Wolves of Empire [EPIC DARK FANTASY] [Book One Complete]

Nine

Tali

Alzikanem, the Imperium

7th of Tournus

Tali stood alone, here at the end of the world.

Even on a rare temperate day, the Kanem Archipelago, east of the Imperium's mainland, was a desolate landscape. Alzikanem, largest of the islands, presented a severe stretch of wind-blasted fields and barren hills. Her father's ancestral estate crowned one such rise, its stonework a dull grey that seemed to seep into the rocks beneath it.

She'd been told that, when her paternal grandmother had owned it, the building had been animated and homely. However, twenty-four years ago, a fire had ripped through the estate, gutting it and killing Asterion and Phaedra Boratorren, her father Endarion's parents. Though repairs had been made, the building remained an empty shell. It was all Tali had known for the bulk of her sixteen lonely years.

And for what? Her hands rose instinctively to cover the stunted horns curling through thick black hair styled to conceal them. Those, paired with the unusual grey pallor to her skin and slight point to the tips of her ears, marked her as a half-breed, as a youth whose mere existence was a crime.

As a child, she'd tried to comprehend her supposed sins, tried to understand why she lived in hiding here on this barren rock, when her father enjoyed all the prestige of a celebrated general back home in the Imperium proper.

Her first failing: her illegitimacy. Her second: her Dontili mother, who'd gifted her the visible markers of her grey-skinned, horned race. Her third—and worst: her mother's Tharghestian ancestry.

"You were born into a war," her father had once said. "For the first few years of your life, your mother's nation and mine were allied. When we turned on Tharghest, she became the opposition. Your birth would have been proof enough that I consorted with the enemy. You and I would have been executed for treason."

Tali didn't understand how an infant could be cause for execution. But it had been enough to condemn her, and that was all that mattered now.

Solitary in the wretched estate save for her single, equally desolate mentor, Tali often wandered the hollow hallways, searching vainly for something to occupy her. Today, her feet led her unconsciously into the bowels of the building, the darkness wrapping around her like a suffocating cloak. She snatched a torch from its sconce and held it aloft, the shadows shying away.

She stopped short at the imposing oak door to her father's office. Once inside, she held the torch over the dusty fireplace and waited for the flame to catch. Grey, muted light seeped in through the room's sole window, and Tali turned her back to it, instead focusing her attention on the war table dominating the room's centre.

An aged sheet of paper had been pinned to its surface, annotated by smaller diagrams. The larger sheet represented the asymmetrical continent of Indaver, with its three jutting arms and the immense extent of the Karhes plains in its centre.

Her father had made a habit, whenever he was on campaign, of sketching landscapes he found interesting to be sent back to her. It was an attempt to bridge the gap between them, to prove to her that she wasn't forgotten. But she'd always seen it as futile; instead of the freedom to explore the world for herself, Endarion offered a stagnant doodled insight to be stuck to a map so that maybe she could imagine it for herself. Not to mention, she knew her father was in the business of making war, and supposed that, as soon as he'd captured a landscape for her, he ravaged it with his army and ensured no one else could ever admire it again.

She picked up his latest drawing, a few months old, and frowned. It depicted the landscape of an alien planet she recognised as Shaeviren, a world carved entirely from sun-blasted sand. It was a planet that could be reached only by an Atlas Gate the Imperium had been granted access to by their allies, the Castrian League.

The Imperium, excited by the unearthing of a Gate long thought destroyed with the rest, had immediately organised a campaign to the untouched planet beyond. Her father had been given command of an exploratory foray into a realm the Imperium might one day conquer. During a fight with the strange, demonic natives of Shaeviren, Endarion had been unhorsed, taken captive, and tortured.

Tali knew all this because she'd borne witness to the results as her father battled bouts of madness.

The centrepiece of this newest sketch was a jagged pillar, thrust upwards like a crooked canine: the tower in which he'd endured months of torture. A dark figure waited at the tower's entrance, captured in senseless whorls of ink forming a vaguely humanoid shape.

