Book Three: Elder Magic

Excerpt from Elder Magic:

Inside the castle’s tumbledown walls a spark of awareness flickered.

What was left of the black stone gleamed, slick with moisture and mold from the breakers that crashed in from the sea, brutal waves defying any living creature to venture outside. They beat against the wall of stone that was Mount Gris, sometimes sweeping away the small children who hunted for arrowheads among its obsidian rocks.

Using only her mystical vision, Kaen studied the rough-carved stones. Much of the connective mortar had flaked away and many blocks had tumbled around her feet. The roof had vanished, some of it blown away in the unending storms, some littering the floor. Centuries must have passed. Otherwise, how could so much mortar have disintegrated? How could her entire castle be demolished? How could she not have noticed? Rolling her eyes upward, Kaen peered at the sky—thick with gray clouds, wind and lashing rain, so like that awful day of long ago. An icicle blocked one eye; in attempting to brush it away she found she could not move.

Kaen guessed she was soaking wet, and probably frozen, but she felt nothing, not wind, not rain, not cold, just a ponderous ache somewhere deep inside, which her nostalgic nature, if she’d had one, might have attributed to loneliness. She wondered why this small semblance of consciousness had returned, and cast about with her meager perception to find the cause, drifting in and out of awareness as she did so. A thing that had once been hers, an artifact she had long ago created, came slowly, dimly, to mind.

The Talisman of Kaen. Her talisman.

Internally, Kaen smiled with pride. Her legacy. The smile died. She’d no one to pass it to. No descendants; no children, no offspring at all. The thought of a husband brought a second smile to her face. She’d seen love many times but, alas, had never married. All her suitors were so…inferior.

But there was an equal. A sister...

Dorea.

Kaen’s smile returned only to vanish again. Dorea, her twin, identical in outward appearance; inside, poles apart, as different as salt and pepper. Once close, as though physically joined, they’d grown more distant than sun and moon.

Why had Kaen awakened now? And how? The situation required considerable deliberation. She was a magician, she knew that. Yet the legion of spells she’d invented remained elusive. A great sigh wracked her unmoving limbs as she realized her body’s natural magic was missing. Without it, how had she come awake?

Eventually she understood. She didn’t know why or when this realization struck. No bolt of lightning had discharged the truth, no magical spell had been cast. This was a certainty. The only thing Kaen knew for sure: her talisman had brought about this scant wakefulness. Her talisman, now inexplicably loaded with an enormous amount of magic.

Kaen concentrated, reaching out for its power with feeble wisps of her talent, but could not touch it. She tried instead to get a sense of what had changed; what strange craft had brought this about. Why her talisman, which she had thought destroyed, still existed, bulging with power.

In this she also failed.

 

MEET THE
CHARACTERS

HOME

THE
AUTHORS

WORKING
TOGETHER

HEALING
MAGIC

STOLEN
MAGIC

ELDER
MAGIC

COVER
ART

EVENTS

Trade Paperback     ISBN: 978-1-60318-118-1