Excerpt: THE RIFT WAR

From Uncial Press

Book 5 of the Zygradon Chronicles

Excerpt:

The construction of a suit of armor entirely made of star-metal, for Emrillian to wear in hand-to-hand combat with Edrout. She had sworn at the age of twelve to destroy the enemy enchanter so her father would not have to face the man again.

Grego stepped out of the forest and into the intricate gardens surrounding the main house of the Rakkell estate. The lights swirled and spun in a dome around the large workshop that sat a good hundred meters away from the manor house. Mrillis' voice came from the workshop, answered a moment later by Emrillian's rich alto. Relieved to be able to share this perilous news as soon as possible, Grego pushed through the barrier of light and came out the other side, feeling as if he had taken several whiffs of pure oxygen. His skin tingled all over as if scrubbed clean. He pushed the door open, and knowing how Emrillian worked, he moved quietly and slowly. It was not wise to distract or startle her while she worked star-metal.

Emrillian stood in the center of a globe of silvery-blue light, eyes closed, hands spread midway between shoulder and waist. A glowing, molten mass of silver-blue metal, almost the same color as her eyes, churned in mid-air, suspended by green and white streaks of light coming from her fingers. She moved her left hand out, and the metal streamed out and flattened into a sheet. She raised her right hand, just a little, and pointed with her index finger, twirling it, and the sheet of glowing metal folded in on itself, again and again, as if it were a paper being compacted into a packet. Then she flattened it into another sheet, and again folded it. Flattened and folded.

Grego remembered to breathe. He had watched her do the exact same thing not two moons ago to a piece of fine steel, working it and tempering it and folding it, then shaping the hot metal with a stone hammer until she formed it into a thick cuff to protect an archer against the snap of the bow string. Emrillian had quite a reputation as a metalworker among their Archaics friends, and the bow guard, engraved with the image of a drakag, had been a gift for a friend of theirs when she graduated to Valor rank.