“We’ll stay strong,” Alexander said, hopping down. “Stay strong, and unleash hell, rider. That’s an order!”
The dragoons blasted their elements far into the distance, ignoring the stoneborn. The ice, stone, and lightning vanished within the shadow, while the fire erupted it into momentary swirls of flame. Nothing slowed it. Only the fire even left in a dent. Alexander’s heart fluttered as the tsunami approached. He’d never before witnessed L’adim in person, only heard rumors of his power. Was this it? Was this overwhelming wave his true presence? So be it. The demons could bleed, and they could die. The shadowborn was no different.
The wave curled as the shore neared, and with chilling silence it slammed downward upon itself and flooded against the stone barricade. The soldiers braced themselves, but no attack came. The liquid darkness pooled and curled at the barrier, licking it, teasing it, but not passing over. The only visible demons were the stoneborn giants, the shadow up to their chests as they lumbered on. Dragoons focused their fire upon them, the battery steadily wearing the giants down.
What was the point of this? wondered Alexander. To hide their retreat?
And then the fire erupted several hundred feet away from the barricade. It flowed like a wave through the shadow, the fireborn hidden within the chaotic inferno. The stormborn flashed through it as well, lightning crackling about the fire and shadow as if it were a cloud of hell. Alexander swore up a storm. The shadow wasn’t there to hide their retreat. It was to disguise their attack. When the fire and lightning reached the wall, the demons leapt over the barricade, assaulting the shield wall with renewed frenzy.
The dragoons resumed their fire, but the stoneborn endured, not caring for their losses. They bent down to the darkness at their feet, hands scooping. Alexander’s eyes widened with horror as he realized their plan. With a single smooth motion, the stoneborn giants hurtled dozens of demons through the air, aiming for the row of twenty dragoons behind the embattled defensive line.
The demons landed and scattered in a rolling chaos. As they sprang to their feet to attack, their high-pitched laughter grated up and down Alexander’s spine. Soldiers scrambled, dragoons firing even as fireborn sank their molten teeth into their flesh and stormborn flooded their bodies with electricity. A few Seraphim broke ranks to help defend them, the rest too busy attempting to hold back the tremendous tide slamming into the defensive barricade.
Alexander climbed back onto Adrian’s dragoon, and he drew his sword.
“Keep firing,” the commander shouted at him. “I’ll keep us safe!”
The dragoon’s cannons sang as Alexander swung his sword, slicing a fireborn in half. Its burning blood splashed the ground beneath the dragoon, hardening underneath the soft white glow. A stormborn sparked beneath, zipped to the side opposite Alexander, and then leapt up at Adrian’s throat. The tip of Alexander’s sword greeted it, piercing through its open mouth and ripping out its belly. The yellow corpse collapsed upon the cushion beside Adrian.
“Fly higher!” he shouted to Adrian. The light beneath the dragoon beamed brighter, and the vehicle steadily lifted. Another stormborn lashed at Alexander, white and gold light swirling around its reaching hands. Alexander pulled away his leg, grimacing as a claw made brief contact with his ankle. The electricity traveled all the way to his hip, firing off muscles and flooding him with terrible pain. He returned the favor with his sword, slashing off its jaw and then kicking the damn thing to the ground.
Another volley of demons arrived, but the Seraphim were ready, and there were fewer giants to throw, the stoneborn still being battered by the dragoons atop the castle. Men died by the hundreds along the barricade, but Alexander held out hope. This was the demons’ last hurrah. His men just needed to survive a bit longer. His eyes searched the battlefield, a troubling question tickling his stomach. The fireborn and stormborn were racing through the liquid shadow to attack the ground troops. The stoneborn had assumed the form of giants, doing their best to besiege the dragoons behind the front lines. But where were the iceborn? Where had they gone after breaking apart and vanishing beneath the ocean?
