KINGDOM OF THE STONE -- a Wattpad featured novel

Bonus Chapter 1

The Stone King

By J. A. Partridge

Chapter One

Thirteen years before the founding of the first kingdom

Ten-year-old Garanth held his sister Eiraena's hand and followed their father down the dusty trail, listening to the insects chirp his name.

"Ga-ranth. Ga-ranth. Ga-ranth."

"Help us. Help us. Help us."

Eiraena stumbled, jerking Garanth to a halt. Though she had spent the morning staring off into the dried grass and shrub-covered foothills of the Pelahi Mountains, the sixteen-year-old girl looked around in sudden alarm, as if seeing the landscape for the first time. Throughout the four years of wandering from village to village, Garanth's father, Karux, had always told him to stay close to her and that she was in charge of him. Except that, for the last couple of years, he'd begun to suspect the reverse was true. Most people called her simple-minded. When Garanth asked his father why she was different, a strange look of awe and doubt had crossed Karux's face. "Eiraena sees the world that really is. She sees this world as little more than light and shadows."

Garanth tugged on Eiraena's hand.

"Help us. Help us. Help us."

Karux had continued on down the path. Despite leaning on a staff and limping on a bad leg he had managed to leave them behind. Garanth pulled on Eiraena's hand, trying to hurry her. Hot, tired and thirsty, he called out, if only to slow his father down. "Adra! How much further to the next korion?"

Karux stopped and looked back as Garanth had hoped. "Just beyond those trees, past that far hill...."

Garanth pulled harder on Eiraena's hand as she stumbled along.

"...and don't call me Adra."

"But Uncle Mac calls you my foster father."

"That just means I have to take care of you. That doesn't mean we're related. And don't call Macander 'Uncle'. You have no relations and he's no longer anyone's uncle," Karux added in a bitter note.

"But Madra said—"

"Let's not talk about her," Karux snapped.

They didn't have to. Garanth could tell from the far-away look in Karux's eyes that he was remembering the same thing: the day they first met.

Garanth's mother lay naked in her bed. Blood had soaked her sheets and pooled on the floor. A strange man knelt beside her, his face a study in grief carved in pale stone—exactly as it was now.

"Come here, Garanth."

He had walked over to touch his mother's hair, the only part of her not covered in blood.

"Garanth, honey, this is your new Adra."

Garanth looked up at Karux. In the four years since that day, Karux seemed to have aged twenty. His young beard had filled in and settled into the folds of a permanent scowl. The sun had tanned and lined his skin and his endless searching from korion to korion had thinned his flesh, wrapping it tightly over the bones of his face. His eyes, however, remained sharp and snapped to a fierce focus at a point behind Garanth.

Garanth looked back. A line of beetles stretched hundreds of yards northward, following with slow determination.

"Let's get moving," Karux said.

Approaching the village, Garanth noticed many women and children working in the fields or tending the fishing nets along the riverbank. Their fields spread out for a mile or two along the river, their rows radiating out from a tight circle of stone and timber buildings. A few men worked alongside them, but not many. If their hands tightened on their hoes or their fishing knives at the sight of the three travelers, they did not pause in their labors, but merely kept a wary eye on them.