First 500: Sky Tracer by hayden Moore
WELCOME TO THE FIRST 500: Sky Tracer EDITION, WHERE WE AT VRAEYDA LITERARY SHARE THE FIRST 500 WORDS OF OUR PUBLISHED WORKS.
BELOW IS THE FIRST 500 WORDS OF Hayden Moore’s Dark Fantasy Novel Sky Tracer, CURRENTLY ON SALE AT THE VRAEYDA STORE AND WHEREVER NOVELS ARE SOLD.
What’s Beyond the Dark
It was the wind forcing her to look down, always looking down, at the gloom to come. Had she the strength to raise her head, she would have seen the cobalt sky and peerless sun that reigned. Mighty birds of prey played deadly games with murmurations, elegant in their multitudes, articulating emptiness, only to fall back into a cluster and remake, with fewer birds than before.
It was a beautiful game played for time-eternal, an ethereal dance of death, boundless, unlike the carriage tracing its predetermined course over the spore cloud. Muffled screams would have driven the Weir mad, but for her Whispers in the wind.
Just before the dark carriage left behind the blue, an errant gust blew the Weir’s skeletal face up. Windmills spun atop a world of branches, as daunting as mountaintops, where cloud ponds and Labyrinths and the tangled road loomed. The Weir’s black hair undulated like black waves in the wind, along her bound body and beyond her ruined feet. Wind found its way back down and her head followed, to witness the oncoming murk.
In the grim embrace of a windless realm, all settled into quiet. Her eyes grew pronounced in the darkness, while her Whispers to the cloud only made them shine brighter. Spores danced darkly in her gaze, wild and thoughtless, acquiring touches of crimson from the Weir’s unblinking eyes. Dew dappled her skin, thinly covering her bones, good for nothing but accepting ropes holding her body to the carriage’s foremast. Her bones resonated her Whispers and the spore cloud bulked at the magic.
Droplets sustained her as she Whispered on, yearning for death, while her spirit diminished, orbit after orbit, around the same old sun. Spores constituting the darkness were her source and her Voice was the only thing keeping the spore cloud over the Fungal Realm of Ümfalla. Through the tilt of the carriage, she was left staring upon the Sinel Hills.
Muffled screams reinvigorated the carriage, on in its arching way back down, down into the winds over The Churn. The Weir heaved at the screams, sending the vessel into manic bursts of speed. Her lips kept moving, in spite of her torment. Through grim magic, the spore cloud bulged through replenishment.
Her need to scream remained unrealized, a primal force contained, feeding her Whispers. The sea hissed at the carriage’s approach and the Eternal Storm claimed the horizon through swirling thunderheads. Balance was restored, just as it would be in the days to come, through an unchanging ritual. The only difference would be in the Names of the ones ferried back.
LIKE WHAT YOU SEE? Whose screams were muffled?
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