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NaNoWriMo 2013: Excerpt 13

Mother, hear my prayer, she pleaded silently. If you have ever loved your wayward initiate, stand with me now.

No answer came back, but then, it never did.

Emelethana had chosen her path; she refused to complete the task that the Mother’s order required of all its lesser daughters, the one which would make her a full priestess in her own right. She had forsaken the Mother’s Way in every thought and deed since being sent from her home on her pilgrimage, the youngest daughter of the High Priestess of the Smoke Clan, and she knew that the Mother would never truly stand with her.

A chill ran down her spine, and her knuckles went white around her talon’s handle.

The Father was not so selective about whose prayers he heard, though it was nearly unheard of for a priestess of the Mother, even a mere initiate, to turn her eyes toward the lesser of the dyad. Sucking in a breath of the chill morning air, Emelethana clenched her jaw.

Father, hear me…

NaNoWriMo 2013: Excerpt 12

Both Aspar and the young man stared at her, their eyes round in horror.

“Emelethana—“ Aspar began, but she cut him off with a sharp look. “Priestess,” he amended. “Are you mad? We cannot fight them.”

“I don’t know what he said,” the young man put in, “but I’m guessing by his tone that it was along the lines of ‘are you crazy?’ They’re darkhounds.”

NaNoWriMo 2013: Excerpt 11

His breath hitched in his chest when he saw her. Hair the color of wood smoke—almost black with just the hint of blue—hung to her shoulders in waves. Her skin was the color of wheat or honey, a radiant gold in the morning light, and her eyes burned brilliant orange, like the last embers of a dying fire. She was tall, lithe and slender, but a lifetime of living amongst women who fought alongside their men had taught him to see the hidden strength that the feminine form could contain, and she was brimming with it, like a bowstring drawn taut. Her features were proud and angular, nose perhaps a bit too long and her eyes set a bit too close to be artistically perfect, but those minor flaws only served to prove to his mind that she was real, and not some kind of feverish hallucination brought on by a dying mind.

“A Dragonmaid,” he breathed. A real, living, breathing legend stood before him. Mirhalan had never been sure whether the skalds who sang about them even believed in the Dragonkin, given the outlandishness of their prose and their poetry about them. In the songs, the Dragonmaids appeared only long enough to give a kiss and a blessing to a warrior who had proven his worth or made a hero of himself, before disappearing again into the mists.

His vision swam, and he lay his head back down on the moss before dizziness overcame him again. “I must still be dreaming,” he muttered.

NaNoWriMo 2013: Excerpt 10

Mirhalan dreamed of fire.

A roiling black wall of smoke and cinders choked him, and he coughed, trying to clear his throat of the burning pain. The wind whipped through his hair and his clothes as though trying to tear them from his body. The sound of ripping cloth echoed in his mind, and he struggled frantically to see through eyes that burned and watered mercilessly.

“Brynjar!” he called, but the wind stole the sound from his mouth. “Afrith!”

Unseen flames licked at him. Sweat poured from his forehead, dripping off the ends of his arms, but as he looked down at his fingers, it was no longer sweat but blood.

“Am I dying?” he asked silently in the wind. He turned, searching for the lantern which would lead him to the Eternal Light, like the Radiants always promised, but everything was just black smoke.

NaNoWriMo 2013: Excerpt 9

Current word count: 9,036

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On the back of a great, horned, scaly beast, an impossibly-slender and uncannily-graceful figure rode, its face and body encased in pale white metal, one hand bearing a steel-topped spear that must have been eight feet long. Surrounding its mount were thralls—but not the overgrown infantry kind. These were human-sized, staggering along beside the armored, tree trunk-like legs, attached to the saddle by chains that hooked to collars around their necks.

The wytchen lord had ridden onto the field.

“No!” Brynjar shouted, his broken voice swallowed by the din of battle all around him. “Your Majesty! Retreat! Retreat!”

They couldn’t hear him. He was too far away.

NaNoWriMo 2013: Excerpt 8

“Dammit, boy, where the dark pits did you go?”

“Brynjar!” A voice called out.

The old warrior spun, just in time to see an enormous thrall—even larger than the others—raising what looked like an entire tree over its head. Brynjar leapt backward even as the air buzzed three times in rapid succession around him, and three arrows sprouted from the thing’s eyes and face.

It let out something between a roar and a piteous wail, dropping its club to the ground with a crash, and Brynjar stepped up and put his axe in its head before it had a chance to recover.

