Darkness Follows Dawn (Unfated, Book Three)

By Edward Cowan

The serial epic continues!

Who plays god in a godless world? Man? Or Fate?

The Mourning Dawn has risen, marking the coming of a new year—another grim anniversary of humanity’s schism into Unfated and Blessed factions. In both the Fateless Lands and the Blessed Realms, armies gather in preparation for a final confrontation. How will Sudden Aldreth and her little army of freedom fighters—or terrorists, depending on one’s beliefs—figure into the conflict? What is Trantz Nurayanan to do with his life now that he has failed to deliver Sumei to the Shrine of the Eternal Tree? And what has become of Sumei and Harker after their descent into the darkness beneath Damara? Find out in Unfated, Book 3: Darkness Follows Dawn.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edward Cowan
• Release date: Mar 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781945152023

Book preview

UNFATED

Book Three:

Darkness

Follows Dawn

•

Edward Cowan

Contents

Welcome Back to a Serial Epic

MAP: The Blessed Realms

MAP: The Fateless Lands

MAP: The Frontier

The Archivist’s Delight

1. The Pyre

2. Purpose

3. The Chimera

4. Shadows

5. The Runner

6. Friendly Daggers

7. That Which Abides

8. The Unknown

9. Among the Ruins

10. The Wrath of Fate

11. Vision

The Story Continues . . .

Glossary and Pronunciation Guide

About Edward Cowan

Acknowledgements

Copyright

Welcome Back to a Serial Epic

If you’re reading this, you already know what you’ve got here: a serial novel by the name of Unfated. (Unless you accidentally picked up this book before reading the first one. In which case I say: Back! Back with you! You should be feasting your eyes on Fate Decrees, Man Defies.)

Firstly, thanks for reading!

Secondly, just a friendly reminder that Unfated is a quarterly concern, meaning you’ll be seeing four new installments every year until this beast is finished. For news about the release dates of future episodes and everything else Unfated, visit www.edwardcowan.com.

Now let’s turn this back over to our dear friend, the Archivist.

The Archivist’s Delight

Yes—it’s me again. Your faithful Archivist, once more inflicting myself on this narrative before my due time.

I already violated all protocols by prefacing this transmission with a lament for my doom as its chronicler. I then interrupted it to wallow in a diatribe concerning your human bloodlust. As wild and reckless as a comet all asmolder in the emptiness of space, am I! . . . Just like you humans, blazing through the void as if on some set course, when we could each be snared at any moment by the pull of a greater power.

The illusion of purpose, perhaps?

—But no. No. That’s hardly fair to your species. And so I intrude here to balance my stated scorn with a delight I never expected to feel while chronicling your saga.

You elevate farce to epic, yes. You crave one another’s blood as the leaf craves sunlight, certainly. And yet you survive. Thrive, even. How?

Because you depend on one another, too. Brother will kill brother over the pettiest slight, but when backed against the proverbial wall of existence, he will just as quickly forge an alliance with his sworn enemy. Amid all that conflict and bloodshed and remorselessness, there is . . . hope.

And love? Love! The absurdity! You barely trust your own neighbor not to murder you in your sleep—yet you’re eager to hand your heart over to the first person who sweeps into your life with a smile or a wink or a smirk.

Why does this delight me? Well: for one thing, it makes for a better story. Beyond that not-inconsiderable detail, I treasure your species because, for all your warring and scheming, the greatest flaw—or miracle—of the human soul is how ready—no: desperate—you are to place your faith in each other.

. . . And how you are always surprised when that faith is betrayed.

But let’s have no more of my delight. Where were we in this tale? Ah, yes: the Mourning Dawn has risen over the world. A Blessed queen and an Unfated rogue have escaped a subterranean hell. That rogue’s sister (or is she his daughter?) has herself been crowned by an army of freedom fighters—or butchers, depending on one’s perspective. And a fallen warrior, having failed in his life’s purpose, must seek out a new mission.

We begin, however, with our rogue, Harker Aldreth. As you humans are fond of saying: He has some explaining to do . . .

1. The Pyre

He told her everything. She pulled no tricks, now, nothing to unravel Harker’s life thread by thread—unless he counted the way she curled up, half atop him, shivering with her wrappings puddled between them, her flesh hot against his patchwork scars. How she pushed her head between his shoulder and jaw, burrowing her face against his neck with her lips an inch from the hollow of his throat, panting smoldering breaths that froze before they reached his skin. How she lay, expectant, on that first night, and the way, when he knelt over her, she grasped his tunic and didn’t pull so much as offer to be pulled. How her breath quickened and her eyes lidded and her back arched—ever, ever so slightly—as he unwrapped her. How she trembled as his finger retraced the path of that silver raindrop from her forehead to her nose to her lips to her chin to her throat to her breasts—and further, circling her navel, and further still, until his hand forgot the game and clenched over her. How she gasped and shuddered, gripping him around the neck, by the collar, to pull him into her.

He knew all the gestures and postures and murmurs—Freelander women were equally adept at them—but with Sumei, each felt virgin and foreign and delectably wrong. He found the forbidden and thrust himself into it, and that abyss swallowed him so wholly he need never fear the judgment of those he had left behind. Nothing that came before mattered: he had died already, on that table. He knew it when he opened his eyes and saw her hovering over him. His Leashed angel. Now he hovered over her, returning no favors. He—took.

Scalding water poured over ice. Tempered steel quenched. His hand, frozen, sealing her warmth. As they fled the Mourns, the sky echoed them: Brightmoon faded back into a ghostly disk, its ashen sister appearing once more, while the Mourning Dawn grew, scouring the world with fire.

