Nightvision Midnight Sands

By C. H. Knyght

A prince without an elemental partner. A princess with untamed power. Their world is dying. In this second exhilarating book of shapeshifters and magic, Dante and Nakai search for the key to stopping Prince Kobrona as the taint of his death magic spreads, infecting the wild magic of the Mother. Dante faces new doubts. Nakai discovers new fears. Torn apart, they fight to survive in a labyrinth of tunnels filled with danger and betrayal. Vital knowledge lies at their fingertips, if only they can reach it, but time is running out.The hour of Communion draws near. If you adore Amelia Atwater-Rhodes or Mercedes Lackey, then read Midnight Sands NOW!

• Language: English
• Publisher: C. H. Knyght
• Release date: Feb 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463096802

C. H. Knyght

C. H. Knyght lives in Minnesota next door to her family with her critters: two dogs, a cat, and a horse. Her library takes up most of her home with eleven bookshelves and counting. (She dreads ever moving for this reason.) When she’s not writing, she’s drawing.Magic is what you choose to create of it.

Book preview

Nightvision Trilogy

Book Two

Nightvision

Midnight Sands

A Novel of the Mother’s Realm

C. H. Knyght

Nightvision Midnight Sands- C. H. Knyght

© 2019 C. H.

www.chknyght.com

All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

First Edition, 2019

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN: 9781795235891

Imprint: Independently published

Cover art and design by INKmagine and Create Studio

Edited by C. Halverson, Michelle Dunbar, and Aaron Fernandez

To Mom, my foundation

Prologue

Pasha

Pasha lunged to block the blade swinging toward the defenseless woman’s upraised arm. His arthritic joints, stiff from sleep, protested, but he caught the sword blow on his scimitar, redirecting it while the woman scrambled away. The force of the attack jarred his bones. Black bruises marred his thin skin. He was too old for battle.

No, this wasn’t a battle—it was a slaughter. His people, the Rattleon, were dying around him. He wheezed. Out-of-shape muscles throughout his body throbbed from the strain of sudden violent use.

A couple of nights ago, his chevaliers had caught and contained intruders in his home, a strange and stupid attempt; the intruders didn't get far. They refused to speak, even after he broke the silence rune. He had written it off as the actions of a few, to be mentioned at council during Communion. The sheer audacity of a full-frontal attack from the Kobrona family was senseless. Pasha couldn’t wrap his mind around it.

What was there to gain?

Trapped in reflexive reaction—parry and attack, attack and parry—he didn’t have time to dwell on the whys of Prince Kobrona’s actions while his people lay slaughtered.

Soldiers kicked open the doors to the adobe homes along the street and stormed inside. One stood in the street shouting orders. He wore golden plate armor with the Kobrona crest embellished in black on his chest. Pasha thrust his wide, curved blade at the soldier, puncturing through the metal armor and into his flesh, twisting the scimitar as he withdrew. A gaping hole opened in the man’s side. The soldier sagged to his knees. Putrid waste spilled from his intestines, oozing out of his belly between his clutching fingers. Even the death magic painted on his skin couldn’t keep the man on his feet after such a wound. Reflexively, Pasha’s tongue flickered out to gather the scents in the air; he gagged, knowing the odors would not wash out of his mouth anytime soon. He didn’t linger over the dying man. His people needed him.

This attack was an atrocity, an affront to the Mother cradling their world in her roots. Violently shed blood flowed onto the red earth, darkening it like the first drops of rain from a thunderstorm. Darkness would rise from this day. Pasha remembered the tales his Grand’Mère told an enraptured nest of him and his many siblings. Tales of when the Hearts had been seeded into the earth. Tales about a voracious void contained by the Mother. Pasha wished it hadn’t been during his reign, putting his family in danger, or that it had happened when he was younger and stronger.

Straps on his hastily tied sandal flapped about his ankle as he fought through the melee. Kobrona’s first wave of soldiers had marched into Sunari at dawn’s light. Pasha had been bathing when alarm bells rang.