He whirled around, and spotted Afrith and two other archers standing on a low rise a few dozen yards away. Exhausted and blood-spattered, Brynjar gave them an appreciative wave before hefting his weapons once more.

NaNoWriMo 2013: Excerpt 7

Word count at the end of scene 4: 7312

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She turned to him with fire in her eyes. “We don’t have a choice, Aspar. He’s going to die unless we can clean and cauterize this wound.”

“This young warrior is hardly our responsibility,” Aspar said, his voice reasonable. “If he dies, it will be through no fault of yours. By starting a fire, you risk our lives in addition. Be certain that the risks you take are ones you are willing to live with.”

“I am not a little girl anymore, Aspar,” Emelethana said firmly. “I understand the risk. There has already been enough death today that was beyond my power to prevent, but I can give this young man a fighting chance. It is my prerogative as your priestess, and I command you to light a fire.”

Aspar frowned, but his eyes were smiling. “Of course, my priestess. I shall obey.”

NaNoWriMo 2013: Excerpt 6

“There’s no chance that I’m putting us in the middle of that mess,” Emelethana said confidently. “We’ll wait them out.”

“And hope that they don’t find us in the meantime.”

She didn’t dignify that with a response.

The sounds of combat moved farther away, but they were still close enough to put her teeth on edge. She preferred the quiet solitude of the hunt, the test of her intelligence against the natural wit of her prey. Open combat was a messy, dangerous thing, and even more so when it turned into full-fledged battle. Her people did not often war against others, but they had defended themselves against outside threats, and she had seen firsthand what that meant for the people involved. It was not a pretty sight.

“How much longer will they fight?” she asked.

Aspar raised his upper lip and sniffed the air like a hound catching a scent. “They fight the wytchen lord’s horde. Dawn will sap much of their enemy’s power, and if any of them have survived, the battle will be won.”

“And if they all die?”

“It is unlikely.” Aspar paused for a moment. “In that case, however, we shall wait here and slip past their guard when they press onward to the north.”

“And hope that they don’t find us in the meantime?” Emelethana asked with a tight smile.

Aspar returned the expression. “Precisely.”

NaNoWriMo 2013: Excerpt 5

Current word count: 5,527

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Dizzy and dazed by the blow to the head, Mirhalan staggered to his feet. His boots slid on the wet ground beneath him, but he managed to keep his balance. With a gloved hand, he retrieved his axe, which had fallen in the dirt a few feet away. He tried not to think about how much blood he was covered with or what the squishing sound beneath his feet meant.

He slowly turned, but he’d lost sight of Brynjar. The battle had moved away from him, pushing back the way that the horde had come. The warriors of Cal Dorejn were winning, holding back the tide, but Brynjar had assured him that even the best of battles could turn on a single fateful moment.

Krejk pressed his body to Mirhalan’s leg, and Mirhalan steadied himself on the war hound’s rock solid back. The archers must have moved past him now—the angry-hornet buzzing of arrows no longer filled the air.

There was a copse of trees not far away, he noted, but there was no movement in that direction. For a moment, he and the Dorejn hound were alone on the plain, forgotten by all of the combatants, left for wounded or worse.

With a roar, another thrall came out of the darkness, gibbering in strange tongues. This one was not so wide, but was instead rope-thin, its muscles strange and seeming stretched in the pale light from the moons. Its face was drawn into a hideous, skull-like grimace, teeth shining white as it screamed, thrusting a spear at Mirhalan’s heart.

NaNoWriMo 2013: Excerpt 4

Here’s the excerpt for the 4,000 word mark:

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Aspar looked up again, his face grim and gray in the pre-dawn darkness. “We must build a pyre, and quickly. I fear we will not be safe here long.”

Emelethana began to speak, but a long, low moan drifted across the land, echoing in the ravine. It belonged to no animal that she recognized, but the hairs on the back of her neck raised defensively nonetheless.

“What is that sound?” she whispered, crouching down instinctively and looking up at the ragged edges of the ravine. Her knuckles went white around the handle of her wing-and-pinion.

It came again a moment later, sounding like a monstrous animal in pain, but with no natural quaver at all… just a note of pure sadness in the night.

“It is a war horn,” Aspar said softly. “That sound means that a battle is about to be joined, and I fear that we are far too close for my comfort.”

“A war horn?” Emelethana asked. “What kind of creature—?”

Aspar shook his head. “Not a creature.”

Her eyes widened. “You mean…?”

He nodded.

“Men.”