A shiver rippled unbidden along her back as she scoured the picture, feeling something wrong about it, yet unable to define exactly what. The figure wasn't a native—she'd been told they were bullish, tusked beasts with broad shoulders and four heavily muscled arms, called Dhamara. It wasn't human, either, but something close to it.

She set the picture aside with a grimace. Just her father's unstable mind, nothing for her to react so childishly to.

She favoured another picture, one she'd scrawled herself and stuck to the centre of the continent, to the plainlands dominating the landmass. A simple doodle, it depicted a spread of the Karhes's endless steppe on a cloudless day, bisected by a meandering river. Though an amateur artist at best, she still felt a pang of longing at the sight.

Before she'd been forced back to the dull safety of Alzikanem at the age of twelve, she'd spent a few years on the plains with her renegade uncle, Helleron, and his cadre of mages. Her uncle and father had agreed between them that Tali deserved a taste of freedom far away from the Imperium that would kill her if it ever discovered she existed. Their compromise had been for her to enjoy Helleron's nomadic lifestyle for a time before fears for her safety had driven her back to her island prison.

She was so far removed from her time there, her memories had almost completely faded, and the Karhes might as well be a dreamscape of her own desperate devising.

With a sigh, she flipped the paper over and set it face down against the map, then turned her back on the war table. Nothing existed here but captured memories that had never belonged to her, and to linger over the possibility of them was to cruelly tease herself.

The office door creaked painfully open behind her and Tali spun on her heels, fists raised in defence. A blade's tip, gleaming softly in the dull light, pointed accusingly at the space between her eyes. Beyond its length flashed a smile, brighter than the metal.

"I'd like to see how one combats a sword with just her fists," spoke a hushed, husky voice.

Tali lowered her hands. "If I punched it hard enough you might lose your grip."

"Or skewer your hand."

The blade lowered, and the nimble, battle-hardened form of Shira, her mentor, coalesced from the darkness of the doorway. Shira produced a second sword, clasped in her other hand, and offered it hilt-first to Tali. "I thought you would benefit from a distraction," Shira said as Tali claimed the weapon. Before Tali could reply, her mentor spun on her heel with the flourish of a soldier on parade and disappeared into the shadowed hallway.

Tali followed with a sigh as Shira directed her to a quaint courtyard towards the estate's heart, her favoured place for sparring. Flanked on all four sides by arched walkways, with a perfect square of flattened grass in its centre, it seemed like a sacred place. Built into the stonework of the arches hung carved figures faded with age, some scoured to a sheen by the persistent sea breeze. Several of them were recognisable as her father's ancestors, their heavy brows and stern visages marking them as Boratorrens. Her favourite had always been Andaria, Endarion's namesake and the woman believed to have raised the wolves that would go on to become the first stonehounds.

She strode out into the courtyard to face her mentor.

Shira was all Tali had now. Hailing from south of the Castrian League, Shira had been raised in a family of warriors and boasted a fighter's physique. Her every stance hinted at controlled tension, as if, like a coiled snake, she would strike without notice. Her skin gleamed a rich, deep brown, her thick hair coiled around her head in intricate braids. She wore a loose-fitting garment more like a tunic than the straight-cut uniforms Imperials favoured, its style simple and reserved.

She was also an idomancer, able to employ her magic to hop short distances in an instant, as if stepping through time, and had served in Uncle Heller's cadre for several years. Like Heller, Shira had pledged herself to the Fensidium, a group of renegade mages beyond the control of any nation who used the endless expanse of the Karhes plainlands as cover for their activities.

Shira levelled her sword at Tali's eyes again, then snapped it up vertical, one hand braced against the blade, the other grasping the hilt.

"I don't really want to spar today," Tali said, keeping her sword at her side.