With eyes as blank as a doll’s, a wolf shifter rushed him with a weak growl, hefting a stave, the poor man’s weapon. Mismatched pieces of ill-fitting leather armor left openings any amateur could see. Pasha’s loose shoe flew off as he made a spin that took him inside the attacking soldier’s guard. As he moved in close enough to read the markings, Pasha noted a different set of runes painted across this soldier’s face—control and obedience. He grunted and fell as Pasha drove his shoulder into his sternum.

Having only one sandal threw him off balance. Pasha slid the tip of his blade through the leather straps and cut the other free. He preferred having direct contact with the earth and his elemental, Rasp, who swooped in and out of the ground, dragging soldiers into the ground and leaving them to suffocate in their burial.

Mother forgive me.

If he could reach the catalyst, Prince Kobrona, maybe it would end here and now.

There.

Dominating the market square, the unfolded walls of a large wagon spread to the ground, forming ramps leading to the wagon-bed stage. There, the prince stood above the chaos like a vulture watching the carnage. Defeated Elkians stood hitched to the wagon. The heads of the once-proud shifters hung low, their hunched backs marred by d

ozens of whip lashes.

Blood dripped from Prince Kobrona’s hair and coated his face in a nightmarish mask. Sitting at his feet was a smoke-filled crystal. Fractures spiderwebbed the stone’s surface under macabre streaks of blood.

Two soldiers threw a struggling youth onto the wagon and punched the back of his knees, forcing him to kneel. The boy yelped and half-shifted in their grasp. A black-edged diamond pattern of scales traced down his spine to the tip of his tail. Lunging, the naga sank his fangs into one of the soldier’s cheeks. The venom that would have come from the youth’s uncontrolled bite should have dropped the soldier in crippling pain, but the runes on his face flared with magic. The soldier merely clamped a hand on the boy’s neck and pried him off.

Reflexively, Pasha sidestepped a fleeing mother with three babes desperately clamped in her embrace. Tears poured over her pale cheeks. Pasha cut off the soldier on her heels, slicing him from shoulder to hip with a blindside attack. He spun back around to check on the boy.

Kobrona fisted the youth’s hair, exposing his naked throat. Pasha yelled. Freshly spilled blood gushed beneath Kobrona’s blade, pouring over the crystal. The spider web of fractures grew into a fissure, threatening to split the crystal in half. The youth fell limp except for the final twitches of dying muscles. After the flow of blood slowed to a drip and the crystal soaked in its fill, Kobrona tossed the boy’s body over the side to land on a pile of corpses—Pasha’s people.

Near-berserker rage fueled Pasha’s strikes. If he couldn’t kill, he maimed. These soldiers wouldn’t fight again today, no matter the death magic spurring them onward. His four chevaliers fought their way back to his side. With their aid, he cleaved through the outer ring of Kobrona’s guards. Sunari surged to his summons as he reached for the Heart’s magic. It wasn’t enough. He wanted no trace left of Kobrona, not even a smear of ash. Pasha would erase him with everything in his power. Holding the Heart’s magic, he came to the ley lines, carelessly drawing on the wild magic faster than his elemental could tame its fire. His channels burned as though lava poured through his veins. It didn’t matter. If it stopped this madness, the pain was worth it. If it didn’t, he would rejoin the Mother this day, and it would no longer matter.

Rasp glowed molten with ley magic, feeding the wild force to Pasha semi-tamed. Weaving the power into runes, Pasha scribed them in the air where they hung, glowing like hot coals. One, two, three runes, until he made a chain a dozen long. His chevaliers circled, battling Kobrona’s soldiers. Another chain of runes, then a complete spell glyph hung suspended, a working the likes of which few alive had the knowledge or strength to wield.

Behind him, a child screamed.

Amara!

The cry was followed by the desperate shouts of young Faar trying to herd his younger siblings and cousins to safety. Why were his grandchildren out here?

