The Severshold Trilogy: Book One - Endira

Prologue

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. Although, it had been an arcadian and idyllic paradise when they had ruled, for The Great Principa Rerum was not a land meant for men to inherit.

The Valley is beautiful despite the violent conflicts that for centuries had been waged on its soft grasses. The lush lowland is like an oasis of greenery between the harsh rock and earth of the mountains, a reprieve from the severity of the landscape. The air is crisp and fresh and always smells of pine and musk from the Tsuga and Hemlock evergreen trees that wood the glen. Agrius flowers, also called Sunbursts, bloom from thickets while Ferox vines twist around long fallen stumps and the large boulders that dot the area. Now a deemed neutral zone between Krilnok and Giassador, the canyon of sorts the Valley makes, acts as a chasm between the two mountains which serve as natural eastern and western borders of the continent’s most volatile regions. The dragons, who were not as capricious as their human counterparts, did not concern themselves with land separated by invisible lines backed by threats of metal, blood and promised death. They made their home on both the treacherously sharp peak of Igetsala in Krilnok that reached into the sky like the narrow, calloused, and arthritic fingers of an angry old man and Tersolvo in Giassador. The latter is the less precarious of the two and easier to navigate but is just as hulking.

According to Principa’s enigmatic historians, the Scriptors, the majestic and needlessly feared animals were often recorded to have been seen soaring through the clouds above the Valley or lounging below. In Principa’s most complete record of events, the Scriptorium, dragons were listed among the first creatures to roam the continent, however, they had been slaughtered by fearful, fickle and greedy men. For there had been murmurings that individuals who slayed dragons were able to take hold of the great power the dragons had been endowed with. These murmurings held no truth whatsoever, albeit the truth did not stop men from attempting the impossible. This abhorrent pursuit, tethered with the unfounded fear, led to the species complete eradication. In the present year, not a soul alive had seen a winged beast. They are the subject of sordid myths whispered in ears and tales told to children around hearths, narratives meant to send chills up one's spine and keep little ones from dawdling about unattended. Dragons were very much gone. It was an accepted notion but, when fireballs rained down on the small village that sat in the center of the Valley, that is what the people screamed. “Dragon.”

This small village is but a tiny ink splatter on any Charter’s map. The land is insignificant and the crops it yields equally as lackluster. There are no large buildings or a nearby portly Courtsman with an estate filled with silvers and jewels that would make the area worthwhile to thieving latros; robbers of the worst kind, for in addition to money, they like to steal people too. The village called Donshire did not even have a proper church. If the people ever wanted to gather, they cleared the drink from the shelves of the tavern and congregated there among the stench of their sins from the previous night. There is absolutely nothing of interest or consequence in Donshire at all beside the people who live there. They are hardworking and generous, which was saying something, for the richest man in the village owned only three medium sized goats and the poorest owned not even the clothes on his back. They were welcoming and it was this, their friendly and naive natures that would be their doom. For the people of the tiny village had sheltered a stranger, a seemingly adrift traveler. But, this stranger hadn’t been lost at all. They had been running for not just their own life but that of another and consequently, the fate of the entire continent as well.

The stranger had emerged from the mountains of Giassador, feet mangled from the rugged and coarse earth. They had been near death when one of the Herders tending to the cattle had seen them when they had collapsed on the ground, weak from exhaustion and the effort enduring the journey had required. The stranger had been in grave condition, terrified and near delirium from their injuries, and the villagers wanted to help. But in terrible addition to this, the stranger had another predicament. She was a young woman, a dangerous thing to be in certain dark corners of the realm, especially alone. She was a girl merely, no older than thirteen years. Horrifyingly, she had been very close to giving birth, her thin arms circled around the swell of her abdomen tightly. Even though she had tried to warn them away, the villagers were steadfast in their benevolence. It was their unwillingness to return her to the wayward and harsh elements from which she had staggered from, their unselfish goodness that led to their demise. “Dragon.” They screamed. They were simple minded people, but one would have to be without any wit at all to divine another source for the fiery, cataclysmic destruction all around them. Other than the only half-believed in monster, who or what other being was capable of the type of visceral carnage they were suffering?

