The smell of rotting apples hung heavy in the air. It was a thick, cloying scent. It clung to the stone walls of the keep. It seeped into the wool of Sir Kaelen’s tunic. He stood in the courtyard. Rain pattered on the flagstones. Each drop was a small, cold hammer.
Kaelen was a man of few words. His hands were scarred. The skin was hard like leather. He had spent twenty years on the field. He...
The door was locked from the inside, a fact that Elias had noted with a calm, detached precision, as one notes the time on a clock or the barometer reading before a storm. He sat in the center of the small, windowless room, his hands resting on his knees, fingers interlaced, the skin dry and papery as old parchment. Across from him, in a chair that seemed to have been carved from the same dark,...
The air in the Grand Hall of the Sovereign’s Palace tasted of ozone and old dust, a metallic tang that coated the back of your throat and made the teeth ache with a subtle, persistent vibration. You stood at the center of the vast parquet floor, your hands trembling not from fear, but from the sheer, overwhelming pressure of the atmospheric shift that had sealed the room in a dome of silence....
The iron gate did not creak, a fact that unsettled Elias more than the wind howling off the moors could have ever managed. It stood open, a jagged mouth in the stone face of the keep, waiting to swallow the last of the King’s shield-bearers. Behind him, the rain hammered against the wet wool of his cloak, a rhythmic, percussive drumming that seemed to count down the seconds until the end. He...
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