Fear socked him in the chest. Pasha yelled at his chevaliers, Go, get them out of here!

His Second, Third, and Fourth Chevaliers broke away. Shifting into the slender forms of rattlesnakes, they slithered between the soldiers’ legs, slipping through their lunging grasps like grains of sand.

His First moved to stand at his back, a physical shield—his partner, his lover. He wanted to order Chakra to go, too, but the order would be disregarded and futile. His life-mate was stubborn like that. Chakra shifted, taking on the dyre form of the naga. A long, copper-scaled tail looped around Pasha, an armored shield of muscle. The rattle on the end shivered with menace, daring the soldiers to advance. The paired scimitars of Chakra’s soul-wield clashed in a furious rhythm. Chakra was a brutal fighter when stirred.

Pasha scribed another layer of runes over the growing spell glyph. The ley magic singed his fingers with every stroke. Arrows hissed past, shaking his concentration. His grasp on the magic faltered. A half-dome of sand arched up to catch them. His elemental, Rasp, took over shielding him as Chakra lunged at the archers.

They were losing. Heartbeats passed as he wrote the runes. He couldn’t rush; one wrong line and the glyph would implode. His people were falling in droves, and the spell was the only tactic he had left to employ.

Chakra yelled, surrounded by soldiers. Arrows pierced the dome of sand as Rasp spread it thin to cover him from all angles. One pierced through, cutting into Pasha’s shoulder. Planting his feet against the pain, he held firm to the magic and kept writing. He hissed as Chakra’s furious yells turned to screams of pain.

Then, a handful of wolves leaped into the fray, fangs flashing in the morning sunlight. The wolves fought Kobrona’s army with the frenzy of revenge-driven fury. One red-furred wolf, though limping, rushed Kobrona directly. Her lips folded in a snarl, baring gleaming fangs as she leaped onto the wagon. She wore the harness of a range wolf, a protector of her home forest, Ookamimori, well out of her territory. Pasha was grateful for her presence and aid in protecting his. Another wolf, with a mangled ear and a grizzled muzzle of silver, slunk in from the opposite side, beelining for the crystal as Kobrona turned to fight off the other.

Pasha’s swollen knuckles ached as he forced his twisted fingers to write out another chain of runes.

The male wolf shifted to dyre form to lift the watermelon-sized crystal. As soon as the wolf’s clawed hands touched the crystal, Kobrona stopped playing. With a flick of his sword, he slit the red wolf open from jaw to shoulder. The white of her jawbone gleamed wetly beneath the gaping, flayed muscle, and blood streamed from the severed artery in her neck. She was dead before Kobrona turned to fend off the silvered dyre wolf. Pasha locked his jaw; there was nothing he could do except use the time they were buying him. Four powerful nagas, Prince Kobrona’s chevaliers, converged on the wagon. The wolf slashed with long claws and was rebuffed by the nagas’ shimmering obsidian scales. Outnumbered and surrounded, the dyre wolf was overwhelmed and pushed away from Kobrona into the main fray.

Almost done.

The abrupt arrival of the wolves had given Pasha time to finish. Atop his platform, Kobrona grabbed the nearest man, one of his own soldiers, and slit his throat. Blood gushed over the crystal, spilling over Kobrona’s bare feet. The fissure in the smoky gem split, and a wisp of shadow trickled out, rising to eddy through the air like a miasma.

Pasha scribed the final rune. Slashing his hand without care, he planted his palm in the center of the glyph. The working flared with blinding magic. Pasha funneled ley and Heart magic into the glyph. He screamed from the agony of his channels melting.

A beam of light, aimed at the deranged prince, shot from the glyph like a thousand sunbeams. Consumed by the magic, Rasp’s lithe, serpentine form fused into glass. Pasha sagged to his knees as a shared piece of his soul was torn from the roots. Without the elemental holding it in place, Rasp’s shielding dome shattered as a spear struck it. Pasha moaned.

