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  “Naoné óra baría…

  …kar freon.”

  “Courage cannot awaken without fear.”

  - Sergeant Jason Kale

  THE HIDDEN FLAMES ARTIFACT

  BLOODFLOWER

  Copyright © 2021 by K. J. Harrowick

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without express written consent from the author, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to [email protected].

  Visit author’s website at www.authorkjharrowick.com.

  Visit publisher’s website at www.portalworldpublishing.com.

  Visit Teacup Dragon cooperative at www.indiestorygeek.com.

  Published by: K. J. Harrowick & Portal World Publishing

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021911642 | ISBN 978-1-955532-04-4 (digital)

  Subjects: Fantasy | Romance | Science Fiction

  Book & cover illustrations by: Rebecca Wilcox

  Book cover design: K. J. Harrowick

  Edited by: Carly Hayward of Book Light Editorial

  Copyedited by: Jeni Chappelle of Jeni Chappelle Editorial

  Interior design by: K. J. Harrowick

  Interior illustrations: Rebecca Wilcox

  To (the real) Dusty Inman

  Your loss will never be forgotten.

  BLOODFLOWER

  CHAPTER 1

  The North

  The Rakir were still on their trail—tower soldiers with orders to arrest Captain Jon Ayers and his men. Trained to be an army of mercenaries and assassins, Rakir guarded the north under the rule of the high council.

  Until six weeks ago, Jon had been one of them, something he wasn’t proud of. They’d executed his family—three sisters, his parents and his nephew burned alive over a jeweled hunk of metal.

  Jon gripped the bloodflower and crouched at the edge of the plateau, surveying the valley below for any sign of Rakir. The pendant’s four metallic leaves dug into his skin, the central ruby warm against his palm. He needed to get south of the Forbidden Mountains where his men were waiting.

  This was his life now, exile or death. Cursed to always be on the run.

  “Guardians be damned.” He needed a cigarette. Already out of shadeleaf, it was still half a day’s ride to the next village, a small cluster of buildings nestled in the gap between the far mountains.

  The heavy rainfall soured his mood further as he shoved the bloodflower back inside his shirt and moved away from the edge. Lichen slick with rain covered a labyrinth of crumbling stone walls across the muddy plateau.

  “What do you think this place was?” Mather, his best friend and second in command, crouched on a broken wall, bow in hand. The dark green of his wool clothing camouflaged him against the lower tree branches.

  With his hair wet from the heavy rains, the tattoo on his forehead was a beacon for any Rakir hunting them. As if reading Jon’s mind, Mather mussed his hair until it covered the inked mark.

  “Observatory maybe. Though with a spyglass that large”—Jon gestured at the rusted metal tube in the center of the ruins—“someone could probably see all the way to the land of the Guardians.”

  Such a place was no more than legend, and Jon cursed himself for even speaking it. If any protector of their world existed, they sure as shit didn’t care about anyone in the north.

  Patting his horse on the cheek as he passed by, Jon entered the labyrinth of stone and metal.

  “We need to get moving.” Mather leapt down from the wall. “Those scouts have likely found our trail.”

  “Not yet.” Jon traced his fingers along a wall made of metal with long, worm-like vines draping from a heavy crack. He and Mather had barely saddled their horses for the day’s ride when something had tugged at Jon’s instincts, calling him to this place.

  Be it destiny or fate, he could never ignore that sixth sense. It had saved his life on more than one occasion, even if it did take them an hour out of their way.

  Jon brushed dry dirt off a spidering crack, a few granules whispering away on the breeze while the remainder plopped to the ground. Long ago, a mudslide had covered the floors of this place, packing hard earth against stone. But as the rains of gensana·darak, the season of leaves, fell heavy on the mountain, everything turned to slick ground mat over the forest ruins.

  “What are you hoping to find here?” Mather fingered his bow as if expecting an attack.

  “I’m not certain.” But the instinct pushed at Jon’s senses. It must have something to do with the bloodflower. At least he hoped it did. Something was here. He just had to find it.

  Cold wind sliced through his clothing, chilling him as he slipped partway around the next wall. The muddy ground glowed with a green reflection, and he froze, not daring to move another step.

  “Dalanath.”

  The ghost-like apparitions were a terror every northerner grew up with. They were common around the north, many believing the sleepers to silently damn the misdeeds of this world. At least one must have been just out of his sight, its eerie green glow reflecting in the muddy puddles.

  Jon clenched his fist—he didn’t need their judgment today.

  He already bore the guilt of his family’s death. He’d arrived too late, forced to hand over the bloodflower, only to receive a box of his family’s ashes.

  Jon would never let the high council have the pendant now. After stealing it back, he’d barely escaped to the mountains. Biting back the pain in his heart, he was tempted to reach for his weapons, but in the thirty-three years of his life, no dalanath had ever awoken. That he knew of, anyway.

  Yet the hairs on his neck stood stiff. He was probably just on edge from the Rakir bearing down on them.

  “Aren’t we done with this place yet?” Mather muttered.

  Jon edged around the corner in plain view of the ghosts, the soft green glow of their sleeping faces floating against the stone wall. It was always the same, half-formed bodies that tapered to a smoky mist below the waist.