"I didn't ask if you wanted to spar," Shira replied. She held her position, narrowing her eyes. "Nonetheless, you'll spar."

Tali stuck the tip of her blade into the dirt at her feet. Before she could reply, Shira shifted forward, sweeping her blade into a wicked arc aimed straight for Tali's head. Tali stumbled backwards, keeping her footing only by instinct. Shira snatched her blade and tossed it at her.

"Decapitate me if you want," Tali said, "but then there'll be no one to spar with."

"You don't want to learn to fight?" Shira said, flourishing her blade outwards and forcing Tali to lift her own in a hasty block.

"It's pointless," she replied. "I'm stuck on this island and being able to use a sword won't make any difference."

Shira seemed to consider for a moment, then stepped back, her shoulders dropped alongside her guard. "You won't be stuck here your entire life."

"You sure about that?" Tali said. "I'm sixteen now, and my father's never taken me back to the Imperium with him. I'm never escaping." She threw her sword to the ground, knowing it was petulant but feeling a tiny burst of satisfaction. "I should never have left Uncle Heller. Should've stayed with him."

"You were only brought back here for your own safety," Shira replied as she bent to retrieve the discarded sword. "You don't think I want to return to Heller as well? You think I enjoy Alzikanem any more than you do?"

Tali huffed and turned away. "You didn't have to come with me."

"Your uncle asked it of me." The warrior cleared her throat, as if measuring her next words. "You may be bored here, but at least you're alive."

She spun on her heels to face Shira again, found the woman frowning at her. "I don't even understand why I'm hiding here. I don't know who's hunting me or why."

"Your mother warned your father before she died that you were in danger."

A slither of anger tightened Tali's gut. "Are you sure this isn't just paranoia? I'm just a bastard half-breed. No one could care about me enough to want me dead."

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

It was an old argument, had not just with Shira, but with her father, and with Heller as well. From a young age she'd been hidden, whether in her birthplace in Tharghest, at her father's far-removed island home, or even with her uncle, out in the Karhes. Everyone she knew made great efforts to keep her hidden from a threat she'd never been told of and that, as far as she knew, didn't even exist. She fled from ghosts, it seemed, trusting the word of people who claimed to want her safe, yet had never told her anything about her circumstances.

Now she thought about it, her anger deepened.

It wasn't just her imprisonment that grated, nor even the seclusion and loneliness. It was the way her life of hiding had stripped back her existence to the bare minimum, leaving her less than half a person. She had family she'd never met. Her father had four other children, three of them as illegitimate as her. He spoke of them fleetingly, as if they were strangers and not her half-siblings. She had another uncle, Valerian, a powerful politician in the Imperium's heart, and he had two children. But she didn't know them, didn't even know their names. She doubted they knew of her existence.

She had no family. Not in any way that mattered.

And why?

Shira opened her mouth to answer, then closed it. Tali shook her head.

"I get it. I'm too young and stupid to be told anything yet. Wait until I'm older. Wait until I've died of boredom."

She didn't wait for Shira's reply, because she knew it would be just another placating non-answer. Her mentor would try to coax her back into sparring, and Tali would play the part of obedient student and drop the matter. But she was as tired of that routine as everything else.

She didn't look back as she paced out of the courtyard.

―

The water lapped gently at the side of her kayak as Tali pulled herself along the jagged flank of Alzikanem's eastern cliffs later that day. She aimed her kayak east, towards open ocean, and put the island to her back.

Her paddles carved through the water until her arms burned and her legs cramped. She'd often considered the possibility of rowing eastwards until the scattered humps of the Kanem Archipelago dipped beneath the horizon. One day she'd even gone as far as packing provisions and securing them to the back of her kayak, then hauling the craft down to the harbour. In the end, she'd waited at the harbour's mouth, letting the water roll her between the walls, before returning to shore a few hours later.

