Read In Her Name: The First Empress: Book 01 - From Chaos Born for Free Online

T’ier-Kunai’s side, Ayan-Dar had reappeared at the entrance to the stables where the magtheps were kept. He saddled up one of the beasts and bridled two others as pack animals. This was a task normally appointed to acolytes, but all of them were free of their duties for this day as part of the celebrations. Ayan-Dar did not begrudge them their temporary freedom from toil, for he preferred to do such things himself, without the over-eager help of the well-intentioned younglings.  
    Next to the stables was one of the temple commissaries, and he took for himself bags of water and ale, packages of dried meat, a shelter, and a few other items that he thought might be useful. He was not sure yet where he was going or how long he would be away. The first part of his quest would be to find a place of quiet solitude where he could seek out the voice, to learn the location of this child among all who had been born that day. All he knew now was that the child, whom he believed to be female from the tone of her spiritual voice, had been born of Desh-Ka lineage. Most likely she was here on the continent of T’lar-Gol, but she could as easily be among the stars. The Bloodsong, as some called it, knew no bounds, was not constrained by any distance or laws of physical reality.
    Having strapped the various bundles to the snorting magtheps and tying off the reins of the pack animals to his saddle, he took one last look at the sky, which was now an ugly blood red as the eclipse ended.  
    With a quiet humph , Ayan-Dar mounted the lead animal and headed toward the winding path that led down from the plateau to the valley below.  
    After two days of easy riding, he arrived at a hilltop he had visited long ago. It was not a great mountain, and did not have a view of endless vistas. Its appeal for him lay not in such things, but in the ancient ruins that lay there. Among the withered granite bones of the buildings that had once formed a small village was a circular structure not unlike the Kal’ai-Il . Its true purpose he did not know, for there were no records of this place in the Books of Time, so ancient was it. Unlike most habitations from olden times, which had either been destroyed and rebuilt countless times, or obliterated from history forever, this place had somehow survived. The endless wars that swept over their world like waves of blood had always parted around this place, as if it possessed a secret magic all its own.
    Relieving the magtheps of their burdens and freeing them to graze, Ayan-Dar built a small fire at the center of the circular structure amid the shattered and eroded remains of the columns that had once surrounded it. He liked to think it was a temple to ancient gods in a time when his people still had gods in which to believe. But the only god his people worshipped now was war. It was the only god that could hope to survive in a crucible of endless bloodshed.
    With a mirthless smile, he knelt by the fire, holding his hand out to the warmth as night’s chill began to set in. His race was born and bred for war, and he would be the last one to say otherwise. Even the non-warrior castes were tailored for war in their own way, each of them occupying a niche in a system, an ecology, that had evolved over millennia to support the warrior caste. It was a perfect symbiosis of intelligent beings working in harmony in the ultimate endeavor.
    But the Way, the code that defined the system by which all but the honorless ones lived, was a closed loop. His race had stopped evolving in the cataclysmic First Age of their recorded history, four hundred thousand cycles ago. The Books of Time from that period were, not surprisingly, fragmentary, but the glimpses he himself had seen showed that very little had changed in all the ages since the first titanic upheavals of those ancient civilizations. For better or worse, they remained the children of their ancient forebears.
    In his heart, he wished for more. He felt his race could