  “Looks like someone tried to seal them in.” Mather patted a mud-brick wall covering several of the apparitions. “Long before our time.”

  “Probably didn’t want to be judged.” Jon slid his hand over a pane of glass buried in smooth, metallic stone, the surface chilled in the morning storm.

  A thin line of blue light slid across the glass.

  Jon jumped back. “Shit, did you see that?”

  Magic, it had to be.

  Mather yanked an arrow from his quiver and slid it onto the bowstring. “Guardians be damned, Jon. What did you do?”

  Blue light spread across the pane, illuminating ancient symbols nobody alive could read.

  “I barely touched it.” Jon’s voice fell away as a figure walked onto the glass. Unlike the dalanath with their green glow, the full-grown man looked like he could step out of the wall into the real world.

  “Vamahéa heriakór Jason Kale,” the figure said, strain lacing the desperation in his voice.

  Jon gripped the hilts of his sheathed daggers and stepped closer, wishing he could understand the tiny man’s words. “Who are you?”

  As if unable to see beyond the barrier, the figure kept speaking, rubbing a hand across his short, blond hair. Releasing the grip on his weapons, Jon touched the glass. Still the same smooth chill, and the man kept talking as if Jon wasn’t there.

  “You think he’s a Guardian?” Mather traced a finger along his arrow’s fletchings and eased the tension.

  Jon couldn’t imagine he was. Only seven Guardians remained, the others deserting Sandaris when they disappeared into the night sky.

  Human-like beings from the old world, their language could still be seen etc
hed into stone ruins, but it wasn’t enough to ease the cultural scar of their desertion. While those in the north shattered many of their statues long ago and turned their backs on the Guardians, the southern lands still worshipped them, hoping to one day call them back.

  “Maybe he’s trapped.” Mather slid the arrow back into his quiver. “Maybe that’s where they all went, into some unknown land of metal and glass.”

  Jon waved at the talking figure to get his attention, but the blond didn’t budge.

  “If he’s trapped, we can try to get him out.” Maybe this man was exactly who he needed to find.

  Jon gestured to the figure to stand back then slammed the hilt of his dagger against the pane, a jolt sizzling up his arm as the glass remained uncracked.

  The figure kept talking, then disappeared into blackness.

  “Dammit, what is this stuff made of?” Jon said. “I can’t crack it.”

  Smoke poured out of the seams between glass and rock, fire-sparks erupting from the corners.

  “Shit, Jon, I think you made it worse,” Mather said. The dalanath flickered, disappearing for an instant before they reappeared. “What the fuck?”

  Jon stepped back to avoid the sparks. The closest dalan was an old man who looked meaner than a rabid wolf. His ghostly green body disappeared, nothing but smooth metal wall behind him. Where were these figures disappearing to?

  “This has to be magic.” He touched the smooth surface scattered with raindrops, a pulse whispering beneath his fingertips. “You ever seen anything like this?”

  “No.” Mather scanned the trees. “But we need to get out of here. Not even the wind speaks to these woods now.”

  The breeze had died down, the woods too quiet. And there was an unmistakable edge to Mather’s voice. That could mean only one thing: Rakir were close. Mather was right. They needed to get the fuck out of here.

  Except Jon couldn’t make his feet move.

  Lights flickered on inside the metal wall, illuminating a hollow space filled with glowing green liquid.

  A woman floated inside, colorless worms or vines growing out of the interior and digging into her body as if to trap her.

  Long hair obscured some of her features as the strange pulse passed under Jon’s fingertips again, this time stronger.

  Her body jerked as if she’d been struck from behind.

  As her hair threaded away from her face, the woman opened her eyes wide, terror and anguish in their depths.

  There was something familiar about her features. He couldn’t place it, but he’d seen her before. Or maybe his lack of cigarettes was muddling his thoughts.

  “Jon. We have to move.” Mather smacked his shoulder. “Now.”

  She pressed a hand against the glass and opened her mouth wide as if screaming, but no sound came out.

  Guardians. That’s what struck him about her features. Even with her hollow cheeks, she bore a striking resemblance to Herana, the Guardian of Lost Souls.

  Jon had seen her statue before, though always with part of her face shattered. Someone long ago named her after the cold emptiness of a derelict world, and that meaning had become something of an ache to his own lonely heart.

  He laid his palm against hers on the barrier, discarding the idea of the woman as a Guardian. It was ridiculous.

  She mouthed something as if trying to speak to him, but he couldn’t stay any longer. Not without putting himself in more danger.

  “Captain!” The strain in Mather’s voice said time was up. Run or fight. There might be two scouts or a dozen, and he didn’t need another close call.

  The woman seemed lost, desperate. Jon didn’t want to leave her stranded. He unsheathed his sword and slammed it against the transparent wall to shatter it so she could escape.

  Tension rippled up his arm, and he didn’t even put a dent in it. “Fuck.”

  He’d have to lead the Rakir away and hope they didn’t get blocked in.

  “Get the horses!” he said to Mather then slapped the glass to get the woman’s attention. “I’ll lead them away.”