It began cold, though. The platform delivered them to the plateau’s surface as Brightmoon and the Dawn struggled for the heavens, a thousand stars witness to the battle. To them. He pinioned Sumei to him to imprison her reality, sure that, should he release her, he would find himself back in the depths, hacking mutely at that remorseless wall of stone—or worse, on the operating table, the Broken Men carving him with their tubes and saws and scalpels.

Not until the plateau shook, their hell rumbling lustfully for their return, did he come to. They watched Damara shudder and collapse, then raced the crumpling earth, their hell’s mouth well and truly desperate to engorge them. The plateau folded, gashing a canyon across the face of the Yellow Mourns. Only when they reached the ridge edging the plateau, where the mountains grimaced but stood firm, did he notice the Dawn and realize how long they had slaved in the tunnels beneath.

She dragged him back as he stared at the canyon, stunned at the gulf of unfeeling between him and Damara. He had searched for this, made it his own Broken quest, for half his life, near enough. Now that he’d found it, his life’s goal fell into oblivion, swallowing his ambitions as if they’d never existed. He examined that emptiness—his—rationally, dispassionately (Scientifically! chanted a Broken voice), until she put a hand on his cheek and made him face her, face the Dawn, and he forgot that vacuum—the nightmare—hell—himself.

He felt nothing. So he turned to her and felt for everything.

That night, after clambering down the ridge and finding a spring spurting brackish water, she lay beneath him, and he unwrapped her, trading words for her warmth. He spoke without thought or direction—for the first time, without a target. All his life, words had been as arrows in a quiver: finite, precious weapons in a wilderness run rampant with careless mouths, to be used sparingly and only for lethal effect. No longer.

He told her of his last dig at the ruins claimed by Ekumas Torcu, his obsessions finding enough common ground with the Iron Count’s for the two of them to forge an alliance barely stronger than their mutual contempt. He told her of Hayn Kensal and his black tears, of three earthen mounds and eleven unpenned goats. Of his search for Sudden.

—And further, to a time before Sudden. He told her of a mother as wasted and yielding as curdled milk, a father as rigid as a stone well aching to be filled with a credo that would guide him and his family unfailingly toward desolation. Of Harker’s thirteenth year, when Solemn left the farm to do battle at Daggerhilt, Harker’s older half-brother following their father. Of Solemn’s return from the battle having lost a son while finding that credo, that faith: Symmetry. Of Solemn’s orders never to speak of his missing son again. Of Solemn leaving again—mercifully—to join the Ten Thousand three years later. And of Sudden’s birth in his absence—always, inevitably, Harker’s tale wound back to Sudden.

I tried to escape her. All my life. But it wasn’t her I wanted to escape, not really. It was him. My father’s death freed me to find her. And when I did . . . For the first time in a life lived by the smirk, he found no twist of the lips fit to express what he left unspoken.

She then unraveled her life for his examination. Not that first night, or the second, but when he exhausted himself of words, she spoke of an orphan working as a scullery girl in Qutan’s stinking harbor slums. Of Sano Tanzin, her ascension, and the opulent blur of life as the Eternal-to-Be. She described that existence with the detached wonder of one recalling lost loves, failed loves, to a new love, as if examining why she ever believed any of the old ones, exposed as such hollow farces in the face of true love, would succeed.

"The scullery girl—she was half my life. More. But I remember her the way you’d remember a girl in a poem or a painting. I could sit in my palace and tell myself I saw them, my people struggling and suffering—your common folk. But I didn’t. I saw the scullery girl, and when I saw her, I saw a mirror." She murmured into his chest; he felt the vibration of her words as much as he heard them. "Tyona Saa. The Dream Somewhat Real. That’s what the Master of Tranquility calls life."

"My father called life Eagh-yoran. That means ‘Pissed-away.’"

In what language?

He claimed it was the one Malar Vasudris spoke when your ancestors drove mine over the Mourns. Whenever I spilled a bucket of milk or shirked my chores, he’d beat me and tell me all about it. The near-fondness of his laugh surprised Harker as much as Sumei. Pissed-away.

They wandered south and east, following the gurgling streams that spiderwebbed down from the mountains, leeching the Yellow of these Mourns to feed the Amber Sea. They ate what they found—roots, berries, grubs—when they could, but life beneath had Broken them of human comforts. In the Ideal world of the Master of Sciences, suffering was the norm, not the sudden, wrenching exception.

Each night grew warmer as Harker traced the raindrop memory down her body. He repented of ever having imagined Leashed love as efficient, passionless.

They lay gazing east, the Dawn’s blood burbling from the horizon. Without you, I’d be on the Isle of Contentment now, she said.

Without me?

"Without you. And your sister. And your father. It’s all one piece. Ujyari, remember? I am because we are."

He kissed her. Don’t say what you’re about to.

I won’t, but—

He kissed her again, and night fell, and that ended it. But she had twisted him around to Sudden—again—inescapably. He found himself telling her of the months after his father joined the Ten Thousand, leaving him and his mother alone to tend the farm.

She nodded and said it before he had to: The other one. Your highborn woman.

•

Balthanon’s crusade would surely keep Solemn away past the planting, possibly longer—hopefully forever. Stalwart Comel, then a young father with a dream of building a mill and the will to thrust that dream into reality, took pity on Harker’s mother, Penitence. For that, if nothing else, Solemn would have hated him. Stalwart found work for Harker in Ilthorn, odd chores to support Penitence—and win the goodwill of village folk who might then fund Stalwart’s mill. Soon Harker was spending four days in Ilthorn for every three at the farm. And there, down in the river valley, he met her.

It was first necessity, and then habit, that pinioned her name in