She angled her kayak around now, aiming at Alzikanem again and finding herself no more than half a mile distant. A solid finger of smoke drifted skywards, rising behind the cliffs and licking at the undersides of the clouds. Tali frowned; it almost looked like a volcano's plume, yet there were no volcanoes here.

Before she could consider the smoke, it blossomed outwards. The thunderclap of an explosion rippled through her an instant later. It sounded as if the sky had collapsed.

Confusion and a small measure of panic ensured she could ignore the fatigue in her muscles as she started rowing back towards the harbour, where the smoke now wafted. Halfway there: another thunderclap, this one far louder and punctuated by a distinct fiery glow that painted the cliffs orange.

She leapt from her kayak and dragged it up onto the beach's shingle, grabbing the small bag of supplies she'd packed in anticipation of a few hours at sea. The trek uphill was a blur, her mind too set on the smoke, on the explosions, on the destruction she expected to find at the hill's crest. Villagers gathered outside their homes, a few from further up the slope bolting down towards the harbour as if fleeing something monstrous. When she reached the crest, a cataclysmic tableau confronted her, and she understood the villagers' hysteria.

Her father's estate was a shattered remnant, its stone walls torn asunder. Rubble was scattered everywhere, and Tali spied several bodies sprawled within the chaos. It seemed the building had been ripped apart, as if by godly hands in a fit of spite.

She stumbled towards the ruins, her eyes snagging on the corpses despite her best attempts to tear her attention away.

Here, the cook who supplied Tali and Shira with their meals, her right side burned black, her left slick and crimson. And there, the farmer whose livestock kept the estate's stores filled, a mess of innards all that remained beneath his waist. And right here, by her feet, the farmer's boy, no older than ten. Pulped as if he'd been dropped from a great height.

Tali cringed as another explosion erupted, this one close enough to whirl raw heat through the ruins. Movement flickered within the sundered stonework, bright flashes of colour punctuated by the grinding of armour plates.

Was this one of her father's enemies, or one of the many people he'd claimed would see her dead? Or even the assassin her father claimed had murdered her mother all those years ago, here to finish their vile work?

She flexed her hands. Though she possessed no weapon, had rudimentary training at best, didn't even know what she faced, the bulk of her already focused on the fight. Panic and adrenaline and anger devoured her common sense as she paced towards the central spread of the toppled estate.

A hand grabbed her shoulder and she recoiled. Shira appeared at her side in a waft of bitter-scented magic, expression grim, the air around her blurring with recently expelled idomancy. Her wickedly curved khopesh, a favoured blade, jutted boldly from her other hand, though not yet blooded.

"We need to go," Shira said. "Now."

Tali pulled away. "What's happening? Who is it?"

Wordless, Shira tried to move her away from the wreckage.

"Who is it, Shira? What's going on?"

A silhouette ascended skywards behind Shira, and Tali's eyes widened at the sight.

"What is that?"

He moved as if he commanded the sky. A pair of nightmarish wings, membranous like a bat's but tufted with bird-like feathers, stretched out behind him. Though human in outline, vaguely human in visage, in every other way he was something else entirely. Too large to be a man, at least ten feet tall, with the width to compliment such size. Bedecked in plate upon plate of archaic-looking armour of glimmering grey-blue, though it didn't fit right, as if it wasn't a suit donned by the figure, but as much as part of him as the wings. His face, warped by a bloodthirsty grin, was sculpted and handsome and pleasingly symmetrical, with a distinctive hawk nose.

She ran through her knowledge of the world's races in a few hurried heartbeats, trying to rationalise this creature as something she recognised.

Nothing. This was like nothing she'd ever heard of or read about before.

"Shira," Tali said as the creature snapped his head towards them.

His palms splayed, aasiurmantic flame shimmering in his grip. With not a flicker of exertion, the figure hurled a ball of fire, as bright and hot as the sun. Tali, pinned in place by a deadly combination of awe and shock, only avoided a fiery death when Shira ploughed into her side. The rush of Shira's idomancy enveloped them as she skipped them twenty feet away in the blink of an eye. They landed in a heap, Tali taking Shira's weight on her side, the air punched from her lungs. The heatwave rippled out from the fireball when it exploded against a wall behind them and bathed them both in a dazzling ochre glow.

