When Ravens Call: The Fourth Book in the Small Gods Epic Fantasy Series (The Books of the Small Gods by Bruce Blake (ebook reader with highlight function TXT) 📕

It has been more important since the day I left the castle.

Teryk shifted, moving his hand to the right, fingers touching a hard surface. He snatched them back, worried whatever he'd encountered might be less than friendly, but no response to his touch came. Despising the tremor shaking his arm, he reached out again, cautious as he crossed the dark space.

His fingertips brushed it again, and he jerked away, but the distance of half a hand's breadth this time. With no reaction again, he moved back, traced the pads of his fingers along its shape until he recognized a boot's leather sole.

"Rilum!"

Teryk changed position, grasping the man's ankle to give him a shake, but he stopped as he sensed a presence near his own head. Had it been there before? If so, he hadn't realized it, but now he felt it with certainty, an energy pulsing and reaching out toward him.

At first, he sought to cower from it, to get as far from it as possible, but he doubted he'd find anywhere in the darkness to avoid it.

Instead of shying away, he reached his free hand up beside his head. His fingers met a cool flowing substance not quite fluid enough to be water, but which he knew to be black sand.

His contact with it lasted for the briefest of moments before the surrounding space changed. The blackness disappeared, replaced by bright light enveloping him. The mound fell out from beneath him, Rilum along with it, and the prince experienced a sensation of falling.

Not falling—floating.

For all he might guess, he dangled from unseen strands pulling him up and away from the world, air rushing around him as he rose. Teryk blinked hard to clear his sight but resisted the urge to rub a knuckle against each eye for fear of the precariousness of his position. The brightness soon dimmed; the light remained, but not enough to blind him. Blue surrounded him. It filled his peripheral vision, seeming to stretch on forever. He tilted his head back and found it above him as well but, in the distance, it darkened until it became black. He bent forward until his chin touched his chest, looked past his feet hanging in nothingness, and his breath caught in his throat.

At first, he didn't understand what he saw.

Most of it shimmered with a dark blue-green hue, large patches of green and brown breaking its consistency. Realization crept into him, and with it, fear.

He recognized the shape of the Windward Kingdom and the Leeward Kingdom, the Inland Sea separating them. He floated above the world, seeing it in a way no one had ever seen it. Its beauty might have taken his breath away if panic hadn't already done so.

A blue swath stretched between his home and the land across the sea, where he'd come to shore after the God of the Deep destroyed the Whalebone. The size of the new territory surprised him though he knew of no reason to think it small; he'd seen but a tiny sliver of the beach.

To his greater surprise, other landmasses dotted the ocean, a few so tiny as to appear no more than pinpricks from his vantage point, others larger than his homeland. In their fear of the God of the Deep, his people never strayed far enough from shore to discover the world was much more than they imagined.

How did we not realize?

He rose ever higher until the earth shrank to a blue, green, and brown disk surrounded by darkness on every side. The swaddling sky disappeared, replaced by inky blackness; the lone source of light shone from the glow of his world far below him. Teryk didn't want to stop looking, but a compulsion to turn his head—to view anything else to see—overwhelmed him. He wished he hadn't.

A man hung in the nothing beside him, a distance equivalent to the height of twenty men separating them. The stranger pivoted to face the prince, his visage appearing both full of rage and glee at the same time. A glow began around him, brightening until he plummeted earthward, a fiery tail streaking out behind.

The Small Gods are real.

And then Teryk fell, hurtling toward the world at a speed enough to prevent him from drawing breath into his lungs.

He closed his eyes and waited to die.

XIV  Danya - Vibrations

Despite the dirt track ending two sunrises past, Fellick guided the horses and wagon around obstacles and over hills. A few times, steeper grades necessitated they get out and pull on their harnesses, helping the animals. Not long before sunset on the second day, the trees grew nearer together, the trunks too tight to allow them passage.

Ive sighed and looked at his companion.

"No other path, Mr. Fellick?"

"Your eyes work as well as mine."

Despite the exhaustion and worry weighing on her, Danya fought back a grin at the stout man's comment. He didn't speak much but, when he did, he packed a huge dose of sarcasm into few words.

"What's your opinion on leaving the wagon behind?" Ive asked.

"You know how I feel. I don't give a tinker's damn about the cart, it's the wares I hate being unattended."

The tall man straightened in his seat, one hand held up to his forehead as he surveyed the area with an unhidden display of mockery. "Can't see many thieves hiding among the brush here, Mr. Fellick. Few others are so vain as to venture so near the Green."

"Vanity ain't why I'm here," Fellick grumbled as he lay the reins on the floorboards by his feet. He sighed and climbed out of his seat.

Why are we here?

The Seed of Life trembled beneath the princess' foot, its movement enough for her to notice, but not so much as to attract attention. Evalal's declaration of the woman who'd