Read Keystone (Gatewalkers) for Free Online Page A

 
    Ah, well. Maybe she’d just clear out all those old saves, but that was for another day. Today was a new game.
    Charlie checked the waiting list and added herself to the queue for the room at the very far end of the hall, squeezing her time in right after her shift ended. Feeling a little guilty, she only marked in half an hour. She really shouldn’t linger any longer than that. It would fly by too quickly anyway.
    After that, the remains of her shift crawled along. Every time Charlie checked the time, only minutes had gone by, leaving an unimaginable gulf between herself and freedom. Waiting became pure torture, leaving her distracted and edgy. She felt like she had to go play now or she would burst.
    The moment her replacement arrived, Charlie swiped her card and clocked out. With her other hand she loaded the game on the data key. When it finished, she all but dashed down the hall, stripping off her name tag and stuffing it in her pocket alongside her pocket comp.
    ***
    Tom and Lallia exchanged a triumphant hand slap, as they had observed several of the humans do. As the woman opened the door on the hall, Tom quickly wove a new set of gate spells over the talisman in her hand, linking it to the Great Gate they had come through.  
    They had their hero.

CHAPTER TWO
    One-Winged Angel

    Legends claimed that Silverwyn Castle had been an elven outpost during the Nightmare Wars. Its defenders clung to life and clung to hope, a lone island in a land over swept by Ard Ri’s forces.
    After the Nightmare Wars ended, it was years before anyone could make their way into the unforgiving mountains to discover what became of Silverwyn’s final futile defenders.  
    Investigators found the castle intact, its gates barred, its walls unbreached despite evidence of long siege. They climbed the walls to find weapons dropped where the men had stood, arrows in their quivers, armor cast away. What they did not find were bodies.  
    Workers refused to rebuild, claiming the vanished defenders haunted its halls and a terrible, unnamed creature roamed its depths. They abandoned it. Forgotten by time.
    Forgotten no longer.
    The Blood Prince surveyed Silverwyn’s inner courtyard from what had once been the guard tower. Below him, the blue skinned terradi commanders ran their men through ruthless drills in the mud below. Green skinned orcs with jutting jaws and heavy muscles; nimble, crafty goblins; bloodthirsty terradi with their collections of rotting skulls hung from their belts. His army even boasted a growing community of vampires, a feat in itself for such solitary, territorial creatures. He had discovered that wearing masks relieved the vampires’ territorial urges to kill each other. He suspected that shielding the eyes – the conduit of vampiric mind magic – was the reason it worked.
    Silverwyn Castle was little more than hollow ruin when the Blood Prince discovered it. He organized the orcs and the goblins, bullied and rewarded them into cutting lumber, quarrying stone, repairing walls, and rebuilding floors. Now, they had forges for tools and weaponry. They had fields of crops, and something approaching a town, nestled on the mountainside below the castle where its elven predecessor had been so long ago. When his army began outgrowing their food supply, the Prince authorized raids on outlying villages, bringing back prisoners for blood sport to sharpen their skills and for the vampires to feed.
    All of this was his doing. He had taken a foraging rabble and made it into an army, all in less than ten years.
    His forces still slowly collected more from the mountains, the Black Forest, the Dead Marshes in the east, gleaning vampires from the streets of the cities and the caves of the countryside.  
    The Blood Prince felt a surge of euphoria that was not entirely his own, followed by a wash of fatigue. “Stop that,” he snapped, tightening down the shields over his mind against the intrusion of the Mara’s wispy mental