Sun's Heart

Prologue - Soot and Shadows

Selias lowered his dark brows and scraped the sole of one boot with a calloused hand. Soot dusted his palm. Was he satisfied or relieved at knowing he wasn't insane? He brought the long blade of his sasuri down to examine its silvery length.

Of course there's nothing. What was I expecting? Strange birdsong drifted through the twining pillars around him. Wind rustled unseen trees.

Mere steps beyond the magical barrier separating his homeland from Hildor, he had heard an all-too-familiar scream. Wings buffeting his head before sharp, razor-like talons hooked into the thick cloth at the back of his neck. He'd reached back, tore the creature free and threw it to the ground, and swung the sasuri downward with a twist of his hands on the wooden shaft. Its screams stopped as suddenly as they'd started, and it had vanished, leaving a cloud of silent soot and clumps of coal.

It was one encounter of thousands he'd had in his lifetime, yet its wrongness loomed over his head like a mountainous weight suspended by a hair.

Shaman Selias was not a man easily scared.

"Fearless" was something a man or woman should never be. Fear was reason, instinct crying for life. A limiter on foolishness. Yet a leader inevitably finds himself pretending to be fearless out of necessity.

He turned his wrist to eye the crimson stripes oozing blood through the bandages wrapped in place of his ruined leather cuff. The creature had swiped with its talons when he grabbed it. An irritating injury.

A sfalo . It could be nothing else. But sfalo attacked in flocks. His lungs squeezed, and he unhooked his sand veil for a breath of cool air.

If the attack had happened on the other side of the mountains where the desert lay, it would be less worrying. Expected, even. But in Hildor, just past the barrier which contained such creatures to prevent them from spreading across the face of Ketsa like a plague...

If he'd thought it could help, he would have turned around after the attack and sought to contact the Elahn, but it would have been a week-long trek through Sand Sea to Haliculir. No, it was more practical to continue to Beryl and send help back.

As the rider who flew him from Hildor to Beryl informed him, gryphons' teleportation only travelled one forward in time by a little less than a day. Meaning there was still hope to be had for preventing the spread of shadowbeasts.

Perhaps it wasn't a shadowbeast.

He cut off the thought firmly before it could continue. It was too risky to ignore even the chance of a shadowbeast making it past the barrier. Unless it hadn't passed through the barrier at all. Had it come from another source than within the desert? Selias thinned his lips and crossed his arms, allowing the sasuri to rest upright against his shoulder.

Of course not. If there were shadowbeasts outside Sand Sea, he would have heard of it long ago. And the rider had known nothing of sfalo when questioned about them. Even after hearing a description, the man's only concern was that Selias suffered from heat stroke.

He had thought so, too, until the shock of the encounter wore off.

It was good that I decided to continue to Beryl.

The Beryllian Academy of Magical Arts was beautiful, in a pale and lonely way. Its cold white hallways reminded him of the lower levels of Haliculir, where the empty towers lay dead and dark. At least in Haliculir, he wouldn't have had to wait to be seen like some young hunter too eager to bite at ash. He thinned his lips. Different people of different ways, ran through his head like a mantra. His bottom had gone numb an hour ago.