Leviathan: An Asher & Avandriell Story, page 1
LEVIATHAN
AN ASHER & AVANDRIELL STORY
PHILIP C. QUAINTRELL
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2024 by Philip C. Quaintrell
First edition published 2024.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.
Cover Illustration by Bodidog Design
Book design by BodiDog Design
Published by Quaintrell Publishings
For Those who need a little more Asher in their life…
ALSO BY PHILIP C. QUAINTRELL
THE ECHOES SAGA: (9 Book Series)
1. Rise of the Ranger
2. Empire of Dirt
3. Relic of the Gods
4. The Fall of Neverdark
5. Kingdom of Bones
6. Age of the King
7. The Knights of Erador
8. Last of the Dragorn
9. A Clash of Fates
THE RANGER ARCHIVES: (3 Book Series)
1. Court of Assassins
2. Blood and Coin
3. A Dance of Fang and Claw
A TIME OF DRAGONS:
1. Once There Were Heroes
2. In The Shadow of Kings
NOVELLAS (POST-ECHOES SAGA):
1. Leviathan
THE TERRAN CYCLE: (4 Book Series)
1. Intrinsic
2. Tempest
3. Heretic
4. Legacy
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Adilandra Draqaro
Princess of Illian
Aenwyn Kirion
Elven Ambassador
Asher
Ranger
Athis Draqaro
Prince of Illian
Avandriell
Bronze dragon, bonded with Asher
Balthazar Blackhelm
Pirate Lord
Doran Heavybelly
King of Dhenaheim
Galanör Reveeri
Elven Ambassador
Gideon Thorn
Dragon Rider
Gwenyfer Valayan
Queen of Erador
Hadarax
Giant
Ilargo
Green dragon, bonded with Gideon
Inara Draqaro
Queen of Illian/Commander of the Guardians of the Realm
Kassian Kantaris
Master of the mage school, Ikirith
Vighon Draqaro
King of Illian
THE STORY SO FAR…
AClash of Fates brought an end to The Fated War, scattering Verda’s heroes to futures they fought and bled for.
Illian and all within its borders are ruled by Vighon and Inara Draqaro, the House of the Flaming Sword. Their children are Athis, so named for Inara’s dragon, and Adilandra, so named for her grandmother. For seventeen years, they fostered Gwenyfer Valayan, the rightful queen of Erador, who now sits upon that western throne.
Gideon Thorn and his dragon, Ilargo, worked tirelessly for years to secure peace in Erador, thereby allowing Gwenyfer to rule without threat of death. Their task complete, the pair now roam the world in search of potential Riders, who might awaken the dormant eggs in Drakanan.
Galanör and Aenwyn, who pledged themselves to Queen Reyna and King Nathaniel of Ayda, were gifted the station of ambassadors. They call Illian their home and work always to aid the world of man on behalf of the elven nation.
The icy realm of Dhenaheim was left in the grips of monsters, who invaded upon the dwarven halls in their absence. King Doran, son of Dorain, sought to uproot the fiends and make safe his peoples’ homes once more. He did this after several years of hardship and yet more fighting, and with the help of an old friend and his young dragon.
Asher and Avandriell gave years to the dwarves, hunting monsters in the dark places of the world. It was their great pleasure to do so, enjoying their time amongst Doran’s kin. In the years since, leading to Queen Gwenyfer’s departure from Illian astride Ilargo, life had never been so sweet for the ranger and his intrepid dragon—and well earned it was.
1
THE HUNT
The snow crunched under his boots, the powder all too fresh, even in a village so sleepy as Hogstead. There should have been evidence of a hundred people living their lives, their prints muddying the streets up and down. The region hadn’t known snow for two days. That was two days in which the village must have lay dormant, desolate, dead.
The latter had brought a ranger into its midst.
Asher crouched down, his green cloak fanning across the ground behind him. With one hand, he bore down through the snow and wiped it away.
Blood.
Splattered across the hard ground, it had frozen, a dark secret beneath nature’s purest blanket.
The ranger sighed, his hot breath spoiling the air. He had never wanted a contract to be so wrong, imagining the lack of contact with Longdale, the village’s lifeline to real civilisation, was due to the particularly harsh winter.
“They’ve probably been bedding down for a few weeks,” the ranger had said, his words aimed at the very lord of Longdale, from whom the contract had found patronage.
“Gods be damned,” he cursed, tossing his handful of snow away.
Rising to his full height, it was with patient and experienced eyes that he surveyed all that he could of Hogstead. From the road, if it could be given so grand a name, he could only see half a dozen buildings, and they were all coated in thick snow. Still, Asher noted the damage here and there.
A broken window frame.
Discarded supplies poking through the snow.
A door hanging from a single hinge.
A house with no door at all, its threshold piled with intruding snow.
Then there was the lack of smoke. Not a single chimney revealed the fire that should have been battling the bitter cold, keeping the inhabitants of Hogstead warm. It seemed the shadows were Hogstead’s only inhabitants, not to be beaten back by even a mere candle.