Kobrona raised his arms to shield against the beam of light. Triumph filled Pasha. Not even ash would remain. He had done it, the grave cost worth it. His people hadn’t died unavenged.

The dark miasma rose up, shielding Kobrona and swallowing the light. It exploded, redirecting the magic outward in a hail of shards.

Chakra’s bronze arms wrapped around Pasha as copper scales enveloped his entire body, a coiled, bodily shield from Kobrona’s counterstrike. Chakra died, riddled with a thousand holes. The snap of the chevalier bond stung, but the severing of the life-mate bond shredded Pasha’s heart. Loosening from their fierce defense, Chakra’s iron-hard coils fell limp, lifeless.

Pasha wailed. First Rasp, and now Chakra, his beloved. He bent forward until his forehead ground into the red earth. Tears mingled with the pooling blood, some of it his own. He was dying.

Thank the Mother.

He wouldn’t live to witness and suffer more of this. His broken soul screamed. Pasha barely felt his other three chevaliers succumbing to death as the threads of magic connecting them snapped. Blood roared in his ears as the din of battle died, sound fading away.

A cold shadow fell over him. Pasha shivered. The point of a sword lifted his chin. Kobrona glared down at him through eyes like black pits. Chattel, you’ve deprived me of your blood, wasted the power within your bag of flesh. Kobrona’s forked tongue flickered out to taste the air. You would have been of great use to me.

Pasha gurgled a laugh. Hot blood spattered down his chin. "Then, at least I have accomplished something against this atrocity.

You will not use me to release the void.

Chapter 1

Dante

The shadows refused to fade before the swing of Dante’s sword, no matter how desperately he slashed through the air. A chill crept into his bare feet from the stone floor as he fought through drills trained into him since he was a boy, trying to burn out the fear and frustration of doing nothing when he needed to be doing everything, or at least something.

Duty and honor clashed with a cruel enemy and implacable time with  him pinioned in between.

He’d believed he and his family would be safe here, in Kuroyuki with the Lupinic, and hoped King Marius would know how to stop the bloodbath and that he could let someone else shoulder the weight of stopping Prince Kobrona. Naïve of him. As prince, his family depended on him to protect them. It would take all the families together to stop Prince Kobrona’s madness.

Dante whipped through a sequence, making his still-tender knee protest. The bite from the helcat had left a new knot of scar tissue to plague him when it rained. He wished it had been the worst of the wounds taken; it’d been the least. Raiven, Raphael, Alexion—each member of his pack had been progressively injured in comparison. With the shelter of the ice lands between them and Kobrona, they should’ve been safe. The pride of helcats did more damage than Kobrona’s enhanced soldiers, putting half of his people under the healers’ care. Everything was wrong, and he still didn’t know how to fix any of it.

Poised, katana gleaming in the firelight, Dante sucked in a deep breath, trying to calm his racing pulse before pulling back into a starting position to begin again. The deserted training room seemed hollow without the bustle of people. Unable to sleep, he’d begun early. Only the stoic weapon racks, standing along the walls, witnessed his battle against his own inadequacies. The swords, staves, and axes didn’t care for his struggles in the slightest.

The old, wrinkled apple of a Fardreamer took absurd delight in tearing their brief hope of sanctuary apart. According to her visions, they couldn’t stay here—not if they wanted to stop Prince Kobrona. The visions hadn’t been clear about their exact destination: a lost place of knowledge. How was that supposed to help them? Another trek like the last might break his pack’s spirit.

Alexion’s toes barely wiggled upon command after the spinal injury inflicted by the helcat elementals. He might never walk again. It depended on the healers and his Fourth Chevalier’s strength. His Second, Raphael, continued in his mute compliance to Dante’s orders while on a liquid diet as his intestines healed. Fuming and hurt, he gave Dante the shortest responses possible.

Sweat beaded on Dante’s skin as he lunged across the room, parrying at flickering shadows cast by the bowls of fire that lit and heated the room. He whirled to lash at an unseen opponent. Each blow fell weak and unsteady, even against the empty air. Without the anchoring magic of Ookamimori’s Heart, he wavered untethered, as though he’d left something behind when he stepped across the border of his lands.

