Free The Unfinished World (The Armor of God Book 2) by Diego Valenzuela

some great faith that led them to the fissure right next to it.
    He wished he shared any such faith.
     
    Solis had been sitting at his post for six hours. It was noon. There had been no signs of any monster, wild or passive, anywhere near the mountain. He wondered why. Had all of them finished their trek?
    If no more came today, it would be at least a little exciting to be able to go back home and tell the others that no monsters had been sighted; that should make a few people’s night a bit brighter.
    Solis rose to his feet, putting his little book of stories on the table, and looked through the window.
    At first there was disappointment when he looked through the glass eye to find a creature coming.
    But then his disappointment turned into confusion and even fear when he realized that, if that was one of the monsters, it wasn’t of a kind he had ever seen before. It was too humanoid to be one of the Laani, and far too big to be a human being.
    What the hell was it?
    The thing was moving slow, as if wounded, dragging its feet in the sand, large arms barely hanging onto his shoulders. It took it several minutes, even at its tremendous size, for it to come close enough for Solis to realize that it was neither man nor monster, but something in between.
    It looked like a cloaked giant wearing war-battered armor. Its dark skin was covered in thick plates of silver, its head with a mask forged to give him an intimidating appearance. There was a pylon shooting upward from its left shoulder, and the base piece of another on its right, broken—maybe lost in battle?
    Covering most of it was an enormous tattered cloth that fluttered behind it like a cape.
    Had it been fighting the creatures? Maybe someone else?
    It appeared to be coming, not to the fissure through which the creatures had been disappearing, but to the citadel’s small and well-hidden entrance—the miraculous entryway that allowed no monster-sized creature in.
    The armored giant stopped its exhausted walk and brought one knee to the ground. Solis looked down at it with his own eyes and it was hard to believe what he was seeing.
    Pieces in the giant’s armor began to shift, particularly in the area of the abdomen, until they opened to a hollow space.
    Solis held his breath, terrified, when he saw movement, and a man stepped out of the giant, which appeared to be left lifeless.
    His extraordinary eyesight had “earned” him his position as watchman, so he could see that the man who had been in control of the giant needed help. Like the huge thing he had brought all the way to Clairvert, he could barely walk, tired from what had to be a very long trip.
    Solis stepped away from the window and approached the horns. There were three of them, each shaped to give the air blown a specific pitch and a specific timbre.
    The red one—a menacing low note—would warn the people of Clairvert about an impending threat; the blue one—a higher note that sounded like the howling of a dog—would let them know that a survey troop had returned.
    The green one he had never sounded. He had never needed it. No foreign human being had come to the citadel in decades.
    He blew the green horn, and rushed down to help the man.
     
    When Solis was back in the citadel, he had to fight his way through crowds of concerned, confused citizens begging him to explain what they had heard, why he had sounded the horn, and what that new and exotic sound meant.
    “ Who is out there? ”
    “ Are my children in danger? ”
    “ He’s just having a laugh! He’s probably drunk again! ”
    He ignored them as he always did, and was allowed passage into the atrium, the maze of narrow stone passages that separated them from the world outside.
    Two armored soldiers were kneeling next to the man, and several others were looking outside, no doubt at the monstrous vehicle that brought him to the citadel. Solis approached him, just as he was asked his name.
    “Thank you,” the man—who turned out to be