Page 1 of Drawn into Oblivion

Chapter One

The day was hot and sticky, a testament to the fact that full summer was upon them. As the days grew long and lingering, everyone in the palace used every hour of sunlight efficiently. The halls and courtyards buzzed with activity—lectures on magic, combat drills, or a combination of the two, festival preparations, and wedding preparations. The complex practically overflowed with people, all walking somewhere, carrying something, or talking to someone else.

Mai stepped down from the covered walkway ringing the main courtyard of the inner palace, needing a break from the ruckus. The midday meal had left her feeling lethargic, and a walk through the palace grounds had helped. She had also taken the opportunity to speak with two women belonging to another of the thirteen major houses of the court regarding the upcoming festival. They were overseeing the building of a stage for performances and had reported excellent progress.

She was glad she hadn’t dawdled, though. A special combat demonstration she didn’t want to miss would soon be underway in the courtyard. Dozens of men had all gathered at the far end. Their deep voices resonated, some sober and others cheerful. Judging by their easy familiarity with each other, everyone liked everyone else and was glad of it. The empress and her young brother were also in attendance, albeit seated in a place of importance.

Rather than join them, Mai availed herself of the concealment offered by a pair of cherry trees at the opposite end of the courtyard and tried to stay as inconspicuous as possible while waiting for the sparring match to begin.

Even though she recoiled from the idea of standing with the men, despite the open space in full view of the empress, Mai marveled at seeing so many black-haired people together, and at how far they’d all come. Just three months ago, everything had been so different.

Demons had attacked human cities with a brutality not seen in anyone’s lifetime, ending the centuries-long reign of a class of humanity once praised for their utter lack of magical ability. In the blondies’ place, black-haired magic-users ruled once more. Leading them all was the empress and ordained champion of the Divine One. Shumei was the most powerful magic-user and the one who would end their war with the Damned One and his demons once and for all.

But the empress had once been like many of the black-haired people who now followed her: vilified for the color of her hair and thus her connection to magic. Up until recently, she had languished in a small, isolated village, supporting her family and herself on a meager living as an apothecary.

Then, on the cusp of major changes in her life, she had met Vallen, and her latent magic had emerged. With it came an end to the temporary truce between humanity and demons, one put in place when the blondies had seized power centuries before. Thankfully her magic had also sent out a powerful call known as the Pull of the Empress to all magic-users.

Mai had followed the Pull without hesitation or regret, leaving behind her village in Stillwood. She’d spent weeks looking for her empress and had been one of the first to find her living at a magically hidden estate, one from the days of the old court. Her hopes had been high—too high, she now realized. What had she expected after centuries had passed between one empress and the next? Certainly not just four people rather than the dozens or even hundreds of energized followers she’d hoped to find. Shumei had looked as uncertain and inexperienced as a child, and much to Mai’s shock, her young brother was a blondie. The two black-haired men, Vallen and Rosuke, had piqued her suspicions from the moment she’d laid eyes on them.

Betrayed by her expectations, Mai had lashed out and had demanded a duel with the empress. That she had been so impertinent still made Mai blush with shame, for not only had Shumei dodged or deflected every single attack, she’d also given Mai bruises that had lasted two weeks. Mai counted herself lucky that she’d narrowly escaped with no broken bones.

The evening of her first night at the hidden estate, Mai had shared dinner with the four of them while rebuffing the attention of the one named Rosuke and wondering with disbelief why her empress had become intimate with the one named Vallen. That the empress shared her bed with him had been obvious despite how little Vallen had spoken. The heated looks they’d shared had been more than enough of a hint.

She’d also learned Vallen and Rosuke had been original members of the old court, and that a curse placed on them before the court’s destruction had granted them immortality, which had carried them through three hundred years of blondie reign—something few people knew, even now. And only Shumei, Vallen, and Rosuke knew the exact details of the curse, for Shumei had cured it not long before Mai’s arrival.

Mai’s blush of shame deepened as she recalled the battle that night. Unbeknownst to her, she had led the enemy right to the empress, and they attacked when night fell. Shumei’s brother, Oka, had been confined to the house, but the four adults had stood against a hundred so-called “dog soldiers”—demons that looked nothing like dogs but sounded like them when howling their battle cry.

Leading them had been Empress Shumei’s equivalent under the Damned One. Majo, once human, had lived in the same village as Shumei. She had been like an intimidating older sister to Shumei, and the villagers had called her “the witch” behind her back. Majo’s thirst for power, her jealousy of Shumei’s destiny, and her hatred of the villagers had sent her spiraling into evil. As a powerful crow woman, she had been the ideal choice for the Damned One’s champion.

