Page 113 of An Empress of Earth & Darkness

The youngest Stryker nodded, and the rest of the clan did as instructed.

Emara noted a glance from Breighly to Artem, and she couldn’t decide if the wolf liked the idea of them being left alone or not.

It didn’t matter.Artem kneeled on the ground beside the door to the underground tomb and lifted the hatch. Everyone took a step back, and Emara was thrilled when nothing popped out. Torches threw out some light, and it cast shadows on their faces. Artem found their gaze again. “Be careful, you two. You just so happen to be my favourite people. I need you both back alive.”

Torin said nothing as he stepped onto the first step. Emara rested a hand on Artem’s shoulder as an acknowledgment of his kind words, and he gave out a sigh. Before Emara and Torin disappeared down the stairway, she threw a glance over her shoulder at her remaining two guards to let them know that she would be safe with Torin—her husband. She needed them to protect one another, no matter what. She had no idea what awaited her at the bottom of the stairs.

It was eerily quiet at the back entrance to the temple’s library, and there were still no guards in sight. They had been so very careful as they moved through the temple, waiting for something terrible to finally show itself.

He wasn’t just going to assume that it was the work of the Dark Army, because in times past, it had been his own faction or the witches that had meddled with the darkness. Regardless of who was behind this, good blood had been spilled here. Years of service to this place by the people who maintained these grounds had ended in horrible deaths.

The Dark God had seemed to work his influence through every faction lately. It had been the humans at the uplift, then his corruption had spread through the witches, and then the son of a bitch had turned Gideon’s own faction into traitors. They had sided with the Dark God so that their hearts would never stop beating. It had cut his soul into pieces as he took them down, one after another, in the Amethyst Palace to show that the Dark God had lied.

Veles was never going to protect them.

Torin had taken care of most of them, shattering their disloyal dreams of immorality with the swords that were always strapped across his back. They had folded like a stack of cards under his wrath, and they had not risen despite the deals they had made. Death had been the only thing they had been promised that day. Gideon had both envied and admired Torin as he watched him brutalise his brethren without blinking an eye. He made it look so easy. He made it look like he didn’t even think about what he was doing as he ended their lives to protect Emara. And Gideon often wondered if Torin suffered from the same night terrors he did. The screams, the swirling black portal that led to the abyss of the underworld, the destruction, the blood, Emara’s choking, his brother begging the Supreme not to kill her but to take him…

“Over here,” shouted Sybil, pulling Gideon away from the nightmare of his memories. She was in a corner of the tremendous library.

His team had split up around the library, and as he heard the fear in Sybil’s voice, he knew it had been a mistake to leave her with someone else.

Gideon, Kellen, and Marcus ran over, meeting from all different sections of the space to find the tiny earth witch leaning over a body. Her hands were on his chest, and she was already pressing healing magic into his heart. But he was grey and frozen in a time before now. He was certainly not alive. She whispered something to the Gods, and her eyes closed. Her small hands shook, already covered in blood. Sybil couldn’t mend what lay bleeding under his robes, and that would shatter her.

Gideon wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her up, leaving the man on the floor. It was then he saw a crest on his chest. He was a retired hunter. He had to have been a credible warrior of Thorin to have been granted retirement here.

“Do you recognise the crest?” Kellen asked.

“I do. He is of Clan Brownclad, a clan almost gone with time.” Marcus leaned over him, brushing his hand over the old hunter’s eyes, and whispered, “May all the stars in the Gods’ sky guide you back home.”

Marcus turned to head back in the direction of the stairs to the second floor.

“No, wait,” Sybil called out and moved from Gideon’s embrace. “Look what he is holding.”

She glided forward, her gown smeared in blood. As she kneeled again, she pulled out a crumpled ball of paper that was tucked into his sleeve, the corner of it sticking out.

“It’s a drawing,” she announced, and then turned to face him. Her vast green eyes flashed with something unfamiliar to him, and he took a step towards her, as did Marcus. Kellen remained rooted close to a large bookcase, watching the grounds around them. “It’s from the Book of Light,” Sybil choked out.

Marcus blew out a whistle. “Shit the bed.”

Gideon could feel his brow pull down. Although he was versed in the books of his teachings, he was ashamed to say that he’d thought the Book of Light had been a myth. A journal kept from the beginning of time, handwritten by the Gods themselves, couldn’t be read.

“Gideon…” She turned to him, her voice breathless. “This piece of scripture is so old; I can feel my magic calling to it and it’s calling back. I can feel the ancient magic lingering in the ink. This wasn’t written by an empress or a Supreme. A God has written this.” She turned the single page over to reveal a scripted passage. “It’s even marked down the bottom as a passage from the Book of Light.”

“It can’t be a coincidence that he is holding it.” Marcus looked at Gideon, and a rake of goosebumps littered his skin. “But surely if that scripture is from the Book of Light, it wouldn’t still be in his possession.”

Marcus’s head tilted. “Not if the thing that killed him overlooked what it was, too thirsty for death and too stupid to see what was in front of him.

Kellen left his post and moved closer. Gideon moved to stand directly beside Sybil, so close he could feel the heat from her skin touch his. He looked down at the ancient page in her hand. “What does it mean?

“I can’t work it out here.” Sybil’s hands ran over the wrinkled paper again.

“It has clearly been ripped from a manuscript,” Kellen waded in. “So where is the full book?”

“Why would there be pages of an ancient manuscript shoved up a dead man’s tunic sleeve?” Gideon asked.

“Because he was trying to protect what he could,” Sybil whispered.

Concern pushed through Marcus’s dark features, and he moved uneasily. “Do you think he was trying to hide the Book of Light when the Dark Army found him? Could it still be here?”

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