Asunder: A Gathering of Chaos by Cameron Hopkin (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

least part belch, wondering what kind of joke the man was telling. He hadn’t seemed like much of a jokester until now. “I, uh… huh. What do they look like?”

The warrior monk withdrew a small bundle of paper scraps from one of his many pockets and put a blank square on the table, stowing the others away. Then after a moment of searching he brought forth a nub of lead in a little wooden holder and began to sketch as he spoke. “There are many varieties, and none of us that follow the koda has discovered them all. Most have a humanoid shape. Some of their spies and sappers are as small as a child, but their fighters can reach three meters in height.” Kest raised his eyebrows, hoping he looked adequately impressed. That’s as tall as a goodly-sized bear up on its hind legs. It was all he could do not to roll his eyes. “Those are the most numerous and are cursedly hard to kill. They are intelligent – at least as cunning as we are – and entirely without empathy. Their skins are purple or black; so are their eyes, without any white, though they glow green in the dark. Bone spurs poke through their skin in many places. Some have horns. Many sharpen their teeth to frighten us. Others have teeth that are sharp already. They reason like humans but live only to kill.”

“That’s…” Kest squinted at the ceiling, trying to find the best way to say it. “That’s the biggest load of rhino dung I’ve ever heard. Wait, no. Bear shit. It’s stinkier.” He snorted derisively. “Purple monster people three meters tall! You couldn’t scare a toddler with that.” He rose to his feet and found himself a trifle unsteady. “You could have just said you weren’t going to tell me anything. It would have been less insulting.” He turned to leave and found the bench in his way. He was considering how to navigate the obstacle when Gamarron pushed the sketch over to him, his face still grave. Kest snatched it up.

It showed a monstrous, grotesque face. The man was a skilled artist. Is there anything he isn’t good at? Kest wanted to throw the paper in the fire, but he couldn’t look away. Curved horns like a ram’s topped the head, everything got worse from there. A huge, toothy maw split the face vertically from forehead to chin, and jagged teeth lined its edges. A long tongue thrust forth from the middle like a whip. The eyes, set too far apart because of that awful mouth, were shaded a pure black from corner to corner. It was deeply unsettling. Kest was sure he would see it in his dreams.

He was so intent on the drawing that he didn’t see what else Gamarron was holding until he handed it to him. It was a severed finger, old and desiccated. Kest took the thing without thinking and nearly dropped it once he realized what he held. He sat back onto the bench, stunned. The finger was shaped like a human’s, but it was not human. All of the joints were in the right place, and there was a dusting of soft hair across the uppermost finger joint that was nearly the same color as Kest’s. This artifact, though, was black as night both in skin and flesh. Even the bone poking from its end had a purplish cast to its ivory color. It was also longer than Kest’s entire hand. He held it in his palm, and it stretched from mid-wrist to beyond the tip of his middle finger, where it terminated in a thick, crystalline talon that looked capable of tearing flesh.

“That’s not real,” he quavered. He didn’t believe it even as the words left his mouth. “I can’t… I mean, demons? It’s ridiculous.” He dropped the gruesome thing to the table and pushed it back at Gamarron. “Put that away.” His hands were shaking, and his stomach felt queasy. He wiped his palms on his breeches.

“It is real, Kest.” Gamarron tucked it into a pocket. “I took the fingers off this one’s hand as it was trying to crush me with a hammer as tall as myself. I keep it as a reminder. I have many reminders.”

“This is impossible.”

“Is it really? What is a demon but just another animal that you’ve never seen before? Tell me, have you ever seen the carrier birds of the Sky Isles? The poison frogs of the eastern swamps? If you can think of a thing, then it has probably existed, whether here or in some other sphere. Why then should it be impossible that some of those creatures might have shapes not unlike our own? Minds not unlike our own? It is merely one more way in which Asunder surprises us.”

Kest threw up his hands. “All right, stop. Maybe there are demons. Fine. You fight them. Good job. Thanks. Maybe if we tell the governor here, they’ll throw you a party.”

The ghost of a smile flitted across the monk’s stern face. “Unlikely. Regardless, this is what I do. What my people do. It is a hard life, but those who live on the Black Isle are hard people. Fierce. And as I said, we have had great success in recent years. But something has changed. The demons have a new lord. He is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. He burns with heat from within, and his eyes glow red like coals. No one had ever heard of him until the demons began chanting his name when they came against us. Bakal. We didn’t know what it meant at first. And then, five months ago now… he came for us. He is powerful beyond measure. All our great warriors, our powerful men and cunning women – he fell on them in the night and slaughtered them without mercy. Things caught fire just from him standing nearby. We fought, but we might as well have been babes in the