Shira leapt to her feet and dragged Tali up after her. She led them in a stumbling run towards the shattered remains of a wall and ducked behind it.

"What is that?" Tali demanded in a forceful whisper. "Is that what I've been hiding from?"

The wall trembled and thrashed as, one by one, the stones comprising it shot away. Revealed behind was the surreal figure of their attacker, drifting ever closer.

"There you are."

A depthless voice. Calm and soft-spoken words rolling through a yawning mountain range and amplified tenfold in the echoes. The voice, Tali imagined in her terror, of a god.

Shira took Tali's forearm in a panicked grip. "Get to your kayak. I'll hold him off."

"Absolutely not," was her instant reply, delivered in her numbed panic.

The monster drifted closer, his wings beating with powerful pumps that flexed the membranes. Menace seethed in every line and angle of him, and his voice, though oddly gentle, thickened with threat. "Come with me and avoid any further disruption."

He spoke as if the destruction of an entire island and the slaughter of its inhabitants was a trivial issue. Had she not been facing this inhuman threat, she would've laughed at the absurdity.

She shook her head, backing away with Shira at her side. The monster barked a laugh much louder and more forceful than his words and raised clenched fists. The ground ahead of them cracked, the rock pulled away into a widening fissure that seemed to shift the entire island beneath their feet. Tali swayed, staring in rapt horror as the crack opened beneath the remnants of her father's estate and swallowed the stone carcass.

The monster advanced, the bright crackle of lighting playing across his hands. The air shimmered around him, the atmosphere pulled taut by his magic.

"Tali, run. Now." Shira made to shove her away, but Tali latched onto her hand.

Closer drifted their death, held aloft on strange wings. The gaping wound in the island's surface followed, splitting off in a trail that speared towards them.

Panic, sharp and acidic, engulfed her. For an absurd moment, she pictured the tower her father had scrawled. Pictured the figure beneath it. Was this titan the monster he'd tried to depict there?

Then the world ended.

It wasn't so much an explosion as a hurricane of energy consuming her, bright and vibrant, searing against her skin. It suffused her limbs, girded her bones like a second skeleton, saturated her with such raw power she felt the size of a mountain. The apocalyptic backdrop of her massacred home disappeared, giving way to a luminescence of every colour that existed, and a fair few that didn't.

A shredding pain ignited her. Her skin was being torn away slowly, piece by bloody piece. But the pain existed internally, too, a metaphysical pain, a pain existing beneath her awareness. A pain experienced in a dream, only to fade upon waking.

And then it was gone, not just the pain but all sensation.

She slapped her free hand to her chest, feeling for the fatal wound she knew she'd been dealt, finding nothing. She grasped at smoke.

Tali looked down, certain the monster had savaged her, left her such a ruin she'd lost all feeling, but there was nothing. Not even the cracked ground. She wasn't there anymore. Didn't exist.

Just a black expanse. She drowned in the night sky.

Was she dead and experiencing some form of afterlife? Was her disoriented mind catching up to the reality of her body's catastrophic demise, and even now she floated towards oblivion? Surely there was more to death than this?

Shimmering movement beneath her, the ripple of a reflection on a lake's surface, and then a thunderstorm detonated. A roiling thing, all fury and anger. She sunk into its depths, expecting to find her feet on solid ground again, but was instead held suspended.

She hadn't the words to describe what happened next, but it felt as if the storm filled her, warped her, assimilated her. Just when she feared she would burst from the irresistible pressure, she was released; she plummeted through monstrous clouds, down through a landscape of violent, writhing energy. The wind tore at her with flensing force.