  His instincts fought what his training told him to do. And the terror in her eyes was like a knife to his heart.

  “I’ll come back, I promise,” he said.

  Jon really hoped she wasn’t Herana as he bolted back to his horse. It was uncanny how similar the woman’s features were to the old statues. The last thing this world needed was mercenary soldiers with a Guardian’s power behind them.

  CHAPTER 2

  The North

  “Help me.”

  Jàden pressed against the glass. Green stasis serum held her weightless as a man with a bushy beard stared back. Gone almost as fast as he appeared, she screamed and pounded the glass, heavy grief clutching her chest. She had to get out. Even hypersleep couldn’t erase the most traumatic day of her life.

  But waking jolted like the touch of an electric fence during a bad chest cold. The final pulse hit her heart with the grace of a hammer shattering glass.

  Fully awake now, the system opened the cover. Liquid rushed out, and she dropped into a huddled ball. Her hands shook so hard she had to clench her fists to make them stop.

  A bracelet circled her wrist, stone laced with a honeycomb of metal.

  The electricity provided a barrier between her and the Violet Flame, the universal energy source used to fuel starships.

  Except she’d been born with the ability to touch the Flame without the use of technology.

  She reached for the well of liquid fire, but a static buzz blocked her. Jàden yanked on the bracelet, trying to rip it off. Too weak to pull it further than the base of her thumb, she slammed the walls of her pod in frustration.

  Every inch of her body ached from those final horrifying minutes before the darkness and her last moments with the man she loved. An exploding fireball of twisted metal flashed across her memories.

  “Kale!” She tried to scream her anguish at his death, green goo burbling down her chin. Her brain refused to believe he was gone.

  Gripping the edge of the hypersleep capsule, Jàden squirmed onto the ground, a mire of rain puddles and thick mud riddled with footprints.

  Someone had been watching her.

  Before she could hold onto that thought, she heaved green ooze, clearing stasis fluid from her searing lungs.

  Her hands sank into the chilled earth, and she gripped the mud until her fingers were frigid, sobbing her grief. “Kale.”

  He’d been in the cockpit when his ship hit the ground, crushed under two tons of metal. A faint shout reached her ears, the sound far away but still sending a jolt of panic through her. The men who’d killed Kale would be close.

  She had to run.

  A difficult task with a tangle of plastic tubes dangling from the needles in her body. She scanned for the plumes of smoke from Kale’s ship, but silence and heavy rainfall pressed in on her from a forest of thick sequoias. Nothing looked familiar, and the man who’d been watching her was nowhere in sight.

  Maybe she could figure out where she was and how to get out of this place. Jàden crawled to her pod’s control panel and wiped the mud-splattered screen until four red numbers stared back at her.

  3,793 years.

  That’s not possible.

  A row of pods stretched to either side, the closest ones buried beneath crumbling stone blocks, as if someone had built around them before fading into history. Ghostly green faces formed the exterior laser illusion of each occupant’s features, a way for families to keep watch over loved ones who chose the long sleep between worlds.

  Red numbers flashed on the exposed chambers: 3,654, 3,722. Each one was different, noting the passage of years since each occupant stepped—or was forced like her—into hypersleep.

  No one survived that long in stasis. There must be a mistake. Jàden pressed her thumb to the screen’s bottom corner. Please still work.

  Thin blue lines scanned her biometrics, tracing acr
oss the glass to form her personal welcome message. Jàden Ravenscraft. Bioengineering Guild, Class 3, Blue Sector - Hocker Hills. 1,365,480 days since your last login.

  That number was too large to comprehend.

  “Where am I?”

  Maybe the central computers could tell her. The screen flashed blue with a single black ring in the center.

  Hàlon, one of the last human starships.

  But the image zoomed in on the orb in the center of the ring, a moon trapped in the starship’s theric energy web.

  “Sandaris.” She couldn’t be on the moon’s surface. With her feet planted on its rocky surface, Jàden should have sensed its beating heart. Last time she’d visited, the entire landscape was rock and water and refused to be terraformed. The computer had to be wrong.

  The data map stopped on the smallest of the three central landmasses. Nashéoné, “the forbidden zone.”

  The only place on Sandaris no one could go without security clearance. She’d never been to this region of the moon, though Kale had many times over the years.

  Jàden’s hands trembled with fear. If the Enforcers found her here, she’d be imprisoned or killed for the power that flowed through her veins.

  If Frank found her…

  Terror gripped her heart. She needed to get back to Hàlon where she had thousands of places to hide. But she couldn’t fly a damn starship to save her life.

  Voices caught her ear again from a different direction, and this time they were closer.

  Run first, she prodded herself.

  Time to pop the tubes free and yank the needles. She’d hide where no one would find her. Kale’s hidden ship. Their ship.

  “Release hypersleep tubes.”

  The screen went dark.

  “No.” Jàden slapped the glass. “Please, just work!”

  The image of a young man faded onto the pixels, his skin pulled tight around a distraught expression.

  “Kale.” She traced the glass, leaving a streak of glowing mud on his cheek. 3,793 years.