A Time of Dread (Of Blood & Bone, #1)

by John Gwynne

Winged warriors wrapped in gleaming mail swooped down to the battle-plain, skimming above men’s heads, stabbing indiscriminately with spear and sword, lifting men into the air, rising up steeply and dropping them, screaming, limbs flailing.

Kadoshim. Dread demons of Asroth who had escaped their bonds in the Otherworld and entered Drem’s world to become creatures of flesh and blood, monsters come to destroy all that lived in these Banished Lands.

She is like the sun when she is happy, like a furnace when she is angry. I have never known anyone so utterly opposite to my people. All seething emotion bound within a sack of skin, blood and bone. Only when alone with our kin or Clan are we Sirak able to be like this. When in front of our enemy the cold-face is king.

“Pride, first step to defeat,” his father had said to him. “Emotion, the wild horse that must be tamed,” his mother had intoned. “Be the master, not the mastered …”