Black Stone Heart (The Obsidian Path Book 1)

  BLACK STONE HEART

  THE OBSIDIAN PATH #1

  by Michael R. Fletcher

  That Which Kills You

  Makes You Stronger

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is mostly coincidental.

  BLACK STONE HEART Copyright © 2020 by Michael R. Fletcher

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Editor: Sarah Chorn

  Cover Art by: Felix Ortiz

  Cover Design: Mike Fletcher

  Books by Michael R. Fletcher

  Ghosts of Tomorrow

  Beyond Redemption

  The Mirror’s Truth

  Swarm and Steel

  A Collection of Obsessions

  The Millennial Manifesto

  Smoke and Stone (City of Sacrifice #1)

  Black Stone Heart (The Obsidian Path #1)

  Upcoming releases

  Ash and Bone (City of Sacrifice #2)

  She Dreams in Blood (The Obsidian Path #2)

  For Rich, who was there when this story first began

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Table of Contents

  TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

  PROLOGUE 8

  CHAPTER ONE 9

  CHAPTER TWO 13

  CHAPTER THREE 19

  CHAPTER FOUR 23

  CHAPTER FIVE 31

  CHAPTER SIX 40

  CHAPTER SEVEN 49

  CHAPTER EIGHT 57

  CHAPTER NINE 72

  CHAPTER TEN 93

  CHAPTER ELEVEN 102

  CHAPTER TWELVE 107

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN 116

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN 127

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN 130

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN 139

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 150

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 158

  CHAPTER NINETEEN 164

  CHAPTER TWENTY 174

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 184

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 196

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE 205

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR 213

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE 225

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX 232

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN 239

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT 247

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE 254

  CHAPTER THIRTY 259

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE 266

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO 274

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE 284

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR 299

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE 310

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX 318

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN 330

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT 340

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE 351

  CHAPTER FORTY 361

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE 367

  EPILOGUE 371

  PROLOGUE

  Every day we do the things we think we have to do. So rarely do we stop to question our choices. We don’t even see deciding that we ‘have to do something’ is itself a choice. We blunder through life, writing our failures and excuses as we go, defending every choice with justifications made up after the fact. The truth is, we never really consider the consequences.

  My choices had consequences. Vast consequences.

  A kingdom fell. No, I shouldn’t belittle their efforts just because they fall well short of my own accomplishments. An empire fell. People died. A lot of people. Some died peripherally, as a result of my choices. Many died by my own hand. I tore souls from innocent victims to summon and bind hellish creatures. Demons, you’d call them.

  I did terrible, terrible things trying to do the right thing.

  I sought a god trapped in a sword, the End of Sorrow, and I found it.

  I went in search of the ancient god I worshipped all those thousands of years ago, and I found her. I had a vision of remaking the world as it once was. She tore out my eyes and replaced that vision with one of her own.

  So much death. So much violence.

  In finding everything, I lost the one thing that mattered.

  I’ll start at the beginning, but know that it’s not the beginning, just my beginning. All this started thousands of years before my story. You’re not going to understand, at least not at first.

  CHAPTER ONE

  For an eternity I was nothing but animal hunger. Small lives, crawling, twitching, and slithering, fed me. I wanted more, needed more. Always more. Buried in earth and stone I fed off the grass above me. When the roots of an ancient tree that started life millennia after my death reached me, I drank its life too. I was voracious, insatiable, a devourer. Squirrels and mice crossing my ravenous grave stiffened and fell dead.

  With each life I grew.

  Blood.

  Blood soaked through the earth. This was a large life, a bright spark of existence, wounded and dying. It collapsed upon me. Even buried I felt its weight impact the soil above. Sucking the life from it, I regained some shred of what I was. What I had been.

  I woke, suffocating in the earth, choking on dirt and clawing in mad panic. I fought free of my prison. Roots hung from me, the veins through which I fed. I watched them squirm and writhe their way back into my flesh, and wondered what I was.

  A lone wolf stood a score of strides away. Gaunt from a hard winter, its fur hung in tatters. It watched me, waiting. For a moment I couldn’t decide whether I should flee, or try and run it down so I could feed off it. I turned toward it and the starved beast disappeared into the trees.

  I had no name, no memory of self, and yet still this seemed strange.

  Naked and filthy, I stood in the morning sun. A circle of dead grass, a dozen strides across, surrounded me. Thousands of tiny corpses, husked and dried, littered the ground. Translucent shells of insects. Fragile birds, skeletal and empty. Countless remains of squirrels and rodents, twisted with agony. The corpse of a man, long rotted to bone and gristle, lay nearby. He wore armour, decayed leather and scraps of rusted chain. His throat had been torn out. A cleared path through the corpses suggested he’d been dragged onto my grave. At the edge of the dead circle stood an ancient tree towering far into the sky. Rot hollowed its trunk. A good wind would bring it down.

