Free Phoenix in Shadow - eARC by Ryk E Spoor

sit, to eat of his rations, to drink water. But even sitting still, in the quiet greenery, he was tense, trying to watch everywhere, for he had learned all too well in the last weeks that danger could be anywhere.
    This place deserved its name, he felt. He had spent years as a Justiciar of Myrionar—or, as he was now being honest with himself, as a false Justiciar empowered by what was almost certainly a great demon, perhaps drawing power directly from the King of All Hells himself. But though his true nature as a Justiciar had been dark, he had in fact spent much of his life as a defender of Evanwyl, protecting it because Myrionar, the so-called patron of Evanwyl, was too weak, or too uncaring, or both, to do so.
    In that time he had faced many enemies—bandits and murderers and other ordinary people turned against their own kind, yes, but also many worse things. The blade-legged doomlock spiders, monstrous creatures which could lash out with cutting forelegs to drag you, slashed and bleeding, to their deadly venomous fangs, or who might first entangle you in paralyzing webs before closing in; graverisen, fearsome shambling undead things that seemed slow, clumsy, until they would suddenly scent the living and rush upon them with terrifying speed, rending men limb from limb and feasting on their entrails; flame-ants, dwelling within the earth and carrying the fires of the interior with them, swarming and consuming everything they touched like a conflagration; even, once, something for which he had no name, an armored monstrosity the length of a dozen wagons that came ravening out of Rivendream Pass, with a mouth like a cavern of blades and claws that cut stone like grass, and healing so swiftly that wounds closed even as the blade passed through the flesh.
    But such things were the ordinary here. All his powers had been needed, every day, as he made his way through the twisted, hideous, contradictory terrain of the Circle of Hell. He could not imagine how the true Hells could be much worse than this place, where he had seen a floating black cloud, like a thunderhead come to earth, turn and pursue a creature, rend it apart with screaming wind and crackling bolt, and leave a shriveled, desiccated, scattered corpse behind; where a great stone had suddenly moved, become a hunger-howling mass of granite which he had to trick into a fall to shatter hundreds of feet below; where a lovely flower had suddenly bent down towards him, opening a maw that dripped corrosive sap upon him that even left a scar on his nigh-invulnerable armor.
    He had often thought of turning back, but now, he knew, there was nowhere for him to go back to. The false Justiciars knew he had been sent on a special mission; if he returned without that power he sought, they would know his will and courage had failed, and worse, that he had given up on the oath so fiercely and publicly sworn to their...patron. And before he left he had been told, by that same patron, that Thornfalcon’s fall had torn the veil of secrecy, and because of that he knew that Evanwyl itself was now no longer his home. He could never walk the streets again as Condor. There was little he knew of the lands beyond, and he didn’t know how he could have made his way through the lands elsewhere, even if their patron allowed him such a simple escape.
    And even if he would have, he now held himself in utter contempt, unworthy to return until he truly redeemed himself. Whatever the excuses of rage, of revulsion and terror and denial, he had himself betrayed his father, Shrike. Oh, he had excuses—shock, white-hot anger, unthinking escape from a horror he had never imagined—but the last comment of their patron as he departed had struck deep and reminded him of how Condor was as guilty as the one he sought. “You have little time and a long distance to cover,” their patron had said, smiling falsely from beneath blonde hair and blue eyes, “so make haste. Worry not; we shall tend to