Crystal Eye 3: GEMMARKED SAGA

By Jazlyn Gambol

Strength gained through a pact with a spirit has been removed and now Aruzhan faces the law and the inevitable sickness. With her power merely a shadow of what it was, can Aru make it through enemy patrols, wilderness, and the trials of the grotto?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jazlyn Gambol
• Release date: Nov 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393550723

Jazlyn Gambol

Jazlyn Gambol is a former legal assistant and a self-proclaimed nerd with a penchant for D&D and renaissance fairs. With over a decade of indulging in D20 tabletops, pen, and paper Rpg’s, She is currently taking time out of the legal field to spend more time engaging in fantasy writing. Having a touch of morbid fantasy she enjoys writing about things other authors may shy away from.  Jazlyn grew up in the outskirts of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania living and working in and out of the city. She received her Political Science Pre-Law B.A. from Temple University with a good-enough GPA. After college saw her working as a paralegal at a small law firm which essentially saw her do lawyer work for assistant pay.  In her free time Jazlyn spent considerable time nerding out in bookstores and coffee shops until she learned about D&D and similar games. With this newfound understanding of nerdom she boldly strode out from her bookstores and coffee shops to places where DM's and dice rolls can be heard late into the night.

Book preview

Title Page

CRYSTAL EYE

Necromancer Book 3

GEMMARKED SAGA

––––––––

Jazlyn Gambol

Errant Gerund LLC

Copyright

Copyright © 2020 ErrantGerundLLC All rights reserved

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

ASIN- B08FH7WTBW

Cover design by: Book_design @ Fiverr.com

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

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Other Works By Jazlyn

Chapter One: Wet and Wonky

Chapter Two: Evasions and Effusions

Chapter Three: Unexpected and Unsure

Chapter Four: Fighting and Failure of Fortitude

About the Author

Review

Other Works By Jazlyn

Thanks for Reading

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Other works by Jazlyn

Chapter One:

Wet and Wonky

I remember feeling wet, like uncomfortably wet, the wetness one experiences when one knows they shouldn’t be wet. This is not a fun wet, this is a wet that gnaws at you through the deepest reaches of slumber. I remember voices, voices one hears when overwhelmed by fearful emotion or life threatening trauma. The voices were all yelling and screaming breaking through my cocoon of silence. These voices were loud and demanding but frustratingly unfathomable in their meaning. I also remember pain, not the sharp stabbing pain of a knife, but the dull throb of an ache washing over your body that comes from being in an uncomfortable position for too long.

Time is weird when you’re dead, if I was ever dead at all. You see there’s an in-between space that one occupies during specific instances of time. It’s a seemingly eternal place where unbirthed thoughts inhabit and play. This place is for those who have passed on, haven’t been born yet, or are dead temporarily. One cannot go there purposefully, but can end up there should a number of things happen. In this realm one waits without being able to think but able to view an unlimited number of ideas.  Imagine a waiting place for all thoughts, but thoughts unhinged from the mind. The best way to describe it is that this is a place where one goes when dreaming, but without access to a mind for rational thought. Upon arrival you essentially exit your body as a breath exhaled into the wind. Leaving the body you know you exist but are being pulled along and are becoming part of something so incomprehensibly vast it defies explanation. Without a mind to discern what you’re experiencing you continue to swirl around peacefully amidst the chaos, moving from one idea to the next. Whether it be fate or agency, eventually you coalesce back into a breath, and that breath is placed or returned to your or another body, then you are born, or wake up, or come into existence, or whatever your situation is. Why do some breath’s return to their original body and continue living while others are born anew, while still others move into death I haven’t a notion. If one does return to the world, they do so only to realize a faint familiarity, like a place you are revisiting after being away a long time. As time progresses, like a dream, the past experience is forgotten and you are left with a mind and body in a world devoid of all your past experiences. The knowledge of this place is overwhelmingly forgotten, save for a few. Those that can recall this time before life are generally born with the knowledge of having lived past lives with the ability to give explicit details about them. The purpose of this place while undeniable cannot be divined as the lesser gods don't know, while the elder gods say nothing. 

As I stated earlier I was being bothered by the feeling of a strange wetness, such to the extent that I could no longer ignore it. As I continued to wake up, the voices and faces I was seeing and hearing as well were strange too. 

Who were these people?

Why couldn’t I understand them? 

I was hearing conversations but why didn’t it make sense? Time felt as if it stopped for me, everything moved so slowly. As my eyes continued to adjust I noticed people looking at me, talking to me and doing things I couldn’t focus on. They moved so fast it was as if we were of different worlds forced together for some strange reason. Then blackness and wetness again before feeling myself cough and sputter. As my mind was not fully of this world I felt myself visiting and leaving this world a number of times staying a bit longer with each visit and becoming a bit more comfortable the longer I stayed. Then, at one finite point in time, like a joint being pushed back into place, everything came rushing back into alignment.

Gasping and sputtering at the latest bucket dumped on me I attempt to sit up. The best I could manage was a bit of shaking and a crazy-wide-eyed stare into blackness. I look around back and forth trying to understand where I was and how I got here.

Relax relax, heat stroke, you’ve got heat stroke.

Another bucket of cool water was dumped on me and I reacted by trying to scramble away. At least that’s what my brain was trying to tell my body, my body had other ideas and let out a gurgled unintelligible response. 

It would be a few hours before I regained enough control of my cognitive and physical functions to leave. The surrealness however would follow me for the next few days, despite my best attempts to return to normalcy. This situation wasn’t completely foreign to me though, as it was similar to when Kevah first gave me his gift. Imagine having an out of body experience where you are floating about a meter above and a meter behind your own body. You see what’s happening to you and you are trying to get yourself to move but there’s no real way to interact or to get your body to move. If you try and communicate with yourself it all comes out as a garbled mess.  Long story short, I had to relearn how to do a lot of basic functions. 

This time however, instead of feeling alone and cut off from emotions, I was overwhelmed. I felt weirdly indebted to those who were caring for me, how kind and wonderful they were. Who would go out of their way to care for me? Strangely I was also aggravated that they saw me in this state. 

It sucks being at the mercy of your emotions. 

Stumbling from the shack, and thanking the farm hands for taking care of me I wave and try to put some distance between myself and what had just transpired. It was even more embarrassing as I think some of them recognized me from working with them in prior seasons. While I was thankful they took care of me enough to dump some water on me and make sure I wasn’t dead, I felt so awkward and weird at being looked after.

Never