Ren and her artifact had rained down this destruction. She had used all of her remaining sorcery and whatever she’d stored to lay the battlefield to waste. All of the Nine were dead. Including Ren. But Samal Rak-shazza, the Adversary, remained safely locked within his arcane prison.
Tarrik blinked back tears as he acknowledged Ren’s final stand against Samal.
He looked across the vast expanse of burning ground, searching for a way to escape. There was none. His gaze rested upon the looming mass of the pyramid and the shadows at one side of its base. Were they dark enough? They had to be.
He poured himself into the darkness and felt his essence dissolve into the void, re-forming far from the devastation wreaked by the Nine’s attempt to free the Adversary.
EPILOGUE
Tarrik knelt in the dust, staring at the pyramid and the razed battleground, his blackwood spear discarded beside him. Flickering sparks of sorcery winked in and out of existence. He wasn’t sure what they meant. The demon army Ren had summoned had been returned to the abyssal realms, and there was no one left near the pyramid apart from the few survivors of the Cabal’s cadre of sorcerers.
He watched the conflagration numbly until the flames died down. The patches of molten ground fractured with sharp cracks as they cooled and hardened to slag.
Far above, though it was daylight, the white moon of this world was a blurred crescent, followed by the curved gash of the crimson moon. After the battle, the relative peace held an ethereal quality. Tarrik breathed calmly and slowly, steadying his heartbeat, but tears formed as he thought again of Ren’s last stand. She had struck to his core and made him love again. Yes, love. A curse.
He wandered a few steps, feet dragging in the dust, then stopped, his eyes burning. For long moments he remained still, his hands clenched into fists, the only sounds his blood pumping in his ears and his breath rasping through his open mouth. Ren was dead. There was no avoiding the truth. There was nothing left for him here. He should never have thought otherwise. Once more this human world had made him care and then stripped him of all he desired, all he needed.
He reached for his dark-tide power, measured it, and decided he had enough to force his way home. He closed his eyes and soon felt a tug, a niggling sensation in the back of his skull. This time he wasn’t going to fight it, as he had when she’d summoned him.
Invisible white-hot hooks jagged into his limbs, torso, and consciousness. He surrendered himself to the burning ordeal, embraced it, though it seared his nerves. The hooks sliced and clawed at his essence, unraveling him.
As his physical body was rent asunder, he bound three objects to himself.
His spear. Ren’s journal. Ren’s sword.
Reality tore, prized open by arcane forces. A blast of frost washed through Tarrik, a frigid wind he could sense ethereally but not physically feel. A conduit was created, joining this world to an abyssal realm.
The void beckoned.
Tarrik Nal-Valim surrendered to its song.
TO MY READERS
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
When he was eleven, Mitchell Hogan received The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and a love of fantasy novels was born. He spent the next ten years reading, rolling dice, and playing computer games, with some school and university thrown in. Along the way he accumulated numerous bookcases’ worth of fantasy and sci-fi novels and doesn’t look to stop anytime soon. For ten years he put off his dream of writing; then he quit his job and wrote A Crucible of Souls. He now writes full-time and is eternally grateful to the readers who took a chance on an unknown self-published author. He lives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife, Angela, and his daughters, Isabelle and Charlotte.
Shadow of the Exile (The Infernal Guardian Book 1) Page 38
