Darkness and Light, Beth Cam [interesting novels in english txt] 📗

They took the babe the day it was born
Ripped from its mother's arms
Tears streaked down the woman's cheeks
She new it'd come to harm

The Oracles of Valta

_The rancid odour of rotting flesh and putrid organs sent chills down her spine.
Fear, overwhelming and endless, rushed over her like a spasm of continuous harsh tidal waves. Her body shook, her heart throbbed, her mind reeled in all directions like a drunken sailor aboard a ship, set in the midst of an unrelenting storm. 

Questions, demanding and insistent burned at her mind, begging for answers that she knew she could not answer and to add to the torrent of foes she battled, was her burning and sticky forehead, overcome by the control of the fever.
She'd hid in that dry hole for how long? Judging from the skull like appearance of the first few bodies that had joined her, it had been a while.
Cold at night, sticky and sweaty and swarming with flies in the day, hungry, fearful, dirty — it had been hell. 

And if the faceless demon and his cold blooded men, supplying the bodies had seen her, she had no doubt that she too would have been a stinking lifeless corpse.
A sharp pain ripped at her stomach and she curled into a tight ball, biting her bottom lip until she drew blood. She was famished, starved and dying of thirst as the bag of food and water one of the corpses had carried around their shoulders had long since run out.
She rolled to her side and starred at the dirt wall that surrounded her, taunting her and reminding her of just how insignificant she was. Just as they, those dead and decaying all around her had once reminded her her whole life, accept now they were silenced and she had only her memories to torment her.

It had been a normal day. The sun had crept up high upon the horizon and had been hot, cruel and vengeful from the onset.
The stinging heat had caused the villagers to grumble - tempers had flared and what little patience they had had lessened. She had risen out of bed that morning not by her own accord but by a hard kick in the back after five hours of fitful sleep.
After milking her mistress' cows and feeding the stock she'd set off for the town's sole well for her ration of water, proportioned to each person individually. Her village was a particularly dry one at that time of year, dust everywhere, no grass, no flowers, apart from the pastures out near the canyon, which even there was sparse. So water was precious, and every drop counted. The wealthy normally obtained their fair share, the merchants and the farmers, a little less, servants, a little more less and those like her... ? Those who were less than servants – the outcasts, the beggars, the orphans, the unclean considered less than the dust under every one else's feet... The meagre amount apportioned to them served to simply wet their tongue and cool their blistering throats whilst thirst overcame them.
She excepted it, as her lot in life, so each day, as that day, she had stood silently in line as any unwanted urchin, her head bowed, silent as the grave, received her portion and turned to leave to find herself walking head first into the son of the villagers' Lord.
The shock that bit her from the cold sensation of water splashing upon her chest shook her to her core but fear took centre stage as she looked up into the cruel leering dark eyes of Balterzar. He had laughed, wickedly, and when she had shown no sign of retaliation had grabbed her by the hair and pushed her back into the hard rough dirt, and kicked her several times, professing to the onlookers that she in fact had thrown her ration into his face. This had scored her many angry glares and by the time she'd had the guts to pick herself of the floor and flee what could be a stampede she'd received several bruises and more than a few scrapes that had drawn blood. She hobbled into the farm she was momentarily hired at as tears threatened to tear loose from the binds of her eyes, but as perusal, she had fought them back and continued on with her day whispering empty promises to herself that one day, things would improve. In reality however, she knew better.
Life had lashed out at her her entire life by not only making her parentless and poor but the target of every villager since day one.
Normally nobody noticed the urchins that walked the street, but with her, it was different and had always been for the past seventeen years of her life.
Whispers from ladies standing in the doorways and crude cruel remarks from men in the street told her enough .
"The wretched thing... She's been cursed." They would say, others would incite exactly why they thought such, "She was born when the sun and moon aligned, a wicked a sign! And of course from parents who were never married." Heads shook, tongues tsked, frowns ensued.
It gave the conversations around the supper table enough drama but what bit the head of the body was that according to the elderly, her grandmother and mother had been sorcerers and her father too and mingled in the dark arts. Lies, she often told herself, as magic had long since departed from the land and all that had remained were tales, spun by bored old ladies and drunken old men.
Well... That's what she'd believed anyway, until that faceless demon or whatever he was had come.
Shouts and screams had sent her running out the butcher's, heart pounding and eyes dancing frantically around for the source of alarm.
She'd seen black smoke, the blue fire, the blood, the bodies and had all but dashed underneath the planks of the butcher's front porch as a dark figure upon a midnight black stallion came galloping into the midst of the village square, blue fire shooting from his gloved hands. She'd watched, eyes open in terror as at first he'd seemed to target the stronger men, than the younger men, but soon enough women, children, babies, every last soul, destroyed before her very eyes.
She swore he'd killed them all, until others appeared, darkly clad as him, but unmasked, armed, and having the faces of regular men... fierce and merciless regular men. They'd gone from house to house, pulling out those in hiding, those bedridden, new borns even for mercy's sake and had killed them, in cold blood without any show of remorse.
Demons. That's what they were. And for the first time in a long time she began to feel something. She began to feel fear for her life, a life she had often despised and wished dead. The thought of her going like that however... Pushed upon the dirt and plunged through with a sharp glinting sword as her screams died upon her lips and her blood soaked the ground is what shook her to her core.
And she knew, as they scoured the alleys and the attics, the basements and the rooftops that it wouldn't be long before she was found and such thoughts and fears would soon become, reality.
So that night, as the screams died down, and the demons seemed to be at rest, she crept out of her hiding spot and by using the darkness and the shadows of the night, she stole past the village stores hoping to ride some lone horse out of the hell around her to safety.
But to soon had she left her haven when she was spotted by one of the murderers and had then been forced to abandon the crevices of the dark.
The dead that had once tormented had saved her she often mused, as it was the pile of corpses she had plunged under after darting across the wide village square that hid her from the sword and now... Several weeks later she lay alive by the bodies of other's long dead.

