Titles by Martin V. Parece II
Blood and Steel (The Cor Chronicles, Vol. I)
Fire and Steel (The Cor Chronicles, Vol. II)
Darkness and Steel (The Cor Chronicles, Vol. III)
Gods and Steel (The Cor Chronicles, Vol. IV)
Blood Loss (The Chronicle of Rael)
The Path of the Indie or How to Self Publish Your Book
Copyright 2014
Parece Publishing, Martin V. Parece II
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be printed, scanned, reproduced or distributed in any printed or electronic form without express permission from the above.
The golden haired, bronze skinned girl wearing a dress of white flowing silk moved through the streets of the city at will. Like her unrestrained hair, it blew behind her in the warm lazy breeze, with only a simple rope clasped with gold about her waist. No one crossed her path. In fact the people that crowded the city below her father’s tiered temple-palace hastily avoided being in her way and not just for the burly, black-skinned bodyguards that followed behind her. The guards wore no armor, and in fact they barely wore anything at all. Only loincloths and razor sharp scimitars adorned their bodies, allowing all to see the deadly definition of their muscles.
They all knew Thyssallia, the thirteen year old daughter of Mon’El on sight, and in the city of Kaimpur, her father’s word was law second only to the gods. The people of Kaimpur worhshipped her name, bowed and knelt as she passed, and on her birthday, they reveled long, ate until stuffed, drank and fucked. Though, this day was not her birthday. It was a day like any other, but Thyssallia had longed to escape her father’s gilded palace and walk amongst the people under the sun. She waited until late in the morning, until her father was well caught up in mundane affairs of state.
This usually did not take long, for the man had proved himself long ago to be the most powerful priest in this region of western Dulkur. With the vassalage of lesser priests, some of which bowed while others had to be conquered, Mon’El carved out a sizeable fief, easily four hundred miles east to west and double that north to south. Unfortunately, such a large fiefdom required much administrative work. To accommodate this, the priest built a massive temple that also served as his palace on the great, wide River Thyss. It was on a lazy barge upon that river on the first warm day of spring that his daughter, Thyssallia, was conceived. The city that sprung up around the great temple was less grand, though that was by design. Mon’El would not allow his own power to appear eclipsed by the people beneath him, so he allowed only what people were necessary to support his symbol of power.
Still to Thyssallia, it was a place of wonder compared to the plush lifestyle within the palace’s halls. Her sandals clopped on streets paved with smooth circular stones, and as per her father’s edicts, the streets were clean of waste and debris unlike many other cities. Her brown eyes took in the people as they lived, as they toiled, breaking their backs under loads and whips. She watched overseers strike laborers for their weakness, and she watched whores ply their trade behind shops and in alleys. She smiled at it all, for such entertainment was not available to her within the palace.
The people around her varied so much in size and shape, though there were only three colors of skin of which to speak. Most plentiful were the brown skinned people native to this part of Dulkur and who made up most of the populace. They could be found in all of the castes from slave to laborer to merchant, excepting of course the priests who all shared the bronze skin of her race. And then there were those with the black skin, the strikingly gorgeous skin of ebony, against which the whites of their eyes and teeth were such a shock. There were few of these people here, as they come mostly from southern Dulkur, and most were employed in some form of protection or another. This was common due to their large size and well-formed physiques, and they were one of her mother’s favorite appetites, she knew.
Thyssallia found herself in Kaimpur’s market, a long and wide bazaar offering a wide variety of food and goods to those that milled about. Most of the merchants and vendors had makeshift stands constructed of wagons with canopies, upon which sheets of linen were draped to keep off the sun. A few had small storefronts that extended straight out from the buildings on the periphery of the market. Come nightfall, the former would pack their wagons and return to their homes, while the latter would pull their wares back inside the buildings, and all would return just before sunrise.
She idly wandered her way between the vendors as they hawked at passersby, though none propositioned so. For that matter, here they did now bow or kneel, and at most, all she received was a respectful nod. As this continued, something boiled upward within her, and she fought it down with clenched fists and teeth. Her anger turned to joy when she passed a merchant with a wagonload of grapes, the perfectly sweet variety with the pale green skin. Thyssallia carelessly swiped a bunch of these as she passed, smiling as the crisp fruits almost crunched between her teeth and the lovely juice covered her tongue. A few yards away she stopped to admire a merchant’s silks, running a hand across them and imagining how they would feel against her skin. She looked up to see the merchant, a silk clad, brown skinned man with a full, foot long beard eyeing her, and as their eyes met, he bowed his head in deep respect.
