Lightfall, p.1
Lightfall, page 1
Table of Contents
LIGHTFALL
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
VALGARD
TALHEIM
THE HUNTER OF SECRET AND SHADOW
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE PRISONER OF SCHEMES AND STORIES
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
THE SPY OF STARS AND DREAMS
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
CHAPTER SIXTY
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
EPILOGUE
A GUIDE TO OLD VALGARD
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Read On For a Sneak Peek at
CHAPTER ONE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY R. DUGAN
LIGHTFALL
THE STARCHASER SAGA
BOOK IV
R. Dugan
LIGHTFALL
Copyright © 2021 by R. Dugan
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For information contact:
R. Dugan
PO Box 1265
Martinsville, IN 46151
reneeduganwriting.com
Cover design by Maja Kopunovic
Map by Jessica Khoury
ISBN: 978-1-7339255-4-9
First Edition: June 2021
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
DEDICATION
To Miranda and Cassidy.
Because this book—and this author—wouldn’t be what they needed to without your love and light.
Long live the Bookmates. <3
And to every reader who has endured something they thought would break them.
To the survivor, the thriver, the shaker of shadows and breaker of chains.
You are a tide-turner. A fate-changer.
And you are stronger than you will ever fully know.
The
HUNTER
of
SECRET AND
SHADOW
CHAPTER ONE
THOUGH AUTUMN STILL reigned in the Northern Kingdom of Valgard, ice already crowned the upper passes of the Vaszaj Range, and Princess Cistine Novacek shivered in her piled-on furs every step she followed her friends up the mountain. Snow sucked at her boots, though she walked in the others’ footprints: Aden in the lead, Quill at his heels, Tatiana on his. Quill’s mischievous smirk held the secret of why he ripped them all from their private apartments in the courthouse and gave them wind augments to cross the distance, camping the night on this mountain’s southern face and beginning this perilous ascent before dawn.
She paused, sweating despite the cold, gripping a hardy mountain shrub for balance while she sucked in lungfuls of air so frigid it stabbed her throat. It felt good in a way, a distraction from another night of restless sleep, the heaviness in her chest, the somberness that clung to her spirit, and the strange, sick sensation in her stomach.
All her life, there was a call inside her, a sweet and urgent song growing stronger after she came to Valgard. But when she first set foot on the great rune-slab lid over the well beneath the courthouse—one of the Doors to the Gods from which Valgard once harvested their mighty augments—the call went from shrill to sour. And now, deep in her core, it snarled.
Her fingertips rattled the leaves. She pushed off from the shrub, body singing with urgency, and the ice crust snagged her ankles. A gloved hand caught under her elbow, hoisting her back up when she stumbled.
“Careful,” Thorne warned. “If you think you’re cold now, I don’t advise getting better acquainted with these drifts.”
“So much for my plans to protest Quill’s secrecy.” She stabbed her feet more firmly into the footprints three-boots-deep ahead of her. “Ashe could tell you how effective my tantrums are.”
But Asheila Kovar, her Warden since birth, wasn’t here; nor was Maleck Darkwind, one of the cabal’s most trusted warriors. They were in Talheim, Cistine’s kingdom, where the weather was more seasonable and the world milder and full of light. She missed them, and her home, desperately.
“Princess Cistine Novacek, throwing tantrums? Surely not.” Ariadne passed them breezily, throwing a one-sided smile back at her.
Thorne released Cistine’s arm but didn’t move away, and she risked a glance at him. His disheveled silver hair sparkled brighter than the icicles dripping from the mountain ledges, his concerned gaze searching her face. “Are you all right?”
She rubbed her arms and nodded. “Just wondering what Quill’s scheming. But it’s good to be out of the city for a bit.”
He sighed a cold plume of breath and raised a tentative hand toward her face. “That it is.” Cistine flinched at the motion, head humming with spectral sensations of a blow from a different hand, and Thorne recoiled. “I’m sorry, that—forgive me.”
“There’s nothing to forgive.” But she couldn’t draw in a full breath until she moved away from his voice and touch, from the memory stirred by his eyes and voice of an enemy more creature than man.
It was nearly sunhigh when they reached the treeline, a broad shelf of stone dropping perilously toward a thin river between the mountains, and Quill fanned out an arm. “We’re here.”