The village had no more life than the rocky hills that surrounded it.
A well-developed sixth sense informed Asher that a fight was in his imminent future.
As he would, the ranger made a check of his weaponry. The hilt on his hip was as familiar as it was reassuring, the grip a tight binding of dark green leather to match his cloak. His fingers moved up to the pommel, where he could press his thumb into the blunt studs that decorated the sphere.
Feeling he would need it in a hurry, the ranger pulled on the sword, drawing it no more than a couple of inches to ensure the blade hadn’t frozen in the scabbard. He glimpsed those inches, sighting what looked like dull steel under the grey clouds. Knowing it was not steel made Asher feel two-feet taller.
He still recalled the moment Doran Heavybelly had presented it to him, deep in the halls of the newly-reclaimed Grimwhal, the dwarf’s home city.
“Ye’ve more than earned it,” the king of Dhenaheim had said to him, the weapon held horizontally in the hands of the smith beside him.
Asher knew well the part he had played in liberating the dark tunnels of the dwarven realm, though he doubted it had been enough to see any dwarf part with so fine a blade. He also knew of the dwarven tradition where weapons were concerned. Being the one who intended to wield it, he had taken the sword from the one who had forged it, concluding his ownership and, in the eyes of the dwarves, the sword’s loyalty.
With thirty-five inches of tempered silvyr, the double-edged sword was an arsenal unto itself. It was also worth a fortune for those who cared about such things.
Running his hand across his belt, he felt the two throwing knives before going on to find the curved dagger near the base of his back. With his other hand, the ranger tugged on the straps that cut across his chest, securing the quiver across his shoulders. It was laden with arrows, each destined to find its end in some monster.
By the weight of it, Asher knew his folded bow was hooked to the quiver—his oldest… anything. Not that it retained any of its original parts, the bow worked and reworked so many times since his days in the service of Nightfall.
Rounding out his mobile armoury, the ranger reached over his shoulder and gripped the hilt of his short-sword. As he had with the two-handed broadsword, he removed the blade a few inches to make certain it hadn’t frozen in place. Like its larger sibling, the weapon boasted an hourglass blade of pure silvyr. While its shape and size were remnants of his life as an assassin, the weapon itself had been forged by a dwarven smith with the purest of hearts.
He would look in on Danagarr soon, he promised himself.
First things first…
The crunching snow announced his every step. For the second time in his life, Asher entered the village of Hogstead in search of a monster. He wasn’t dealing with a Giant this time—their obtuse handiwork was always clear to see. This was something else, something that possessed a touch of real evil in its heart.
Coming across the house with no door, the ranger paused over the threshold and peered inside, one hand resting on the hilt of his broadsword. Asher narrowed his eyes, piercing the gloom therein. A family had lived inside, their belongings, including small wooden toys, were strewn about, scattered amongst the debris and broken furniture.
More blood.
It was splattered up the walls and interior doorframes. Dark red handprints could be seen inside the small kitchen. It was the blood on the floor that caught Asher’s eye, where it could be seen in thick lines. The red smears suggested that more than one body had been dragged from the rooms and out the door.
Seeing no evidence of the creature he might be dealing with, the ranger moved on to look through the window of another house. It was almost identical. Blood. Debris. The door forced in. Again, the smears on the floor were proof that wounded people had been dragged from their homes.
Crossing the street, Asher approached what appeared to be some kind of shop—a butcher’s perhaps. The hooks were swinging in the wind, absent any meat, and the door hung at an angle from one of its hinges. There was no one inside, not even a body, be it human or animal. Like the houses across the street, there were signs of a struggle and blood smeared across the floor.
Asher’s suspicions were beginning to grow.
He consulted A Chronicle of Monsters: A Ranger’s Archive, its pages clear in his mind. There were a few monsters that might have been assigned to the kind of massacre he was investigating, but he had a feeling he was hunting a monster not found in those archives.
Coming to a stop in the middle of the village’s only crossroads, Asher took in the largest building in all of Hogstead. The tavern had no name nor need of one. The name Felick came to mind, conjured from deep memory. The owner would be long dead by now, he reasoned, taken by old age if he had any luck.
Looking left and right at the crossroads, where he could see the other invaded homes and shops, Asher listened to his hunch and crouched again. Drawing his short-sword, the ranger sliced down through the snow and shifted it to one side. He found what he was looking for but continued to move more snow aside, widening his search area.
Rising once more, he looked down on intersecting lines of frozen blood. From every street and home, those thick smears came to a single point at the tavern’s door.
Taking a step back, the ranger examined the building, paying closer attention to its windows and roof. The latter was covered in snow and the former were boarded up from the inside.
He didn’t need to see through the windows, of course, his blood beginning to boil. He already knew what he would find therein.
Thinking about the space he would have inside, Asher kept the short-sword in hand and strode towards the tavern’s entrance. His right boot came up and slammed into the door, breaking the lock and twisting the hinges, taking the door clean from sight.