In truth, the Scriptors had deemed dragons peaceful creatures who wanted little more than to live their lives in relative isolation and feed on abundant vegetation. The stories of dragons tearing fearless men limb from limb, were just that, stories. Dragons were herbivores and as such, did not eat meat. Even if they did, the sinewy and most likely astringent flesh of man would not be appetizing in the slightest. Humans were acrid with bitterness and greed, not desired by any creature beside that of its own kind. The dragons were very powerful, omniscient and pure emissaries of the intangible force that gives life and energy to everything in the known and unknown worlds. Donum.

Fire erupted from the sky and scoured the village, covering it, like a blanket of snow. The villagers screamed in terrified shock and then agony as their homes, belongings, family members and ultimately they themselves melted away into nothingness. With their dying breaths they proclaimed the heinous guilt of their supposed perpetrator. “Dragon.” Albeit, the ferocious creatures had been driven from the land by the fearful and power hungry Giassadorians long ago. You see, dragons were pure emissaries of donum, but not the only.

Donum is the breath in one's lungs, the blood in one's veins. It both gives life and can take it away. Donum gifted the dragons the ability to fly and to spray fire across the Earth. That very same power gives humans the capacity to flect the five mataries. Flecturs are donum’s human emissaries. The ability to flect is a donum gifted phenomenon that not every human born on Principian soil is blessed with. Unda, the water that flows through the rivers and streams through the southern marsh lands in Tolum. Cael, the air, which whips in great winds across the plains in Areyna, the middle most region of the continent. Igna, the fire that lived in the belly of the long dead dragons and in the great volcanoes in the mountainous northern region of Krilnok. Terra, which can be found everywhere, chiefly under one’s feet, but the richest, most arable, plush soil can be found in Giassador, the self-proclaimed seat of Principa. And the fifth, the most controversial and simultaneously misunderstood matarie, majik.

In the case of the primary four, flections in normal cases, correspond with the region of highest incident. Most terratur, or terra flecturs, call Giassador home, while the people of Krilnok, the Kril, are in general, igna flecturs. This is the normality but in varied cases children born to alike flecting parents are sometimes blessed with novis donum in which they were gifted power over a different matarie. Unfortunately, as is the nature of man, anything different is deemed troublesome or viewed as a cause for concern. Venfers, majik flecturs and those with novis donum are often discriminated against and prejudiced. In extremely rare cases, emissaries are bestowed with unimaginable power. A power that is more legend than the dragons. An individual that is able to flect more than one matarie is called a multaflectur. These are rumored beings, but make no such grave mistake, these flecturs, these multas are very much real indeed. Even more fabled than the dragons, even more obscure than the idea of a multaflectur was the true responsible party for the decimation of Donshire. The Sicari.

An elite death squad composed completely of multaflecturs. Each had only been a child when they were snatched from their homes by the dutiful extended hands of their master. They had been whittled down into soulless soldiers, near incapable of feeling much else beside anger, they hid in the forest on the edge of Giassador and watched, waiting until the people of Donshire had gone to sleep. Like still and silent vultures, they used their eyes and their flecting to circle the village without once moving. When the last lantern from the last house had been blown out for the night they moved in as instructed. They used their abilities to usurp the moisture from the land, the greenery dying and withering away in moments as it was cut off from its life source. They heated the air around the village and with this, created a dry dust bowl, kindling and fodder for their fire.

Their leader, the strongest of them all, was the only of them to possess igna. She was the monster that had set the night sky above Donshire ablaze. Igna exploded from her fingertips and danced wickedly across the small homes and humble barns. She spared not one man, woman, child or animal. If she could have located an ant whom called Donshire home, she would have stalked it back to it’s mound and drawn the entire colony from the earth with her terra flecting just to crush it in her hands and bear witness to the chaos the annihilation she brought upon the miniscule community had catalyzed. She was the terrible dragon back from the dead to exact pain and terror. The people of Donshire had been doomed the very moment they opened their arms to the stranger, but they had incurred her wrath because when the Sicari had arrived, the one they had been searching for, chasing, was no longer there. Maybe the anguished screams of “dragon” that lifted into the sky were really terrified wishes, for in horrifying reality, the leader of this group of multaflecturs was a scythe of death, near deranged from the torment suffered at the hands of her shockingly abominable master. She was a shade of evil darker than the ill regarded dragons. Unlike the beasts so feared who wielded similar power, she relished in watching her victims burn.

Chapter 1

16 Years Hence….