Free The Trials of Trass Kathra by Mike Wild Page B

towards the site, pointing and gasping, it took a few seconds for the mercenary to cease moving forward, his twisted body ploughing a furrow in the ground where he’d landed, his jaw carving a rut.
     
     
    H UNDREDS OF LEAGUES away, Merrit Moon was eating a sandwich when he felt his old life vanish forever, the event transmitted to him by the elven sensory sphere he had left behind with the holographers in the shop. The One Faith, the Only Faith, the Fewer Faith, he thought philosophically. And continued to chew.
    The knowledge that he no longer had a home did not come as the wrench he thought it might, surprisingly. The old place had never been the same since being all but demolished by the k’nid, and even as he had been packing the cracks they had left with the elven compound he had named detonite, in readiness for the Faith forces he knew would inevitably come for him, he hadn’t felt particularly sad. There were some things the k’nid attack had destroyed that could never be replaced – his elven telescope, ironically the first thing that had seen them coming, among them – and he was far too old to seek out and gather such treasures again. To surround himself with such seemed folly in these changing times, in fact.
    There was, of course, also his health. He wasn’t ailing – in fact, for a man of his age he was in quite superior shape – but that was wholly due to the ogur corruption that continued to taint his body. The solutions and elixirs he had perfected to keep his transformative affliction in check continued to do their job, and while he still possessed the thread-engineered antidote that Kali had brought from the Crucible, he resolutely refused to use it. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust it – because of its provenance its efficacy was beyond question – but that, as he’d told Kali that night in the Flagons , to use it just didn’t feel right . If he were honest, he had never been able to shake a conviction that what had happened to him had happened for a reason, and in the light of recent developments he was becoming more convinced still.
    He had not told Kali this but the fact was, since the Hel’ss appeared, he was changing more than he had been. Not changing more frequently – although the bouts did seem to have their own accelerating timetable – but more dramatically. He sighed and raised a trembling hand, watching as the sinew and tendons beneath his skin pulsed and throbbed. These painful phenomena were not just linked to his hands, either, the same effect manifested itself at different times throughout his body, and he could not stare at himself in a mirror for more than a few minutes before one such tic or another materialised. All of these felt different to the Thrutt transformations – for one thing they occurred spontaneously, without the raised adrenalin that normally acted as a trigger – and the only conclusion he could draw was that his body was responding in some way to the presence of the Hel’ss. The question was, why?
    This, he had no answer to – yet. What he did know was that these occasions were something to which he could not risk exposing his friends. The feeling of unfettered power that accompanied them both terrified and awed him, and if it were to be unleashed, beyond his control, when anyone was nearby... he didn’t like to think what would happen.
    So, in the end, he’d decided to leave. What choice did he have? The interesting thing was that it hadn’t been at all difficult to choose where to go. And for one simple reason.
    He could not stop dreaming of the World’s Ridge Mountains.
    They were calling to him.
    And he had answered – or at least relocated to their vicinity in the hope he would there find out what the dreams meant. The lower to middle heights of the World’s Ridge still hid Old Race sites he had been too inexperienced to challenge as a young man, and too incapable of challenging when old, but now he had, if needed, the physical means to