Excerpt Thursday: A KNIGHT OF THE SACRED BLADE

It’s Excerpt Thursday! Today’s excerpt is from A KNIGHT OF THE SACRED BLADE, the 2nd book in my THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS series.

I wrote this a really, really long time ago! 🙂

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Arran tightened his grip on his weapons, gritted his teeth, and waited for the ghouls.

Nothing came.

Sweat dripped down his face.

The ghastly wails still rose from the Plain, but softer, more distant. Arran walked to the edge of the stairs. The Crimson Plain lay cloaked in darkness, and he could just make out the misshapen forms vanishing into the gloom, their wails fading away.

He returned his sword and his gun to his belt. Why had the ghouls not pursued him into the Tower? In this stone hall, they could have surrounded and overwhelmed him. He turned and gazed into the green-lit corridor. “They’re afraid of the Tower,” he muttered.

He couldn’t blame them.

Arran started forward. His eyes wandered over the walls and vaulted ceiling. Bas-reliefs marked the stone, showing strange scenes of other lands and other worlds.

Though in some places the bas-reliefs had been destroyed by cracks running through the walls.

The hall opened into a vast cylindrical chamber. A statue of a nude woman, thirty feet high, stood in the center. Eleven other passageways, each as large as the one behind him, led away from the chamber. Countless balconies with intricate balustrades ringed the walls, and twelve corridors led away from each of them.

The balconies faded from sight far, far above. Did each of those passageways lead to a different world? Arran scanned the floor, recalling Kaemarz’s directions to his mind. “The seventh passage, clockwise.” He spotted a dark smudge of the floor and hurried over. Lord Marugon’s sigil, a clawed hand clutching a flaming eye, had been burned onto the floor.

Arran peered down the passageway. It was built of red granite, with more bas-reliefs marking the walls, along with writing in a strange language. It stretched away as far as the eye could follow.

No mortal could have built this place, and all of Arran’s instincts screamed for him to leave the Tower.

He drew his Sacred Blade partway from its scabbard and looked at the blood marking the steel. “Find Alastarius on Earth.” He had no other choice. There was nothing left for him in the High Kingdoms. He could not go back.

And even if he did go back, the ghouls of the Plain would likely catch him.

He rammed his sword back into the scabbard and started forward. “Find Alastarius on Earth, but gods, Siduri, I hope you’re right.”

-JM