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Fearfully Made: Prequel to the Ellari Invasions
Fearfully Made: Prequel to the Ellari Invasions
Fearfully Made: Prequel to the Ellari Invasions
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Fearfully Made: Prequel to the Ellari Invasions

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In this crossover fantasy novel, a cataclysm transports a group of computer-gaming heroes to a mythic land where evil shades and fallen dragons encroach on a fledgling creation.

The survivors find themselves transformed into other beings with superhuman abilities, fighting and fleeing to escape the shadows of death. Aided by faithful warriors and the denizens of a dwarven city of refuge, a triumvirate of long-time friends rises to leadership. They oppose the fallen ones who taint the innocence of the racessafe in their cities from sin and death until now.

Armed with weapons of the Elf King and acclimatizing to their newfound powers, heroes determine to fight the good fight while others slink away from alien challenges. The trials of this new world winnow a remnant of enduring allies determined to run the race set before them to whatever end the God of all worlds has designed.

In this otherworldly account of the fall, discover the beginning to a literary epic girded with truth revealed through cinematic style and delivered by compelling characters experiencing the human condition.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherWestBow Press
Release dateMar 19, 2013
ISBN9781449788490
Fearfully Made: Prequel to the Ellari Invasions
Author

D. E. Aston

D. E. Aston is Professor of chemical engineering at the University of Idaho, teaching and leading an active research group. He has published and presented his collaborative works in over one hundred venues. He resides with his wife and children in the Pacific Northwest—his home for more than three decades.

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    Fearfully Made - D. E. Aston

    ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

    FOR THE VALUED insights and opinions of many individuals directly and indirectly invested over the years, from retired junior high school English teacher Delores Schmadeka to writers’ group members and fellow workshop participants, from myriad and diverse friends commenting on stories read from various genres—both enjoyed and detested—to my wife and family with their continued encouragements.

    PROLOGUE: FIRSTBORN

    In epicus veritas.

    I looked on earth and saw it void.

    I looked to heaven and darkness.

    CHAPTER 1

    Forever a Changing World

    THEY CALL ME Rifter. I am not of this world. This land is home to many where I am the alien. The fear and the terror of me are on every beast and bird. I am lost. I am fallen. I am changed. I will avenge. The enchantment rises.

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    Silhouettes and shadows, whispers of shape made by light, make a dance of real and imaginary shades to contrast and flutter across the wall. A red-orange blend of glowing forge and guttering lamplight cast moving pictures and abstract shapes around the expansive room. The show of chaotic patterns scrolls over dull and sharp rocks of the cave’s interior. Crystal grains sprinkled throughout stone walls enhance the complex designs.

    A blue-white aura, new and brilliant, spills into the chamber from the outside world, lights a cone of mist expanding inward and brighter. Gentle eddies in foggy air push and pulse the hot and denser ether of the cavern back toward the other realm, the places without, the world not like this one. The forge’s heat raises waters from quenching pools, swells the air, conjures transformation. This unnatural fog curls away from the cave mouth into the night.

    Flash, and darkness. All is lost in the black. Hammers cease. The bellows gasp.

    Boom. The rumble shakes dark spaces that separate worlds and gods and ideas of men.

    The forge and its lamps reappear. Shadows of men return with the old light. The cave sucks in sparkling mist from beyond as the forge bellows recapture their breath. The working atmosphere within the mountain resumes a slow, rolling cycle toward its escape from earth and stone. One silhouette stretches forth, drawn out from the mouth of the master smith’s chamber by the world returned to shadow.

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    The flash somehow felt tangible, tactile. The light disappeared. The impact jarred Rick’s chest. He could not breathe—no air to inhale or exhale. He imagined feeling his brain slosh in a direction opposite from his skull, sponging up the collision. At the same instant, he had the impression that something anchored him, that immense pressure allowed not one hair’s width of motion. He heard the crash… or explosion, or thunder. Then he did not hear it. His eardrums had blown or some great vacuum sucked away the medium of sound. Even with stalled hearing, the rumbling resonance threatened to vibrate his limbs into separate pieces.

    Confusion came from catastrophe.

    Where am I? Rick wondered as he drowned in the depths of unknowing panic. Floating, hanging, falling, what?

