Eagle: Fell Lords, #1

By Vladimir Duran

Before the Blood Ocean and the Fall that came after, the Harrower Knights, the Deathwings, ruled the sky. Sent on a grave mission in the midst of a desperate battle, one Knight will find her moment. With the fate of her legion and a city hanging in the balance will she be able to seize it? In an age of Heroes, how do you rise to the top? You do what no one else can do. 

Excerpt 

Wings of Harrowers sketched the rough sphere as they desperately fought for their lives. Fought for victory. Demons by the score flew in clots like locusts, smashing into the darting V’s of fire. Sometimes the V’s pulled out, sometimes not. Huge arms of the sooty black stains pulled out of the surface of the battle and arced back into it with crushing force. There was a shadow moving through the sphere. Like a worm in an apple, ripples of fleeing V’s followed wherever it went. 

Victory it had to be. If they failed, this army’s next attack would fall on Avalon. That could not be allowed to happen. The other legions were pinned down in another theater or war and the regular army in Avalon was still licking their wounds from their last battle. They could not hold against this force. 

Summoning the visor of her armor back up her green eyes disappeared behind an expressionless mask. The plates that formed it slid over her face to form a smooth only slightly curved surface, broken only by the crimson lenses of her eyes. Readouts from the battle appeared at the edges of her vision. Aided by the augmenters on her belt, Lore drew deeply on the Reigh and her hair caught fire. Pulling her bow from one of the tesseract pockets in her belt. Silvered and knife-edged at the ends it had no bowstring until she drew the invisible line to her cheek. The Harrower felt the tug on her mind as the string came into being. A bowstring of the mind, an arrow of will, her first instructor in the wizard bow had said to her. 

“Draw.” She commanded over the orator and her wing drew with her. Harrowers needed no command to fight. They had their bows out before she spoke. Concentrating beyond the silvery bow marked with birds she focused her will to destroy. An arrow of crimson light flared into existence between her fingers. 

“Release,” She commanded and let go. With it flew all her determination that these things should die and be no more. Ten other arrows of crimson light flew after it. Lore focused harder and her arrow multiplied, becoming two, then three, then four. Before slamming into the back of a clot of flying demons she had made a full dozen. Combined with her wing, more than a hundred arrows tore that clot from their sky. A cloud of ash was all they left behind. 

But there were thousands of such clots and destroying one was no great accomplishment. Taking pot shots was not the reason her Fell Lord had sent her wing to breach the surface of the battle. They had a specific mission and it waited for them below. Theirs was the happy task of pulling the worm out of the apple.

• Language: English
• Publisher: A Rising Knight Publishing
• Release date: Jul 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781301889617

Book preview

Fell Lords: Eagle

By Vladimir Duran

This is a work of fiction. All Characters and events portrayed in this anthology are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

EAGLE

Copyright © 2013 by Ignacio Vladimir Duran

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

Before the Blood Ocean and the Fall that came after, the Harrower Knights, the Deathwings, ruled the sky. Sent on a grave mission in the midst of a desperate battle, one Knight will find her moment. With the fate of her legion and a city hanging in the balance will she be able to seize it? In an age of Heroes how do you rise to the top? You do what no one else can do.

Eagle

-Everyone finds their moment.

May 2nd 1:17pm (Local Time) – 20,000 years before the Blood Ocean and the Fall of the Knights.

-127 degrees Fahrenheit. At a height of fifty miles above sea level, there is almost no air and little protection against electromagnetic and ultraviolet radiation in the earth’s Mesosphere. Occasionally noctilucent clouds form near the poles and sometimes lightning bolts called sprites crack miles above where thunder clouds form. Waves of air will form like tidal mountains in the troposphere and stratosphere below and rise from a depth of miles, carrying energy and power into the Mesosphere far above. It is a too cold, too clear, too bright world. Far below humans have only just begun to migrate over the land bridge into North America via the Bering plain. They will speak of the lights in the sky this night for millennia. The earth’s last ice age grips the world tight in one last great squeeze before it’ll begin to relax its hold.

First there were waves of flame like those that race away from an oncoming storm at sea. Fast and huge, all power and fury forming a shell of death around the battle. Waves shot through with veins carved from amethyst lightning.

But then Lore broke through the shell. Laid before her was the entire majesty of the heavens. Stars by the billions spun above her, glittering like painfully bright points of fire on the blackest velvet cloth. Above the cloud and ozone layer there was nothing between her and the cold flame of the stars. She and her wing were on the night side of the world today and a huge crescent moon watched over them all. Even the chatter of the orator in her ear seemed to die away and leave her in blessed silence.

Shooting straight up like missiles from the battle below, her wing flew at top speed. They streaked up almost until they hit the wall of the Mesopause and broke into the thermosphere beyond. That was their border, as far as they could go before the spells keeping them alive where they should not be failed. Up there they would need new spells. Like an artfully choreographed dance the two arms of her V shaped wing spun around her in spiral. Ten men and women, Harrower Knights,* her command, followed her movements. She was their leader, their Razor.* Wings* carved of crimson flame trailed behind each of them like bloody capes and from their hair like crests.

At the top of their flight she slowed to a stop, leveled and spun as she flipped backward. Lore dropped her armor’s* face shield as she went. Holding her breath and feeling the sting of cold on her face was a small price to pay for the sight. She wanted to see the battle with her own eyes not the readouts in her visor. Her long black hair was held tight, pulled away from her face by a tight intricate braid. Its fire was extinguished as she throttled back on how much Reigh* she drew through her golden belt.* Lore Waveblade's hunter green eyes were steady and calm, warmed by the joy of flight no matter the reason. Her lithe body was graceful even sheathed in black armor that looked like it was made of a thousand large and small plates. Graceful as she turned away from the stars and pointed herself at the battle. Below, the world was a roiling ball of orange, black strained flame. Through cracks in the shell she could see where they stood.

Monstrous shapes filled the sphere of battle. Contorted blasphemies of people, animals, plants and all manner of foul thing. Damned by giving in to fear, demonic forms were cages forged by individual nightmares. The fiends were prisoners and prison in one.

The entire third legion, a full thousand Deathwings* had been sent to intercept a hundred times their number of demons. Not a one of the demons down there was below level four. The Twisted had better scouting and better leadership this time around. What had been intended as an ambush had turned into a burning hell fifty miles above the earth’s frozen surface.

Wings of Harrowers sketched the rough sphere as they desperately fought for their lives.