One last time, it’s SUNDERING SUNDAY!
It’s SUNDERING SUNDAY!
That’s because THE REAVER: THE SUNDERING BOOK IV releases on Tuesday, February 4th, and as we count down to that, I’m posting an excerpt from the novel each Sunday.
The publisher has posted the first chapter. You can find that here:
https://www.wizards.com/dnd/Product.aspx?x=dnd/products/frnovel/reaver
You can also find four previous excerpts here on my blog.
In today’s excerpt, the Red Wizard Umara observes the start of a ritual of high magic.
Standing at the brink of the drop-off, closer to the hidden sunrise than anyone else, Stedd extended his hands to the eastern horizon, and they bloomed with gold and crimson light. He turned and thrust them at the ground. Lines, circles, triangles, and more complex figures spread outward from the spot he was indicating, writing themselves on the ground in light.
Standing to the west of her collaborators, Shadowmoon began a kind of slow, twisting, pirouetting dance in place. She made the contortions look as effortless as they were lithe. To the north, Shinthala looked upward and muttered; the clouds overhead rumbled and flickered as lightning stirred inside them. In the south, Ashenford stroked arpeggios from his harp.
Traceries of light flowed from the druids’ positions across the ground to interweave with the figures Lathander’s power was drawing. But the new designs were green instead of yellow or ruddy, and more freeform, their shapes hinting at the uniqueness of every leaf on every branch or every bend in the course of every stream rather than the perfect roundness of the sun or the flawless arc of its daily progress across the heavens.
Trained to construct every pentacle with geometric precision, Umara winced at a sloppiness that, had a Red Wizard committed it—perhaps because he was drunk—would have proved either futile or suicidal. But the Elder Circle’s figures smoldered with a power that, so far at least, they seemed fully able to contain.
A droning began. It sounded so much like a deep tone from the Thayan pump organ called the zulthoon that Umara might have mistaken it for one had she not known no such instrument was anywhere nearby. Eventually, she realized the treants were groaning out the hum as accompaniment to Ashenford’s harp.
One or two at a time, the other celebrants joined in, sometimes singing, sometimes chanting, sometimes contributing by other means. A barefoot, dirty, and nearly naked druid—a hermit, Umara suspected—beat out rhythms on a pair of femurs. Sprites hovered in a cloud to merge the whine of their wings into a piercing chord. A spindly horned man with enormous eyes and ears simply exploded into a run of eight ascending brassy notes, leaving not a speck of flesh nor a drop of blood behind.
By rights, it should have all combined into cacophony, but somehow, beauty emerged instead. What Umara chiefly noticed, though, was vibration resonating through her bones as mystical energy accumulated.
The glowing designs grew larger than the space taken up by those who created them. A straight line of rose-colored luminescence shot into Umara and Anton’s lean-to and out the back. Figures and sigils even wrote themselves on the surface of the pool, maintaining their forms thereafter despite the constant flow to the tops of the three waterfalls.
Then the storm clouds to which Shinthala had been muttering answered as clouds had never answered any mortal spellcaster before. The sky—the world—blazed white with so many lightning bolts that it was impossible to see the individual strikes or, in fact, anything but brightness. The accompanying crash was so loud that it scarcely registered as noise. Rather, it smashed sensation and thought into chaos. Even though Umara had had some notion of what to expect, for a moment, she feared that she was dying.
You can preorder THE REAVER: THE SUNDERING BOOK IV here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EGMB6BU/ref=s9_simh_gw_p351_d0_i2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1AEKHHJJH4JY5QDXYZ1A&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1630083502&pf_rd_i=507846
Or here:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-reaver-richard-lee-byers/1115479179?ean=9780786964581
That’s because THE REAVER: THE SUNDERING BOOK IV releases on Tuesday, February 4th, and as we count down to that, I’m posting an excerpt from the novel each Sunday.
The publisher has posted the first chapter. You can find that here:
https://www.wizards.com/dnd/Product.aspx?x=dnd/products/frnovel/reaver
You can also find four previous excerpts here on my blog.
In today’s excerpt, the Red Wizard Umara observes the start of a ritual of high magic.
Standing at the brink of the drop-off, closer to the hidden sunrise than anyone else, Stedd extended his hands to the eastern horizon, and they bloomed with gold and crimson light. He turned and thrust them at the ground. Lines, circles, triangles, and more complex figures spread outward from the spot he was indicating, writing themselves on the ground in light.
Standing to the west of her collaborators, Shadowmoon began a kind of slow, twisting, pirouetting dance in place. She made the contortions look as effortless as they were lithe. To the north, Shinthala looked upward and muttered; the clouds overhead rumbled and flickered as lightning stirred inside them. In the south, Ashenford stroked arpeggios from his harp.
Traceries of light flowed from the druids’ positions across the ground to interweave with the figures Lathander’s power was drawing. But the new designs were green instead of yellow or ruddy, and more freeform, their shapes hinting at the uniqueness of every leaf on every branch or every bend in the course of every stream rather than the perfect roundness of the sun or the flawless arc of its daily progress across the heavens.
Trained to construct every pentacle with geometric precision, Umara winced at a sloppiness that, had a Red Wizard committed it—perhaps because he was drunk—would have proved either futile or suicidal. But the Elder Circle’s figures smoldered with a power that, so far at least, they seemed fully able to contain.
A droning began. It sounded so much like a deep tone from the Thayan pump organ called the zulthoon that Umara might have mistaken it for one had she not known no such instrument was anywhere nearby. Eventually, she realized the treants were groaning out the hum as accompaniment to Ashenford’s harp.
One or two at a time, the other celebrants joined in, sometimes singing, sometimes chanting, sometimes contributing by other means. A barefoot, dirty, and nearly naked druid—a hermit, Umara suspected—beat out rhythms on a pair of femurs. Sprites hovered in a cloud to merge the whine of their wings into a piercing chord. A spindly horned man with enormous eyes and ears simply exploded into a run of eight ascending brassy notes, leaving not a speck of flesh nor a drop of blood behind.
By rights, it should have all combined into cacophony, but somehow, beauty emerged instead. What Umara chiefly noticed, though, was vibration resonating through her bones as mystical energy accumulated.
The glowing designs grew larger than the space taken up by those who created them. A straight line of rose-colored luminescence shot into Umara and Anton’s lean-to and out the back. Figures and sigils even wrote themselves on the surface of the pool, maintaining their forms thereafter despite the constant flow to the tops of the three waterfalls.
Then the storm clouds to which Shinthala had been muttering answered as clouds had never answered any mortal spellcaster before. The sky—the world—blazed white with so many lightning bolts that it was impossible to see the individual strikes or, in fact, anything but brightness. The accompanying crash was so loud that it scarcely registered as noise. Rather, it smashed sensation and thought into chaos. Even though Umara had had some notion of what to expect, for a moment, she feared that she was dying.
You can preorder THE REAVER: THE SUNDERING BOOK IV here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EGMB6BU/ref=s9_simh_gw_p351_d0_i2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1AEKHHJJH4JY5QDXYZ1A&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1630083502&pf_rd_i=507846
Or here:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-reaver-richard-lee-byers/1115479179?ean=9780786964581
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