Thank you to everyone who has asked about the current status of the second novel in the Wither the Waking World Saga. Please be assured I am putting great effort into completing the sequel to The Death You Deserve. Theel has many more steps to take in his quest for Warrior Baptism, and I am as anxious to complete this journey as you are.
My current goal is to have it ready for publication by Christmas. I know this is unsatisfactory for many of you. Hopefully an excerpt will help tide you over.
Enjoy …
Horrible deeds committed on this ground had colored the Craft weaves black, making it sour for the living. When this happened, even those not practiced in the ways of the Craft or the Method could sense the darkness that clung to the earth. Most people who encountered such things would shrink away, fleeing in terror from the truth. But Theel sought the truth, no matter how terrible these memories were, no matter how they curdled his stomach. Rather than flee from the horror, he ran toward it. He needed to know.
He realized he was running, chasing the sounds with a strange desperation in his heart. He hoped it was happening at that moment, an oddly terrible desire. But if it was happening right then, he could still do something to stop it, to aid Leely, to comfort her. These memories were recent, but he couldn’t be certain how recent. Leely might have screamed only moments ago, but it also could have been a year ago, or even longer. But whether moments or a year, his heart didn’t know the difference and the ache in his heart begged him to act. And so he ran through the trees, the snow crunching under his boots, the frigid air filling with plumes of his hot breath.
As he got closer, the cries became louder, and seemed to carry greater emotions on the wings of the Craft, as well as some of the story behind what created them. Leely was now a full grown woman, with children of her own, and she feared for their safety. She was in terrible distress. She didn’t know where they were, or if they were safe. Her ears were full of crackling and snapping. Her face was scorched by waves of heat. Her nose was burned by black smoke. All she could think of was her children.
Theel gripped the handle of Battle Hymn tightly, resisting the urge to draw the blade. Fear clawed at him like and icy hand trying to grip his throat. He wanted to fight it off with his sword. He wanted to stab something, break something, destroy something. Whatever it took to fight the fear. But he kept Battle Hymn in her sheath, thinking that if he bared the shadowsteel blade, it would absorb the Craft weaves from the air around him and the memories contained within them, stealing Leely’s voice when he needed to hear her most.
He could see the trees thinning out ahead of him in an area where the ground became more rocky as if he approached a precipice. The sounds tugged him in this direction, the screams, the cracking of fire, the smell of smoke. Now it was becoming unclear to him if these things were brought to him by his Sight at all. Was he actually sensing these things with his eyes and ears? Were these things happening in the present? Was there still a chance to save her?
He scrambled up the rocks, slipping several times on the thin layer of snow that covered them, but maintained his balance by grabbing at the branches of the runt pines that grew there. He looked ahead and saw the plume of smoke, thick and billowing, the offspring of something much larger than a campfire. Then the stink hit him, the acrid smell of a something burning. It scorched his nostrils and caused his eyes to water. His throat tensed up as he felt his body react to the filthy air. He coughed it out of his lungs and knew in that moment this wasn’t coming to him courtesy of his sight. The flames were real. The smoke was real. The screams were real.
This was really happening.
The anguished cries continued, fueling his desperation as he picked his way over the last jumble of rocks. He pulled himself up onto a large boulder, then climbed to his feet, standing at the peak of a sharp ridge. Below him, a stream bubbled its way through a snow-covered glade, turning a waterwheel at the center of three modest buildings made of piled logs and thatch. One of the buildings was an inferno while another was leaking fingers of smoke from its roof and windows.
Theel could not see anyone. He briefly wondered why the inhabitants of the settlement weren’t fleeing the flames. Why weren’t they bucketing the stream to fight the fires? Why was no one was attempting the save the animals? A small collection of sheep and goats milled around with wild eyes, crying out in fright. They weren’t penned in or even watched by anyone. With nothing to stop them, they began to scatter into the trees.
It was then that Theel noticed the two burning buildings were far from one another. There was no way those flames could have spread on their own. His confusion quickly turned to clarity.
No one was fighting the fires because they weren’t accidental. They weren’t the result of someone knocking over a candle or breaking a lantern. These fires were deliberately set by someone.
Now that the sheep and goats had fled, Theel noticed another animal. It was a large gray dog, the shaggy kind often kept in the mountains for shepherding. It lay on its side with three arrows in its hide.
Someone had killed that dog. Someone had lit those fires.
This was an attack.
Another strangled scream spurned Theel to action. He leaped off the rocky precipice, falling ten feet into the deep snow below, then tumbling down the slope in a cloud of white powder. As soon as his falling momentum was lost, he sprang to his feet and charged toward the third building, the place from which he heard the cries of distress.
And now he felt like he was hooked, like a fish on the end of a line. He as no longer in control of his actions, pulled toward the cabin by the Craft weaves and the emotions, the terror, contained in those screams. He was desperate to know what was happening, but when waves of magic rolled over him, telling him the story, he was instantly sickened.
Leely was being beaten.
“No!” Theel screamed. “No!”
Leely didn’t know who these men were, but they came to take her animals away. And whatever food she and her children had. And now they wanted to take more.
“No!” Theel shouted again.
It was both an exclamation of revulsion, but also an attempt to be heard. He wanted his voice to reach the ears of Leely’s attackers. He wanted them to know he was coming and see him as a threat that must be met. Hopefully, they’d come out of the cabin to fight him. Hopefully, they would leave her alone.
The screams continued to pound at Theel’s ear drums as he ran, and the Craft weaves continued to crash against him, relentlessly, pitilessly, choking his heart with the horror of what transpired within that cabin. There were at least three men, two of them pushing Leely to the floor and holding her there, while the third restrained her children, two small boys, weeping and reaching out to their mother.
“No!” Theel screamed again as he sprinted toward the building. “No!”
Then a man dressed in furs and mismatched armor emerged from the smoking building. His strides clanked loudly from the spurs on his boots and the crossbow hanging from his hip. He didn’t see Theel coming, didn’t react to him at all. Instead his face was stretched into a dirty, gap-toothed smile, both satisfied and triumphant.
Theel didn’t know what had this man so amused, nor did he care. What he knew, and what he cared about, was the act of cutting the man’s smile off his face, slicing the man’s face off his skull, hacking the man’s head off his body.
Battle Hymn was singing loudly as her shadowsteel blade burst free from her scabbard. Her tone was majestic, fierce, and filled with vengeance. Theel felt a whooshing of wind as the elements of Craft rushed in to answer the golden angel’s commands. He felt his hair standing on end, and the air crackling with Craft as he raised her blade. There was nothing in the world to prevent this man’s life from ending, right in that instant, from a single stroke of flashing shadowsteel.
The Southern Cross 