Chaos Bound Read online

  “Chaos Bound exceeded my expectations and then some... It's hard saying goodbye to my fictional friends.” — NIKKI MINTY, MULTI AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR

  “What I like best about Chaos Bound is – well, everything. L. Ryan Storms tops off a splendid fantasy trilogy with a royal flourish!” — SORCHIA DUBOIS, AUTHOR OF THE ZORAIDA GREY TRILOGY

  “An outstanding and engrossing final piece. L. Ryan Storms is a phenomenal writer. She has crafted a deliciously addictive world of magic and mayhem that you'll want to get hooked on. Chaos Bound is an ending worth waiting for.” — MARIELY LARES, AUTHOR OF SUN OF BLOOD AND RUIN

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  CHAOS BOUND. Copyright © 2022 by Lorraine Storms. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without prior permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Published by RaineStorms Press, 2022.

  The paperback edition has been catalogued as follows:

  Name: Storms, L. Ryan, author

  Title: Chaos Bound / by L. Ryan Storms

  Description: Electronic file (eService)

  Series: The Tarrowburn Prophecies; Volume 3

  Summary: Finally, the Chaos Wielder’s identity has been revealed, but Quinn is gone, and Reina and Alesh have little time to save their world from an eternity of chaos and ruin. But not all is as it seems in these lands, and those who die don’t always stay dead.

  ISBN 978-1-7328492-4-2 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-7328492-5-9 (ebook)

  Subjects: | YFC: Children’s / Teenage fiction: Action & adventure stories | YFH: Children’s / Teenage fiction: Fantasy & magical realism | YFB: Children’s /Teenage: general interest | BISAC: YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Fantasy / General | YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Action & Adventure / General | YOUNG ADULT FICTION / General

  www.lryanstorms.com

  Cover art by AK Westerman

  More at www.akorganicabstracts.com

  For Jean,

  who dreams the dream.

  Anything is possible.

  (For you, I’ll even pretend the

  epilogue doesn’t exist…shh.)

  The true king sits

  On the throne at last

  A short-lived peace

  Which passes fast

  Months at best

  ‘Til the scale tips

  The kingdom has

  Until the first eclipse

  What’s dead is alive

  What’s alive is dead

  The veil has thinned

  In places shred

  To mend what’s broken

  Three must travel

  Scour the Plains

  Or worlds unravel

  The Bringer of Life, the King,

  The One Who Failed

  Find the Heart of Death

  Through much travail

  Only in Death

  Can balance restore

  For a time at least

  ’Til the next great war

  For the Chaos Wielder

  Has allowed

  The balance to slip

  Too long, too proud

  That Liron may fall

  To darkness and mayhem

  When the power rests

  In the stone of the diadem

  To fix forever

  Chaos bound

  Only then

  Balance found

  CHAPTER ONE

  Haunted by Memory

  Reina

  I ran, hard and fast, pretending the unfamiliar terrain and the darkness didn’t bother me. Then my boot slipped in the slick mud, and I hit the ground, teeth clacking together, palms stinging with the brunt of the impact. I rolled with the momentum, stood, and took off sprinting again. In the dark, it was impossible to see which direction I was headed, but I ran anyway.

  Getting caught wasn’t an option. I flung a crimson-black tendril of power into the base of the abandoned structure as I passed but didn’t stop to watch its effects. A rumble sounded as the walls crumbled behind me, and I gave an out-of-breath smile. I wasn’t half-bad at learning to control the power of death, after all. Death had a different feel, a different taste on the palate, but its power was every bit as robust as life.

  A wall of greenery sprung from the ground, shooting skyward and flinging dirt just ahead. I deadened a section in the center of it, creating a doorway of dried, dead vines I plowed through effortlessly.

  I turned to see my pursuer dodge a half-dead tree whose roots I had weakened. The giant trunk fell through the air, reaching with leafless limbs. He took a nimble leap out of its way, and the tree crashed, useless, to the ground.

  Before I could spring another tendril of death on him, I went sprawling downward headfirst, my boot snared in a root that had grown upward to encircle my ankle.

  I lay stunned for a moment, trying to catch the breath knocked from my lungs in the fall. Then Alesh stood over me, grinning like a madman.

  “Cunning,” I said, working my foot free from the trap, breath coming in puffs as I tried to recover.

  “I am still faster than you,” he said, bright white teeth visible in the moonlight. His breath came heavily, but he wasn’t winded, not even after a chase. Where did he store his energy? He was more than twice my age, for Saints’ sake. He offered a hand and I took it, allowing him to pull me to my feet.

  “As a reminder, only one of us was bit by a Gohmi viper but a few days ago. Besides, if I had my horse, I promise you wouldn’t be faster.” I brushed dirt from my breeches, then tucked the talisman back beneath my tunic. I missed Aeros. I missed—

  No.

