An excerpt from my latest revisions, chapter 8 – The Stray Chronicles

Why? What was so important to hide – what had Valdyir done? She shook her head feebly.

            The Chief pulled a worn dark leather pouch from his cloak. As he carefully loosened the tie, a fine haze seeped from the pouch. He cast its content across the broad table. Fine, jet black opalescent sand. Nyhm knew in an instant what it was; The Dark Sea. The sand hissed as it scattered across the table and bubbled where it met Mourdrid’s blood. The Chief spattered out a few crude words then tossed a handful of the bubbling blood-sand atop it. There, where it landed, the blood solidified into dark jewel-like stones.  The ripples and folds of the sand began to quiver, and stir.

            “…Take us there…” The Chief spoke.

The ripples moved.  They bobbed and ebbed, and the stones began to form faint figures amongst the sand. As she watched these figures, raising and falling, materializing then smoothing again in a dark dance, she started to lose herself. She was hypnotized by this haunting, yet dazzling image. Distracted by this vision, she forgot the horror around her. She forgot the throbbing in her head, the pain that welled in her chest. Her tears dried, and she simply stared. Deeper. Deeper.

The hall darkened into shadow, and faded from sight and mind. She no longer saw the table laid before them, only the sands and the figures. Their world slowly faded out of sight, and new images grew up around them. Suddenly the dancing image of the sand-shades began to fade as well, and new, stranger images took their place.

In front of them she saw an overcast valley, gloomy and dull. A heavy storm loomed over them, pouring rain in torrents across a dreary, meek cluster of small huts, thatched houses and clay buildings. The winds raged upon the quaint village, and seemed to rip it to ruin. All about them, the lands grew dark. The fields began to rise and fall, just as the sands of the DarkSea, and she realized they were no longer in the hall of GanorPalace, but they were there: they were in the vision.

She sat in the field, wind raging all about her drowning out all other sounds. The tall grasses ripped in the winds, slicing at her and drawing thin streaks of blood against her hands and cheeks. Around them she saw the ebb of the valley, mimicking the sands that controlled them, and amongst them grew figures, the shades, forming into an evil, half-dead army of ghostly shadow beasts.

            Horrific, tall and spindly. Their dark, sickly grey-green skin pulled taut over defined, if lean, muscle and bones that spired into dagger like points at the joints. Their hair was wet and dreaded that hung limp and stringy across their shoulders and hid their faces, though their fanged grins flashed in the dim light. The little you could see of their faces peering from beneath their mangled manes were vulgarly distorted. Not unlike men, but not human at all. They stood with spines arched, the vertebrae cresting their backs as they pierced through the flesh, bent with their elongated legs folded beneath heavy, muscular thigh as they walked on the balls of their clawed feet.

            Nyhm stared, wide-eyed in horror as she watched more and more of these creatures rise up from sand-shades into reality. Thunder crashed, and lightning flickered. Nyhm jumped, hiding herself beneath her arms as more appeared all around her. She has seen many foul and cursed beasts of Caermeryn – horrid creatures, the mutilated remnants from the backlash of the fall of the Olde Empire. But she had never seen anything like these. These had none of the same characteristics or attributes of the beasts she was familiar with. These were something more; something older…these were no beasts. They were demons. They were the creatures of nightmare – what the people had feared so much, what stalked in the shadows…they were real…

They were real.

She clasped a hand over her mouth has she huddled amongst the grasses, unable to move, unable to speak. Petrified, she could do nothing but watch the horror. The Reapers faded away into shadow, looming over the field as the demons moved on towards the village. The Chief stood to command.

“Kill them all…leave nothing for him…”

            With that the beasts erupted in a rampage. They cried out an earth-shattering roar of bloodlust that resonated through her bones. She wept. They took to the fields, hoards of them, racing faster than any mount or steed Nyhm had ever known, across the valley – towards the village. She covered her ears and hid her face as she lost control, sobbing into her lap. The Reapers cried out their hallowing call in response. They raced past her, over her, around her, as she huddled, and cried. This was it.

This is what happens when you cross those who hold the Reapers.

What had Valdyir done?