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    Black Lion
    Black Lion
    Black Lion
    Ebook116 pages59 minutes

    Black Lion

    By Vladimir Duran

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Burning Stone, the wizard city of flame, has fallen. Betrayal opened the way for demons to come and rip out its heart. Before the long night is done the demons will make the city theirs. A new Necropolis to plague the world.

    Alone and without magic, two wizards born of Burning Stone make their way through the blood-soaked labyrinthine streets and staring corpses. A young girl desperately searching for her mother and a man in black who’s come to bring the city peace. Stalked by unseen evil their time is running. Running out to escape, running out to make the stones Burn.

    Excerpt

    Taking off at a run, the Harrower darted down one alleyway then another and another. The route was as clear to him as the way to his family home. While he ran, the demon's presence skittered across his mind as it hunted him. Fractured bodies closing in from every direction.

    Hopping one last wall, the Harrower landed in the huge back yard of a smith's shop. Tough, stained the glass windows were still green and the flowerbeds bright.

    The Harrower took in but ignored the small details barely visible in the light of an orange emergency lantern. Other things demanded his attention. The gemelo demon had followed and now climbed over the garden wall.

    Six of them appeared from all directions, one perched on the roof of the house behind him. They looked like green and tan badgers the size of bears. Claws like spades extended themselves toward him and their breath smoked as it rasped in bone dry throats. The Harrower could smell the combustible stench across the garden even through his helmet. Whatever that thing had in its gullet he didn't want any part of it.

    Sheathing his sword at his hip, the Harrower flicked his hand over a panel on the back of his belt. Time to change weapons. A spear came into his hands, appearing from thin air. The black haft of a spear spun out of nowhere as he fell into a defensive stance. The black spearhead moved like quicksilver as formed and reformed its shape with every swing. Sliding down the black shaft it could appear on the butt end as likely as the head.
    The Hydra Spear, one of the twelve weapons all Harrowers had to master. A good weapon for fighting enemies coming in from every direction.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVladimir Duran
    Release dateAug 16, 2014
    ISBN9781311188236
    Black Lion
    Author

    Vladimir Duran

    Vladimir Duran is a man who loves a good story no matter what form it takes. He’s into everything from comics, manga and anime to the epic poets and classic cinema. A good story is a good story is a good story. Vladimir lives in New York City where he pretends to be a legal clerk when he would rather be writing. He spends his free time Drawing and Playing Mass Effect. He also likes to build magic systems based on classical philosophy.

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      Book preview

      Black Lion - Vladimir Duran

      Black Lion

      By Vladimir Duran

      This is a work of fiction. All Characters and events portrayed in this anthology are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

      BLACK LION

      Published by Vladimir Duran at Smashwords

      Copyright © 2013 by Vladimir Duran

      All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Contents

      Other works by this Author

      Cover Credits

      Black Lion

      Burning Stone, the wizard city of flame, has fallen. Betrayal opened the way for demons to come and rip out its heart. Before the long night is done the demons will make the city theirs. A new Necropolis to plague the world.

      Alone and without magic, two wizards born of Burning Stone make their way through the blood-soaked labyrinthine streets and staring corpses. A young girl desperately searching for her mother and a man in black who’s come to bring the city peace. Stalked by unseen evil their time is running. Running out to escape, running out to make the stones Burn.

      One

      Two

      Three

      Four

      Five

      Six

      Seven

      The World of Knights: Wizard Nobility

      The World of Knights: Wizard High Houses

      The World of Knights: Demon Levels

      The World of Knights: Shields and Wards

      Glossary

      Next Time

      About the Author

      Connect with Me Online

      Cover Credits

      Cover: Shane Braithwaite

      Other Works by this Author

      A Rising Knight Volume One: Everything that has an End

      He was a killer by fifteen, a warrior by sixteen, a revolutionary by seventeen, a legend by eighteen, he won't live to be nineteen. These are Steps Vlad will take to define his destiny. He will spit at the feet of god and slay his angels.

      A Rising Knight Volume Two: Born for War

      Welcome to the game. It wants to kill you. Now the stage had been set it’s time for the real show to get started. All three story arcs from volume one are continued in explosive fashion. It’s time to go play with monsters.

