Fated Born by Kristin L Hamblin EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Kristin L Hamblin
- Language: English
- Genre: Sword & Sorcery Fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Centuries of habit plastered the smile on Ardenis’s face. It was
what humans did, or at least what everyone here thought humans
did, so it was what he did too. In fact, as Ardenis crossed through
the stone courtyard, sandals slipping over smooth rock, everyone he met
wore various versions of the same smile. Their matching blue robes
smattered the otherwise clean, sunny space.
“Good morning, Amalia,” Ardenis said, spotting her. She was a watcher
of mortals, like him.
Amalia locked eyes, but frowned in his direction. He tilted his head,
studying her as she made to pass him by.
Had Amalia been emotionally altered? It wasn’t his calling to enforce
the rules, though if she’d been altered—
But then her smile appeared. It looked as forced as his felt.
Ardenis watched her over his shoulder as he left the courtyard behind.
He shrugged, swishing past rows of sweet-smelling roses in constant bloom
in this world where rain didn’t exist, the weather always perfect. The
watchtower loomed ahead, where he worked observing the world below and
its inhabitants in order to pass along information to the council. The stacked
stone towered several stories high, the tallest structure in Acantha.
Inside the white-domed space, morning light from the tall windows cast
over the motionless forms of the night watchers, still deep within the thrall
of observing the mortal world of Thera.
The watch window, an elevated pool of white marble filled with pristine
water, beckoned, and Ardenis took his seat before it. Though they didn’t
have magic like Thera, he liked to think of the window as their own form of
it, allowing them to see another world.
He rested his arms on the hard ledge and breathed a quiet sigh. Mortal
humans would call it contentment, if such emotions existed here in
Acantha. Even after countless millennia, the devotion to his calling hadn’t
diminished.
More people filed inside, smiling and nodding hello. The council
dictated that everyone in Acantha wear the same blue robes, but gave
allowances for hairstyles, so long as they kept with the current trends on
Thera. Ardenis preferred his jaw-length and disheveled.
He focused on the smooth water, so white in its marble casing it almost
glowed. A soft, round light appeared on the surface of the pool, and then an
image formed of the world below—the earthen realm. Someday, when it
was his turn, he’d go there and be born to a mortal body.
Ardenis stared until the image seemed to surround him, until he seemed
to actually be there, floating in the sky. From this vantage, the forests of
Thera were puffy shapes of green hugging the contours of the land below,
broken only by the expansive blue of the Tribunair Sea, the deep red of the
Sengi Desert, and the grey of North Mountain jutting toward where he sat
in premortal Acantha. The names of the landscape changed over time,
depending on who ruled and the language.
Floating above the land, yet still rooted in his chair in the watchtower,
he waited patiently for the Fates to guide him. Soon, a gentle tug to his
middle directed him where to go.
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