Lichgates: Book One of the Grimoire Saga (an Epic Fantasy Adventure) (3 page)

Something glittered from a gap in a desk drawer, so she hopped to the floor with a soft thud and knelt to get a good look. There was no handle on the drawer, but she was able to slip her fingers through the opening and drag it out of the desk. The rock groaned from the effort. As it finally slid open, a sunbeam skirted around her and cast her shadow onto the book hidden inside. It was wrapped in thin silver chains, but had no padlock.

The air in the small room stalled as it had before the storm: stagnant and suddenly heavy. The muscles between her shoulders tightened, and her neck tensed.

Hidden deeper within the drawer was a thick sheet of parchment paper. Kara set this aside, covered as it was in an illegible, spidery script. The book’s faded red leather was porous and soft, its title written in gold lettering that had long ago begun to chip so that now, only spotted lines comprised the runic letters.

The chains wrapped around the cover like metal vines, and instead of a padlock, they had all been fused together in the book’s center. In this mess of iron was a small silver pendant, hung from a short chain and set into the fused metal like a key in a lock. It was the same symbol that had appeared on the door: a crude four-leaf clover comprised of thin crescent moons. A brilliant diamond glittered from its center.

Her hands inched along the pages trapped beneath the odd lock and brushed the silver vines in the process. The metal burned her fingertips. She dropped the book, which thumped on the desk. Pain shot through her arm.

Someone whispered in her ear.

She whipped her head around and held her breath, but the library was empty and quiet once more. Her shoulders tensed, and her body told her to run, run! But there was nowhere to run to. The library had no door and only one inaccessible window.

Maybe she wasn’t supposed to open the book. The thought alone made her want to open it even more.

She sat in the chair, tore off a bit of her sleeve, wrapped it around her hand, and dug her thumbnail beneath the pendant. It shifted. The cold vines stung her thumb through the fabric, but she gritted her teeth and jiggled the pendant again. The necklace moved above her finger and finally popped. Something else clicked.

The sound of metal slithering over fabric made her freeze. The iron vines unwound themselves and fell from the book, and for the second time that day, she suppressed a scream as inanimate things moved. The metal twisted away, clattering to the floor.

The air thickened again, weighing on her neck. A shiver raced down her back. Her hips pressed into the chair, as if someone was pushing hard on her shoulders. Another whisper chorused in her ear. Even though her breath caught in her throat, she didn’t try to find the source. She doubted anything would be there if she looked.

She slid her thumb under the now-unlocked cover, pausing for only a second before she flipped it open.

A gale blew through the room from nowhere, ruffling pages and tearing books from their shelves. It ripped around her, whipping her hair so that her face and neck stung. The pendant’s diamond glowed blue.

The blood in her veins seemed to boil, scorching her from within. Pins and needles ravaged every inch of her body. Sweat dripped down her back and chilled in the gusting wind. The ripped shreds of her shirt stuck to her bruises. She opened her mouth, but the air was gone. She couldn’t scream.

All at once, everything settled. The library was silent, the pain in her body dissolved, and all she could hear was that incessant ringing.

“Holy—!” She couldn’t even finish her thought. She wiped her face, her mouth, her neck. Something scratched her skin.

The little clover pendant glittered in her hand. She stared at it, gaping. Something started clicking. It was a steady noise:
flick, flick, flick.

She gasped.

The flick sound came from the book, which was—well, it was—its pages were turning. The room was motionless, the air heavy and still again, but the pages flipped on their own, one after the other. After a minute or two, they finally stopped when a page drifted slowly to rest on its brothers.

“Holy...” she whispered. She sat on the edge of the immobile stone chair and peered at the open book while keeping as far a distance from it as she could.

A drawing covered both pages. The loose sketch showed a cliff overlooking a lake, a river, and a valley, and on top of the cliff was a lush forest. She squinted at a familiar sloping path up the cliff face and saw, hidden in the overhanging branches of the trees, the lichgate’s roof. And there, at the base of the path, was the marble door. Beside it, a man draped in a blue cloak lounged against the rock.

He peered up at her from beneath his hood, his face draped in shadow. One of his hands pointed to something off the page. She looked to where he was pointing and found the little note she’d brushed aside earlier. It still lay on the desk, somehow unaffected by the gale which had ripped books off their shelves.

She flipped to the next page, but before she could read more than a few words, the page shook itself free of her grip and settled once more on the landscape and the man.

She grumbled and turned the page again, but it once more wrenched itself free and turned back to the drawing of the cloaked man who pointed to the letter. She huffed and moved the book so that he was pointing at a bookshelf.

His arm moved against the motion of the book so that he still pointed to the letter.

Kara gasped and grabbed the loose parchment from the desk, taking the hint and leaning as far back into the chair as she could.

The letter had been gibberish before, but she caught a word she knew as she scanned the page. Then another. And another. Her hand covered her mouth as she read, horrified.

From the moment you read these words, you will be hunted. If you wish to survive what will come, you must pay attention.

Because you have found this Grimoire, you will come to know my world: Ourea. It’s a beautiful place, but its creatures are unforgiving and brutal. Ourea is a hidden pocket of the earth and has always been locked away, accessible only through the lichgates. Since you found this book, you have already discovered one of these portals. You can never return to the life you knew once you step through a lichgate.

Thousands of magical and non-magical species live here, but three are notable above all others: drenowith, isen, and yakona. Be wary of them all.

Drenowith are known in human lore as muses; they change form freely and don’t age. Isen are mostly evil, as their kind harvest souls to remain immortal and can don their prey’s appearance at will. But I believe that my people, the yakona, are far worse. We as a race have mastered magic, but we are divided and live in secluded, warring kingdoms. They will be the death of me, though all I ever wanted was peace.

