Excerpt from This Deadly Maiden
This below is almost all of Chapter One.
I'm still unsure if I will use Cari Silverwood as the pen name for this book
I'm still unsure if I will use Cari Silverwood as the pen name for this book
Rorsyd
I land violently, bloodily, skidding to a halt, my feet sputtering across carpet, bodies, and dirt.
I loom over the crib of the offspring of the two monsters that killed Orish. My towering shadow slowly shrinks to man-size, reluctant as it often is to accept my new form.
Around me the tent fabric flaps and flutters then stills.
I am struck by anguish and anger. My claws drip with the gore of the babe’s protectors, my hearts thud with the echoes of exhaustion. The flight to this enemy camp took the last of my energy and my wounds will have their due.
Sunlight paints the scene bright in utter contrast to my despair. I left red streaks on the canvas and a ragged hole in roof and sides. A sideways glance reveals the sprawled corpses of the guards, their faces in the dirt. The idiots thought to prevent me from entering.
I am undone and what dragonshifter weeps at death?
What Orish suffered was not a mortal death.
Though it feels as if it happened barely seconds ago, an eternity describes the loss far better.
The memory is written in pain.
That battlefield…
It might have been a monumental celebration equipped with rocketing fireworks.
It was not.
The clouds whispered past as we glided above the field of thousands milling below.
Sounds drift upward. The faint clangs from weapons. The cries. The spectacular eruptions of multi-colored etharum from mage wielders. The battle against the usurper is going well.
An immense summoning shakes the sky and my vision into shivering jelly. A darkness composed of many spots pours upward. This summoning comes from a trifling pair of fae so far away they are sticklike, gesturing with their tiny arms. The cloud of darkthings batter at Orish like a swarm of insects, glueing to him, crawling inside his roaring mouth. His spew vomits a geyser of black that arches groundward yet mocks sense, for it reforms, coalesces, then forces its way through his teeth and back inside.
Horrified, I watch as it destroys him from within.
His wings frantically cup the air then stall.
The plummet and spin as the black binds him, wings trapped, a dark mist dissipating and peeling off in spidery shreds.
I beg for him to stop but he falls and falls, only a tiny piercing scream tells me he may still be conscious.
The boom as he hits earth, gores deep. The force throws aloft gyrating boulders and clods of fractured ground that darken the sky.
Tomblike cold spreads in my chest.
I swoop across and cry out, attempting to compel him to return to life. Yet I know it is futile.
I dare not try to kill these spawned darkthings, but their creators? Yes.
I thunder to them, arrowing lower, finding the two on a small promontory waving toward the battle that teems with thousands of people trying to exterminate each other. Magik streams and swirls, purple, green, stark red…black. The etharum carves swathes of death through the combatants.
My roar summons dragon heat and I belch a molten stream. It rampages forth, my fire-breath colored with incandescent hues. Fried air boils at the edges.
Flames ripple over the pair, crisping them to eye-scalding brightness. Crackling red-and-orange creatures, writhing. Eyes taut, third transparent eyelid protecting them from the heat, I hover then circle them as they convulse. I eat their screams, pleased yet unsatisfied, for what can ever sate this wrongness they gifted?
I leave them to their deaths.
Orish lies, frozen forever, encased in a god-rotting, darkthing cocoon.
In the middle of the battlefield.
He is a monument I fear will decompose in situ.
Dying is so wrong.
Thousands, tens of thousands of others die here, but I care naught for them. Or little for them. My grief unhinges my thoughts. They had but tiny lifespans ahead. Orish had forever.
And so, here I am, contemplating ending this child.
My own gore curls down the thick muscles of my thighs, swirls past my calves, writing the bloodiness of this day on my feet.
Vengeance was what brought me here to this crib.
I heave in a few breaths and surprise myself with a throat-tearing sob.
I am a fool. I weep at the stupidness, the unfairness, the everydayness of my friend’s death.
Everyone dies, if they are neither Aos Sin fae nor dragonshifter, nor enhanced by some nefarious use of etharum.
Immortality has its failings and so I weep for Orish.
“Fuck this day.” I say it quietly, though as far as I am aware, there are none alive in the camp to hear me.
I should kill this babe. It is my only reason for being in this place.
