Free A Guardian of Shadows (Revenant Wyrd Book 4) by Travis Simmons Page A

sure he could take it all in. Maybe when they got home, it would all be better.
    But how? Life on the plantation never changed: people went about their routines, and things like this never happened. Maybe that was why he was having such an issue — he wasn’t used to change. But even so, all of this was so much!
    Jovian frowned. He’d imagined going home would be a happy time, seeing his father and friends for the first time in ages, but now he thought that all of the changes would only be made that much more evident in contrast to the ease with which life flowed there. Would he ever fit in with that again? Would he be content with going home to the life of a farmer?
    He took to studying the tapestries that covered portions of the wall now. They were unlike any tapestries he had ever seen before, and looked like still-life images rather than paintings. So real were the images that Jovian thought he was looking out a window at something actually happening outside the tunnel, but that was absurd.
    “What are those metal… things ?” he asked Uthia.
    The dryad shrugged. “They look like some kind of machine,” she told him.
    The same huge machines were in many other tapestries, billowing smoke out of a chimney affixed to the top. The group drew to a halt, and they studied the picture.
    “Powered by…?” Jovian asked.
    “Wyrd?” Angelica wondered.
    “I don’t know,” Uthia said. “It would have to be, right?”
    They looked to Joya, but she only shrugged.
    Beside the metal monstrosity walked creatures easily seven feet in height, and oddly feline.
    “These must be the frement,” Jovian said, rubbing fingertips over the fabric picture. They stood like men, were even shaped like men, if slightly thinner than was natural for a human, but their faces were odd. Their mouths were shaped like a cat’s, protruding slightly from the rest of their face, their lip split up toward the base of their nose. Long whiskers protruded from their cheeks, close to their mouths.
    And their color. Not the colors one would see in humans, and none of them were really the same. Their fur was cut short, close to their skin, but in varying shades that marked each one of them as individual. They wore armor such as Jovian had never seen, each piece looking like a work of art, with carvings of symbols and words he didn’t understand. He didn’t see any armor the same, either; some had cloaks fastened over shoulder pads that arched up like miniature wings, while others were fastened at the base of their shoulder blades, and some didn’t wear cloaks at all. If this was an army, Jovian didn’t know how they determined rank, because it didn’t seem to be depicted by any form of uniform.
    “How strange,” Angelica mumbled.
    “Look here,” Joya said from a distance farther down, studying another picture. They hastily moved to see what she had found.
    “What in the realms?” Angelica asked.
    “The ooslebed,” Uthia said, crossing her arms. The tone of her voice suggested the dryad didn’t care for the race.
    “This must be First Daughter,” Joya said, eyes roaming over the wall hanging. At the mention of the First Daughter, Jovian remembered the tale he had heard while with the Elves of Nependier. First Daughter was filled with sin, and left her family of elves to make her way north, where she started the tribe of dark elves, or ooslebed, as they were called here.
    The dark elf was the prettiest woman Jovian had ever seen. Her hair was long, black, and much more like silk than any hair he had ever seen, shining in some green light like satin. Her skin was dark blue, with bursts of green that (despite being in a picture) seemed to move along her skin in a constant blush, like hot breath blooming across cold glass.
    She wore a regal outfit, most unlike anything Jovian would have imagined the Elves of Nependier wearing. The robes hugged her body tightly, in shades of red and purple. A long pipe was held in her hand, wafting pink smoke