Ninth Haronizer Episode One: Anzhul

By Brett P. S.

Iidris saw a decade drenched in the blood of a war over a precious and non-renewable resource: Remnants. Last vestiges of a forgotten era, these stone fragments are endowed with cosmic functions. They fuel labor, transportation, medicine ... and war. This is the story of Rita, a mere byproduct of a worldwide arms race and the power of a Harmonizer that lurks within the spirit of one once human.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brett P. S.
• Release date: Feb 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463020531

Brett P. S.

Brett Sawyer (1986), born in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, is an indie author who writes short stories & novellas, from science fiction to heroes. He graduated from Eastern Illinois University in 2015 with a Bachelor’s in education and currently teaches game design at Lake Land College.Short Change arrived at retailers in November of 2014, the start of a hero series where ordinary people gained powers over oddly specific domains, following the story of a shorter than average hero who can telekinetically manipulate small units of currency.Short Change is free on “smashwords.com/profile/view/BrettPS” and Barnes & Noble along with other samples and short fiction.Brett’s popular releases in science fiction include “Dark Station” and “Tales from the Colony: An Interstellar Saga.” Dark Station is a deep space thriller set aboard an abandoned orbital science station where Ben Gebbley and his crew secretly investigate the disappearance of the original staff before others come to claim the lost assets.

Book preview

Table of Contents

TEN YEAR WAR

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

EPILOGUE

Ten Year War

Suffering Strife of Iidris

The continent of Iidris, the known world, has met the last ten years drenched in the blood of a bitter war over a precious and non-renewable resource ...

Remnants.

Last vestiges of a forgotten past and the echoes of a people too mighty to have merely eroded in time.  These stone fragments are endowed with cosmic functions, epitaphs that range in size from the smallest diamonds to grand stone-craft mobile fortresses.  remnants make life in the wastes bearable.  They fuel labor, transportation, medicine … and war.

remnants cannot be reproduced.  They cannot be synthesized and they can hardly be repaired.  remnants are dug from the wastes.  Countries excavate them by the masses in quarries that stick in the ground like a gaping wound, countries like the Solf Empire, a decadent reserve of patron nations from across Iidris.

Vast barren wastelands and dunes spread across most of the continent, leaving those with no stomach for The Wastes to seek shelter in the few places filled with green grass and flowing rivers.

The Solf Empire of the eastern dominance took its foothold in the valleys and mountains that cradled the wastes.  Green forevermore, a heart to dwell in its own lush power, cautious to venture forth into the emptiness and cold.  To the west lay the crimson kingdom of Muisan.  Rolling hills and steep plateaus lay covered in an eternal autumn.  Gold and rusty grasslands matched only by its mighty treetops and a breaking dawn.

This ten-year war was not the first time Muisan had shed blood against the steadily growing Empire.  The Kingdom had always proved a thorn in Solf’s side, but never a competent foe.  After continuous swings in a declining war effort that left Muisan’s people battered, starving and weary, the battles shifted in favor of Muisan.

Something happened in the battlefields of the wastes, something strange and ghastly dug from those quarries that gave Muisan’s might the upper hand in a war that should have ended five years ago with a broken people and a new addition to the Solf Empire.  Rumors circulated like propaganda and a new spirit of hope birthed from the blood soaked soil.

In Iidris, wars are not fought over Principle.  They are fought over quarries and mines, because it is in these grave sites that real power is obtained.  Fortunate are those with the military might to walk the wastes unhindered, to walk the rows of tombstones that litter the shadows of a once-dead world and pluck free those hearts of stone.

Prologue

Orphan Maker

Valsur, Northern Solf Empire

On the fifth year of the Great War, when their armies stormed Valsur …

Blood sullied a summer night’s air.  Sirens filled Rita’s ears with deafening dread and screams as soldiers fought off the advance troops.  Ballista cannons fired volleys of shocking power that lit the air ablaze as the streams traveled far into the misty clouds and the mountains beyond. 

Earth trembled and birds fell from the air to meet shallow graves as young Rita scampered through mud and static charges that raised the hair on her arms.  Remnants clashed beneath a bitter curtain of starlight that twinkled above her.  Gods gazed down onto the world below and did not care for the deaths of good men tonight. 

Tears flowed down her cheeks as she laid her hands on the brass handle of the chapel gates.  Her face, beet red and sore, twisted as she heaved to open the chapel.  A white marble temple in service to a god she never bothered to know and now a sanctuary into which Muisan dared not intrude.  They could raze the land asunder.  They could part the clouds.  They might fell a city, but they would not dare …

Rita pried the gates open and covered her mouth as wisps of foul odor exhumed from the depths of the chapel sanctum.  A putrid, fungal stench met her nose and she choked on her own vomit.  It spewed from her lips as she dropped to her knees. 

Blood trickled across the hardwood floors and pooled around her fingers.  Her head spun.  Her knees weakened.  Rita lifted her gaze, followed the trail of rubies.  It congealed in the mass of corpses in their pews, others strewn out across the floor.

A blackened silhouette loomed ahead of her, a figure clad in ebony coat and a