Read Heirs of the Fallen: Book 04 - Wrath of the Fallen for Free Online

blessed nothing fell like a blanket over her mind....
     
     
    ~ ~ ~
     
     
    ....And now I’m here, unable to move, unable to think right, unable to help my dying sister .
    Belina blinked at the flood of tears filling her eyes. Not just for Nola, but also for Leitos, the young man she had envisioned so often while growing up, a man steeped in shadow and pain, a warrior of steel, a bringer of death. Where is he? He’s the key to everything. If —
    She refused to think about what could be. He was alive. He must be, or the world would fall at last to the Faceless One’s rule, and the age of humankind would perish.
    Where is he?
    The memory of the battle within the Throat threatened to overwhelm her anew, but this time she refused to let it. Why had any of them come to the Throat in the first place?
    “Help me!” Nola wailed.
    Someone else groaned in the other direction.
    Those voices were distant, as if from a dream. Belina struggled to remember why she had come to the Throat—
    A misty vision of Fauthians painted a dread picture in her mind. They were the race that had persecuted her people long years, at first convincing Yatoan women to breed with Mahk’lar, and later with Alon’mahk’lar. And from those unions came abominations of Creation—Belina’s eldest sister, Zera, being one of them.
    And then she remembered Adu’lin, tall and golden-skinned like all Fauthians, his fierce face long and angular, so like the carving above the entrance to the Throat of Balaam. The Fauthians had once been Yatoans, but the Faceless One had blessed them, changed them, and they became the cruel masters of their former kindred. Adu’lin ... he fled here, to the Faceless One, and we gave chase.
    Instead of calming her, remembering only made matters worse. In her visions of Leitos, he never destroyed the Faceless One here. But here, she always saw was his death.
    That thought momentarily cleared her mind, gave her purpose. Heart beating loudly in her ears, Belina reached for the weight on her legs, found a rough block of stone, and shoved against it. Rubble shifted, jagged edges dug into her shin. She gritted her teeth against a scream, and pushed harder. The weight rolled away, and there came a loud clatter of falling rock. With a little more painful work, she was able to crawl free.
    Trembling head to toe, weak, she came out atop a field of shattered stone dotted with crushed foliage and splintered tree trunks. She turned one way and another, stunned.
    Upslope, the forest had been leveled in a broad fan that originated at the base of a cliff. Where the blue light of the Throat of Balaam should have been, now there was a crooked little cleft scarcely wider and taller than a man. The graven face that had glared so sternly upon anyone who dared enter the domain of the Faceless One had been destroyed by whatever force had thrown Belina down the mountain.
    “Belina?” Nola cried. “Father? Please ... someone ... help me.” Gone was her usual ferocity. She had become a little girl, abandoned and hurting.
    Belina stumbled down off a strew of rubble, every step sending bolts of silvery pain through her limbs and chest. Her snug leggings and tunic had been shredded. Blood wept from the abraded skin beneath. She tried to grasp how they could have survived such absolute destruction, when she had seen others perish after suffering much less.
    When she was a girl, a man of her clan, Creytus, drunk on fermented melon juice, had been recounting a story of a boar hunt. Making a grand gesture, he tumbled off his perch and bumped his head against a rock. Everyone had laughed, Belina too, but Creytus didn’t get up. Damoc rushed to his side and rolled him over, revealing a small, bloodless bump on his temple. Creytus died, never to wake or finish his tale. Shaking fingers told Belina she had received worse wounds, yet she lived.
    “Help me,” Nola gasped, pulling Belina away from the memory.
    Cursing the fog filling her skull, Belina