Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 86059 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 430(@200wpm)___ 344(@250wpm)___ 287(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86059 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 430(@200wpm)___ 344(@250wpm)___ 287(@300wpm)
“Because you’re a control freak,” Melina adds, though she frowns at Gwen.
“Because I have a great, vested interest in living,” Azar says bitingly. “Even if it must mean living in this world. And if we do not work together, none of us will live beyond the next year. If that thing comes through the Rift, we will all perish.”
I swallow hard. “Thing…?” I ask.
Gwen sits back in her chair, uneasy. She exchanges a look with her dragon, who puts a comforting, possessive hand on the back of her neck.
Azar gestures at me. “When your people tore open the Rift between our worlds, the drakoni and a few Salorians were pulled through. That Rift still pulses, and it has not been closed. Since it has been open for so long, I think it has come to the attention of other things. Dark things.”
This sounds like something out of a horror movie. “Dark things?” Jurik hands me another pancake and I take a bite, but it’s no longer as pleasant as it was. Instead, it tastes dry, hard to swallow. I thought nothing else awful could happen to our world. The shithole we have left has already been through the worst…and now he’s saying something else might happen? Something worse than what we’re living through right now?
He is trying to scare you, Jurik sends fiercely. He lies.
But look at Gwen and her dragon, I send back. They look worried, too. Something is going on.
“There is a presence,” Azar continues in a calmer voice. “It reaches out through the Rift from time to time. I feel it. I spend great amounts of energy every day trying to influence it not to come through. Not to explore this world. Someday my efforts will not be enough, though. We must find a way to close the Rift before then, or we risk losing everything.”
“What is it?” I ask around a mouthful.
“I do not know.”
Because he makes it up, Jurik says. Because it is a lie to put fear into our hearts.
He’s got a point. “Then how do you know it’s bad?” I ask Azar. “How do you know it’s just not someone on the other side checking for all the drakoni that are lost here?”
“You think I do not know how it would feel to touch minds with another drakoni, even across great distances?” His lip curls in a sneer. “I know what a drakoni mind feels like. I know what a thousand of them feel like. This is something different. Something darker, from an entirely different world. And it is hungry.” He gestures at Gwen and Vaan. “Ask them if you do not believe me.”
But Gwen looks uncertain. “We haven’t actually seen anything either. But some of us…a friend of mine…has had bad dreams. The same type of dream every night, and she sees the same thing he does.”
“I have bad dreams, too,” Melina admits. Azar’s mouth thins into an unhappy line and he looks over at us.
So everyone is scared of something that we don’t know of that might or might not come through the Rift? I frown at the thought. It just doesn’t feel like enough.
He could be planting the thoughts in their heads, Jurik offers. Controlling them from afar with concepts and ideas instead of directly controlling them like he does the dragons on the wall.
“How do we know—” I begin.
“That this is not a trick?” Azar asks. “You do not. You think this is all some game I play at because I wish to rule. But I already rule here.” He gestures at our surroundings. “I have enough to be comfortable, and my mate at my side. Yes, I wish to rule this place…but it means nothing if I am a king of corpses. And that is all that will be left if this thing pushes through.” He leans forward, a desperate look on his normally calm face. “It grows bolder by the day. I have tried to dissuade it, using tricks and mind control, but nothing works. It sends out probes, and once it decides that this world is ripe for the taking, it will come through.”
“What’s stopping it right now?”
“I do not know,” Azar says. “Something holds it back, but I do not know what. It was growing in strength for a time, and then grew weaker recently. It is pushing harder, though, and it will keep growing in strength once more.”
The young, Jurik tells me. Luminoura. Sallavatri. They are keeping it back.
How do you know?
It grew weaker recently. Luminoura was born.
They’re babies. What if they’re thinking there’s a problem because he’s putting it in the air?
That is possible, Jurik admits.
I focus on the half-eaten pancake in my hand. Then what do we do? How do we believe him?
We must see for ourselves.
How?
I will go to the Rift, Jurik decides. Fly as high as I can, and see what I can sense.