The Bone Spear (The Flayed Sun Trilogy Book 1) by Alexander Layne

Author:Alexander Layne [Layne, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Independent
Published: 2023-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

THE IMPALEMENT OF A GOD

Kalia eats one of the Sana every three days. It takes her twelve days to escape the desert.

By then, her skin is withered and dry and cracked, bleeding in places and terribly burnt in others. She’s filthy, aching, disorientated. Her monthly bleed comes and goes, one misery heaped upon all the rest. Her head is empty of thoughts. She is numb.

The desert comes to an abrupt end. Crystalline, sharp sand gives way to ankle-high grass; the brightest shade of green Kalia has ever seen. She lies down in it and laughs, rolling around. It’s so soft. She pulls out fistfuls of grass and stuffs them into her waistband so that she can bring it back to her world. There are trees here and many of them are filled with serpents, but she’s no longer afraid of them. Other trees, taller and wider, host flocks of many-eyed birds, which call down to her in voices that sound disgustingly human. The remaining Sana assemble around her, growling, their rotten breaths misting in the frigid air.

“We did it,” Kalia says, and laughs, rising to her feet. She hugs One Eye.

One Eye remains awkwardly still. She steps away from him and looks out across the field of vivid, swaying grass, and toward the hills and mountains in the distance. These mountains are snow-capped and pretty, but her attention doesn’t linger on them for long, instead focusing on the solitary tower built into the side of them. It’s a black spear, so tall it doesn’t look real, the point of it hidden amongst mottled, bruised clouds.

Kalia swallows, now excited. A thing like that was almost certainly built by Ashir. It seems a fair assumption that she might find one there now. If she’s right, she could be back home sooner than she’d allowed herself to even hope.

The problem, of course, is figuring out how to kill it.

“Here we are,” Kalia says proudly. “I’m still alive. You hear that, One Eye? You hear that, Red Scale? I’m still alive. I’ve made it this far. We just need to make it to the tower now. Then we’ll kill an Ashir. Then we’ll drink its holy blood, and take its head, and return to Annexus. I’ll take you all with me. My world isn’t all that nice, but it’s better, I think, than this place. And I’m going to do great things, you know. That’s why I’m here. This is a test.” She looks at the creatures, which stare at her with dark, glittering eyes. “I’d like for all of you to be by my side.”

Of course, they don’t say anything, but that’s okay. They would if they could, she knows, and the absence of words doesn’t mean that they’re not feeling anything. They are her disciples now, and they are helping her understand what her destiny is.

“I wish you all could talk,” she says to the Sana. “I think that’s been the big problem. My kind and your kind and all the other kinds have never actually spoken to one another.

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