The Pact - Dark Roads, Book One

The Pact - Chapter Three

(You are reading a sample of Brantwijn Serrah's full-length novel, The Pact. If you like what you read, you can find the full novel at www.brantwijn.com/the-pact.)

CHAPTER THREE

Somewhere amid the study and reflection, D'aej put Serenity to bed. She recognized it when his consciousness took control of the body—he could do so, of course, and when she sank so deeply into her work that she forgot all sense of time and even her physical needs, D'aej often slid into the lead and handled those things for her. She allowed him to guide her. Her mind already drifted towards sleep.

All weavers dealt with darklings. Bonding with an otherworlder, however...that was a different matter.

Even weavers acknowledged the darklings were deceitful beings, just like all demons of the otherworld. They might need darklings in order to tap into magic, but allowing a darkling access to a human mind and body, even for the instant, carried terrific risk. Men could be driven insane by the darklings, or lose their sentient personality under the encroaching shadow. lost souls were all that remained when humans lost themselves to the will of a demon, and the demon stole their body for mischief in man's world. Darklings couldn't affect the physical realms alone, after all, with their natural powers confined to the realm of the spirit, or the twisted Rachalör, where the realms of the spirit bled into the realms of man. Any weaver who tapped those realms gave the darklings a chance—no matter how brief—to cross over. And a darkling who gained the power to play in the world of man was a dangerous being, indeed.

So, traditional weavers took great care over how much of themselves they offered to the claws of the spirits.

But there were other weavers—a secret sect of them, a cabal known as the Black Guild—who deemed the interaction between weaver and darkling as the key to true knowledge. When a weaver opened his body to a spirit, and the spirit paired his mind to man's, then and only then could greater understanding come truly within reach. A weaver strong enough to take a darkling into herself, and to hold it in herself, without succumbing to its wild, ferocious nature, would in theory retain all the creature's supernatural talents indefinitely. She could draw from it at any time, for any purpose. The secrets of nature could conceivably be reached out and plucked from the aether like an apple from a tree.

These men and women—Black Guilders—were more than weavers. They were true arcanists. Demonologists. Prodigies, like Serenity.

And she wasn't afraid to let her demon take over her body every once in a while. She knew D'aej like a good man knows his wife. As the darkling moved through their hotel room, managing little things like cleaning up her studying space and putting away her books, Serenity—inside herself—was mostly already dreaming.

D'aej's cool words, like a night breeze, came to her. Don't forget why we are here, my little one. Hold it before your heart as you sleep. Remember the man we are hunting. And why he must be punished.

Her journey on the path of the Black Guild began after they laid Jack to rest in the ground. Though fate had taken her teacher, her studies continued, and every evening after Magda excused her, Serenity trekked across town to the weaver's school to spend long hours in study. The weaver's library contained perhaps the most expansive collection of spiritualism and lore anywhere in the daylight lands, and there was something to be had in those books, she was sure. Some precious gem of knowledge she intended to find, something to take the place of the emptiness Jack left behind. He'd want her to go on in her studies, she knew. He'd have wanted her to learn great things.