  Dew beaded my arms and torso, bright gems of rainbow light. I admired their beauty as a cool breeze puckered my skin. I was empty, a vessel waiting to be filled. With memories. With life. With death.

  The ground cracked beneath me, a thin crust of dirt still frozen after the passing of winter. I remember the joy of standing in the sun, the feel of the air, of life buzzing and croaking all around me. Birds flitted through the trees, chasing each other in an endless game. I was nothing, and that nothing was beautiful. I think, even then, I had some inkling of what I once was, what I must once again become. If I could have stayed there forever in that empty state, I would have.

  I should have.

  When I did finally move, stepping toward a rabbit who wandered out of the bush to stare at me, I collapsed to my knees. The rabbit bolted and I scrambled after it, crawling, tearing my hands and knees on sharp sticks and stones. It soon became clear that I would never catch the little beast. I lay panting in the dirt, grinning at the sky.

  Hunger drove me back to my feet and I padded barefoot through the forest, limping and whimpering.

  At the time, the direction I chose seemed random. I now know I followed some instinct wri
t deep in my tainted blood. I walked south, stopping to eat worms and beetles and the occasional plant. I needed life. Large life. I was too weak, too slow, to catch it.

  When the sun sank I collapsed to the soil and slept, dreamless and innocent. I should have been cold. I wasn’t. I woke to find the shrivelled corpses of slugs and leeches spotting my body. Picking one off, I crushed its brittle shell before tossing it aside.

  Had my flesh drained them of life?

  I walked south for two days. Sleeping, drinking icy water from the snowmelt of a winter just ended, and eating what small lives crossed my path. On the morning of the third day I found a cabin. It was a crude structure of sticks and mud. For the first time since waking, I knew an emotion other than endless hunger: Curiosity.

  Furs hung stretched across sticks driven into the trampled mud. The bones and skulls of hundreds of animals sat piled against one wall. Yellow and furred brown with clinging strands of rotten meat, they looked to have been well-gnawed. Moving closer I saw the hut was made as much from bone as from sticks. This was a home of death.

  The air stank of decaying flesh and rancid fur.

  Another feeling grew in me: Fear.

  Up until this moment I had always been the hunter, the killer, devourer of lives. Whatever lived here was a more successful murderer than I. The desire to flee pulsed through me and yet, even more powerful, was the need to move closer, to see who or what was within this hut.

  The door swung open on leather hinges and an old man, swaddled in furs, stood framed by wood and mud and death. He was bone thin, ropes of hard muscle and veins stretched over an angular frame. His skin was a ruddy pink, wind-burned.

  Lifting an arm, I examined my own flesh, black, darker than night.

  Something hung in his fist and I recognized it as a weapon. Where my feet were bloody and raw from walking the forest, his were encased in hard leather.

  I wanted that weapon. I wanted my feet to be warm and protected. I wanted his crude hut and his furs.

  I wanted everything he had.

  He said something, and I tackled him, crashing into the hut. We wrestled until I smashed his head against a rock lodged in the mud floor. Over and over I slammed his skull against stone until he became still and limp.

  I took everything he possessed and made it mine.

  Everything.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Years passed in that hut. I was alone and it never occurred to me I could be anything else. I remembered flashes of some distant past and words like axe and boots. I found his shortbow and learned how to use it, fashioning rough arrows when the last of his disappeared into the forest lodged in the haunch of a deer. By following the old man’s tracks in the mud, I found his traps. After studying them, I was able to reset them and make a few of my own.

  Sometimes wolves would visit me. They’d stay in the trees, watching with knowing eyes. Perhaps they recognized a fellow predator. They never bothered me, never came closer. I grew accustomed to the attention and soon ignored them. They were a small, unhealthy pack, clearly eking out a desperate survival. Sometimes their fur hung off them in ragged clumps. No matter how awful they looked, they never moved closer, never stole meat from my kills, even when I left it outside.

  Time passed, unnoticed by the emptiness of me.

  I killed. I ate.

  Winters were cruel and I often went hungry. Each spring my traps filled with squirming life and I gorged myself.

  Early one morning, as I sat outside enjoying the feel of the sun on my face, something woke in me. I felt a presence growing nearer. I didn’t know what it was, but felt in my blood that it was important, that it had something I wanted.

  Returning to my hut I collected my hatchet and stood waiting. A wolf came to the edge of the treeline to wait with me. He watched with infinite patience.

  Hours passed before a naked youth staggered from the trees. Unlike the trapper I killed, we were the same colour. Long coils of greasy blue-black hair hung to his shoulders like matted snakes. A tangled scruff of beard muddied his features. I reached up to touch the matted riot growing on my own chin. My hair matched his, though I tied mine back with a leather thong.

  He stared at me, blinking. Eyes of black, set deep in a sunken and filthy face, watched me. He moved closer, tentative like a baby deer.

  I waited, hatchet held behind my back. He had something. Inside him. It was mine.

  I wanted it.

