SIGNED – Awakener (Darkblade #6)

The Hunter dreamed of darkness.

Amidst a sea of golden grass and rolling hills stood a tower of the deepest midnight black. Its surface shone with the light of a thousand thousand shimmering stars, at once bright yet devouring all light around it.

Serpentine threads of green and violet entwined around its base and oozed into the ground, turned the lands around it barren, consumed earth and rock and creatures with a rot no living thing could withstand. All in its environs turned to ash and dust and decay. Life extinguished by an insatiable hunger and darkness both fell and unnamable.

For within lurked evil. Boundless, eternally ravenous, like the great maw of a creature as immense as Einan itself. The force of its desire emanated outward with such force it set the shimmering black walls throbbing. Pulsing with the steady rhythm that might have been not one, but two vast heartbeats.

Ukuhlushwa Okungapheli.

The name rang in his mind, shivered down his spine, pierced him to the marrow. He could not tear his gaze away, could not retreat. For it held him fast, dragged him ever closer.

Ukuhlushwa Okungapheli.

It called to him, too. Whispered in his mind, seeped into his thoughts, filled his head with incomprehensible pleas, demands, and entreaties. The twin heartbeats called to him with a voice that resonated to the core of his being. To his very soul. Inexorable, insistent, ever-shifting between subtle invitations and incessant commands.

He ached to do its bidding. Recoiled from the voices. Sought to hear them clearer. Fought to keep them out of his mind. An inner war raged, the essence of his being torn in half.

Ukuhlushwa Okungapheli.

It wanted him. Needed him.

“Hssht!” A sharp hiss pierced the Hunter’s mind, and an elbow dug into his side.

The Hunter’s eyes snapped open, instantly awake and alert. His hand dropped to the weapons on his belt, ready to draw Soulhunger or the Sword of Nasnaz at the first sign of danger. Only to stop upon recognizing the woman hovering in the darkness before him.

Kiara’s dark eyes shone with a glint of excitement so bright it rivaled the stars sparkling in the heavens above. A smile split her face from ear to ear, and she radiated the eager energy of anticipation.

“It’s here!” she hissed, though her voice was barely audible above the deafening roar of falling water.

The Hunter’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”

Kiara nodded, every muscle in her lithe, well-formed body quivering with elation. She jerked a thumb over her right shoulder. “Look!”

The Hunter rose from where he’d been reclining against the stone wall of the narrow trail they’d used to descend from the top of Zamani Falls. He hadn’t intended to fall asleep, but the last weeks of restless nights, plagued by torrid dreams, had taken a toll on him. Kiara’s pronouncement, however, banished any lingering trace of slumber. He had to see it for himself.

Kiara didn’t go far. On her hands and knees, she crawled across the narrow trail and settled onto her belly overlooking the basin into which the thunderous Zamani Falls emptied. The roar of hammering water grew louder as the Hunter peered over the trail’s edge. His eyes traced the seven cascades rising a full five hundred paces into the air, followed the water plunging from the clifftop into the deep pool that it had carved out of the rocky earth over thousands of years.

And there he saw it. First, he spotted the single glow of its lone eye. A deep blood-red, darker than the light that emanated from Soulhunger’s gemstone, yet emanating from an immense orb as large as his torso. Though he could not hear it over the cacophony of the waterfalls, he had no trouble imagining the metallic clinking and clacking of the thousands of coppery scales that stretched along the length of its body.

The Hunter watched in dumbfounded amazement as the creature slithered forth from the depths of the waterfalls’ pool. Coil after coil of gleaming reddish-gold thicker than he was tall, propelled by muscles so immense they were said to have cut the Inyoni River out of the earth to carve a path fifty paces wide and a hundred leagues long.

Keeper’s teeth! Icy feet danced down the Hunter’s spine, and his mouth went suddenly dry. He slid a hand to Soulhunger’s hilt; the solid metal came as scant comfort, for he knew even the Sword of Nasnaz would fare poorly against such an immense creature.

Kiara turned toward him, her face aglow with an exuberance that bordered on childlike wonder. “Indombe!”