The smell struck him first.
Death had its own kind of odour, a putrid and rancid scent that promised never to fade in memory. The stench was that and more, the tavern assaulted by additional smells. Rot. Mould. It would have been enough to turn even the most hardened of warriors away, but Asher had to see it for himself.
The sky’s pale light was enough to banish some of the shadows inside and allow the ranger to place the bare bones of the large room in memory. The hearth in the centre was cold, its flames long left to die. Beyond it, the bar stretched from one wall to the other, though it did not display any drinks, tankards, or the usual sundries often seen on the shelves in most taverns.
Instead, it was lined from end to end with severed heads.
They filled the shelves and spilled onto the bar, each placed ear to ear. Streaked with blood, their every face was stretched in agony, their final moments a torment. Another step and his boot nudged something on the floor. Asher narrowed his eyes, trying to make sense of the body part he was looking at.
It was a forearm, he decided. Snapped at the elbow with every finger and thumb bitten off the hand. It was one of many body parts littering the tavern floor. Like the forearm, every torn limb or torso was in pieces, the flesh stripped and devoured.
Asher had no doubt that all of Hogstead filled the tavern, their bodies brought together where they could be feasted on in the dark. The ranger knew immediately what manner of beast he was hunting, just as he knew he wasn’t the only one drawing breath inside that frigid room.
With his free hand, Asher reached out both physically and ethereally. He could feel it, that intangible veil finer than parchment, finer than a single strand of silky hair. The ranger had only to touch it in his mind, and the realm of magic would flow through him, his body a conduit to that inexplicable world.
From the palm of his hand he birthed an orb of light, the globule rising from his skin to float up towards the angled ceiling. His eyes slowly tracked up, careful not to look directly at the orb itself.
Two dozen eyes, surely as black as the pits of hell, looked down at him.
Orcs.
The first of their wretched kind to leap at him fell upon the orb, extinguishing it.
Asher sidestepped, his sword arm flicking up and across to slice neatly through the orc’s waist. By the time it slammed into the floor it was almost severed completely in half, its dark and vile blood adding to the rest.
It rained monsters after that, their roars a deafening cacophony. The timbers creaked in relief and the floor thundered under their collective impact. While short in length, the silvyr blade cut left then right, removing the arm of one before splitting another’s face down the middle.
Their numbers brought a degree of chaos to the tavern, with most turning violent on the orc beside them in order to reach the fresh meat that had invaded their nest. Of those who came for Asher, they were met by precision and skill, both of which were supported by a blade that knew no equal among their smiths.
Always, the ranger would find the exposed areas where a simple knick would open an artery or a quick stab would puncture something vital. The floor was soon slick with orc blood and all the harder to navigate with the growing number of body parts.
Asher’s attempt to evade an incoming axe saw his right leg skid, breaking his stance. Changing his strategy, the ranger simply dropped to one knee, allowing the axe to pass harmlessly over his head, and thrust the short-sword up into the orc’s pale gut.
With a roar of his own, he powered forwards, ramming the dying fiend into those behind it. There was one among them, however, who would not be budged. The orc stood a head taller than its kin, its hands as big as Asher’s face. There was no time to swing before it picked him up by belt and throat. The floor taken from beneath his feet, the ranger was thrown across the tavern, over the hearth, and into a pile of broken corpses.
Most of the orcs hesitated to cross the soft beam of light that cut across the middle of the room, where the doorway exposed the tavern to the outside world. The big one didn’t hesitate. With a growl, it leaped through the light, scooping up a fallen sword on the way.
It didn’t matter.
Asher had decided the orc would be dead before its feet touched the floor, and so it was.
There was no telling whether the orc registered the flash of silvyr as it flew from the ranger’s hand, but its twisted expression in death suggested a notch of pain had been delivered as the blade ploughed through its chest mid-air.
There followed a moment of inaction, the remaining orcs reassessing the human.
If only they knew.
Asher rose, his hand reaching for the broadsword on his hip when the beasts found their courage. As one, they charged through the corridor of light, braving the sky fire, to avenge their fallen.
Instinct forced the ranger’s hand up, his innate magic exploding from his palm in a crushing wave of compressed air. The closest orcs were hammered by that wave and launched in the opposite direction with a collection of shattered bones.
The air was cleaved by the ring of silvyr, his broadsword freed at last. Meeting the rest of the orcs with a charge of his own, the ranger sprung with his final step and came down with a two-handed swing. There was no flesh that could stand against silvyr, not even the stone-like slabs of orcish muscle. That single swing decapitated one and bore down through shoulder to chest of another.
Catching the glint of steel, Asher adjusted his grip on the hilt and spun the blade to deflect a sword before deftly spinning it the other way to block an axe. A swift boot to the chest pushed the sword-wielding orc back, giving him the space to pivot, duck under another cutting axe, and hack through the midriff of a third.