    Still blind and deaf in this new and restricted reality, Rick felt the skin tingle on his bare arms and legs. Every strand of hair embedded along his skin decided to imitate the prickling quills of a porcupine. Needles skittered over his body. Except that he hung on a single breath, the cataclysm would have caught it in his gut. He knew the sensation, so quick, should hurt, but his reeling head registered no pain from the rest of its body. A returning physicality pulsed first from his extremities, crept along skin, through bone and muscle, pulling signs of life back through his ensorcelled being—tendrils of imaginary forces coiling around fingertips and toes, twirling ribbons of hot and cold around hands and feet. Both apparitions burned, reaching up arms and legs to his core. This rush of senses came as a unique experience to Rick and he still could not locate himself in any known place: home, work, anywhere.

    A bomb: Someone hit Seattle. A volcano: Rainier had decided to resurrect from ancient history, without warning, like St. Helens. An earthquake: Gas mains burst into massive, engulfing explosions. They might all explain the wafts of smoke and sulfur diffusing into Rick’s nose before taking his next breath.

    Brimstone. Jim. I was talking to him; where’d he go?

    Rick caught up with himself as gravity grabbed him. His fall to cobblestone pavers was a drop into his king-size bed compared to the eruption of that concussive power already unleashed on him with the blinding flash that had reset him—mind, body, and soul. Details came back from his blackout as if long forgotten. He had been standing; now he lay more or less horizontal. Little pains, minor irritations prodded and harassed him. He sucked in filthy air and hacked it out with dry grit. He sprawled across rubble and people. Feeling body parts beginning to wriggle and twitch—parts not connected to his own, feet and hips and elbows of friends caught in the same disaster—brought some extra power to his pulmonary convulsions, startled by terrible tangibility. Were all those anatomical features attached to their owners? In the blankness of his environment, Rick’s visual cortex revolved through hundreds of photographic memories recording carnage of various battlefields and catastrophes before he wiped them away with a conscious clamping down of his will. He needed to locate everyone at Jim and Mary’s pool party before the destruction had come, but he still saw nothing and could only hear his own blood rushing past eardrums.

    He had not thought to speak, to shout for one of his friends, to call for help. His overworked heart scavenged oxygen at its functional limits. He raised himself from the living and inanimate debris by ratcheting increments, pausing every few inches to confirm his state. Once standing, Rick worked through each joint in a fluid, diagnostic motion that tested his ability to start search-and-rescue. Instinct propelled him to action even without visibility.

    His ears opened. They rang and stung as he heard gasping and coughing, groans and whimpers; the blackness surrounding him lightened to grey. The crying ones wound themselves into frenzy, joined by disparate wailings and then one dominant siren screamer. Her noise formed no discernible emotion. Anger, fear, pain, all of them? She just screamed and breathed and screamed. The sound shrieked so peculiarly that Rick imagined the woman made a rational decision to yell one note as long and as loud and as many times in a row as possible, maybe just to prove that she could, maybe just to be different. But he knew it was not deliberate. Rick had heard that sort of anxiety expelled in just that fashion before at the scene of a fatality, and his memory of the single-minded panic in that other woman’s face flashed to his new reality. The woman near him now was neither rational nor functional, though perhaps reasonable in some respect for reacting to a singular, ominous fact: the cataclysm, whatever it was, had revealed everyone here to be fragile humans made helpless.

    Confusion added chaos.

    Rain and mist landed on Rick’s bare arms. He felt something else and wiped at his face. The grime of dust or sand buffed at his skin. Ash. The photographic images flashing through his mind faded into the present darkness as his sight returned by dim increments. His hand blurred into view as he rubbed gritty, sooty fingers together, mixing the wetted minerals of destruction with the sweat of shock. His eyes became seeing. He noticed his own heaving chest and the blank peripheral vision that threatened to pinch off his sight.

    He saw shapes and tones of grey and black. He located and identified the siren screamer as Sheila through the coagulating dust, ash, and mist. Her straight blond hair hid in the monotone disguise of an ashen ponytail, and the few yards of separation suspended enough dust and ash to obscure facial features. But Sheila’s bright white bikini shone patchy and muted through the murky atmosphere of destruction and left no doubt of her identity. Rick had known Sheila since their teen years and was familiar with her particular curves in the way that a man of modest means admired the lines of a Ferrari without coveting the millionaire’s portfolio. Her living sculpture shrieked while enduring the ugly façade of dust and fractious fear.

