Inside the Vault, at 10 a.m., in a room with no windows, with three large men seated on the floor playing cards, a young, slender man with long-blonde hair and deep blue eyes sat cross-legged on the single bed in his cell.“That… Fucking… Bastard.”==========Like a storm from nowhere on a bright morning, the catastrophe hit the world. Within twenty-four hours, Salvena was overrun with visitors and guests alike, from businessmen and women to government officials, from news people to geologists.There was no room in any hotel. Every restaurant was either fully booked or fully reserved.A mad frenzy hit the noble’s city, and all of Ashrone felt the shockwave.In Jergens Capital, the staff had not gone home the day before.Trades were being made in Ashrone and overseas, calls were being put out, stopped, or redirected. No one left their desks except to use the washroom, and even at that, they were back in minutes.But it was not f

He had vomited violently after that.He rushed into a stall and slammed the door shut. Unlike The Tower, the bathrooms in Jergens Capital were not so eclectic. Anyone could come in at anytime and see him at the sink. But in the stall, there was privacy. The doors closed completely, no space between the walls or the doors, and the floor.There, he heaved into the toilet bowl as tears he did not know he had, for a man he did not know, fell.His body trembled from head to toe, and he could not hear anything. His ears were blocked to all sound, both within and outside himself.He had done what Tally had asked him not to do, and it felt like a hundred bats with their fluttering wings, and screeches were hitting his mind, but the shadow within was keeping them out.He wanted to reach out to his mentor, Amika, but he suddenly felt like that would harm the mage at that very moment.He held on, focusing on clearing his vision, which was cloudy. To st

Most warlocks used dark magic. But only because of the lives they were forced to live by ‘others’ who sought their blood and bones for their own ends.They were easy to recognize, and it was difficult for them to hide.Things simply happened around them. They could cause hail and floods. They could heal and kill with less effort than it would take an ordinary mage to recite a warding spell. They were marked as harbingers of disasters.There was no way Amika would admit to being such a thing so easily.Tyler swallowed. There was another question in his mouth, but he did not dare voice it. Instead, his mind threw it up, but he blocked it from reaching the man at his side.Did he serve the blue-eyed King mead?! Was he a servant of that man's?! Amika? A servant? Then what is that man? Who is he? What… Who… Am I dreaming about?!“My Lord.”Tyler’s eyes snapped back to the large mage.“Patience… Is a virtue.”“I have

“We have no bullet wounds, no knife or other sharp-edged weapons’ markings. Except for the single explosive, there is nothing that shows regular people were involved in this incident.”“There’s also no evidence of hand-to-hand combat,” the man who had been speaking earlier chimed in.The Baron nodded at him. “So that rules out human-based magic, and implies mages or their ilk.”“This body,” he pointed at one of the seven corpses, “has absolutely no blood in it. Zero. Unless we are dealing with vampires,” the group laughed quietly, their eyes on their leader. “Then he was probably very close to that vehicle.” The Baron tapped the single car on the road with far too many dents and cracks in its bodywork.“We all know that average citizens do not use mages and rarely make deals with magic or gem users. It’s simply too expensive,” he continued, waving a slender hand in front of his face as he shook his head.“Nobles, however, have mages attached to the

The young man gazed around, like a visitor in a showroom, a light smile on his face, his eyes drinking in the environment with childlike pleasure.As the group watched the tall, robust man, who was turning his head about, looking at the stones in the ground, on the wall, and in the ceiling, many present shifted on their feet.For some, it was irritation, for others impatience. At first.As he drew closer, for most, it became something else.From floor to ceiling, the lights swelled as the man moved. The stones pulsed, as if they were greeting him. The smile looked like an acknowledgement to them, on his part.Without any action, without any word, the council members, half the same age as Henry Kramer, the other half older than him, felt a presence, an aura from the man who entered the cave.He, like everyone present, was dressed in a long robe that covered from neck to toes, with large billowy sleeves that reached the wrist. With his almost