Welcome to the Wattpad Block Party - Summer Edition III!
Round SIX of this popular event is coming your way the entire month of August 2017 and it's going to be epic! The invites have started to roll out and everyone from your all time favorite Wa...
Hello, hello! I'm Ren Tachibana, a featured fantasy writer here on Wattpad and a winner of a 2016 Watty for my novel Bereft (yay!). Some of my novels creep into the top twenty of the fantasy category, including Bereft and other books of the Bereft Series and Mark of the Harbinger, which is where you may know me from. Otherwise, I am just another author in a sea of orange who is thrilled to be joining the Block Party this summer! Thanks, Kelly!
For my post, I'm sharing with you guys the very first chapter in the newest book in my Bereft Series, Bereft: Ignite.
"But wait, Ren! I haven't read Bereft or any of the other stories in the series!" That's okay! This post is spoiler free, so you can kick back, relax, and enjoy!
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PROLOGUE | KING & KINGDOM
The echo of his footsteps rebounded through the gray hall like the ringing of a great bell.
Elias marched with his mouth pursed in repressed frustration, his posture stiff and unyielding as the flat heels of his black boots struck the stone floor with considerable force. The sound warned those within earshot of his irritable temper, and—as he passed one of his servants with a grim nod—the young man bent at the waist and scuttled into the shadows once more.
He walked from the hall to a stark corridor and beyond. The silver chandeliers overhead dripped blue crystals and thin chains of enchanted lights. From the gray walls, portraits of his fair faced ancestors and missed children marked his hurried passage, their cyan eyes alive with a malign humor known only to the dead.
Elias came at last upon a set of gilded doors, beyond which hummed a morass of magical energies woven and overlapping in intricate patterns. The Vytian hesitated with his hand upon the door's crystal handle as the implicit music of the energies reached out to him, playing their many fine-fingered hands across his skin, whispering the secrets of old spells long sleeping in rotted grimoires and forests untrodden by his kind for generations.
Such a sensation was unsettling in its power and beauty.
He shook himself and stepped inside.
Light poured from the western windows and laid lines of orange and gold upon the oratory's floor. Beneath the decorated transom rested the two altars of the family's patron Kings. To the left was a statue of a three-eyed stag, yellow wildflowers thrown at its carved hooves. To the right was a banner depicting a skull and mandible encircled by a wreath of twisting ivy.
Dust crawled upon the stone pews and dripped from the brackets of unlit torches. Empty for a dozen years or more, only one king could be found in the disused oratory now. He knelt in the middle of the nave, working without complaint, the stick of chalk scraping upon the pitted stones.
"My lord," Elias said as he took in the rest of the circles lain upon the columns, the floor, and the high walls. Each had been created with painstaking effort, measured and redrawn, emboldened by double lines and dark paint. Some of the designs had already been activated, and from them arose that malaise of ancient, amoral magics, their lines incandescent in the sunlight as they glimmered with aching splendor.
