Free Mythborn by V. Lakshman Page A

“You know we will save them, right?”
    She nodded. “I cannot believe Lilyth would risk everything by bringing him back.”
    “She’s desperate, and her foolhardiness will cause the death of us all.” He held her at arm’s length. “If not for you, I would have been lost forever.” He pulled her in, squeezing her in his warm embrace. “I love you so.”
    She closed her eyes, “Beloved, you do not have to—” Her eyes opened wide and her mouth made a smal lO . A strange sound, a keening like escaping air, hissed out of her but nothing else.
    Valarius slowly bent his left hand down, forcing his wife’s head toward the wooden bowl using the slim dagger he’d pushed through the base of her skull. When her neck was over the bowl, he took another blade with his right hand and slit her throat.
    Black blood gushed out into the bowl and despite his preparedness, a sob escaped his lips. At that sound, the platoon of elves went to a knee as one, paying homage to the sacrifice their highlord paid to open this one-way gate back to Edyn.
    Highlord Valarius Galadine turned to the assembled men and said, “Sonya’s death must mean something. Defend Bara’cor and find Lilyth’s gate. Give me a path back to you. You are Avalyon’s last hope.”
    A flash of blood red fire flashed from the bowl then, lighting the entire room in a crimson glow. That glow flooded the chamber and a vortex opened below the platoon, painting their blue-skinned faces purple in the blood light. Malak looked at his highlord and Valarius saw the love shining in his firstmark’s eyes. The elven commander saluted, fist to chest. “We stand eternal.”
    Valarius didn’t answer. Instead, he looked back down at his wife, her form now still in death. His heart was near breaking, but he finished the spell.
    Sacrifices had to be made, and his love for her powered this single escape from Arcadia. Though he could not take it yet, he knew what he did offered life for all his people. In a red-white flash the entire platoon, fifty of his best warriors, disappeared.

 
    The Lens of Arcadia
    The easiest way to deceive someone
    is to tell them a small truth instead of lies.
    -            Argus Rillaran, The Power of Deceit
    W hat?” Duncan was at a loss for words. He wasn’t sure he’d heard her right.
    “Valarius is a thorn. You would be doing the land a favor in dealing with him,” replied Lilyth.
    Duncan looked at her as if she’d lost her mind, then asked the question most obvious to him: “You’ve failed to kill him for almost two centuries and expect I’ll succeed?”
    Lilyth leaned back, her eyes becoming half-slits, like a viper assessing her prey. A moment passed, then two, then the demon-queen said, “You and Valarius were once friends.”
    Duncan felt a clinical detachment, a strange ability to ascertain his own mental state. He tilted his head, “Not—”
    “And now he has your wife.”
    He stopped short, her comment nudging his deepest fear—what had actually happened over the last two hundred years between them? Was Sonya truly an unwilling captive? Yet was killing Valarius even right?
    Lilyth, in a strange echo of his own thoughts, said, “Killing him insures your family’s reunion. The man has brought more misery to our worlds than can be believed. Would this be such an injustice?”
    As if she thought his surrender was inevitable, she beckoned a hand servant who approached with a small box on a silver platter. Lilyth took it and met Duncan’s eyes, opening the box casually. With two fingers she gingerly extracted a crystal, thin and circular in shape, and held it up to the light. “Do you know what this is, Lore Father?”
    Duncan shook his head. He did not recall ever seeing one before. The crystal was clear, smooth, and maybe a bit smaller than the size of his palm.
    “This is a lens,” she said, turning it over slowly. He noted that the edges were beveled, catching and refracting the light into sudden small