Thyssallia released the silks and turned to wander elsewhere, and she realized with a start that one of her personal guards no longer stood alongside her. She looked back toward the wagon of grapes and saw her wayward bodyguard listening solemnly as a fat, brown woman blabbered on to him animatedly. Thyssallia’s guards were generally considered as off limits as Thyssallia herself, so what could this old bitch possibly find so important as to so breach such custom?
Thyssallia stormed back to her bodyguard and, with sandaled feel set wide and crossed arms, demanded, “Woman, why do you assault my man with your words?”
The woman glanced over her shoulder for just an instant, and then stopped suddenly when she realized her mistake. She truly was ugly – a little over five feet tall and three times the woman she should have been to Thyssallia’s eyes, lines of age showed on her face, and some of her curly black hair had begun to turn gray. She moved away from Thyssallia’s bodyguard to take her place behind the wagon.
She bowed her head with closed eyes and said, “My apologies, Lady. I meant no disrespect.”
“Answer my question,” Thyssallia commanded.
“She is concerned about being paid for the grapes,” the tall and well-muscled guard said.
“Paid?” Thyssallia asked, almost sounding confounded.
“W-Well,” the merchantess stuttered, and the market grew ever quieter as more began to listen to the confrontation. “My Lady, it’s only that your great father already receives our taxes, our tithes and whatever else his House and the gods require of us.”
“Paid,” Thyssallia repeated.
“I-I-I’m pleased to serve, but what is left must go far,” she tried to reason.
“Paid!” shrieked Thyssallia. “Here is your pay!”
Thyssallia looked above the wagon, where plain white linen was draped over a wooden framework to keep the summer sun off of the tender, juicy grapes. She stared at the linen for just a moment, willing her consciousness to ignore all else, as if nothing existed in the world except for the linen. It began to smolder, a wisp of black smoke rising upward from the focal point of her vision. Thyssallia took a deep breath, and the linen ignited outright into flame. Within moments, the fire spread across the linen, while the merchant screamed and called for help, but no one dared move. The cloth split from the flame and f
ell through the framework holding it up to land, burning, on the merchant’s load of grapes. It continued to burn until there was no linen left, the fire shrinking the fruit and turning its skin black. Some of them split and burst forth, the juice sizzling as the wooden wagon too began to burn.
“You demand pay?!” Thyssallia screamed. “I’ll leave you with nothing, you bitch!” As she said this, she pointed directly at the old, ugly fat woman, and a candle’s worth of flame appeared in the woman’s hair, almost as if the ends of her hair were a wick. The flame spread and grew, and within moments, the woman cried and screamed for mercy, for help.
“Stop this!” thundered a voice from the far side of the market, from where Thyssallia had originally come. Thyssallia nearly jumped out of her skin at the sound of her father’s voice, booming unnaturally across the bazaar as it did when he used his powers of the air. She looked to see him storming across the market toward her, undisguised anger plain upon his face.
Her father, Mon’El, appeared as a giant to her, even though he barely stood six feet tall. Perhaps it was some kind of magical illusion that she did not understand, or maybe it was the fear of a child facing an angry parent. Mon’El always kept his face and scalp shaven, causing the sun to reflect off the bronze skin of his head ever so slightly, and today like most days he wore silksteel robes so pale and light blue to be almost white. His narrow face, sharp jawline and hawk-like nose often appeared imposing, but it was his eyes that truly showed his anger at his daughter’s actions.
Thyss looked back at the havoc she had wreaked and saw both the merchant and her wagon blazing heavily while the woman screamed. She tried to will the fire out, begging Hykan to give her the strength, but there was no answer. She called on Nykeema to aid her in extinguishing the flames. But the goddess of water required serene wisdom in all things, and Thyssallia shook with the emotion of it all. She heard her father sigh even over the fire’s low roaring, and within moments an ice cold wind came down from the sky to stamp out the flames.
“Tend to her,” Mon’El commanded a priest in his entourage as he pointed to the merchant who lay moaning, “and take my daughter back to the palace. I will deal with her later.”