To learn more, ask the Grimoire. It will always answer if you ask the right question.

You must be cautious. When you opened this Grimoire, you became its next master, and you will be known as the Vagabond. Only you can read these pages, and the vast knowledge held here is a coveted thing. I trust to you its secrets, its stories, and its fearful power. A daunting world awaits you, but I hope you discover the beauty hidden in even the most vile of things.

Tread carefully, Vagabond. Guard the Grimoire as you would your life because everything you hold dear will one day depend upon what it tells you.

The lines in Kara’s forehead deepened. She reread the short letter, holding her breath the whole time. A thought pulled on her mind, but her pulse raced too quickly for her to pay much attention to it at all. 

CHAPTER TWO

THE YAKONA

Braeden Drakonin ran his thick hands over a cavern wall he’d found deep in the tunnels of some unknown mountain in Ourea. The yakona’s short black hair stuck to his olive skin, which was covered in sweat from the four days he had spent on this hunt. He was close.

He held up his hand and a gray fire erupted in the air above his palm, fueled by the magic that coursed through his body. The blaze flickered in the dark cave, casting its light across the glossy wall to give him a better view. Its white stone blocks were perfectly aligned without a single crack in the ancient mortar, and the fortification stretched across the cavern in an unnatural line that blocked off half of the cave. Its edges met the curved slope of the organic cave walls, the design bending to fill every possible gap in the rock with a white brick. Engraved into the center of the wall with thin, silver lines was a large symbol: a four-leaf clover the size of his head, made of four crescent moons that looped through each other.

This was it.

Finally, after twelve years of dead leads and the dying hope that it even still existed, he had found the Grimoire. It waited, somewhere behind this wall, for its new master. It waited for
him
.

He’d grown up listening to the legends of the Vagabond, as had every yakona child for the last thousand years. Most children daydreamed of finding the priceless treasures hidden in the Vagabond’s abandoned village; Braeden, however, had only ever dreamed of becoming a vagabond himself to escape having been raised to kill. He was a prince and Heir to the Stele: an evil kingdom filled with vile yakona that preferred torture to diplomatic negotiation. Becoming a vagabond was the only escape from that life. Though he’d escaped the Stele as a child twelve years ago—living another life while his kingdom thought he was dead—his luck wouldn’t last much longer. He needed to find the Grimoire before his father learned the truth.

Braeden stepped back, examining the cavern as he looked for a door. A sunken tower had fallen across two of the four entrances to the cave, but the worn stone blocks scattered on the floor were all that remained of it. Aside from the collapsed spire, the cavern was completely bare. The solid white wall didn’t have a trace of a hinge or a handle. His stomach twisted into a knot as a slow realization washed over him.

There was no door.

Dread shot through him. “No. There has to be a way in. There has to be something.”

He ran his hands along the Grimoire’s clover symbol, hunting for a clue, but his search turned up nothing.

“No.” His voice shook as he smacked the wall with his palms. The stacked bricks shuddered, and the gray fire in his hand fizzled out. The room plunged into darkness once more. He pulled on his hair and repeated the word over and over, his voice growing louder as panic bubbled in his gut.

He finally lost all sense of self-control.

“No!”

Braeden’s fingers cracked as he lifted a nearby boulder that was easily half his size. He dug his hands deeper into its crevices to secure a solid grip and hurled the giant rock into the wall.

The boulder smashed over the symbol and crumbled into powder from the force. The wall trembled, and the shock of the blow sent a roar up the mountainside that split the ceiling. Sharp sunlight dissolved the cave’s gloom with thin rays that beamed down from this new skylight above. He threw himself against the wall for support and took a deep, shaky breath, but it only made the loathing race faster through his veins. He dug his hand into a crack in the wall, using it as a brace to steady himself.

Pebbles drizzled from his palm and sprinkled onto the floor before he realized that he had crushed the rock in his bitter, absentminded rage. His chest heaved. His knees shook. He clenched his teeth and glared at the smooth, polished wall he had tried to smash open.

There wasn’t even a scratch on it. The Grimoire symbol’s silver lines glinted in the meager sunlight, taunting him.

Heat crawled beneath his skin like a swarm of beetles, spiking from where it smoldered in his gut before it slithered into his chest. His fingers twitched. He curled his hand into a fist and let the hatred take him.

He punched the rough bricks, bones cracking as he broke his hands across the wall.

The skin on his knuckles ruptured, spraying his black blood over the clover symbol in a thin shower. He cursed and spat on the floor, but the skin on his hands knit itself back together in quick stitches, repairing the broken veins and shattered bones almost as quickly as he broke them. His fist healed in a matter of seconds, but that was one of the few benefits of being a yakona prince: only those with a royal bloodline could heal so quickly.

He glared at the wall and punched it once more, throwing everything he had into the attack. Layers of black, bloody splatters covered the white stone and the symbol that proved the Grimoire was so, so close.

The searing sting in his hand forced him to his knees until he could heal again. He leaned his head against the wall and forced himself to take sharp, deep breaths that hurt his lungs, but at least the momentary calm cleared his mind. He turned and sank to the floor. Light blinded him from the new ceiling he had ripped into the roof, forcing him to squint into the shadows as he tried to think.

The slow, hollow echo of someone clapping broke across the cavern. He glanced up, searching the darkness.

A woman materialized from the gloom and finished her final clap as she came into view, her skin glowing with the warm tint of honey in the hazy light. Gentle brown curls nuzzled the soft arch of her neck, and the glint of a sword shone from around her waist. She let loose a disappointed sigh as she looked him over: a noise that reminded him to breathe. Her perfume clung to the air now that she was closer.