    Rick stepped toward her and stopped on his second lurching step as he saw Carter hop over rubble in a blurred motion to get to Sheila. Carter, yelling her name, halted a foot from her face, his bald head glistening with grimy moisture. She reared back to inhale for another outburst, and Carter grabbed her dirty arms, yelling, "Fo-cus! Sheila, focus!" Carter scanned over her body for injuries, hugged her close to him, and began surveying his surroundings as her siren wavered and sputtered into weaker sobs and hiccups.

    With Sheila in familiar hands, Rick held his place to observe more of the carnage, to orient himself for the next decisions. He could see a few dozen yards before the dusty haze confused his vision. Within his contracted sphere of reality, he saw more still bodies than moving ones. The shadows of death outweighed the silhouettes of the living that pulled and dragged themselves into action.

    A vise-strong hand clamped onto Rick’s bare biceps and he whipped his head to the right.

    It’s not a fire, he thought aloud. Not a gas explosion. Could be a bomb.

    We’re in big trouble, Elfking. Get your game face on.

    Jim—short and half again as thick in chest and thigh as Rick—spoke in a low and clear voice. He seemed even shorter in this disastrous setting with his ears tucked into a baseball cap and rumpled stacks of sweatpants material bunched at his ankles. Jim’s wife, Mary, stood an arm’s length from him, not frantic but intense with dilated eyes studying shapes and subtle movements across the yard. Rick almost smiled to hear Jim’s nickname for him and see Mary’s face, her dark, shoulder-length hair turned grey by the dust and ash that also obscured Jim’s reddish mop. Both held the same concentration that all of Rick’s computer-gamer friends wore when engrossed in their virtual worlds of warfare. Only, this new place held the details of reality that no artificial realm could. They had conditioned themselves to block out distractions and adapt quickly, but the couple struggled to assess their surroundings.

    Everything seemed painted in tones and textures of grey.

    What happened to your house? Rick asked while wheeling about to locate any structures.

    Jim pointed past his friend, who stopped on the dark mass churning into reality where their home should have stood. A vortex.

    More bodies raised themselves from the plane of destruction and crouched over other fallen—many more bodies than Jim’s party patrons. Detritus rained from the sky. Fine dust and black flakes of carbonized matter did not seem enough to turn the air opaque. An ocean of darkness had quenched their bright evening. A mass of dark persons now stood or staggered in singles, pairs, and clusters marking a collective decimation.

    Uh, guys? A familiar voice approached from behind Rick. He swung left to find his computer-game-obsessed friends Blackstar and Buffalo—no one on-line knew them as Al and Don—jogging toward them. The latter hooked his big toe on an upturned paver. Buffalo’s backpack lurched higher over one thin shoulder as he hopped to catch his spindly frame in baggy clothes and keep from clattering to the ground. The darkness made him appear thinner. His thick, wavy hair bounced around his head in comic relief. Buffalo halted near to collision with the much shorter Blackstar. A confused, nervous chuckle inappropriate for the moment escaped Buffalo’s throat with a honk as he straightened and targeted his friends with the head movements of a humming bird.

    We’re okay, announced Buffalo.

    Ash and dirt clung to Blackstar’s bushy goatee. This isn’t Seattle, predicted the gnomish outline. A few blades of grass dislodged from the natural Velcro of his face. Turning his head to the sky—not that there were any signs to read through the murk—he recalled patterns of stars that should be there and imagined the ones he would find in their place.

    No time for star finding, Buffalo pointed over Blackstar’s shoulder to the troubling dark void that had replaced Jim and Mary’s house.

    Singularity, Blackstar described. Wormhole. No one has that technology yet. We could be looking at an alien invasion.

    Buffalo, Blackstar. As with Rick, Jim called Don and Al by their nicknames. Let’s rally the troops. He used words familiar to his tongue for less than serious occasions, but even here they encouraged the desired response of search-and-rescue counterbalanced by command-and-conquer.

    None of them wasted two heartbeats to guess how dozens of strangers had landed in their backyard barbeque, or how Jim and Mary’s home had evaporated in the mysterious explosion to leave little more than coal dust and fumes over a charcoal landscape, or if they had been blown into another county. Racing away from the vortex and past onlookers, the five friends collected Carter and Sheila, who had managed to attract two more from their fractured gathering. Rick recognized the dirty shapes of Lena and Andy only because he knew them well. Their lithe silhouettes materialized from the ubiquitous, engulfing haze a few yards before him—a tall, wiry man coated in ash dampened with the heavy sweat of panic from his spiky hair to the tops of his shoes accompanied by Rick’s former fiancée. He recalled her as much shorter but now observed her head bobbing above Andy’s shoulder as they jogged through the calamitous shadows.