The ground shook, an earthquake thrice the power of when Y’vah’s shield had collapsed. Alexander gripped the side of the dragoon, his jaw falling slack. It couldn’t be. His eyes must have been deceiving him.
A creature slowly rose from the ice beside the tall castle cliff, shadow and water rolling off its body. Its head was the size of a cottage, its broad shoulders little blue hills. It continued to rise, higher and higher, four arms digging into the steep cliffside. The gargantuan creature was beyond anything Alexander had ever seen. Its three-fingered hands bore enormous spikes of ice, and they slammed into the hard stone, pulling it ever higher toward the castle. The creature had no mouth and milky white eyes, but it bore a crown of horns, nine jagged spikes of frost jutting from its skull. Long, thick icicles trailed from its head down to its waist, frosted white and shimmering like frozen hair.
“The iceborn,” Alexander whispered, still in shock. “It’s all of them. Every last one.”
The cliff crumbled under its weight, but the gargantuan kept digger deeper, pulling its weight higher as boulders crashed into the ocean below. The dragoons turned their fire toward it, needing no order to prioritize such a terrifying monstrosity. Fire, lightning, and stone struck its arms and sides, sending showers of frost flying in small white puffs. They were but beestings, inconveniences, as the iceborn climbed and climbed until it reached the castle and the dragoons stationed atop it.
It took less than a minute for the iceborn to smash the entire building to the ground. Its four arms thrashed and grabbed, walls crumbling to its strength, towers collapsing like glass instead of centuries-old stone. Alexander watched it all with newfound horror in his gut and tears threatening his eyes. The ice of the creature’s face split wide, giving it a mouth with which to speak. Its voice thundered across the countryside like a volcanic eruption.
“YOU ARE CHILDREN WITH TOYS. BREAK THEM. BREAK THEM ALL.”
introducing
If you enjoyed
FIREBORN,
look out for
HOPE AND RED
The Empire of Storms: Book One
by Jon Skovron
In a fracturing empire spread across savage seas, two people will find a common cause.
Hope, the lone survivor when her village is massacred by the emperor’s forces, is secretly trained by a master Vinchen warrior as an instrument of vengeance.
Red, an orphan adopted by a notorious matriarch of the criminal underworld, learns to be an expert thief
and con artist.
1
Captain Sin Toa had been a trader on these seas for many years, and he’d seen something like this before. But that didn’t make it any easier.
The village of Bleak Hope was a small community in the cold southern islands at the edge of the empire. Captain Toa was one of the few traders who came this far south, and even then, only once a year. The ice that formed on the water made it nearly impossible to reach during the winter months.
Still, the dried fish, whalebone, and the crude lamp oil they pressed from whale blubber were all good cargo that fetched a nice price in Stonepeak or New Laven. The villagers had always been polite and accommodating, in their taciturn Southern way. And it was a community that had survived in these harsh conditions for centuries, a quality that Toa respected a great deal.
So it was with a pang of sadness that he gazed out at what remained of the village. As his ship glided into the narrow harbor, he scanned the dirt paths and stone huts, and saw no sign of life.
“What’s the matter, sir?” asked Crayton, his first mate. Good fellow. Loyal in his own way, if a bit dishonest about doing his fair share of work.
“This place is dead,” said Toa quietly. “We’ll not land here.”
“Dead, sir?”
“Not a soul in the place.”
“Maybe they’re at some sort of local religious gathering,” s
aid Crayton. “Folks this far south have their own ways and customs.”
“’Fraid that’s not it.”
Toa pointed one thick, scarred finger toward the dock. A tall sign had been driven into the wood. On the sign was painted a black oval with eight black lines trailing down from it.
“God save them,” whispered Crayton, taking off his wool knit cap.
“That’s the trouble,” said Toa. “He didn’t.”
The two men stood there staring at the sign. There was no sound except the cold wind that pulled at Toa’s long wool coat and beard.
“What do we do, sir?” asked Crayton.
