*Book One of The Accursed Chronicles*
August was a man from a normal world, living a mundane life until one night everything changed, and he was sent spiraling into a world stuck forever in winter, full of magic, creatures, and a curse that has grip...
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Grey light still shone steadily though the frost on the panels of the windows in the corridor. It gave me a few hours of day to get August dressed appropriately and then fed before I had my own matters to attend to.
"We should find you suitable clothes," I stated, ushering him to follow me down the corridor. "Laelmos is an unforgiving place when it comes to its weather."
"I figured that much when I almost fucking froze my balls off," he replied bluntly, and when I glanced his way, he looked at me like I'd grown two heads.
It was perhaps the other way around since he was the strange one out of the two of us. He wore unfamiliar garments and spoke using the oddest verbiage. It was almost as if he weren't from here...
He shivered when a breeze of chilling air blew through the corridor. "Is it always this cold?"
"You'll feel no heat in Laelmos. Winter is all we have known for the past two hundred years. You'd know that though since you live here the same as I."
"Right," he murmured with a nod before he bit his lip, as if trying to hold himself back before he suddenly asked, "How do you... mages grow things and survive?"
I blinked in confusion at him but held the confusion to myself. Perhaps he'd hit his head and had messed up his memory.
"Magic," I replied plainly as I opened a door to the outer courtyard. "Humans have it worse from what I've heard and have been relying on scheming ways, but you would know that, wouldn't you?"
He furrowed his eyebrows and quieted as we stepped out into the courtyard. Then I noted the same reaction to the apothecary as his eyes grew wide and interested when he set gaze on the frozen fountain in the courtyard. The ice was a bluish tint, sculpted into its last shape before it had frozen many, many years ago. Dustings of snow littered the cobblestone, but most was being swept away by students of Merk's academy, Lindir.
Merk was within the Forest of Madde and the closet to Isolde's kingdom of Wyneir and therefore received the blunt end of the raging winter. It took great work to upkeep the academy and the surrounding city of Merk, to keep her streets clean and not overrun with piles of snow. Students of Merk, battle mages in training, were required to do a servant's work because Lord Kallias believed that it honed a battle mage's mind.
However, I was certain it was only because he didn't want to pay anyone to keep his city clean. The students were free labor.
I walked away from August, leaving him mesmerized by the fountain before he shook from the daze and hurried after me.
"Why don't you help the humans?" he asked when he reached my side.
"Mages, elves, we've all tried in the past, only to be murdered or backstabbed by the humans we had assisted," I grumbled, knowing it had happened in the past.
Humans, while they were easy to quiet, were rats and cowards and could pull the wool over your eyes without you even noticing. They were conniving in every sense and why most mages avoided them because they would always ask us for "favors". It helped now that most humans never stepped foot into our side of Laelmos anymore, say for trading.
