There’s a demon in Praamis.
The Hunter leaned back against the over-stuffed seat and tried not to growl in frustration as the coach hit what felt like its thousandth rut in the last five minutes. The ten-day journey across the Windy Plains had been uneventful—a sort of boring that verged on frustration, given what awaited him both in Praamis and back home in Voramis.
He picked up the parchment in his lap and read it again, as he had so many times on this teeth-grindingly dull journey.
“As per your instructions, I’ve had my contacts in Praamis’ Hidden Circle keep an ear to the ground for anything that might indicate the presence of a demon in the city. I believe this fits the bill.”
The note was as concise as it was neat. Graeme, the fat alchemist who ran The Angry Goblin Bookstore in Voramis, tended toward brevity and wrote in a script that bordered on compulsive precision—a far cry from the typical chaos that reigned in his shop. The shelves of his hidden back room looked like they’d been decorated by a hurricane. Yet when it came to information, he was as methodical and organized as a priest of the Coin Counter’s Temple.
Which explained why the note came accompanied by more scraps of parchment, each describing the details of bodies that had turned up around the city of Praamis. Three corpses, two men and a woman. One of the men had his throat slashed, but the other two victims had been found with their heads encased in plaster, a strange symbol carved into their chests.
The Hunter held up the parchment that depicted the symbol: a crescent moon and star set in the middle of a circle with two right-angled lines connected.
Graeme had failed to identify it, though he’d reached out to all of his Hidden Circle contacts across the continent of Einan for information. That would take time, however, and the Hunter wasn’t the sort to wait around.
The Hunter might not understand the symbol, but he thought he recognized it, at least partially. He’d seen similar runes carved into the walls of the stone tunnels beneath Voramis, again in the twin temples of Kara-ket, and last in the lost city of Enarium. Serenii runes, the writing of the ancient race that the world believed had disappeared from existence thousands of years in the past.
He knew the truth of the Serenii, however. A truth that no one on Einan knew, that no books would tell, and few could believe.
Three years had passed since he stumbled into Enarium, bleeding and dying from an iron-poisoned wound. There in the Lost City, everything had changed for him. He had been reunited with his wife, Taiana, and learned he had a daughter. My daughter. Even three years later, the words still sounded strange in his mind. She was somewhere on Einan, wearing a face he’d never seen and bearing a name he might not know. Alive, he hoped, though he had no idea. Still had no idea, truth be told. Even after three long years, he was no closer to finding Jaia than the day he’d first learned she was alive and freed of the Serenii-built prison into which the Warmaster had condemned her.
Back in Enarium, he had also found out that the gods were nothing more than Serenii worshipped by ancient humans. The Serenii had sacrificed themselves to stop the Devourer of Worlds, a being of pure chaos that sought to destroy Einan and every other world in existence. The Hunter, like all the other Bucelarii, the offspring of the foul Abiarazi demons, had sworn to help the Serenii in their fight against the Devourer. After a mortal wound forced him to place Taiana in a Chamber of Sustenance to recover—slowly, over the course of decades, or perhaps centuries, even Kharna did not know—he alone remained alive to continue the battle.
To seal the rift against the Devourer of Worlds, the Serenii needed the magical energy that existed inside all living things. Captured humans had served as the primary source of power for thousands of years, until the Hunter freed them from their prison. Now, he sought the Abiarazi, for the demons’ life force was almost as powerful as the magic within the Serenii.
He’d vowed to Kharna that he would hunt down the rest of the demons around Einan. In Kara-ket, the Sage had had a map that depicted his Abiarazi agents in Praamis, Malandria, Drash, and countless other cities and kingdoms around Einan. However, the Hunter hadn’t found even the barest hint of a demon’s presence.
Abiarazi were vicious, bloodthirsty creatures, driven by an innate lust for battle and death. Yet they were also equally cunning, surviving for thousands of years among humans who feared and despised them. The Hunter hadn’t known of their existence until Father Reverentus had tried to hire him to kill the Demon of Voramis, hadn’t believed it until he came face to face with the First of the Bloody Hand. Only happenstance—some might call it fate, though he refused to lend that credence—had led his path to intersect with the demons in Voramis and Aghzaret.
The Hunter might have had more luck hunting down the demons around Einan had he left Voramis. Yet he’d felt his place was with Hailen and Evren. Three years was a mere drop in the ocean that was the millennia-long lifespan of a Bucelarii—or the Abiarazi he hunted. For the moment, the two youths needed him, just as he needed them. He had dedicated himself to preparing them to look out for themselves and survive in the harsh, unforgiving world in which they lived.
Together with Kiara, the four of them had lived a strangely quiet life—by his standards, at least. Outside of his daily training sessions with Evren and Kiara, his excitement had consisted of putting down the gangs that had tried to fill the vacuum left by the Bloody Hand’s extermination and rebuilding his network of eyes and ears in Voramis. Though his vow to Kharna never left his mind, he had stayed where he felt he was most needed.
Until now.
Graeme’s note had spurred him to once more take up his weapons in the defense of humankind and the eradication of his forefathers. The Hunter’s vendetta against the Abiarazi was as personal as it got. He’d seen them kill men, women, and children without hesitation.
He’d lost friends and loved ones to their cruelty. Where dead bodies and cruel murders abounded, he would always find the hand of a demon at work. He could not ignore the first concrete lead on an Abiarazi he’d gotten since the day he pursued the Sage up into the Illumina.
I’m coming for you, Demon. Wherever you are, whoever you are.
