In a world teetering on the brink of destruction, one man’s quest ignites an epic battle between light and darkness.
Ten years ago, Boren was a young boy when he saved his homeworld of Komad by destroying a portal linking it to the corrupted world of Taytos. He paid a price for his sacrifice: he became himself trapped on that crumbling world. For a decade, he has survived, hunted by the Four Anjuns, the demigods who rule Taytos’ world-spanning empire from the shadows.
Driven by a thirst for vengeance, Boren forges an alliance with an imprisoned ancient dragon and its spawn. With newfound, yet little understood, power coursing through his veins, he sets out on his quest for retribution. Yet, there are schemes at play that threaten both worlds. Hidden plots, in which Boren, the dragons, and the Anjun themselves are risking everything to achieve their goals.
Meanwhile, on Boren’s homeworld, his old allies face a new threat. Magic wielders known as Jasver's Acolytes shatter a hard-won peace. Led by Deuc, a priest of the Order of the Righteous, and the battle-hardened warrior mage Feridun, Boren’s former comrades must uncover the truth behind these dark forces before it’s too late.
Date Unknown
Location Unknown, World of Taytos
Boren's fingers dug into the rock as he hoisted himself up the mountainside. A fang-topped staff dangled from his belt. Each strained breath brought him closer to the summit, where he hoped to find answers.
Is it you, Kleos, my brother? Will I find you here?
He leaned against a ledge in the ashen rock and looked out and down, onto the void. The air was thick with the scent of sulfur, the sky a perpetual twilight blending crimson and violet streaks.
Taytos.
The dying world he had been exiled to was a place of eternal dusk. He climbed on, one slippery ledge at the time.
No, not exiled. I chose this.
Every waking moment was a reminder. He reached up, resuming the climb. His muscles burned with each step, the hammering heat making his fingers slick and dangerous as he gripped, scraped, crawled upwards. He paused to listen, the silence of the wasteland broken only by faint howls and screeches in the distance. Poisoned clouds hid whatever was up there, looking.
The Anjun's minions? Here?
He had thought himself safer this far from the bits of broken civilization one could find in this world. But they were hunting him, they had been since he had set foot on this world. Now there was no other path but the one up the Gheroin mountains.
The Invincibles, they call them. And if this turns out to be a dead end, they will claim me, too.
None of the sentient creatures that lived down below dared approach the mountains, which made even the wasteland seem more hospitable. Yet he had to. Someone on the peaks had called to him, a pained whisper carried down on the wind, reaching him in vision and fractured dreams.
Are you hurt, brother? I am coming.
His heart pumped faster, fueling his resolve.
***
He felt himself slipping out of the cave and towards the edge of the cliff. But he didn’t fall. He leaped into the air, leaving the rock and brambles behind. Hundreds of feet below, solitary predators, their shapes hazy, crept upon the dusty earth.
Behind me.
He spun around mid-air to find a featherless, long-beaked bird with a vast wingspan soaring by. The monster was scouring the barren land, ready to swoop down for the day’s prey. He soared up, gliding next to the bird-like creature. The pink-fleshed monster could not sense him. He changed course, bending space to his will and projecting himself higher towards the highest summit of the Gheroin.
There it is.
A swirling hole stared at him from across an expanse of ashen rock. Its cool, sharp scent reached him from afar, sending tingles across his skin alongside echoes of the call that had brought him here.
Water. I feel it.
He dove toward it, as he had done dozens of times during the climb. But as he pushed to cross the threshold, the tension in his body grew into pain, then agony. He screamed.
His remaining healthy eye flared open. He was once again in a shallow cave on the face of the mountain. His body had not actually moved. The projection vanished, leaving him breathless. The cave floor rubbed and scratched against his back, as if pushing him away.
Thirsty.
He counted inhales and exhales to regain control of his heartbeats and of his thirst.
Not yet. Not yet.
He had to ration his water, for the mountain offered none. These peaks were far from every wretch who called the wasteland and its few, often tainted, wells and streams, home.
But at least I am hidden from Their servants.
