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Chapter 1
The battle cry was thunderous, not unlike the howling, screeching, and stampeding of nether devils rising from the underworld through the fissures of the lithosphere.
Three figures led the charge, one of them a woman.
Her long, dark hair whipped with power, her aura lit up by the light of the mist-covered twin suns.
She soared in her metsai armour, tracking at high speed across the sky.
To her right was the flaming Drákon Queen, and to her left was her fiancé.
His eye caught hers, and he smiled through sharpened teeth.
She shivered.
Their engagement was to be made public after this expected victory.
Not that they’d be one, she thought.
The horns blew.
The Drákon army of Isato roared and flew forth into the fray.
Their enemy, the Sphinx army of Cygnus, met them with force.
A bank of gloomy, ominous clouds rolled over the scene, churning with the rage of a wild banshee.
The clashing multitude whipped through the devastating derecho, which ripped snow and rocks from the surface of the white world below.
Keeping pace with her consort and his mother, the lean woman with flashing diamond-flecked eyes summoned her blades.
They shimmered from their hidden sheaths on the spine of her armoured suit.
Their unseen profiles whirled through the air, and when she lifted her hands, their diaphanous, translucent forms materialised in her grasp.
She gripped their familiar hilts.
She’d sharpened and polished the whetted edges with such care. If she were to unleash them to the visible eye, their brilliance would summon the sun from behind the clouds.
For they were made of SHärd ether, folded, hammered, fired, quenched, and cooled five times over. In the pearl-like waters of The Seven Wonders of Shotel’s high mountain lakes.
The process urged them into their rarefied fifth-element form.
One believed to permeate all space, including the interstices between the particles of matter and light.
The SHärd short swords were also sentient, each with its unique essence to wield. One had anaesthetic properties to heal, and the other had solvent attributes to annihilate.
She ran her forefinger in both hands along the inset signature groove. It bore her name and a pledge beneath it - in Shotelai symbols. She hissed as the piercing edges slid through her skin.
The pain reassured her they’d complete her mission with the SHärd-like precision she’d refined all these years.
Wiping off the tiny spots of blood from the sharp edge onto her suit, she took in a hitched breath.
One oath, two blades, three tragedies, four slays, five fates.
Her whispered wish was less reverent than when she’d first uttered it many moons ago. Now, it was more resigned to fate and exhaustion.
After a span of anguish, this was the moment.