    The full richness of Lena’s bronzed irises popped from the drab landscape of black and grey, hitting Rick with a new twinge of regret—the first color Rick had seen since his blackout. The blanket of destruction could wash away all other hues but hers. The settling ash and soot lightened Lena’s raven hair—those fine strands of straight beauty that resisted all entanglements. Wetted locks drew thin lines across the light olive complexion of her cheeks. She stared back at Rick’s cool eyes of blue concern piercing the drab atmosphere and its oppression. Neither one asked of each other’s welfare. It was unnecessary.

    Rick glanced up at Andy, a head taller as he had always been, and received his nod of surety.

    Carter whispered, Come on, Sheila, focus, while she somehow continued to shrink into his smaller embrace.

    Jim turned to Buffalo, his best friend since elementary school, saying, Take Andy and find the rest.

    Buffalo twisted around and took off while Andy followed with his common passivity, saying, Okay. His mind would not admit how this place could be anything other than natural… or a dream. Therefore, nothing about his state caused adverse reaction or abnormal emotion. It was just grey Seattle on a Friday evening with a miniature black hole instead of a gas grill.

    And anyone else who needs help, Mary added, brushing wet and matted hair away from her face. The rain came as a dense drizzle.

    Meet us at the climbing wall, Buffalo, Carter shouted after them, wondering what Blackstar had seen in the sky before it went dark.

    Buffalo and Andy split off—the determined and solemn heroes—both in directions opposite the shadow vortex swelling from its black crater. They all knew its danger without understanding. Rick might have called it numinous. It appeared to grow while compressing all of the air surrounding it. Darkness swirled with eddies of lighter grey and black and pulsed with the smallest heartbeat of dread life, each time squeezing itself into the niches of reality, causing a rift in what existed to make a place for something else.

    Jim and Mary’s home was gone, the trees fallen, the pool lost—probably filled with the same demolition decorating the yard in piles. Nevertheless, Jim’s climbing wall seemed to stand strong. A faint outline through the clearing haze of ash and rain, its irregular rock silhouette in the backyard opposed the destruction that had come with the enlarging void. The stony shape did not resemble the exact silhouette Rick recalled scaling a hundred times for practice. But nothing nearby would be unscathed in the cataclysm’s wake.

    Jim had built his wall of natural rocks with mortar and internal metal anchors at the back of his property for bouldering and top-roping. The pinnacle, almost a miniature mountain, had grown larger over the years with help from Buffalo, Rick, Andy, Carter, and a few others. The climber’s playground evolved as a project of diversion from the worries of daily life. It rose in the darkness, prominent, not far from the shadowy Rift resolving into new forms on the opposite side of the yard.

    Two minutes since the catastrophic flash, Jim and six comrades hustled toward those rocks, bobbing and weaving around unknown survivors in a loose wedge formation—a flocking instinct. Fits of sobbing, coughing, and broken speech rose and fell, approaching and retreating behind them like passing cars on the freeway. As they serpentined in a whirl of settling smoke and gauzy ash, Rick recognized grey outlines in the debris, black spots of blood, tattered clothing, and empty shoes marking some exodus. Had everyone survived the blast? By God, perhaps.

    When the seven friends arrived at their rendezvous, the rocks they had once climbed were not there, not blown to fragments, not tumbled into a rockery. In their stead and of the same general structure, a stone shrine of meticulous architecture and detailed designs consecrated the site, an open altar to a god, to a king, to nature perhaps—a sort of Stonehenge. Patterns and imagery decorated the mineral surfaces with a conspicuous absence of writing. Sconces and braziers hung in symmetric arrays about a central gap framed by two tall stone plinths as portal to some unseen sanctuary.

    The thick air had hidden a restrained spectral light until Jim’s party approached. They aggregated into the doorway, peering through, but no one crossed the midline. Ancient and strange weapons and armor rested in carved nooks at various levels, swathed with fine-woven silks of shimmering black, royal purples, and noble blues. The solid silken colors refused the muting powers of the darkness enveloping the scene behind them, though no flame could illuminate the evening surround. The rock temple rested its foreign presence in the shadow of death.

    Mighty suspicious, Rick whispered. Very suspicious.