      A Rising Knight Volume Three: Destruction’s Children

      Why do you fight? Why do you pay the price? Destruction’s Children brings the war home for the Knights of the revolution. Jackal is forced to relive his mother’s brutal death while Olga dreams of getting blood on her hands. Vlad reaches a pivotal point when forced to confront reality, there is always someone better. What do you do when you can’t see the way forward anymore? Make one up.

      A Rising Knight Volume Four: King's Knight

      Wriath is coming and war is coming with him. Vlad has walked three journeys on his path to becoming a Harrower, a King’s Knight. And they have all lead back to the wizard world. To the place he had been an outcast freak, a hated reminder of days gone by and terrifying signpost of things to come. Now its time for him to become something far more dangerous, a man with noting to lose.

      A Rising Knight: Eagle

      Twenty thousand years before the Blood Ocean and the Fall that came after, the Harrower Knights, the Deathwings, ruled the sky. Sent on a grave mission in the midst of a desperate battle, one Knight will find her moment. With the fate of her legion and a city hanging in the balance will she be able to seize it? In an age of Heroes how do you rise to the top? You do what no one else can do.

      Black Lion

      - This is my home, I will destroy it.

      July 7th 12:33am (Local Time) – 200,000 years before the Blood Ocean and the Fall of the Knights

      -92 degrees Fahrenheit.

      The Burning Stone, sits at the edge of the Icy Plains, the easternmost region, of the southern continent. The wizard city of flame smolders above the waters of the Frozen Sea. A long cold night is coming, an age of death and cold that will last thousands of years. The city defies it.

      The chill never reaches beyond the city’s grim black walls and colossal dome. Twenty miles in diameter the city is a perfect circle capped by a half sphere. Hoary white frost covers the smooth surface, giving it a pearlescent sheen. Beneath the ice collectors, long patches of gray stone set into the roof fanning out from the center, gather pure sunlight and draw it down into the structure.

      Every five miles, almost hidden by packed snow, square gray outlines dot a grid along the surface of the dome. Occasionally a square will turn red and fire will erupt from it like a geyser, shooting a hundred feet into the frozen sky. The squares are heat pumps, releasing the pent up flame within the city.

      Fire burns within the black stone, a heat beyond what wind and latitude can counter. The heat of the people living within, the heat of their magic. The heat of the very stones themselves, alive with power. The city is known as the Fire Within the Ice.

      Beneath the dome the city is a warren. Built one atop another on level after level rising from the very depths of the city in a maze of alleyways and street. All together they pack the whole structure almost into a single whole. Old buildings are torn down and new ones replace them every day, making the maze an ever-changing thing.

      The city is a maze filled with light. There are no dank gloomy holes in the city of flame. Vines flow like water along every wall, rising through grates built into the stone to let them pass. They throw off flowers in every color imaginable that glow with an inner light in every shade visible to the naked eye. And a few that are not. The collectors on the dome feed pure sunlight directly into the vines.

      A maze with a purpose. Burning Stone is built to confuse invading enemies. It hides within its coils a hundred thousand places where defenders can strike from. Children run and play in the maze as soon as they begin to walk, learning its routes and passages. No0ne ever learn them all. Mapmakers work constantly to keep updated records of the maze. Civilians must rely on local guides to see them through the complex.

      It did not help. The city has been taken. Betrayal opened the way and demons have flooded in. The hallways reek with smoke and the chocking scent of death strangling the air with the stench of fiends. Darkness has finally come to the city of flame frozen under the ice.

      Three million wizards unable to escape died within Burning Stone’s twisting streets as the flowers went dark.

      Demons infest the city like rats in a whole. Packs of them roam the streets and alleyways, hunting. Hunting for anything living, any life they may steal. They have taken the Burning Stone.

      ✪ ✪ ✪

      One

      Quinn

      Closing her hands over her ears to stop the screams, Quinn ran. She ran from the people she had let die.

      The flowers that lit the streets were dark, dead. Red emergency lights ran along corners and cracks but a lot of them were dark too.

      Silently, Quinn ran from shadow to shadow, never staying in the light for too long. These were the streets she played in every day, she knew where to go, where to hide, where she would be safe. Except she would never be safe again. The demons had come, the city was theirs.

      Those people shouldn't have gone to the left. Breaker street had three stairs leading to the lower levels. As soon as the people reach the middle of the street the Demons flooded up the stairs.

      Quinn saw them heading that way and could have told them. She was eight and she could have told them, everybody knew about Breaker street. Everybody who lived in this part

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