He had been on the run from the Anjun’s hunters for years. How long exactly, he did not know. He had stopped counting the days and months. Even time felt alien in this world. He rubbed his callused palms, then scratched the scar tissue over his blinded eye. A shiver ran down his neck as he saw it again.
Kleos clinging to his hand as they approached the Portal, the Anjun's claws tearing into his flesh as he shielded the Infant. With his brother in his arms, Boren rolled forward, crossing the vortex into the unknown.
He shivered and pushed back the memory, leaving the shallow cave. The sky’s purplish glow blinded him, a luminescence that had once nearly driven him mad. He inhaled deeply, the air on the Gheroin mountains tasting sour yet less humid than in the lower plains. He kept breathing it in until the sting in his eye eased. Though the light was intense, fear didn’t grip him. His heart had a steady beat.
I’m still alive.
I looked out toward a hidden horizon and the barren lands between them. Few dwelled in this region, far from the only hub that mattered. The last bastion of civilization.
Xingon.
Too boundless to be considered a mere city. It was far from here, months of slow trek. He got up, reflecting on the vision of the threshold at the top of the mountain. He had seen it many times in his sleep, the visions never revealing what was hidden beyond the threshold of that cave. They came in dreams that were not dreams, a magma that burned and bubbled in his mind, fragments that showed past and future with no distinction, a mosaic of ever-changing colors, voices, smells and flavors.
The Gift.
An Arcane Vision which had awakened before he had crossed the Portal with his brother, and that had gotten stronger since.
He had always believed that the knowledge of the future was the prerogative of gods, assuming they existed. But on Taytos, he had stopped questioning whether there were gods. They existed. They were called Anjuns, as he had learned back on his world, Komad.
Are they the ones lurking at the top of the Gheroins?
He knew it could be a trap. But one way or the other, there were answers waiting on the peaks of the Gheroin, and he would find them.
He climbed on, bending almost to the point of touching his knees with his chest at every step. Each step sent a cloud of dust into the air, while the rough terrain scraped against his palms, and the distant sound of shifting rocks echoed in his ears. Hours later, he was crossing a plain that stretched on until the next steep ascent. Then the dusty earth gave way to a pitch-colored quagmire, its fetid stench filling the air. It was so wide that it blocked his way across. He trekked around it, trying to stay as far as he could from the bubbling surface.
***
Having left the stench of the quagmire far behind, he was crouching down. In front of him were the ingredients to the highlight of his day. A small pile of dried-out twigs, grass and bark shavings. A fire pit. And the skinned six-legged body of his prey. The animal was the size of a wild rabbit and was one of the few species capable of surviving the barren moors. He knew little about it, except that its meat was edible. To survive this far from Xingon one had no choice. He was hand drilling, spinning a straight stick between his pals against a flatter piece of wood. He blew gently the few embers onto the dry grasses, patiently working the flickers into a fire. He fueled the fire with more wood until it was strong enough to spit-roast the nameless animal.
Lovely, juicy friend, he caught himself thinking.
When his teeth sunk into the lean meat, he forgot all about prophecies, gods, and even about the deadlands around him.
“Yes, yes,” he muttered to the wind.
One by one, he picked up the bones and sucked every drop of marrow from each before throwing the few leftovers that were too hard to chew into the fire. He looked up at a nearby tree. It was a typical example of Taytos’ vegetation: a twisted mass of wood with a handful of leaves. He walked over and ripped one of those leaves, then chewed it. It was the final dish of that meal. He hoped the leaef’s sour taste would clean away the stench of the charred flesh from his mouth. He smothered the fire and kicked the pile of coals away. He approached the tree again, and with a leap, he grabbed onto the nearest branch, then climbed up as high as it would hold him. Here he lay down on the oily mantle of his long, braided hair and stared at the cosmos above him. He had dreamed of that, too. Some nights, he had soared to the scarlet stars nestled beyond the purple mist. In these visions, he had felt that he was somehow close to the truth about this mysterious world, but he always awoke just before the revelation. He stared at the stars, relaxed by their remote pulsing. With one leg dangling off the branch, he fell asleep in the endless twilight.