    Blackstar gave his typical and terse affirmation in one short utterance: Yes. Almost too short and quick to be a complete syllable, he squeezed the word into his choppy expression, similar to that of a stifled sneeze.

    The band of survivors gawked at the construction replacing Jim’s climbing wall. Buffalo and Andy emerged from the haze behind them with several stragglers in tow, including long-haired Walker and Simon the meticulous solver of Sudoku and questing games.

    Here we are, Buffalo exhaled the words as a single string of sound. Zarden insisted on finding his cat, so we left him. Couldn’t find Rutiger.

    Hades! Jim spun around, forcing his friends to back out of the stone entrance. The otherwise quirky curse invoked no grins. His unusual and automatic profanity magically conveyed the solemn gravity of disastrous times.

    My brain must have hiccupped, Rick spoke the words in his mind. How could they have searched the whole yard already?

    What smells? Simon asked no one in particular. Some instinct for self-preservation focused on the unfamiliar odors of this ominous occasion as his particular coping mechanism. Sheila screamed; Andy normalized; Simon sniffed.

    Nothing was as it should be. The bomb… not the volcano… whatever had set off the cataclysm changed their world into a medieval landscape. Even in the obscuring dust and low-hanging clouds dropping rain, Rick considered the impossibility that this place was not Jim and Mary Stone’s backyard.

    Jim stood with his back to the climbing wall—weapon’s shrine—faced his remnant of friends but stared across the yard at the vortex that had destroyed his home, or vacuumed it into another dimension. The warm earth pushed rainfall back into the air as fog. It mingled with the fine dust and smoke obscuring survivors in a dark screen.

    Jim’s thick and sturdy frame stepped between his wife and Lena, both taller than he, to get a wider view of the morphing scene they had left. Buffalo and Andy parted for Jim to peer past their even higher shoulders. Several unfamiliar faces straggled toward their group then veered away from Jim’s piercing attention to cluster at the gathering’s periphery. A last harried survivor ran head down to catch up with his retreating gang and did not see Jim in time to avoid bouncing off the stocky man’s dense shoulder. Jim grunted but held his view focused on the massing void. The smaller, clueless man careened into the group collected by calamity. They arrested his stumbling collision and shuffled him to the side. Jim advanced a few more steps toward the Rift. He planted his feet, ready to stand against whatever emerged.

    Bits of shadow burst forth, darker than the evening atmosphere hanging about them but stitched together with some veins of visible energies, summoned from the eye of destruction. Detaching from the Rift’s center, they blurred outward, jerking into motion like magnetic fluids snapping toward those nearest the black opalescent disk. Jim and his friends watched, transfixed by this new horror attacking. Ethereal tendrils shot their missiles but landed on targets without sign of impact. Streaks of shadow dispersed into the haze.

    Human shapes materialized in front of each targeted survivor. As if unfolding from an invisible line in space, shadows appeared from fog and smoke, indistinct and colorless, all of the same stature and robust build. Jim could not decipher what technology they had employed—the explosion, the void, the tactical camouflage that obscured their movements—some sort of cloaking photonic aerogel that could disguise them in the ashy air. Or was it simply magic? With faces lost in darkness, these apparitions reached out to clutch the throats of their victims, to rip hearts from ribs, to rend minds from rattled skulls.

    Strangers and missing friends grappled with trained assailants, grasping and swinging at the shadow-men. Hand-to-hand combat came dirty, desperate, and instinctual. A handful of unidentified survivors battled well, but the first wave of attacking shades ended in quick tragedy for most. The successful phantasms advanced to their next targets in preternatural blurs, shape-shifting from substance to shadow then back to human form in the blink of an eye, just as some dark fantasy. Jim almost missed the transformation; the scenes unfolded in seconds but he somehow stretched them into slow-motion events. He watched some victims freeze while other cataclysm survivors ran from this new and active danger.

    Rick studied the hazy, indistinguishable warriors and they came into focus for a moment as if paused in mid-stride. These shadow-men must be stopped. He thought, as Jim did, that these aliens wore some sort of concealing suit or device that disrupted the air surrounding them. But Rick strained to peer through that curtain and saw they were men with the bronze complexions of California beach bums and body builders. They seemed to glow darkly, though not enough light made it beyond their cloaks to brighten the surrounding darkness. Too weird, he thought. Can’t be a dream. You can’t dream up this stuff. Then the second wave emerged from the Rift, as if it were just some mirage machine or holographic projector.

