The Lessons Never Learned (The War Eternal, #2)

by Rob J. Hayes

"Any fight is a trade. The combat is merely the act of haggling for how many lives are lost.

there are few terrans up on Ro'shan. The visitors from that city were more likely pahht and I missed my first chance to see one of the other peoples of the world. These days I know them all well; the pahht, the tahren, the garn, and even the mur. I also know the Rand and the Djinn, though I doubt anyone can claim to know them well. They are as Gods to us mortals, or so they would have us believe.

I have since learned there is a monster sleeping in the centre of Ro'shan. A giant none save the Rand has ever seen. Its bones grow out from its skin, out through the rock above, and they grow into the shapes of buildings.

Some say that between them, the Rand and Djinn created the world and everything in it, us included. Some say they just improved upon what was here already. The truth, I think, is that both the Rand and Djinn were far too busy trying to destroy each other to create much of anything.

What I do know is there used to be many more of them, hundreds or thousands even, and the more of them there were, the more powerful they were. But they argued and fought over the world and when gods fight, it's us mortals who suffer.

In Polasia, deep within the desert, there is an oasis where the waters run red and the trees grow purple. Above that oasis the sky is cracked open, and through the jagged scar above a great eye stares down on the world.

there was only one consistency throughout all the stories I had read or been told and that was that all Rand were female. And all Djinn were male.

They are three of the Knights Lunar. Three wielders of the ten weapons that fell when our moons collided millennia ago. I had heard rumours, even down in the Pit, that the Terrelan Emperor had collected the ten weapons for the first time since they were found. Now I believe it to be true. The emperor has re-forged the Knights Lunar and I travel with three of them. I wonder where the other seven are?

But still he dragged that hammer up with him. I know the weapon now as I didn't then. It is called Shatter, and is one of the ten weapons that fell when our moons collided. It is said that one swing of that hammer can break anything.

I survived bringing an Abomination across from the Other World, and to this very day that accomplishment, or perhaps mistake, has never been replicated.

Somewhere out there, the sky was ripped open and a great eye stared through it, a rift caused by a battle between Djinn and Rand when they were at the height of their power. Strange things happen around that tear in the world, and once the eye focuses on you, it never looks away. No matter how far you might flee, or how deep in the earth you might hide, the eye is always watching. Proof, if ever it was needed, that there are things greater than all of us.

A huge boat with three sails, and sailors climbing all over it like ticks. You have probably never seen a Demonship. There are so few of them left, but they are horrific things. The hull is made from some sort of fusion of Golemancy and Necromancy. It is flesh, pulled from the corpses of terrans, and somehow given terrible life. It appears red, almost bloody, and has the texture of skin. But as we drew close, I saw eyes opening along the hull. They were huge things, round and unblinking, and they watched us pass.

"The true enemy is rarely those you fight, but your own ignorance."