As if to copy my mood, the outer winds gust through and shake this large tent, sending dust howling, eddying, scattering the belongings of the necromancers. Clothing, hats, a small stuffed purple toy, pens and quills. A stand of umbrellas, coats, and hats topples with a crash.
Grinding my teeth, molars threatening to crack, fangs projecting further than they should in man-form, I shake my claws and partially manifest my wings. The tips smack the inside of the tent, making it expand then tilt. Perhaps I should simply collapse this shelter and leave the gurgling thing in the crib to suffocate.
Coward. I lift my hand, poise my sharp index claw near its throat. A major blood vessel, the carotid, lives there, beneath its skin. One swift motion and its throat will part. Or its head will detach from the neck if I accidentally slice too deep. I imagine the flood of red on the white cloth it lies upon. My claw twitches.
Then the small pink, plump, hairless … cute … thing kicks its legs beneath the mauve blankie and shoves a thumb in its mouth. It sucks on it, slobbering, mouth greedy for food. Its mother perhaps fed it on her breast. Even evil mothers must do this, I suppose.
Hunger is normal not evil.
I lean over and say provocative words.
“I know your evilness is within, lurking. Bite it. Bite your thumb! If blood appears at that small slobber-wet mouth I will cut you. You do not deserve to live!”
No blood appears. The skin about its little eyes squeezes, wrinkles, and it coos, making loud, lip-smacking sounds.
“Curse you. Turn red. Glow with sinister colors! Do something!” I finish the request with a growl.
Nothing happens. It remains cute and fragile.
My shoulders sag. The thing looks like a dumb, adorable baby. My anger does not suffice. I cannot do this.
Sighing, I move away, gasping as the gaping hole in my gut takes the moment as its own and cores me with a snaking agony. My spine has perhaps been touched; it feels frighteningly deep, as if part of me is gone.
The last vestiges of my dragon form shudder into nothingness. I raise my hands to watch as my claws retract into my fingers.
I should fly from this camp. I have no desire to kill anyone else I might encounter. I trudge outside, kicking away debris but carefully avoiding the pooled blood, brains, and intestines of the male and female guards.
I attempt to shift. Pain drowns my thoughts for a prolonged and wretched moment. I curl over, dropping, my knees thud into earth. I rise from the crouch then stagger onward, hunched over and panting.
The light-purple sky roils with smoke and the scent of well-fired flesh, of spent etharum, of distant screams and sobs. We won this battle, but I fail to care.
The kingdom is saved, yay. Or yay not.
The camp is not quite deserted. A few leftover enemy fae recoil at the sight of me. My grimace is not for them. I cup my side pausing to gather my resolution. The wound that was large enough to shove a pony into when I was shifted to dragon is now only…
I glance at it. Big enough to stick a foot or two into. I will heal from this.
But…I will heal faster if I shift.
Tentatively, I try again to shift and fail, squeaking and gasping at this second malfunction. Blood has spurted from somewhere hidden within the cavity I now bear. I wonder what did this to me. The bearshifter’s spear? No. Darkthing? That mage with the staff that lit with green? Maybe. I was busy at the time with other matters.
Orish, mainly.
My wings have gone. I try for claws, and they pop forth, begrudgingly. Only these remain to remind me of my dragon. I should seek some boots. From atop a bedroll, I filch a pair that fit if I force the leather to obey.
It seems I must walk home. I rip a couple of holes ’tween the uppers and the soles to let my toes have relief.
Then I make a slow turn and face that tent where the baby of evil lies cooing to itself. It might still die. I hope so. I know with every fucking dragonshifter bone in my useless body, that baby will become a child of evil if allowed to turn into an adult.
All necromancers do.
If so…it will be my fault and mine alone.
I will watch the child, whether it be male or female. I will watch it for the first signs of anything at all sinful.
I vow this.
I raise my hand and point and speak the vow aloud.
“Whatever you become, I will be there to see it. I will not suffer the spawn of those monsters to live once you show what you truly are. Whatever. You. Are.
“I swear this on my honor. I swear it on the bones of my ancestors. On the flame that I burn the air with. On my wings and on my claws.”
I suck another breath, a cold, shaking, unshifted breath, and I sweep my blood-encrusted hair from my face. Luckily it is red anyway. At that, I stifle a laugh and stand straighter.
I speak more softly.
“When you show your evil form, pull dead things from their graves to lurch into malignant life, cast blood magik or death magik, I will end you.”
