The Lightstruck by Sunya Mara EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Sunya Mara
- Language: English
- Genre: Fantasy Romance
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
They say I didn’t want to be born. That I stayed in my mother’s belly far
longer than I was welcome. That Ma was furious, storming about the
healer’s rooms, commanding them to hasten my departure.
She wasn’t callous. She was needed by her people. The Storm was a
great torment, a wall of black stormcloud and violet lighting that birthed
rampaging beasts and bestowed curses on all whom it touched. Every day it
squeezed our kingdom tighter—in Ma’s day, it swallowed the farms of the
sixth ring inch by inch. In my time, it was halfway through the fifth. Only
our ruler, the Regia, had the god-given power to stop the Storm.
But he was
weak, and my mother believed she could do what he could not.
And she loved me, but what did the needs of one child matter when
thousands were suffering? Any mother could protect her own child. But to
protect a kingdom? That required a hero.
Ma left me in my father’s arms and died trying to save us all. They
called her a criminal.
Seventeen years after I was cut out of her, I fought the Regia’s son
before all our people, in the sands of our great stadium. They saw me weep,
they saw me fight, they saw me end the Storm.
Ma would’ve been proud. I died a hero.
The world of the dead isn’t so different from the world above. The palace
still gleams cold and indifferent, perched like a crown atop our five-ringed
city. The fifth ring is still home to the poor, where buildings crowd together
like a mouth full of crooked teeth, where the same old moss still coats our
roofs, in a layer of wet, mildly fragrant greenery that’s springy underfoot.
We even have the ghost of the Storm; but down here it’s a wall of white
nothingness that encircles the city. It can’t be entered; it can’t be fought.
There are some things that are different. Up above, there’s only one way
to enter the city: you’re born into it. Here . . .
A crack of distant thunder. Here one comes.
The pale ghost sky opens up, parting like an eye, just wide enough for
something small to fall through. A thunderous rumble follows as it—a
body, with limbs folded tight—descends to our phantom city. Here comes
the newly dead, fresh off of life.
The body falls like a feather on the wind. Gently swinging to and fro.
The slate roof of the watchtower creaks under my weight as I rise to my
feet, without taking my eyes off our newest resident. Not until I get a read
for where they’re falling, where their soul considers home.
The radius of their swinging narrows.
Not the fifth ring, then, nor the
fourth. Interesting. When I first came here, most folks came from the
outermost ring, the fifth. Curses, malnutrition, that sort of thing.
But now folks come from all sorts of places, with all sorts of interesting
stories. Why, I met a peculiar fellow just the other day who’d died of
heatstroke. No one died of heatstroke when we all lived under the damp
shadow of the Storm.
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