recognizing it.
With a whimper, he backed away. Slowly, his mistress’s leg, severed from the sharp rocks when she fell, slid back to her body and butted up to the wound. Her back, spun and broken from the fall, twisted back around. Her shattered face reformed.
Flesh joined. Bones knitted. Blood ran afresh as life coursed through her, running in drips from healing wounds, and then running no more as the wounds closed.
When all of her pieces had joined together, his mistress shook her head and sat up. She glanced at Sniff, then at the swirling snow, then overhead at the tall walls of the castle. She stood up.
His mistress looked down at her torn clothing. Her shirt hung from her in rags, slashed into strips by the sword that had killed her. Her skirt twisted about her legs, covered in blood. Her breeches were in tatters. She gestured. The bloody garments came away from her body, and she stood naked in the snow.
With hollow eyes she looked down at Sniff again. He whined and crouched away from her.
Slowly, her feet left the ground, and she hovered over him. She floated northward away from him and disappeared into the storm.
Sniff barked and sprinted after her.
Dear Reader,
As I mentioned in my last author’s note, Wildmane was written in college in Colorado Springs. The rough draft of The GodSpill was written many years later in New York City, ironically after a failed quest of my own.
After college, I moved to northern California, grabbed a temp job at a shampoo manufacturing company and got promoted a few times, eventually to Brand Coordinator, over the course of a year and a half. As soon as it looked like the job was turning into a real career, the pressure valve went off in my head, and I quit. I didn’t want to be a Brand Coordinator. I wanted to be a writer.
Now unemployed, I flew to Denver for New Year’s Eve, then went on a road trip through the frozen north (Minnesota, North Dakota and Utah) in January. This intrepid leap into winter included broken-down vans on snow-swept roads, fantasies of ax murderers in desolate garages, and inhuman yawns. I wrote it all down. Ask me about the Jack Journals someday.
After that misadventure, my intention was to settle down in Placerville, CA with my friends Brett and Kathryn, find a job as a dishwasher, and write books. Before taking that plunge, though, I hopped on my motorcycle to visit my friend Shona in San Francisco for one last weekend hurrah before looking for a job.
While I was there, my best friend Giles showed up. He had been writing screenplays in L.A., and to suddenly find him at Shona’s doorstep in San Francisco was a shock. As it turned out, he had tracked me down to Placerville, then followed my trail to the city by the bay. He told me that we needed to go on a quest to find magic.
I said, “No way. I have a plan.”
He said, “Wrong answer.” Then he proceeded to explain to me why we needed to drop everything and begin a quest to the east coast. By the end of his story, I was inspired. I agreed to go.
So we jumped into his dilapidated Ford truck, nicknamed “The Drudge Skeleton” after a Magic: The Gathering card, and we went driving in search of proof that magic exists in a cynical world. (For those of you unfamiliar with Magic: The Gathering, the Drudge Skeleton is a weak little creature that can be resurrected time and again. A perfect moniker for a car that kept breaking down, but being resurrected.)
We didn’t find what we were looking for, a definitive proof of the supernatural, but the trip defined our later lives. New York opened numerous doors. We settled in Queens, and I began writing in earnest. The quest had failed, but at least I could write about it. Probably in response to our failure, the adventures of Mirolah and Medophae took a dark turn in The GodSpill, and Mershayn, with his devil-may-care attitude, was born.
The GodSpill is an important volume in the Threadweavers trilogy, perhaps the most important. It is a book where the characters fail more than they succeed, and they have to face their own shortcomings. I hope you enjoy walking with them down their the dark tunnels. We all have our dark tunnels and, I know that for me, they have determined who I became more than my successes.
Thank you for reading The GodSpill. Please take a moment to leave a review. Also, if you would like to stay informed about upcoming book releases, giveaways, or to enter contests I hold for readers, be sure to subscribe to my mailing list, Todd Fahnestock’s Readers Group.
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Todd Fahnestock
About the Author
TODD FAHNESTOCK won the New York Public Library's Books for the Teen Age Award for one of his short stories and is a wri
ter of fantasy for all age ranges. He wrote the bestselling The Wishing World, a middle grade portal fantasy series that began as bedtime stories for his children. With Giles Carwyn, he wrote the bestselling “George R. R. Martin-esque” epic fantasy Heartstone Trilogy: Heir of Autumn, Mistress of Winter, and Queen of Oblivion. He just finished the Threadweavers series, which includes Wildmane, The GodSpill, and Threads of Amarion, and is now working on The Whisper Prince trilogy. Stories are his passion, but Todd’s greatest accomplishment is his quirky, fun-loving family. When he’s not writing, he goes on morning runs with his daughter, who helps him plot stories. In the afternoons, he practices Tae Kwon Do with his son. In between, he drives his beloved wife crazy with the emotional rollercoaster that is being a full-time author.
Connect with Todd at ToddFahnestock.com or on Facebook at Facebook.com/todd.fahnestock/
Excerpt for Threads of Amarion
The human female body sat facing the ocean with an unblinking gaze, and she was a part of it, looking out from the inside. She felt with its senses, felt the sting as the icy air made crystals at the corners of her eyes, and the snow froze against her in drifts.
She was also a part of the waves below, rolling and crashing. The water that pushed against the wind, sending spray into the air and crashing into icy rocks.
She followed the wind, and she was part of that as well. The vigorous storm whipped at the last of the seagulls. He was a huge, stalwart fellow, smarter than the rest, driven to reach her even when his instincts screamed at him to seek shelter.
The storm would soon kill him, just as impassively as it would freeze the mountain peaks.
She seeped into the rock underneath this human body. The cold granite slept peacefully, and it enjoyed the storm. It enjoyed just about everything, even as it was slowly worn away, year after year, by the water below.
The GodSpill Page 32
