Rats of Ruin

By Linsey Duncan

Rust and Bright are rat children; human-animal hybrids created by too much exposure to magic in utero. Like all their kind, they have grown up isolated from the farms and villages and cities of normal human life. Like all their kind, their existence is tenuous. A single stroke of a pen from a king or queen and they may no longer be able to count on the sanctuaries they're currently reliant on. Hated and feared, their lives must necessarily be small.

But it only takes one disaster to start an adventure (or end it!).

Loosely based on the level one experience of many, many tabletop and video games, Rats of Ruin is a novella that combines humor and drama to describe the growth of a couple of misfits as they engage with the world and, just as often, run away from it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Linsey Duncan
• Release date: Nov 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310143236

Book preview

Rats of Ruin

by Linsey Duncan

Text copyright © 2015 Linsey Duncan

All Rights Reserved

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter One

It’s an old joke among humans that rats will inherit the earth if the ants don’t get it first. It’s a joke because the ants already have the world. Go outside, lift up a flagstone. Ants. To actually see rats, you’ve got to be somewhere dirty or abandoned. You have to be lucky. But that doesn’t mean rats aren’t everywhere.

That everywhere was why people like Rust existed. See, Rust was a mistake. Because of her and others like her, Skarsh had a new law: don’t do magic around pregnant women. Rust should’ve been a normal girl, but she was born half-rat. Had the face and the claws and the tail and everything. Mum didn’t keep her. She couldn’t have. Head druid told Rust her mum died having her, that she was fished from the birthing bed by her father and dropped into the first cart heading toward Druid Cradle to the far east, waiting safe and high-walled on a seaside cliff, a home for freaks.

The druids themselves were just druids, but all of their charges were spliced with something not-right, but something commonplace. Druid Cradle didn’t house dragon kids or phoenix kids. It housed cockroach kids and cat kids and dog kids, all of them with some kind of magic snap-snapping through their veins. Rust had the worst kind, so she hadn’t tried to harness it too much. As in, she hadn’t tried to use it at all. Even if she cast some little spell like lighting a candle, chances were the whole room’d be on fire in seconds. If she cast a spell to make someone agree with her, they’d follow her around for days.

So Rust was hoping to live out her life reading books and staying out of everyone’s way.

But the universe wasn’t going to let her get away with that.

Now, the druids were already looking at Rust sideways after she started flooding basements when she just wanted to wash out some spilled mead (she didn’t spill it, that was all Bright). But then Rust started magicking in her sleep. Sending gales through the abbey halls, giving everyone sweaty nightmares. She didn’t even remember what she’d been dreaming about. They fed her herbs, had her swallow down something dubiously wrapped in cheesecloth, locked her in the basement, mumbled all sorts of beast-calming spells. Beast-binding spells, too! But even after Rust was drugged incoherent and couldn’t so much as twitch her toes, she was still doing magic in her sleep.

After a week of this, it wasn’t a surprise for the head druid to unbind her, tell her regretfully she had to leave. That night. He’d accompany her out a little ways and then let her loose in the woods. He told Rust she couldn’t so much as sneeze in the direction of civilization if she wanted to live, but no one was going to put her down for something that wasn’t her fault. No, all rumors aside, most adoptees just went free. Just like this.

Head druid let Rust into the store room to fill a knapsack’s worth of food. Rust needed to borrow the Brooch of Breathing Easy just to walk in without puking. The basement was one thing. Rats don’t drink mead or eat brooms, usually, but they do eat cheese and grain and all of that, so the store room was laced with enough horrible warding spells to make any vermin run howling into the sea rather than chance even a nibble at a side of beef. Rust wasn’t alone in being half-vermin. Far from it. So those nasty wards had the additional purpose of keeping the Cradle adoptees and live-ins from stuffing themselves freely. Rust had dreamed of the store room. She could smell it from any corner of the basement. She could smell it from halfway up the stairs. And Bright couldn’t ever shut up about it.

And now she was here. The food scents itched inside her nose, begging attention. Rust stayed in the doorway a moment. It wasn’t quite the giant walk-in closet of goodies she’d imagined, but nothing could live up to that. It was big enough to shelter several gigantic cheeses, baskets of beef jerky and fruit jerky, potatoes and onions and rolls and . . .

Perched on the largest of the cheeses, with a hunk of cheddar poised in its right paw, was a rat. A big rat. Cat-sized. Its legs hung casually off the edge of the cheese, its left paw braced behind it. It watched Rust in the doorway with hard, beady eyes.

What? asked Rust to the universe, because that was all she could do.

Hey kid, the rat answered instead. Unless the universe was answering through the rat. And how