    The Rift pulsed like a fluid, not a solid black emptiness or a true void but some blend of laminar and turbulent mixing with changing patterns swirling in tones of graphite grey shot through with static flashes. The more Rick tried to focus on the multiplying shades ripping from their source, the less clear their dark obscurity became. What kind of smokescreen were they using? Could it be a true cloaking device? What government would have this advanced technology to attack the US? What organization?

    Whoever they were, they were the enemy; and if they were beings from another world or alternate dimension, Rick was not ready for a closer encounter.

    It could be supernatural.

    This can’t be real, someone nearby mumbled over the background clamor. Several other statements of incredulity folded into one another: This can’t be happening. Who are they? What are they doing? Let’s get out of here. We’re all going to die! Where should we go? What can we do?

    Don’t just stand there! Jim yelled at the chaotic and stunned crowd arrayed across the courtyard but also at the assembled band of comrades now posed behind him. He turned to his friends and scrunched his bushy brow in warrior’s anger. Defend yourselves!

    Only if I have to, Rick admitted through his brain-fog.

    Mary turned to Rick with her straight, serious face and said, We have to.

    They scurried back through the bottlenecking plinths to the weapon shrine, where Jim and the lanky Buffalo climbed towering stones to the higher accoutrements of battle on display. No one paused to wonder how the panoply had miraculously appeared, though some still huddled in their mindless state of herding. Most of Buffalo’s close friends could easily immerse themselves into fictional roles, being used to the shared fantasy of first-person-player computer games, while others struggled or simply floundered like so much flotsam. Action-ready survivalists ripped weapons and pieces of armor from the shrine and handed them down.

    Blackstar tangled with a ceremonial sash draped around a two-handed broadsword almost as long as he was tall. His goatee had lost the grass hanging on from his face-planting into the lawn, but ash and dust had matted with the rain. His face contorted with the concentration of a gnome working out this three-dimensional puzzle. Once loose, he handed off the unwieldy blade to Carter and returned to collecting other items.

    Mary pressed a halberd handle to Rick’s chest. The combination pike and ax blade was something he had only seen in history books. Now that he held one, it became real for the first time to his mind—tangible, knurled handle, iron and leathery smells, a memory completed by substantiation and tactile experience. He felt every ridge of his fingers and palm prints tingle at the myriad contacts with the weapon. Through the eerie mist and smoke suspended around them with endlessly refracted lights of low glowing sconces and braziers nearby, Rick imagined seeing a dark essence building its aura into gloves of plasma. It evaporated with a blink. He squinted and blinked a few more times with no change. He clutched the smooth wood grains of the halberd like a rifleman as he watched Buffalo drop a chain-mail coif and short sword to Andy, who nodded his okay.

    Blackstar got an eight-foot pike. Mary armed her crossbow and hefted a bristling quiver over her head and shoulder. Jim lowered a human-sized legionnaire’s shield to the pavement and Lena slid it in front of Sheila.

    Hold this out with your back to the wall once we’re outside again, Lena told her. An infrequent gamer herself, Lena retained many random facts from all the books and history shows that entertained Rick. Her black belt in kung fu also came with some knowledge of weapons work. Looking up at Buffalo, she said, Get me the long knives. He stepped higher up the wall and picked off the blades.

    Rick leaned in and whispered to Lena, You alright?

    Just peaches. Her bronze and black eyes and long hair contrasted with the pallor of a junky. Dark circles ringed orbs bloodshot from ash and brimstone vapors. Bluish-grey lips trembled intermittently, or maybe Rick’s pounding heart made his vision jittery. The couple exchanged fake and feeble half-grins then turned away from the weapons wall shoulder-to-shoulder.

    Sorry guys, that’s it. Buffalo tipped the second and last pike to Blackstar and scrambled off the rock pinnacle.

    Jim jumped down with the last item, his double-bit battle-ax, mumbling to himself as he inspected its quality. It’ll do in a pinch. He took no time to consider the cursive engravings on the face of each blade—some sort of writing or abstracted pictographs.

    If you don’t have a weapon, keep us between you and whatever comes, Jim hollered before they emerged from the sacred space. Huddle as close to Sheila as you can. The shield will protect at least two of you.

    Who are they? Some tag-along stranger whined as they left the ancient altar. Why are they attacking us?

    Shoot first, ask later, Jim shouted ahead but it carried in all directions.

    His wife fired a crossbow bolt at a distant shadow warrior

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