CHAPTER ONE: AMBUSH
The blue moss of the Rose garden was slick with blood. Two lines of it trailed behind them like tram tracks, Xavier’s life force seeping out through the slashes on his legs. Helia dragged him as best she could toward where she hoped help could be found.
“How much further?” Xavier asked. His words were ragged and weak, as he himself looked, but there was an urgency to them, full of concern, which was unusual for him.
Helia tried to bury the desperation that tore at her insides—the thought of losing him—but failed spectacularly.
Vega, her Orb, sensed her panic. Floating close by, he flashed an anxious message in swirls of green. She frowned at him and shook her head. Xavier saw the exchange and tried to laugh, but it came out wet and pained. She glanced down to see a splatter of red on his lips.
“That bad, huh?” he said.
“you’re going to make it,” she replied, hoping it wasn’t a lie. She blew her cheeks out under the strain of his weight. It was a weight she had always loved. A reassuring, comforting mass of muscle and good humor that provided a rock in whatever storm she faced. But right now the weight was dragging them both into danger, and she didn’t know what to do. She staggered and almost lost her footing. “I’ll get you to safety.”
He saw right through her forced optimism, as he always did. He was the Sage of Truth, after all. It was his gift and often her curse.
“It was a trap, Helia. Leave me and get back to the great Library. Or he’s going to find us and burn us both into cinders. That’s what the stories say he does. He hasn’t changed his ways.”
“You don’t know it was him, Xav.”
“It was him.”
Her Orb flashed his agreement.
She glared at Vega as her mind spun, ferociously trying to remember what had happened. But it was impossible. Her memories of the last hour were gone, swathed in fog, a malaise brought on by whatever had caused the gash across her forehead that was now dripping blood into her eyes. Had she fallen? Hit her head somehow?
She couldn’t remember a thing that had happened since the ambush. That was still vivid in her mind, at least. The surprise of it, the ferocity. The fact it had come from nowhere, a sudden blight of violence in the one place she had always felt safe and at peace.
She could still taste the cloud of ash that enveloped them as they had stepped from the portal and felt the familiar spongy moss beneath her feet at the periphery of the Rose garden. There had been no sky welcoming them upon their arrival. None of the usual oranges, pinks, and purples of the light dancing through the drifting clouds, casting the majesty of this otherworldly garden—the deliciously green foliage, the swaying flowers, the rock fountains—in sunset hues. There had only been glowing figures and clawed fingers reaching from the sudden suffocating gloom.
But worse—far worse—was the sense of what lay in the mist beyond.
A presence as dark and evil as any she had felt across all the realms she had ever visited.
Suttaru was his name. Although she knew him by another.
The Ash Man.
It had to have been him. The one from the founding of the Library—a time long before even Helia’s arrival. A figure of menace that was now only whispered about in the quietest corridors and nooks of the great Library, uttered by students and scholars trying to frighten each other with campfire stories.
Rosalia Aguilar Solas grew up in Mexico City in a family where reading and writing have been passed down from generation to generation. It’s not easy to find her: she spends her time either in her hometown, where she writes in the cozy cafes of bookstores, or at the Great Library of Tomorrow.Learn more on this site about casino https://spinfever-casino-au.com. Whether at home with her family or immersed in exploring new ideas, she invariably creates magical stories.