KINGDOM OF THE STONE -- a Wattpad featured novel

Chapter Forty Seven

Pronos dined with Amantis that afternoon in what seemed an absurdly large feast, but which Amantis assured him was an ordinary meal. Amantis tried repeatedly to ask him what the forces of the north were doing and planning, but kept interrupting Pronos' replies with stories of how he had driven the elders of Nur away and seized unquestioned power over the lives of everyone in the city. He had just interrupted Pronos' account of the destruction of Korion-Garanth when Pronos asked him, "So, whatever happened to that Charissa girl you left with?"

Amantis and Apaidia exchanged glances-his looked uncomfortable, hers smoldered with anger. "Let's just say I put her in her place," Amantis muttered.

Pronos chuckled. He could never tell what Amantis had seen in that skinny thing anyway. At least his new woman had a large chest and wasn't afraid to flaunt it. He held his drinking bowl up in a toast to Apaidia. "You don't seem to be doing too poorly for yourself."

Amantis returned a polite laugh and Apaidia gave him a bemused half-smile and an evaluating look.

Pronos was about to ask about the local women, but Amantis had turned the conversation back to himself. Eventually the time came to leave and the meal ended. A young serving girl came to clean off the table. Pronos tried to catch her eye, thinking he might try to lure her into his bed that night, but she only seemed to have eyes for Amantis. She kept snatching furtive glances at him and blushing.

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The Lord's house was a massive pile of cut stone fashioned in blasphemous imitation of the sacred mountain Archetor. A small building rested on its summit from which, Pronos surmised, Amantis probably liked to look down on all the land he ruled. A series of stone steps cascaded down its side like a stone waterfall, dividing as it neared the base at the lintel of a massive door.

Following Amantis through the portal, Pronos gazed up in amazement at the vast space inside. Each course of stone overhung the one beneath it until they met in a vast shadowy corbelled ceiling. A square of stone pillars helped support the ceiling and another square of taller pillars rose up inside those near the room's center.

Pronos turned in a circle, scanning the hushed shadowy space, unable to guess its purpose. The hairs on the back of his neck rose in the unnatural atmosphere.

The Faithful Sons filed in behind them and stood silently like yellow stone pillars between their taller stone counterparts.

"Close the doors," Amantis ordered as the last of the sunlight drained from the sky outside. "Put out the torches."

The Faithful plunged the room into darkness and, after a moment, a familiar whispering echoed in Pronos' head. A dim light appeared and grew until he could see the stone in Amantis' hand.

Pronos was suddenly transported to a distant spring night when the lights came out of Amantis' stone and the whole world hung upside-down over an endless black Void.

The cold lights grew and filled the room, driving the shadows of both pillars and people away at strange angles so that each stood not behind but slid up next to the other.

"Ctonos." Amantis stood in the center of the space and gestured for him to approach. "Kneel."

The lights swirling from the stone reflected off people and pillars, obscuring more than they revealed.

Pronos felt as though he stood in a boundless black void. He kept sensing movement as if some new presence had joined them, but every time he looked, he saw only a pillar or shadow transformed into the appearance of a man by a trick of the light.

Amantis put the stone on a pedestal and walked around the kneeling Ctonos so they both faced the stone. "Lords of Heaven! Lords of Beyond!" Amantis called out. "Hear our plea and answer our request." He raised his arms and light glinted from an obsidian knife in his hand. "With our breath we call to you. With our blood we open the way. Come!" Holding Ctonos' head still with a hand across his forehead, Amantis put the knife to the side of his neck.