Gaereth

Irresistibly entranced by the forbidden Art, the younger prince of Nuria walks a tightrope between curiosity and fatal disobedience.

BOOK EXCERPT

They were torches after all. The flames did not move or flicker even when he snatched his fingers through them. They were strange and cold to the touch, at once frightening in their otherness, yet soothing and oddly comforting. Torches of stone, for these were no crystals; the fire was not contained, but flowed freely from the rock. There were three on either side of the imposing central figure, which reached at least twenty feet upwards from a little raised dais. In front of the form a larger glow invited close inspection. This particular stony torch was ensconced in some reflective substance, like brass; it seemed twice as powerful as the others. Moreover, it was raised two feet higher, forcing the gaze upwards to the mammoth image.

Gaereth felt his heart lurch. They were not arms. They were wings.

It was a great winged man, roughly hewn out of the massive stone. Half bird, half man, his broad wings reached high to the invisible ceiling. The blue light reached with them, higher, till the walls cast it back and forth. The face gazed down in a thousand-worded silence, at once robbing the onlooker of speech and thought. Here were the answers to questions he could not formulate, locked in an image, still out of reach, and yet…

Forcing his buckling knees to move, he crossed the dais. At once the flames moved and stirred, fanned by an unseen wind. There it was, wafting over him its hint of meadow and woodland at eventide, whispering of the ocean.

The stone itself was warm to touch, lifelike…