And to think... Not long ago, this very place had been her home. Her cruel but familiar home.
Now all that was left of the village she'd grown up in, spent her childhood, were the townsfolk's corpses.

With eyes as black as night
And skin as pale as snow
He rides before the first ray of light
To vanquish the chosen foe

The Oracles of Valta

He leapt of the high limb of the large Aeutus tree just as the dark stallion swept by. The wind surrounded him for a moment before the back of the creature caught him, and allowed him to straddle it. With his left hand he had grabbed ahold of the reins and with his right he kept a firm grasp on his weapon... The dagger he'd been given as a child, the dagger he was told would be used to live out his destiny.

He was returning to the villages by the Eastern border of the kingdom. The villages that a month and half ago he and his men had purged.
The townspeople of the East were empty headed, greedy fools and like he had anticipated, had been weak. They had believed the arts were a thing of the past and thus the proper enchantments they had needed to protect themselves had long since been discarded.

He was headed towards a village, that above all the others had been the most helpless and pathetic.
Less than three minutes to cripple it, three days to end the lives of the majority, three weeks to completely rid it of any fragment of human life.
He's return was simply to ensure a thorough job was completed as he would never–could never take the chance that the chosen may well have escaped.
The chosen was the one prophesied to stand in his way and foil his people's plans to conquer and ruin the gift-less human race.
It would be a young one, a boy, born to human parents that possessed the abilities to wield magic better than the most gifted warlocks. The progress bespoke that this child would be born in the east, and born seventeen years earlier. He needed to find them before their eighteenth birthday. The day their abilities would appear.
For the purpose of destroying this child, the seers of his kind had foretold him he had been born as his destiny lay in bringing his kind, his race, peace from the human people that once had almost destroyed his, simply because of their fear, their fear of the earthen abilities that had held his race.
Those days were gone now. Peace had long since departed and would never return until every human was either destroyed or bound.
He slowed his stallion to a trot as he arrived at the gates of the eastern village, his eyes roving over his handiwork as his men all gathered to await