A lonely caw floated down from the trees; Faer, his trained attack raven, swooped from scouting to alight on his shoulder. Cistine wandered past them, brushing a hand down the bird’s back and leaning over the ledge to peer at the water far below. Aden flung out an arm across her front, shaking his head. Tatiana whistled, high to low, folding her arms and cocking her weight on one hip. “Impressive view, Featherbrain!”
“If the plan was to remind us of our nominal place in the vastness of Valgard, message received.” Ariadne nudged Quill’s ribs. “But couldn’t this have waited?”
“The view, maybe. But not this.” He plundered in his pocket and withdrew a glittering globe of godlike power—a fire flagon.
The taste of what lurked within that thin glass shell blew through Cistine sharper than any mountain wind. She didn’t realize she’d taken a step toward Quill until Aden’s deep voice halted her. “Why are we here?”
Quill’s gaze fixed on Cistine, full of lively challenge. “Because I want to see what she can do.”
As the Key.
The words hung unspoken and understood; they all must’ve been wondering it while they fought to rescue her from Chancellor Salvotor over the past two months. No one else like her existed in this kingdom, a girl forged of power in her father’s bloodline before she was born—power that reached out to the flagon in Quill’s hand.
Come. The familiar call thrummed in her chest. Come and see.
When she laid hold of the augment, Quill’s three-fingered hand tightened over hers. “Only if you want to, Stranger.”
She sucked air down deeply, filling the parts of her that went hollow during captivity in a dark mountain prison. “I want to.”
She took the flagon and turned, catching Thorne’s eye. He lingered farther off than the others, giving her a wide berth, but his attention was focused and intense, waiting for her to need him. That look, if not his touch, still made her heart race pleasantly . When he offered his hand, she slung off her pack and passed it to him. “What do you want me to do, Quill?”
A dart of his chin indicated a peak more than a mile away. “See that mountain? Try to hit it.”
“That’s all? You’re not going to tell me how?”
“I think you already know how.”
She opened her mouth to tell him that was absurd, it took weeks in sparring and swordplay before she started to feel the last bit competent, and this was no different—yet the augment trilled in her fist, and her spirit echoed it, a melody her untrained ears knew and loved.
“Stand back,” Thorne warned as Cistine broke the flagon against her armored thigh. Panic lanced through her along with the fire that it might escape her control like the lightning in Kalt Hasa when she tried to set them free. But where that lightning was vibrant and volatile, this fire purred and hugged her contours, sliding into the reinforced armor that conducted it away from flesh it could otherwise melt, sinew and bone it could sunder in any body but hers.
And then it traveled deeper.
Frowning, she shut her eyes and dove after it.
This sensation was different from the blinding few moments of escape from Kalt Hasa when she embodied light, then lightning; the fire congealed at her very center, heat flowering into a sphere, and in her mind she could wrap her hands around it and mold it to her wishes. The more she concentrated, the stronger it felt—not only a fire augment, but the wild heart of fire for which she was Named. Her spirit sang to that which was like it, a portion crafted before her birth in a ritual known only to her father and the visnprest Order that came before, the making that would pass down to her descendants and their descendants. A trust as sacred as the throne Cistine was born to in the Middle Kingdom.
She reached the bottom of her breath, the door in her spirit where the fire shuddered to a halt. Then she opened her eyes, focused on that faraway peak, and unleashed a sickle of flame, blazing and bellowing like dragon’s breath, blasting the cabal away with audible shouts.
Fire sheared into stone, booming like thunder. With a distant crack, droves of snow, ice, and rock gave way, and half the mountaintop plunged into the valley below.
It took far too long for the echo to fade, for Cistine’s racing heart to slow and the embers to stop drifting from her fingertips. Behind her, Tatiana breathed, “Holy stars.”
“Logandir.” The name was a helpless prayer on Ariadne’s lips. Aden stared openmouthed. Quill folded his hands around the nape of his neck, gaping at the damage, and Cistine’s cheeks heated like all the rest of the embers gathered beneath her skin.
Thorne cocked his head. “Why did you close your eyes?”
She swallowed. “It felt different from how I thought it would, so I followed the power and molded it into the shape I wanted…like how my mother molds clay in her sculpting classes.”
Quill dropped his hands, looking swiftly at Tatiana.
“Is it…not like that for everyone else?” Cistine whispered.
“To us, the power simply is,” Ariadne said. “We channel it, but we don’t shape it.”
Cistine hugged herself, cold all over again. “I wish it wasn’t different for me.”
Ariadne’s angled eyes softened. “What we see as different, the gods often deem miraculous.”
