That’s right, this will be the last; my new epic fantasy We Gather is slated to release early next week. I hope you’re as thrilled as I am!
I’ve introduced you to some of my characters and traveled with you to a handful of places in the empire and beyond. But heroes don’t just sit around being pretty and stories aren’t about the setting where they take place. The world can never be as interesting as the actions of the people inhabiting it.
So, for this final post, I thought I would give you a snippet of the actual story. Enjoy!
from We Gather, by M.C. Burnell
He opened his mouth, and whatever he had meant to say was driven clean out of his head: the building shuddered as if it had been struck a solid hit from a trebuchet. He had been bringing his fork to his mouth and dropped it, spraying raisins and cut-up bits of pear across the tabletop. Everyone in the room had exclaimed, the people on their feet staggering, but there was a moment of stillness afterward in which he had time to tell himself he had imagined it. His eyes had fixed on his sloshing cup of tea, and the next shake spooked an oath from him. This was different, seeming to come from the ground underneath, undulating up and down like the solid hill was a wave. He distinctly heard a sound of crumbling masonry in the near distance, and people screaming.
He hadn’t known they got earthquakes in this part of the empire, it was a phenomenon he associated with the region along the northern coast, but he had wasted enough time being surprised. He didn’t want to be at the top of a stone tower during an earthquake, but he didn’t want to be in this building at all. Two birds, one catastrophe.
Shoving back from the table while everyone else was still stumbling around being afraid, he snatched up his chair and threw it at the guards. It didn’t hurt anyone but gave him the opening to get in and grab someone’s sword. It was heavier than his blades, the grip too short and sitting strangely in his hand. Nothing like so sharp as his, but it didn’t need to be.
He stabbed the man whose sword it was in the thigh, cut the other man across the prominent bulge in his belly. It would be criminal to pass up this opportunity, and while they were preoccupied with the shock of their injuries, he took the time to plunge his stolen blade into the side of the Satray’s neck. Whether or not he made good his escape, the man had become a problem that needed to be addressed.
Then he ran past the soldiers by the door, darting between their halfhearted grabs and not turning back to finish it as he remembered the pitying way they had looked at him when they were the ones with the upper hand. He scampered down the spiral stair as fast as he dared, the insipid slippers sliding about treacherously on his feet until he was forced to stop and kick them off. He made it back into the main building of the fortress without encountering anyone, where he paused at a window to gape.
He could spot the thick columns of dark grey smoke denoting burning buildings from all sides. It was terrible, but natural, that earthquakes should start fires: lit lamps tipped onto piles of documents, burning logs tumbled out of fireplaces. He was rather more preoccupied with what he couldn’t see, which was the city’s wall.
He was on a height, the highest height nearby. The entire quadrant of the city’s fringe that he could see from his lofty perch ended raggedly in rubble and fleeing citizens, without that ominous red bulwark anywhere visible. As he took off trotting down the hall, he shook his head, puzzled by this. A city wall was a stable structure, its purpose was to hold, and the shape was basically a solid pile of stone or bricks, quite thick: it should have been the absolute last thing to fall down.
After that first concussion, the event seemed to have moved on, and all he was feeling now was the tremor of distant shocks. They pulsed as steadily as his heart, shaking other districts of the city, causing further calamitous shattering of masonry. The screams were omnipresent, and there were so many fires that the smoke was starting to darken the sky.
He came around a corner and found himself confronting a handful of guards. These felt considerably less ambivalent about raising a hand to the blood of the emperor than the last ones. Roaring as if he was the cause of all of this, they charged at him.
He struck aside a blow from the first man, kicked him in the gut, cut the next man backhand across the upper arm, kicked him in the hip so he stumbled into the wall. Sidestepped a blow meant to skewer him from the third, grabbed that man’s arm, stabbed him in the abdomen and took the sword from his hand. A weapon in both fists, he cut the man he’d knocked into the wall across the neck even as he turned around, batted the last man’s attack high with a strike to his sword’s underside, and ran him through with the opposite hand.