  Stopping a stride away, he touched his chest over his heart, he then pointed at the same spot on me.

  I nodded, understanding.

  “It’s inside you,” I said, my voice cracking from disuse. “I need it,” I told him. “Whatever it is that’s in there, I need it.”

  He showed no sign of understanding my words.

  I repeated his gesture, touching his chest.

  When he glanced down, I split his skull with my hatchet. He dropped, face first, to the mud. I had to stand on his neck to wrestle the blade free of bone.

  I rolled him onto his back and he blinked up at me, tremors running through his body, his feet kicking in little twitches as he died. I saw comprehension in those eyes, understanding of what I’d done to him.

  Three times I chopped into his chest before the ribs split. Each time, he blinked, his mouth opening a little as if struggling to speak.

  Working my fingers into him, I cracked him open.

  The bastard was skin and bone and my subsistence-level diet left me weak. After opening him, I pulled his heart from his chest, hacking at the veins and arteries with my axe to free it.

  “You’d have done the same to me if you got here first,” I joked. But he was dead, empty eyes staring into the endless blue sky. My voice, unused in years, rang harsh in my ears.

  I tore his heart apart with my teeth, searching. I found what I sought, buried deep at the centre. A tiny flake of black stone barely the size of my smallest fingernail.

  “Who are you?” I asked the corpse. “What do you remember?”

  I blinked in surprise at the strange question.

  The stone sank into my flesh. Following an artery, it tore through me, tunnelling its way to my heart. Agony took the world away and I lay screaming in the mud.

  I woke, staring up at the stars. The body lay beside me, cold and still. The blood I’d splashed over myself while tearing this man apart had dried to a hard crust. I stank of death and murder. Somewhere inside me, the sliver of stone I took from his heart met the flake already residing in my own.

  Turning my head, I studied his slack features and black flesh, and knew him for who he was.

  Me.

  Pushing myself from the bloody mud, I stood grinning at the night sky.

  The wolf was gone.

  “I have a name,” I told the stars. They shimmered and shivered in terror.

  It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  As fragment of stone met fragment of stone, memory coalesced. Meaningless on their own, together they told a story, albeit one with huge gaps.

  “Khraen,” I said, testing the sound of my name.

  I needed more. How many more shards of stone were out there? Where were they? Who did this to me? Why had they broken me apart and scattered me?

  I had to know.

  Staggering back into my mud hut, I collapsed on the stinking pile of furs I called a bed.

  Nightmares tore my sleep that night. I dreamed of a colossal fleet, ships littered from horizon to horizon. I stood on the prow of the flagship, the Habnikaav. Red sails snapped in the wind. Red robes. Red armour. A red sword sheathed at my side.

  I was blood.

  They came out of the sun. White ships. Sails bleached harsh and blinding. A pretension of purity. A lie.

  A wall of water rose up between the fleets, elementalists waking the ocean itself and turning it against me. They were insane. No one could hope to control an elemental as huge and ancient as an ocean. Waking it was a move of utter desperation. But their recklessness spelled the end of the Imp
erial Navy of… of… I couldn’t remember.

  I watched the ocean destroy my ships. I watched the elementalists crack and lose control, and I watched the ocean turn on the white fleet. It was awake now, and angry. Next it would scrub any nearby coasts free of offending life.

  The next morning, I packed my meagre belongings. My clothes were from the trapper I killed several winters ago. I couldn’t remember how long I’d been here. Time in this lonely cabin had a way of sneaking past. The trapper’s hatchet I wore in a loop in my rope belt. His shortbow and collection of crude arrows, I slung over my shoulder. After putting what remained of my cured meat from the winter into my backpack, an awkward burlap contraption which also belonged to the trapper, I left my reeking little hut. I stood in the mud, the trapper’s too-large boots on my feet. They were falling apart now, wouldn’t last another winter. Something took the sundered corpse during the night. Probably the wolves. They were welcome to it.

  Though it had been my sanctuary for years, I thought to never see that hut again. I was wrong. There was so much I didn’t know.

  It felt strange to remember murdering that naked man. Chopping into his skull, his dull look of astonishment, the axe rising and falling, the splash of blood as I hacked his chest apart.

  His skin was black, like mine.

  Somehow, he was me. Or a piece of me.

  That was the first time I saw myself since waking, alone and naked, four or five years ago. Had I not found the trapper and his shack of mud and sticks, gods know what would have become of me.

  Gods?

  I shrugged the thought away.

  This shack, mud, and death, had been my world for too long. It was time to move. I had a name, and a name meant a history. Though I knew next to nothing, I was damned sure people weren’t supposed to have shards of obsidian in their hearts.

  Turning my back on that hut, I set out. After a dozen strides I stopped.

  Everything I knew lay behind me. My whole world. I was safe there, if not comfortable. I knew where the rabbits ran and where wild potatoes grew. I knew a stream where the fish were plentiful. I knew where all the dead and dying trees were within three days walk. I could stay there forever.