Crown of Ash (Blood Skies, Book 4)

BLOOD SKIES
SERIES

Blood Skies

Black Scars

Soulrazor

Crown of Ash

The Witch’s Eye*
*

Skullfire
*
*

Vampire Down***

The Ending Dream***

Darker Sunset****

HORROR
NOVELS

something black…

Blood Angel Rising*

SHORT STORIES

Tales of a Blood Earth

Tales of a Blood Earth 2

* Coming
in
2012

** Coming
in
2013

*** Coming
in
2014

**** Coming in 2015

This is a work of fiction.  All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 201
2
Steven Montano

All rights reserved.

Cover
art
by
Barry Currey

Released by Darker Sunset Press

DEDICATION

To Lib. 

You are everything to me
.

CROWN OF ASH

He looks out from the void.

He is nothing.  A ghost presence.  A phantom. 

T
rapped in a land of whispering voices
. 

He ha
s
been
t
here for so very long.

The world
is saturated
in
darkness. 
It
slither
s
down the trees like rain.

Years have passed
since he
first arrived
in that dismal place
.  His face
is
leathery and r
ough, and
he wears
a thick beard. 
His hair is long and unkempt. 
His skin has gone dark,
saturated by the soot atmosphere
.  His lips are dry and his eyes sting from the dark grit that
constantly
lashes
the landscape. 

Everything is black and cold
. 
The land, the trees,
even
the other inhabitants of that
cloying realm are suffused with
shadow
.  It drips from every pore. 

The sky is
a
frozen sl
ate of
perpetual
dusk. 
L
ight shines from just over the horizon
and drenches everything
in
an eye-numbing glaze.  The
freezing wind smells of rot.

He
’
s come to know this land
of
torn red mud and black ooze.  There are
few
cities,
all of them in ruin
s
. 
He travels past
briny pools of black water
and
dark trees
with
branches
weighed down by
deathly pale fruit.  He avoids reptiles
that
breath
e
caustic slime and carnivorous plants that fan and pulsate like living organs.  H
e circumvents
blood
swamps
and
fields of
mo
ldered bones.

He isn’
t the only human in
th
at
dominion of shade
.  He spies natives
in the distance
, primitive and murderous people
who
roam the land in small
bands.
They ride
on the backs of shaggy mammoth beasts
with scorpion tails. 

He sees phasing fliers, unstable bats the size of whales
.
They
soar low
through
the undine fog and
howl at the ground
as they search for prey
.  T
heir
riders are
horned humanoids with staffs
of
dark fire and
cloaks
of mirrored scale
s
. 

He is a stranger there
,
a refugee.  He walks and walks and dreams of escape,
but he
has been
there
for
so long he’
s almost given up hope
.  The
shadow world
ha
s
him, and
it
will never let hi
m go. 
He tries to
remember
the world he once belonged
to
.  It was a scarred world, damaged beyond measure, but it was his home.  He’d protected it from danger more times than he could remember
.  N
ever before had he appreciated it as much as he does now. 

The worst times
for him
are when he looks into the water.  He hugs himself tight in his cloak
to shield his body
against the freezing wind a
s he
stands over clear pools of ice and salt.  There are only a few of those pools, derelict bodies of steaming cold
liquid
so utterly pale they are like liquid suns on the face of the ebon
landscape
.  They stare like white eyes
up
to the darkness of the sky.

When he stands near them he see
s
into the world
he
used to
call
home. 
The visions are
always random fla
shes
that
last
just
a few moments, but he finds himself staring into them more and more as the years
go by
. 

After a time, he seeks the
pools
out.
H
e evades shadowy pack beasts with knife-teeth and lumbering humanoid walkers with limbs like bladed poles
.
  He braves those creatures in exchange for glimpsing snapshots of a place from his past.

H
e sees his sister’s grave.  He sees faces of people he once knew and cared for
, just
as they’d
been
before his actions brought about their deaths.  The fact that he can’t remember their names means little.

He
drink
s
filthy fluid from the ground, something like blood and
brine
.  He lives off of
fibrous
plants
and small game, shadow-drenched creatures with
cold
eyes and black blood
.
  He doesn’t actually need food in that world of darkness, but the memory of eating is with him, and he nourishes it.

He is alone.  His spirit is long gone, exiled to some other realm, if indeed she even still exists. 
Sometimes h
e
talks
to himself
as
he wanders th
e wastelands. 

The pools seem to follow him, or else
they
anticipate hi
s movement
.  He wonders if they need him as much as he needs them. 

Every time they appear they grant
him
longer and longer visions.  He looks through
to the
adjacent reality. 
The
realm
he is trapped in just
a
reflection
.  The Black
once
melded and conjoined the damaged remains of
disparate
worlds, but
not all of those joining
s
were complete. 

He is
stuck
in a
drift zone filled with the detritus of
places left
shattered
by The Black
.  It is
a
home of the
forgotten
.

He watches, and
sometimes he
sees friends he used to k
now.  He recognizes their faces
.  He knows they risked and lost much to try and help him,
but it was all
for nothing
.  He isn’
t there with them.  He is
n’t anywhere
.

He sees his friends
, and
he knows
they’
re in danger.  It’
s difficult to make sense of it all because he can
’
t determine the order of events. 
He sees a
n old lover in
peril; a forward vampire patrol; a
cadre
of cruel mages
; a
city surrounded by black stakes
; a
broken boundary
; a
n obelisk
of
glass skulls
.

F
ear grips his heart, but there’
s nothing he can do except
wander
the
black
wastelands,
exiled and
lost
.