That baby is Wyntre Diamond. She is adopted by a blacksmith who was employed by her dead parents - Landos Diamond - and brought up secretly as his child.
I land violently, bloodily, skidding to a halt, my feet sputtering across carpet, bodies, and dirt.
I loom over the crib of the offspring of the two monsters that killed Orish. My towering shadow slowly shrinks to man-size, reluctant as it often is to accept my new form.
Around me the tent fabric flaps and flutters then stills.
I am struck by anguish and anger. My claws drip with the gore of the babe’s protectors, my hearts thud with the echoes of exhaustion. The flight to this enemy camp took the last of my energy and my wounds will have their due.
Sunlight paints the scene bright in utter contrast to my despair. I left red streaks on the canvas and a ragged hole in roof and sides. A sideways glance reveals the sprawled corpses of the guards, their faces in the dirt. The idiots thought to prevent me from entering.
I am undone and what dragonshifter weeps at death?
What Orish suffered was not a mortal death.
Though it feels as if it happened barely seconds ago, an eternity describes the loss far better.
The memory is written in pain.
That battlefield…
It might have been a monumental celebration equipped with rocketing fireworks.
It was not.
The clouds whispered past as we glided above the field of thousands milling below.
Sounds drift upward. The faint clangs from weapons. The cries. The spectacular eruptions of multi-colored etharum from mage wielders. The battle against the usurper is going well.
An immense summoning shakes the sky and my vision into shivering jelly. A darkness composed of many spots pours upward. This summoning comes from a trifling pair of fae so far away they are sticklike, gesturing with their tiny arms. The cloud of darkthings batter at Orish like a swarm of insects, glueing to him, crawling inside his roaring mouth. His spew vomits a geyser of black that arches groundward yet mocks sense, for it reforms, coalesces, then forces its way through his teeth and back inside.
Horrified, I watch as it destroys him from within.
His wings frantically cup the air then stall.
The plummet and spin as the black binds him, wings trapped, a dark mist dissipating and peeling off in spidery shreds.
I beg for him to stop but he falls and falls, only a tiny piercing scream tells me he may still be conscious.
The boom as he hits earth, gores deep. The force throws aloft gyrating boulders and clods of fractured ground that darken the sky.
Tomblike cold spreads in my chest.
I swoop across and cry out, attempting to compel him to return to life. Yet I know it is futile.
I dare not try to kill these spawned darkthings, but their creators? Yes.
I thunder to them, arrowing lower, finding the two on a small promontory waving toward the battle that teems with thousands of people trying to exterminate each other. Magik streams and swirls, purple, green, stark red…black. The etharum carves swathes of death through the combatants.
My roar summons dragon heat and I belch a molten stream. It rampages forth, my fire-breath colored with incandescent hues. Fried air boils at the edges.
Flames ripple over the pair, crisping them to eye-scalding brightness. Crackling red-and-orange creatures, writhing. Eyes taut, third transparent eyelid protecting them from the heat, I hover then circle them as they convulse. I eat their screams, pleased yet unsatisfied, for what can ever sate this wrongness they gifted?
I leave them to their deaths.
Orish lies, frozen forever, encased in a god-rotting, darkthing cocoon.
In the middle of the battlefield.
He is a monument I fear will decompose in situ.
Dying is so wrong.
Thousands, tens of thousands of others die here, but I care naught for them. Or little for them. My grief unhinges my thoughts. They had but tiny lifespans ahead. Orish had forever.
And so, here I am, contemplating ending this child.
My own gore curls down the thick muscles of my thighs, swirls past my calves, writing the bloodiness of this day on my feet.
Vengeance was what brought me here to this crib.
I heave in a few breaths and surprise myself with a throat-tearing sob.
I am a fool. I weep at the stupidness, the unfairness, the everydayness of my friend’s death.
Everyone dies, if they are neither Aos Sin fae nor dragonshifter, nor enhanced by some nefarious use of etharum.
Immortality has its failings and so I weep for Orish.
“Fuck this day.” I say it quietly, though as far as I am aware, there are none alive in the camp to hear me.
I should kill this babe. It is my only reason for being in this place.
As if to copy my mood, the outer winds gust through and shake this large tent, sending dust howling, eddying, scattering the belongings of the necromancers. Clothing, hats, a small stuffed purple toy, pens and quills. A stand of umbrellas, coats, and hats topples with a crash.