In that confused way the body had, this deadly expenditure of energy seemed to invigorate him, and he trotted away from the dead or dying guards feeling better than he had in days. He found a stairway leading down around the next corner, a cluster of slaves huddled together upon its steps as if arguing. They turned to watch him come, eyes wide.
As he went past, he told them, “It looks like the entire southeast section of wall went down, there will never be a better time to run for it.” He didn’t stick around to find out whether they took his advice, hanging a left in the corridor where the stair had deposited him.
Through a door, and he pulled up short. He hadn’t thought to wonder what became of Habera; he had simply assumed she was gone, off to complain to her father about the prize the Satray dared to take from her. He hadn’t realized she, too, was a prisoner, but there she stood, hair disheveled, looking wild and beautiful as she used the slender column of a tall brass candelabra to fend off the guards who appeared to be trying to recapture her.
He wasn’t sure what made him do it; he knew it was the wrong decision even as he ran forward. By then, he was already driving his left-hand sword into the lower back of one of the men menacing her. He spun away and slashed the other with both blades across the face. Habera let the stand-lamp droop in her grasp but didn’t relinquish it. “That’s that heart of yours, Sathriel. I told you it’s a liability.”
He couldn’t spare the wit for bantering. “Put that down.”
“No thank you.”
“I’m not trying to take your weapon, dear friend, I want to give you better ones.”
She hesitated only for a heartbeat. Then she righted the lamp and set it on its circular base. Stooping, he snatched up a couple of swords, holding the pair he was using in one hand while he passed the new ones over to her.
“You know I don’t know what to do with these.”
He took off jogging again, and she fell in at his side. “Do you know not to stab yourself? If the answer is yes, you’re already safer than you were not holding them.”
“I suppose.”
“And mine? Back at your house?”
“Probably.”
“Along with my boys?”
“To the best of my knowledge. They weren’t dragged out of the house alongside us, and I don’t know why my people would hurt them without orders.”
They seemed to be approaching the front of the building, the rooms they passed growing ever more lavish and impersonal. They came around a final corner into an atrium and found themselves facing a dozen guards in Manulmanar’s colors. Sathriel slowed as his eyes sought for routes of escape, but the men didn’t even notice them: they had arrived in time to watch the huge doors unbarred, and then the guards were spilling down the steps, fleeing as if something was pursuing them.
He found this briefly startling; it seemed unlikely they had already heard their master was dead, and what of his heir? Even servants who didn’t love the person they served weren’t usually so ready to abandon their posts, the consequences could be severe. Then they reached the open doors and stopped in unison, all other thoughts forgotten.
Twilight had arrived upon Manulmanar, although it couldn’t be an hour after dawn, and it was an evening in which it seemed the sun might never rise again. Fires lit the underside of clouds that were low and dark, composed as much of smoke as fog. Screams echoed off this low ceiling, and the concussion of shaking ground and shattering stone was ongoing, until it felt as if this might well be the end of the world.
“What in all the world-and-sky?” the woman at his side murmured.
“I have never seen anything like,” he said, feeling as if it was an especially stupid thing to say. No one had seen anything like, it was the apocalypse.
“‘The children screamed and the women wailed and the men fell to their knees,’” Habera quoted, “‘as the city of Op disintegrated before the anger of Tisirat.’”
Feeling as if he had been punched in the gut, he finished for her, “‘And the emperor said: you rebelled against my will, let the flames rise and the stones of your houses separate one from the next until there is nothing built by your pride left.’”
“Never knew what that might look like ‘til now.” Her tone was wry, but Sathriel couldn’t share her clinical interest in this catastrophe. She had mentioned the fate of Op offhandedly, she didn’t know how right she was. But Sathriel knew what was happening now, and so he knew that it was happening for him. There weren’t earthquakes in this part of the world, but there was something else here, Habera had brought it within the walls herself.
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