Then, as if it had never happened, she was back on her feet, the ground hard and reassuring beneath her.

Beside her, Shira ripped her hand free of Tali's grip and braced herself against her knees, vomiting noisily. Tali regarded her with detached confusion as the sensation of power seeped from her inch by throbbing inch.

She looked up, and the monster was gone. Alzikanem, too. In its place, a desolate stretch of sun-blasted desert, a seamless tapestry broken only by irregular towers of ugly rock. One was closer than the others, looming over them with ill intent, its tip too high to spy from such an angle.

Her heart spiked when she recognised it.

This was Shaeviren. And that was the tower her father had scrawled on the map in his office.

"Shira," she said, her voice wavering.

The woman rose, wiping vomit from her mouth with one sleeve. She cast her gaze about them, settled it on the tower, and gaped. "No."

"What happened?"

Shira retched again but had nothing left to bring up. "You brought us here," she said between breaths.

"I didn't."

A pointless denial; whatever had happened when the panic overtook her—whatever she'd done by falling into the Abyss and succumbing to the storm—had ended with them here, on another planet.

"I didn't mean to," she amended. She turned in slow circles, hoping each new revolution would plant them back on Alzikanem. "How? How are we on Shaeviren?"

"It's called worldstriding," Shira said, brow creased. "Quite a rare form of aasiurmancy."

"What do you mean? I don't have magic."

Shira shook her head, then took Tali by both shoulders and forced their gazes to clash. "You need to get us away from here."

"I don't know how."

Her mentor jabbed an accusing finger at the tower behind them. "Your father nearly died there. Exactly there. We need to get off this planet before the things that tortured him find us."

Tali cast her gaze wildly about, hoping to find an answer in the barren wasteland she'd somehow trapped them in. She squinted through the hazy shroud of dirt and sand to the sky, to the sun, if it was there.

Something demanded her attention and, as if she lacked control, her eyes were pulled back towards the tower. The tainted air shimmered. There was a foulness here, like the macabre presence of a rotted corpse. Tali felt the barbs of something unnatural and malicious on her skin.

Her eyes found a silhouette, too distorted to distinguish, but vast. Vaster than the planet itself, it seemed, despite being dwarfed by the tower it now stood before. Its desire, so heavy on the desert wind Tali could taste its bitterness, was to end her, to rend her down to nothing. This she knew, just by steering her eyes across its blurred, guttering outline.

"Shira." Tali's tongue had swollen in her mouth, as bulbous as that of a body bloated by its own gasses. Her limbs turned sluggish, her chest throbbing with sick energy. She was halfway dead, so weak she was falling apart.

She felt the thing's presence, its stain deep inside her, like a tumour. Felt it tethered to her, and her to it. An inescapable connection. An anchoring.

Across the scant distance between them, she rocked beneath the punch of the monster's regard. She felt, more than saw, its attention snag onto her, tugging at her mind, luring her into its orbit. She imagined a great predatory head canted in interest as it surveyed her. Imagined an additional weight in her skull, insignificant but no doubt there, as if the creature had deposited a part of itself within her brain, marking her as its own.

"Get us out. Now." Shira seized Tali's hand again and yanked her off balance, the jolt bouncing her eyes away from the evil shape.

Its effect didn't dissipate, but faded enough for her mind to unravel beneath the panic her frozen body hadn't allowed her to surrender to. For the briefest flash, she thought of her uncle, pictured his solid form standing between her and Shira and the monster. Protecting them.

Again, the world exploded. Again, the storm encompassed her. Again, energy filled her to bursting. The expanse of darkness churned around and within her, stripping her of whatever strength she'd retained, leaving her feeling like her ribs were being pried open, her skull split, her muscles torn from weakened bones.

When she collapsed onto unfamiliar ground far away from Shaeviren, the scream she'd ejected into the void, silent for a moment, became deafening. It shredded her throat and starved her lungs until, with a flicker of something she might call relief, she shut down.