“Now, that,” Quill said when another clot of rock shattered from an unstable ledge and hurtled into the valley, “is going to need a lot of molding.”
“I’m ready whenever you are,” Cistine vowed.
He turned his scorched-white wing of hair across his scalp. “Then we should probably start now.”
When Thorne stepped up to Cistine’s side, she didn’t flinch this time. She desperately needed the solidarity of his presence in the silence that followed, beholding the destructive potential of her power.
CHAPTER TWO
TALHEIM’S CAPITAL GLOWED under a banner of ghostlights and stars, flocked with sellers from the horselands of the north, the deserts of the south, the woodlands and wetlands of the west and east. Accents blended across the city plots, pinioning off symphony halls and eateries, the great circus, and the Citadel, home of the royal family.
Asheila Kovar studied that shimmering expanse of glass, marble, and stone through the fringe of her black-dyed hair, heart drumming with longing and unease.
Once, she walked that Citadel as little less than royalty herself: Warden and loyal friend to Princess Cistine since birth. She’d practically been family. Now she was less than nothing, a stranger seated on a bridge looking toward home. Choices—from the Blood Hive arena to derelict Jovadalsa to that stormy night outside Stornhaz when she threw away her prized sword, and that seaside temple where she walked away from her commander and bent the knee only to her princess—had stripped her of places to belong, friends to rely on, titles to boast in. Now all she had was a mission from Cistine, a wineskin in her hands, a new blade on her back, and a Valgardan warrior sitting beside her.
Dragging her gaze from the Citadel, she risked a glance at Maleck and found him transfixed on the assembly across the moat where a pair of vendors tied a garland between ghostpoles, the phosphorescent plants already broken open for the night. “Why are all these people gathering?”
The quiet rumble of his voice, as usual, lulled some of her specters to sleep. She passed the wineskin to him. “For Darlaska, a fete for the True God and his vassals. Our priests and priestesses encourage celebration for what the gods give. Not augments, but…our breath. Our bodies. Our kingdom. We spend a week celebrating, and at the end we give gifts.”
Maleck frowned at the jutting terraces spilling from the marketplace into the moat. “We were told Talheim shunned the gods and their gifts because augmentation wasn’t given to them to protect.”
“Sounds like we were both wrong about the people we went to war with.” Emboldened by wine, she propped her shoulder against his and pointed toward the booths. “See those pennants? The four colors—gold, green, blue, and brown? Compass points, so you know where a merchant came from and what they specialize in.”
Maleck’s shoulder stiffened when she pressed into him, then slowly relaxed. “The same as your royal colors.”
She was just tipsy enough to be impressed he noticed. “That’s right. Vendors flock for this chance. No better time to sell your wares than during Darlaska, when everyone is buying everyone else something.”
“The festival is soon, then?”
Ashe snorted. “Gods, no. More than a month away still.”
Maleck tipped his head, rustling the dark waves of his newly-unbraided hair. “A month of gift-buying seems…excessive.”
Stealing the wineskin, Ashe drank and passed it back to him. “That’s proof you haven’t done much shopping with Cistine.”
His gaze softened. “I imagine she’s quite fond of this occasion.”
“That’s putting it lightly. We practically live in the marketplace from the end of autumn until Darlaska. She fills up her hollow leg with peppermint tea and I carry everything for her until I look like a pack animal.”
Though this year, she likely would’ve carried her own bags.
Struck with melancholy, Ashe put out her hand for the wineskin again. This time, when Maleck passed it over, his gaze lingered on her face. “We’ve watched the Citadel for the Queen’s patterns these last four days, but we’ve also sat on these bridges every night, and gone to the beachside dances, and surveyed the markets.”
“And?” Ashe muttered.
“And I wonder why, when time is against us. Rion Bartos could ride down from the border forts and take the Queen’s ear any day. King Jad and Mahasar’s forces might already be in Middleton, giving us less time than ever to convince them a treaty exists between our kingdoms.” Maleck spanned an arm to the sparkling terraces and stalls, and the buildings beyond. “Why all of this, knowing what’s at stake?”
Because I wanted to see my home through your eyes, to know if there’s anything left in it worth hoping for. I wanted you to know there’s more to me than sand and steel. Because of the way you screamed my name when I closed that grate and left you underneath Stornhaz, the way you stepped between Rion and me when I came back. Because I hesitated whenever I thought of you. Because of how you’re looking at me right now.