Damn Kobrona for this torment. Damn the seer for forcing them to leave this respite. They were to search for a long-buried place, for an undefined, long-forgotten thing. This wasn’t the answer to war. They needed to rally the families, make them understand that Kobrona threatened them all.

Dante’s knee gave out mid-motion, throbbing and swollen from the strain. Dropping to the floor, Dante bowed his head in defeat. Sweat dripped down his nose to darken the stone like fallen tears.

Be strong, young prince.

Dante started. His fingers tightened on his katana, then relaxed as he spotted the speaker. The events of the last couple weeks had left him jumpy; his recurring nightmares made him twitchy from a lack of sleep.

Standing in the entrance was the woman Keer kept blushing over. It is not for you to break yet, the younger Fardreamer said. The beads decorating her ankle-length hair jangled softly as she tilted her head to listen. A red scarf hid her ruined eyes, the price taken by the Mother for her gift of sight.

Bitter laughter lodged in his throat. Sealing his lips, Dante refused to let it burst free.

The journey ahead of you is long, with trials untold. I’ve Dreamed glimpses of it all. The Mother has much for you to overcome.

It never helped to attack the messenger. It never made the problem disappear. I… He searched for inoffensive words, failed, and lied through his teeth. I appreciate your insight. Thank you.

Her laughter sang around the room. No, you do not, and perhaps you never will. However, I have done my part. I have Dreamed, as the Mother has asked of me. The blind seeress dipped forward in a graceful bow. Might I suggest freshening up? You will be summoned by King Marius shortly.

You’ve seen this as well?

She laughed again. No, he asked me to deliver the message as I was coming this way. She left, her laughter tinkling through the hall, chiming with the numerous beads in her cascade of hair.

Dante didn’t know whether to smile or yell. He found the Fardreamers frustrating beyond measure, but in the Mother’s sense of balance, they had it worse. They had to make sense of their Dreams.

He didn’t run into any of his chevaliers between the training room, freshening up, and the throne room. He could have summoned them, but with health and moods as tenuous as they were, he let them be. With his face tingling from a thorough scrubbing, Dante strode alone into the great hall, holding his head high past the morning court of nobles. He refused to skitter in with his tail dragging like a scolded cub. His boots thumped over the slate floor. The whole castle was built out of the gray stone; it would have been gloomy, but the woven tapestries and furs hanging on the walls brightened the dim color. The low ceiling trapped the heat, keeping the room temperate no matter the weather outside.

As he feared, Queen Anora sat on the dais beside her husband. Her ochre-yellow gaze pierced through him. Even in the warm light from the fire-bowls lining the middle of the hall, her hair gleamed as white as snow.

Ah, he arrives at last, the queen’s wintry voice cracked over the hall, drawing King Marius’s attention.

Young Dante! Feeling stronger today, I hope? Good to see you up and about! King Marius radiated jolly welcome. His whole face crinkled behind his beard when he smiled.

Dante dipped his head in respect. Though they were both heads of their families, he was the guest here.

Ach, none of that, my boy. We are cousins, are we not? Family! No need for all those courtly behaviors. The queen’s eyes narrowed, but she didn’t interrupt King Marius. Come, come, I hear my Fardreamers have grand plans for you.

The small clusters of nobles scattered about the hall quieted as they halted their conversations and pricked their gossip-filled ears.

Nodding, Dante kept a neutral expression. Yes, King Lupinic, they’ve said that we must continue our journey in hopes of defeating the Kobrona. I’m not certain what we are searching for. Possibly a reason for his madness.

Anyone who wielded death magic had to be mad. To choose the path Prince Kobrona walked was unfathomable. He slaughtered the very people he was supposed to protect. If the serpent prince hadn’t been insane when he started, he was now. The Heart of the Kobrona lands would’ve echoed the terror