World Of Ryyah: Donnagarian Age, Chronicles of the Shadowspawn Wars, Book One

Opening Sample

Chapter 1 excerpt: sourced from the local manuscript files and condensed for web preview.

The war room held its silence the way old stone holds cold, deep and persistent, indifferent to whatever warmth a man might carry in with him. I stood alone at the heavy oak table, my hands resting flat against its surface, and studied the maps spread before me in the amber light of three oil lamps. The parchment was worn soft at the corners from years of handling, the older ink lines faded to grey beneath the fresh dark markings that showed where our territory had grown, hardened, and settled into something no neighboring ruler could reasonably call temporary. The smell of the room was familiar to me in a way that few things still were: lamp oil, parchment, the faint mineral trace of the stone walls, and underneath it all the particular dustiness of records kept long enough to become history.

My fingers found the Kshearry River by feel as much as by sight. The dark winding curve of it crossed the map from northwest to southeast, and I followed it slowly, the way a man presses on a scar not from pain but from the need to confirm it is still there. Once that river had marked the distance between survival and ruin. Our blood had soaked its eastern banks in the worst months of the war. Now watchtowers stood at every vulnerable crossing, their foundations sunk deep enough to outlast the commanders who had ordered them built. I moved my hand north to the thick forests where our eastern allies had marched to stand beside us, and south to the open plains that now served as our outermost buffer. Nearly a century had passed since the end of what our historians called the Wood Elf Civil War. A hundred years of peace, by the standard of shorter-lived peoples, was a span worth celebrating. Among the elves, it was barely enough time for a generation to change its habits. For me, a half-elf king who belonged fully to neither world, it had been a lifetime spent in the unglamorous labor of rebuilding what war had very nearly erased.