“Not come ashore, that’s for certain. Tell the wags to lay anchor. It’s getting late. I don’t want to navigate these shallow waters in the dark, so we’ll stay the night. But make no mistake, we’re heading back to sea at first light and never coming near Bleak Hope again.”
They set sail the next morning. Toa hoped they’d reach the island of Galemoor in three days and that the monks there would have enough good ale to sell that it would cover his losses.
It was on the second night that they found the stowaway.
Toa was woken in his bunk by a fist pounding on his cabin door.
“Captain!” called Crayton. “The night watch. They found...a little girl.”
Toa groaned. He’d had a bit too much grog before he went to sleep, and the spike of pain had already set in behind his eyes.
“A girl?” he asked after a moment.
“Y-y-yes, sir.”
“Hells’ waters,” he muttered, climbing out of his hammock. He pulled on cold, damp trousers, a coat, and boots. A girl on board, even a little one, was bad luck in these southern seas. Everybody knew that. As he pondered how he was going to get rid of this stowaway, he opened the door and was surprised to find Crayton alone, turning his wool cap over and over again in his hands.
“Well? Where’s the girl?”
“She’s aft, sir,” said Crayton.
“Why didn’t you bring her to me?”
“We, uh...That is, the men can’t get her out from behind the stowed rigging.”
“Can’t get her...” Toa heaved a sigh, wondering why no one had just reached in and clubbed her unconscious, then dragged her out. It wasn’t like his men to get soft because of a little girl. Maybe it was on account of Bleak Hope. Maybe the terrible fate of that village had made them a bit more conscious than usual of their own prospects for Heaven.
“Fine,” he said. “Lead me to her.”
“Aye, sir,” said Crayton, clearly relieved that he wasn’t going to bear the brunt of the captain’s frustration.
Toa found his men gathered around the cargo hold where the spare rigging was stored. The hatch was open and they stared down into the darkness, muttering to each other and making signs to ward off curses. Toa took a lantern from one of them and shone the light down into the hole, wondering why a little girl had his men so spooked.
“Look, girlie. You better...”
She was wedged in tight behind the piles of heavy line. She looked filthy and starved, but otherwise a normal enough girl of about eight years. Pretty, even, in the Southern way, with pale skin, freckles, and hair so blond it looked almost white. But there was something about her eyes when she looked at you. They felt empty, or worse than empty. They were pools of ice that crushed any warmth you had in you. They were ancient eyes. Broken eyes. Eyes that had seen too much.
“We tried to pull her out, Captain,” said one of the men. “But she’s packed in there tight. And well...she’s...”
“Aye,” said Toa.
He knelt down next to the opening and forced himself to keep looking at her, even though he wanted to turn away.
“What’s your name, girl?” he asked, much quieter now.
She stared at him.
“I’m the captain of this ship, girl,” he said. “Do you know what that means?”
Slowly, she nodded once.
“It means everyone on this ship has to do what I say. That includes you. Understand?”
Again, she nodded once.
He reached one brown, hairy hand down into the hold.
“Now, girl. I want you to come out from behind there and take my hand. I swear no harm will come to you on this ship.”
For a long moment, no one moved. Then, tentatively, the girl reached out her bone-thin hand and let it be engulfed in Toa’s.
Toa and the girl were back in his quarters. He suspected the girl might start talking if there weren’t a dozen hard-bitten sailors staring at her. He gave her a blanket and a cup of hot grog. He knew grog wasn’t the sort of thing you gave to little girls, but it was the only thing he had on board except fresh water, and that was far too precious to waste.
Now he sat at his desk and she sat on his bunk, the blanket wrapped tightly around her shoulders, the steaming cup of grog in her tiny hands. She took a sip, and Toa expected her to flinch at the pungent flavor, but she only swallowed and continued to stare at him with those empty, broken eyes of hers. They were the coldest blue he had ever seen, deeper than the sea itself.
