Free Darkness Rising (The Endless War Book 2) by D.K. Holmberg Page A

desert? Or had it returned to the waste once it brought her back to her people?
    “I nearly died,” she said. “I fell from a rock shelf as I tried reaching the water I sensed.”
    “How far did you fall?” her father asked.
    “I don’t know. Halfway down the shelf. Maybe fifty feet.” Had it really been that far? She probably shouldn’t have attempted the climb. But she’d seen the shadow man and had been convinced that he had water. And had she not, she might never have learned of the strange lizard.
    “And you stand here unharmed.” He cocked his head and studied her. “But not unchanged, I think.”
    She swallowed. What did her father mean?
    “I wasn’t unharmed,” she said, remembering the way she felt after landing, the way that her body throbbed, with everything hurting her. “But I had help.”
    Her father nodded slowly, as if he had expected it. “Shadow or light?”
    Ciara frowned. “I don’t—”
    He raised a hand and cut her off. “Do not make claims you know are untrue, Ciara.”
    He knew. Somehow, he knew.
    She refused to look over at Fas, wishing he wasn’t here for what she would say, but her father deserved honesty from her. “When Fas left, I sensed water. Enough water that we would no longer have to wander, enough that I wanted nothing more than to find it and bring our people to it.”
    “When did you sense this?” Fas asked. “There was no water when I left that night, nothing that would have drawn even you.”
    “I walked for hours after you left, but the ledge never changed. It remained the steep shelf that I’d have to descend if I wanted to reach anything different.” She remembered the way sand billowed off the top of the ledge, blowing from the waste to the hard rock below. It hung in the air, hovering above everything like the haze she saw stretching out from her now. When she reached the ground, she found no sign of the sand on the rock below. “Always, I sensed water below me, drawing me forward.”
    “Down,” her father said. “Toward the shadows.”
    She swallowed again. Could he know? Did he know what she’d seen or how she’d gone with the shadow man, wanting to reach the source of water that she would still swear she sensed below?
    “Shadows, yes,” Ciara whispered.
    “But you returned.”
    She nodded. “How do you know of this?”
    “When I was a child in Pa’shu, the priests of the Stormbringer used to tell stories. There wasn’t the same search for water then, though the river would often go dry, and they would talk of times long past as if they had been there.” He closed his eyes, his brow creasing. “They said that there is a battle between shadow and light, of creatures of power stronger than any of us, greater than any shaper of Ter. They have battled for millennia, darkness trying to conquer the light.” He shook his head. “I always thought it nothing but stories until we retreated to these lands. Here… here I think I can feel the darkness at times.”
    Ciara shivered, thinking of the way the lizard had spoken inside her mind. Had that been the shadow or the light? But the shadow man… There was no question about him. What would it mean that she spoke to the shadow? What would it mean if she couldn’t reach the light?
    “They claimed that the draasin,” her father went on, “were creatures of light. They have long been among the greatest, battling against the shadow, burning with their heat. The priests claim that’s the reason Rens embraced the heat and fire of these lands, knowing that no shadow could live here, that only the light burns where the draasin fly.”
    He turned to stare outward, looking away from the village and out over the point. “There is something out there. I can feel it but do not know what it means. From what I see of you since you returned from the waste, I know that you sense it too. Tell me, daughter, what did you experience on the waste? What is it that brought you back to us? What do you know about