He heard a snort from below and opened his eyes just in time before something shook the tree from the root to the branches. He sprang and clung to a branch with his free arm. Below him, a wild goat with horns the size of his arms was digging with its hooves, ready to charge, drooling.
Weren’t these damn beasts herbivores?
He stared at the animal and noticed its hairless patches, the yellowish discolored skin. The wretched creature was sick. He understood, with a sense of annoyance, that he could not leave without confronting it. Balancing himself on two feet, he leaped to a branch on the farther side of the tree, then dropped to the ground just as the goat turned towards him. He flipped the fang-topped stick around. The Gift, as he called it, the premonition that had saved his life countless times, possessed him, pulling him out of the present moment.
He saw the goat rush at him with its snout down, ready to smash his legs with stone-hard horns. It hadn’t happened yet, but he saw it. When the charging animal was close enough to his knees, Boren slipped to the side and sank the pointy end of the staff into the animal’s skull, piercing it from side to side. The beast made one last hoarse cry and crashed to the ground, the weapon still stuck in the orbit of one eye. He approached the carcass and pressed his foot against the neck to extract it.
The vultures will thank me, but what a waste of meat.
Had it been in better conditions, he would not have hesitated to make an instant feast of the goat. He got back on the road, facing the rising temperatures and a breath of torrid, implacable wind. He marched on until he noticed that the air was struggling to accumulate in his lungs.
How many thousands of feet up have I climbed?
He looked up to the peaks. The ground looked like fine white flour among dried trees and shaggy bushes. He felt the impulse to turn around and give up the climb. The unknown above him was as suffocating as the absence of clean air. The Gift whispered to him to proceed, but that power itself was at times cryptic. He had decided long ago that he would not become the puppet of a kind of magic he did not fully understand. The first signs, the first visions, had manifested themselves when he was still on Komad. Those visions had shown him the way to his brother Kleos, then the path to reach the portal between worlds. But on Taytos, somehow, its power had grown manifold.
When he stopped for a sip of water, he saw from the fading light that half the day had slipped by as he tread the winding path. He rested, feeling the gritty mixture of sweat and dust permeating his skin, caking under his nails, and coating the inside of his nose. Balancing his staff in one hand, he listened to the stillness. The only sound was his own labored breathing, rasping in the dry air. All else was silence and desolation. Eyes closed, he sought any whisper of life on the hot wind.
When the prey came close enough, he hurled the staff like a spear. It ended up in a bush thirty feet away, causing a dying howl.
It must be a big one.
Licking his chapped lips, he approached the blood puddle where the prey lay. It turned out to be slimmer than he had hoped. It resembled a fox but was far less elegant. More like an outsized, chestnut-colored mouse. He huffed, blowing away the tuft of hair that had slipped in front of his healthy eye. He dragged the trophy with him, looking for a suitable place to camp, then crossed a slope and found himself on the edge of a narrow path between the side of the mountain and the steep face of the rock. A path too narrow to cross. A dead end. He examined the mountainside for a long time. He traced every rock and crack in the facade in his mind. Every muscle begged him to stop, to give up. He tied the beast to the back of the rope that served as a belt on his waist. His fingers tightened on the first ledge and he began climbing.
He climbed to the top, muscles spasming, screaming for rest. He took the second sip of water of the day, then started the same dinner ritual. A rare gust of wind blew, scattering sparks. He looked up. Wisps of smoke danced upwards, then suddenly froze, suspended mid-air. The sparks too hung motionless as if time itself had stopped. The wind died. He froze, listening, muscles taut. A low hum reverberated through the stone beneath him. The mountain trembled. Rocks tumbled down its flanks. The hum grew louder, becoming a rumble. He stood, alarmed but mesmerized. Suddenly, the stone beneath his feet fractured. The cliff face he had climbed shattered, tons of rock crashing down into the chasm below, the booming and shattering filling the air. But the rock under him somehow held firm. The rumbling ceased, but an echo made its way through the rock into his skin. With one word.
“Welcome.”