Grinding my teeth, molars threatening to crack, fangs projecting further than they should in man-form, I shake my claws and partially manifest my wings. The tips smack the inside of the tent, making it expand then tilt. Perhaps I should simply collapse this shelter and leave the gurgling thing in the crib to suffocate.
Coward. I lift my hand, poise my sharp index claw near its throat. A major blood vessel, the carotid, lives there, beneath its skin. One swift motion and its throat will part. Or its head will detach from the neck if I accidentally slice too deep. I imagine the flood of red on the white cloth it lies upon. My claw twitches.
Then the small pink, plump, hairless … cute … thing kicks its legs beneath the mauve blankie and shoves a thumb in its mouth. It sucks on it, slobbering, mouth greedy for food. Its mother perhaps fed it on her breast. Even evil mothers must do this, I suppose.
Hunger is normal not evil.
I lean over and say provocative words.
“I know your evilness is within, lurking. Bite it. Bite your thumb! If blood appears at that small slobber-wet mouth I will cut you. You do not deserve to live!”
No blood appears. The skin about its little eyes squeezes, wrinkles, and it coos, making loud, lip-smacking sounds.
“Curse you. Turn red. Glow with sinister colors! Do something!” I finish the request with a growl.
Nothing happens. It remains cute and fragile.
My shoulders sag. The thing looks like a dumb, adorable baby. My anger does not suffice. I cannot do this.
Sighing, I move away, gasping as the gaping hole in my gut takes the moment as its own and cores me with a snaking agony. My spine has perhaps been touched; it feels frighteningly deep, as if part of me is gone.
The last vestiges of my dragon form shudder into nothingness. I raise my hands to watch as my claws retract into my fingers.
I should fly from this camp. I have no desire to kill anyone else I might encounter. I trudge outside, kicking away debris but carefully avoiding the pooled blood, brains, and intestines of the male and female guards.
I attempt to shift. Pain drowns my thoughts for a prolonged and wretched moment. I curl over, dropping, my knees thud into earth. I rise from the crouch then stagger onward, hunched over and panting.
The light-purple sky roils with smoke and the scent of well-fired flesh, of spent etharum, of distant screams and sobs. We won this battle, but I fail to care.
The kingdom is saved, yay. Or yay not.
The camp is not quite deserted. A few leftover enemy fae recoil at the sight of me. My grimace is not for them. I cup my side pausing to gather my resolution. The wound that was large enough to shove a pony into when I was shifted to dragon is now only…
I glance at it. Big enough to stick a foot or two into. I will heal from this.
But…I will heal faster if I shift.
Tentatively, I try again to shift and fail, squeaking and gasping at this second malfunction. Blood has spurted from somewhere hidden within the cavity I now bear. I wonder what did this to me. The bearshifter’s spear? No. Darkthing? That mage with the staff that lit with green? Maybe. I was busy at the time with other matters.
Orish, mainly.
My wings have gone. I try for claws, and they pop forth, begrudgingly. Only these remain to remind me of my dragon. I should seek some boots. From atop a bedroll, I filch a pair that fit if I force the leather to obey.
It seems I must walk home. I rip a couple of holes ’tween the uppers and the soles to let my toes have relief.
Then I make a slow turn and face that tent where the baby of evil lies cooing to itself. It might still die. I hope so. I know with every fucking dragonshifter bone in my useless body, that baby will become a child of evil if allowed to turn into an adult.
All necromancers do.
If so…it will be my fault and mine alone.
I will watch the child, whether it be male or female. I will watch it for the first signs of anything at all sinful.
I vow this.
I raise my hand and point and speak the vow aloud.
“Whatever you become, I will be there to see it. I will not suffer the spawn of those monsters to live once you show what you truly are. Whatever. You. Are.
“I swear this on my honor. I swear it on the bones of my ancestors. On the flame that I burn the air with. On my wings and on my claws.”
I suck another breath, a cold, shaking, unshifted breath, and I sweep my blood-encrusted hair from my face. Luckily it is red anyway. At that, I stifle a laugh and stand straighter.
I speak more softly.
“When you show your evil form, pull dead things from their graves to lurch into malignant life, cast blood magik or death magik, I will end you.”
That baby is Wyntre Diamond. She is adopted by a blacksmith who was employed by her dead parents - Landos Diamond - and brought up secretly as his child.