Majo and Shumei, compelled by their appointed roles as much as their own hearts, had to defeat one another. Whoever survived would be able to breach the boundary between the material plane and that of her enemy god—but only for a year. Within that amount of time, the victorious champion had to lead her army against her enemy god and destroy him.

The empress defeated Majo that night, earning the right to enter the Damned One’s plane and attempt to kill him, which would end the war between humans and demons. But gathering, training, and leading an army was far easier said than done. Moreover, no one knew much about the Foul’s One domain. Whatever the old court had known about Oblivion had largely been lost in the burning of its library.

All anyone living could say of Oblivion boiled down to folktales and rumor. Stories of unlucky persons wandering through mysterious gates, falling through planar rips, or being abducted by magic abounded, and all agreed that traveling to Oblivion changed a person forever. They supposedly lost a piece of themselves and gained something else, something they’d carry for the rest of their lives—assuming they came back at all.

Most challenging of all was formulating a strategy for assassinating the Damned One. The night Shumei had killed Majo, she had asked why no previous empress had ever succeeded. Majo had scoffed, “Defeating a God, Shumei? Only a champion of champions can accomplish such a thing.”

Before her death, Majo and the Damned One’s army of demons had wreaked utter havoc upon human cities. During blondie rule, priests had used barrier charms to keep the occasional demon out of cities and villages, which had only worked because of the priests’ mild magical abilities. But Majo had discovered a loophole in the wording of the prayers etched onto the charms, and had sent human-born demons to sabotage the barriers. Then, with nothing to hold them back, her demon army had razed every city and town they’d targeted.

Houfu, the largest city in the plains and considered the jewel of the nation, had been devastated. The brightly colored roofs of the homes that ringed the center of the city had been dulled with layers of ash. The large and imposing wall that surrounded the capital had collapsed in many places. The smell of burned wood and flesh and the fetid stench of decay had hung in the air, and the city had been disturbingly silent.

Most of the population had been slaughtered, including the blond king and his family. A substantial portion of the surrounding city had burned to the ground. Those sections untouched by fire were gruesome scenes of death.

With a hard swallow, Mai remembered the walk from the city gates to the palace at the center. The bodies of men, women, and children had lain rotting in the streets alongside one or two dead demons, with no one to cremate or bury them. The few survivors had been too frightened to come out of hiding.

Several women had been abused before their deaths, their dresses twisted up their bodies or completely torn away. The few children who hadn’t been eaten whole had instead been torn to pieces. Men had been brutally butchered, and the streets had been black with dried blood.

Despite the carnage, Houfu was where Empress Shumei had chosen to reestablish a new court. The enormous palace complex, consisting of fourteen halls, seven squares, five gates, and several hundred outbuildings, had been largely untouched by the invasion. Large sections of the palace’s outer walls had collapsed when demon forces had believed the royals were still within, but they had ceased their advance after the king had been killed fleeing the city. Mai assumed the demons had intended to leave the complex intact for the Damned One and his champion. Workers were now restoring and improving the damage to the outer walls, but they needed at least five more weeks to complete the repairs.

The palace grounds alone were three times larger than Mai’s hometown of Toubou, and the sheer size of them still amazed her. The surrounding city was even larger, and though many parts of it were charred and broken, the beauty and wealth of the capital shone through. Even the humblest homes had glass windows, colorful tile roofs, and bolts for their doors.

The complex’s largest building was the residential palace: several stories of slate-colored stacked roofs, matching dormers, and white stone-and-plaster walls. It housed the empress and her retinue, including the empress’s bodyguards, high-ranking military officers, and house elders. Mai lived in the east wing, her room adjacent to her fellow Spring elders’.

As for the nearly eight thousand black-haired followers who had answered the Pull of the Empress, some crows lived outside the complex, but much of the city’s housing was still in disrepair in the wake of the demon attack, so most had found temporary shelter in the numerous outbuildings of the palace complex while more of Houfu was restored, an enormous task.

The day their enormous caravan had arrived in devastated Houfu, the empress’s first priority had been performing a powerful spell reserved only for the Divine One’s champion. The spell had drained her, and she had slept in a near coma for several days, but the result had placed magical shells of protection over every major and minor city in the empire. Such a powerful spell would ensure that any populated areas demons hadn’t attacked would continue unmolested, at least until the new court could train and establish local protection.

Still awaiting the sparring match, Mai looked past the groupings of soldiers at Empress Shumei, who sat upon a thick cushion beneath the courtyard’s covered walkway. A headdress consisting of stiffened loops of silver-and-white silk braids adorned her long hair, which was artfully twisted away from her face. Her dress was a study in shades of blue, patterned with a flock of white birds flying about her in an upward spiral. She watched the soldiers with alert brown eyes, hands folded in her lap.