Souldancer Excerpt

I've been working hard on the latest revision of Souldancer. It's actually turned into a partial rewrite. Here's a look at my progress thus far.

The sound of boots on the hardwood floor woke Xander from his dreamless sleep. For one panicked moment he forgot where he was, but then he saw the city lights gleaming through the window.

            I am in Salorien on Keth, he realized, in the home of Astlin Tremore. The latter thought gave him comfort, but his earlier fear returned.

            Is someone else here?

            Xander’s gaze darted about. A row of threadbare stuffed animals languished on a shelf in the square of light filtering through the window. The rest of the room was dark as the Void.

            The floorboards protested as something shifted its weight in the dark.

            “Hello?” Xander whispered.

            Several moments passed in silence.

            “I lied to you,” someone said at last. Little more than a whisper, the voice’s clipped accent was familiar but oddly strained.

            “Who is there?”

Creaking leather and metallic ringing accompanied the unseen speaker’s heavy footfalls. Xander tensed, but his visitor stopped short of the lighted square. Even so, the young man thought he discerned a slight figure standing near the foot of the bed.

            “It’s a lie,” the unknown visitor rasped, “but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

            “Who are you?”

            Twin lights pierced the darkness. Xander shielded his eyes from the sudden glow. Squinting through his fingers, he saw two blazing circles like blue stars; their centers hidden by black moons.

Acting on impulse, Xander willed the burning eyes—if they were eyes—away. He reached for his gift, but the power never came.

The lights moved back and forth like blue fireflies as their owner paced the room.

“I tried to save the others,” the unseen woman said, “but I couldn’t help it. You don’t know what it’s like. A wound in your soul bleeding fire.”
            The pacing figure paused beside the shelf. “They were dying anyway,” she said. “I thought they could close the wound, but it burned them up.”

“What do you—?” Xander began, but a slender arm sheathed in black lashed out, batting the shelf and its worn plush occupants to the floor.

“I didn’t want that for you,” the harsh voice lamented. “You’re not like them.”

“What do you mean?”

The dark figure moved into the light. Xander was dismayed, but not surprised, to see Astlin. Pained longing marred her once gentle face. She’d shed her modest clothes for a suit of the randomly stitched hides of alien creeping things.

The sight irresistibly drew Xander’s eyes, but it seemed a mere projection of something far more terrible. He somehow looked through Astlin to a bright line glowing with orange-red heat. The burning cord led to a familiar, ominous sight: a colossal pyramid darker than any shadow.

A blinding light shone in the distance, mostly obscured by the pyramid. Countless silver filaments streamed from the light to cut through the monolith; but Xander saw two of them intersecting at its heart. One cord—the one he’d seen rising from Astlin—plunged into a fiery rift before joining itself to her. The other kept its pure silver sheen all the way from its origin in the light to its endpoint in Xander’s soul.

“You have what I lost,” Astlin said.