“I’ll ask you again, girl,” he said, although his tone was still gentle. “What’s yer name?”
She only stared at him.
“Where’d you come from?”
Still she stared.
“Are you...” He couldn’t believe he was even thinking it, much less asking it. “Are you from Bleak Hope?”
She blinked then, as if coming out of a trance. “Bleak Hope.” Her voice was hoarse from lack of use. “Yes. That’s me.” There was something about the way she spoke that made Toa suppress a shudder. Her voice was as empty as her eyes.
“How did you come to be on my ship?”
“That happened after,” she said.
“After what?” he asked.
She looked at him then, and her eyes were no longer empty. They were full. So full that Toa’s salty old heart felt like it might twist up like a rag in his chest.
“I will tell you,” she said, her voice as wet and full as her eyes. “I will tell only you. Then I won’t ever say it aloud ever again.”
She had been off at the rocks. That was how they’d missed her.
She loved the rocks. Great big jagged black boulders she could climb above the crashing waves. It terrified her mother the way she jumped from one to the next. “You’ll hurt yourself!” her mother would say. And she did hurt herself. Often. Her shins and knees were peppered with scabs and scars from the rough-edged rock. But she didn’t care. She loved them anyway. And when the tide went out, they always had treasures at their bases, half-buried in the gray sand. Crab shells, fish bones, seashells, and sometimes, if she was very lucky, a bit of sea glass. Those she prized above all else.
“What is it?” she’d asked her mother one night as they sat by the fire after dinner, her belly warm and full of fish stew. She held up a piece of red sea glass to the light so that the color shone on the stone wall of their hut.
“It’s glass, my little gull,” said her mother, fingers working quickly as she mended a fishing net for Father. “Broken bits of glass polished by the sea.”
“But why’s it colored?”
“To make it prettier, I suppose.”
“Why don’t we have any glass that’s colored?”
“Oh, it’s just fancy Northland frippery,” said her mother. “We’ve no use for it down here.”
That made her love the sea glass all the more. She collected them until she had enough to string together with a bit of hemp rope to make a necklace. She presented it to her father, a gruff fisherman who rarely spoke, on his birthday. He held the necklace in his leathery hand, eyeing the bright red, blue, and green chunks of sea glass warily. But then he looked into her eyes and saw how proud she was, how much she loved this thing. His weather-lined face folded up into a smile as he carefully tied it around his neck. The other fishermen teased him for weeks about it, but he would only touch his calloused fingertips to the s
ea glass and smile again.
When they came on that day, the tide had just gone out, and she was searching the base of her rocks for new treasures. She’d seen the top of their ship masts off in the distance, but she was far too focused on her hunt for sea glass to investigate. It wasn’t until she finally clambered back on top of one of the rocks to sift through her collection of shells and bones that she noticed how strange the ship was. A big boxy thing with a full three sails and cannon ports all along the sides. Very different from the trade ships. She didn’t like the look of it at all. And that was before she noticed the thick cloud of smoke rising from her village.
She ran, her skinny little legs churning in the sand and tall grass as she made her way through the scraggly trees toward her village. If there was a fire, her mother wouldn’t bother to save the treasures stowed away in the wooden chest under her bed. That was all she could think about. She’d spent too much time and effort collecting her treasures to lose them. They were the most precious thing to her. Or so she thought.
As she neared the village, she saw that the fire had spread across the whole village. There were men she didn’t recognize dressed in white-and-gold uniforms with helmets and armored chest plates. She wondered if they were soldiers. But soldiers were supposed to protect the people. These men herded everyone into a big clump in the center of the village, waving swords and guns at them.
She jerked to a stop when she saw the guns. She’d seen only one other gun. It was owned by Shamka, the village elder. Every winter on the eve of the New Year, he fired it up at the moon to wake it from its slumber and bring back the sun. The guns these soldiers had looked different. In addition to the wooden handle, iron tube, and hammer, they had a round cylinder.
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