Reign of Demons - War of the Last Day #3 [EXCERPT]

Previous Books Recap

It's awesome to be back!

I know it has been a while. That's why I recommend you refresh your memories with the series recap I have included here below. 

Personally, I need to know you are back as well. Tell me in the comments you are here! 

___________________________________

Army of the Cursed

Nineteen-year-old Lady Leila, who has been obsessed with mages, finds herself named by her aunt, the Queen of Murase, as her heiress. Against her aunt's advice, Leila tries her luck in the mages' trials. Though she lacks the gift, the mages accept her to exploit her extensive knowledge.

Infuriated by Leila's persistence to join the mages, the Queen of Murase decides to strip her niece of her title. But before the Queen makes the announcement, a horde of immortal possessed warriors known as the Army of the Cursed assaults her capital. Despite her awareness of her inevitable defeat, the Queen stands her ground and dies with her soldiers. Leila narrowly escapes with Master Yesen, the High Cleric of Murase. On their way westward, where they are supposed to join her mother and her little brother among the train fleeing from the capital, Leila finds them all slaughtered. A Cursed rider intercepts Leila and Yesen, but they are saved by a last-second intervention from Zahra, a young Murasen mage whom Leila has recently met at the royal palace. The three of them decide that they must warn the most powerful kingdom in the west; the Kingdom of Bermania.

Nardine, the sixteen-year-old heiress to the Kingdom of Bermania, survives a failed assassination attempt outside her capital Paril. Her mother Queen Rona, who always has her differences with her, orders Nardine to stay behind the walls of the city until she finds out who is trying to kill her daughter. As Nardine learns that her long-gone father has been working on a weapon that will enable his soldiers to fight the immortal warriors toe-to-toe, she defies her mother's orders and sneaks into the Redfoot, the abandoned fortress in which her father died while working with the mages on that mysterious new weapon. In the middle of her search for any clue about the weapon in the pitch-black castle, two dark figures follow her. By allowing some light into the chamber she is trapped in, Nardine accidentally kills her stalkers, and then, she discovers they are severely deformed humanoids. After she collects all the documents she has found in her father's chamber, she encounters a fully armored man who introduces himself as her father himself.

Nardine's father, King Masolon, reveals that he and the Koyan mages in his court worked on developing a potion that would boost the strength of his soldiers so that they could have a fair fighting chance against the abnormally fast immortals. After a few failed trials that killed his men, Masolon stepped forward as a test subject to encourage a hundred of his soldiers to try an advanced version of the strength-boosting potion, and the experiment succeeded this time, but the price was heavy. Later, Masolon discovered that the potion, which they called The Shunri Blend, was turning them into deformed beings that could not stand the sunlight. Believing that would protect his wife and his daughter from conspirators inside and outside Bermania, Masolon decided to fake his death while he and his men would spend the remaining of their short lives hiding in the Redfoot.

Nardine promises her father that she would find a way to turn him back to his normal self. Upon her return to the royal Bermanian palace, she learns about a rebellion led by a lad who claims he is her elder half-brother.

Born and raised as a commoner in the Kingdom of Skandivia in the north, Halgrim is approached by exiled Bermanian nobles who reveal to him that he is King Masolon's firstborn. As they swear fealty to him as the rightful king of Bermania, Halgrim decides to reclaim his father's throne. While he marches to the capital of Bermania, half of the Bermanian major cities join his army.