  I shut down the thought. I would see Quinn again. He wasn’t dead, no matter what the world beneath Kufataba would have me believe.

  With less than thirty days until the eclipse, Alesh and I traveled southward on foot, covering as much ground as we could, training with our swapped magic as much as we dared. I learned much faster with Alesh as a teacher than I could ever have hoped to learn on my own. I only prayed I was half as useful to him in aiding his understanding of the power of life. Given that he usually won our sparring sessions, I needn’t have worried.

  We never strayed far from camp during our training, unwilling to leave our few possessions unguarded for very long, even if we hadn’t seen another soul since our encounter with the Chaos Wielder.

  Alesh was a good companion, as good as I could hope for under the circumstances, and we’d gotten close to the outskirts of the Elorin Empire’s capital over the last few days. Though he hadn’t opened the Map to Balance again, he hinted we might reach the city tomorrow. Unfamiliar with anything in this part of the world, I took him at his word.

  On one hand, I would be thrilled to get as far from the snake-infested grasslands as possible. Despite both of us working together to isolate the venom in my veins, there was still an ache in my leg, not to mention a sense of impending doom that the poison-filled capsules floating in my body might eventually grow too weak to contain the poison. The idea of the venom being released into my blood at any time was enough to make my stomach turn and my knees weak.

  On the other hand, getting closer to the capital meant getting closer to the Chaos Wielder and having to face her again. Even training with Alesh hadn’t increased my confidence in our ability to defeat her. Not with her mental state.

  The girl wasn’t lucid. I thought back to her attack on the plains less than a week ago, about the raw power she contained
with the stone in her diadem. She hadn’t lied about her power being stronger than either of ours. Chaos was bigger than life and death, if only because of its sheer unpredictability.

  I’d felt her heart beating in her chest that day. I could have ended this all then. At least, Alesh believed so, but…I wasn’t so sure. I’d begun to suspect she would have found a way to halt me in my tracks had I tried to touch her with death’s tendrils. Life and death were rigid in definition. I had aged Bruenner to his death months ago, and Alesh’s father had used the power of death to give life to Alesh, but we couldn’t set things aflame, start vicious, unpredictable windstorms, or take the form of other people.

  “You are stuck in your head again.” Alesh tapped me lightly on the shoulder as we returned to camp.

  “I usually am.” I sat beside my bag and laid out my bed roll, which called to me with enticing invitations of a dreamless sleep.

  “Tomorrow, we reach Ivirreh. No worries until then.”

  Easier said than done. I sighed as I climbed beneath the blanket and rested my head on an arm. What would we find in Ivirreh? Would there be more trouble? Were the people of the Elorin Empire subject to the Chaos Wielder’s same whims?

  If so, perhaps we would find assistance. It was more than possible they, too, were tired of being plagued by the undead. I held to the hope that Alesh and I wouldn’t have to face the crazy young girl alone again, however unlikely the true prospect of help might be.

  And then my thoughts drifted to Quinn.

  I couldn’t fall asleep without thinking of him, couldn’t see the stars without wondering where he was, if he was alive. I ran a finger over the little pink shell he’d made into a necklace for me. I kept the shell in my pocket now since the rope had burned in the Chaos Wielder’s madness that night on the plains. But I still had the shell and the memory of Quinn with it.

  Because of the strength of my ability with the talisman and the fact that I could still summon the magic—even if the magic was death—some days I convinced myself Quinn lived. I’d never had such power without his presence. But then, my ability had never been about death before, either.

  More than once, Alesh had gone on, often to the point of exhaustion, attempting to dissuade me of the desperate notion that Quinn could have somehow survived the journey beneath Kufataba. By now, I almost believed him.

  It wasn’t that I’d given up hope. I couldn’t give up hope. I’d just begun to accept Alesh’s logic on the matter. It seemed…well…logical.

  Of course my ability would work without Quinn once he was no longer living. The White Sorceress, Bringer of Life, wouldn’t lose the ability to channel the talisman’s power just because she was meant to use it in protecting the king of Castilles. If the king of Castilles died, there was no one left to protect with her power, and no one she needed to keep in check…at least, not until a new ruler was named. Her power became hers to use at will.

  Which meant I had more power at my fingertips than I could ever have had when Quinn was alive.

  However much I wanted to deny that Quinn was—

  Dead. Say the word, Reina. He’s dead. Accept it.

  —dead, I couldn’t deny that Alesh was likely right. I’d seen Quinn disappear into the blue abyss with my own eyes. The mountain swallowed him whole. A person didn’t survive that kind of horror, whatever that kind of horror was.

  I swiped at the sudden wetness on my cheeks with a palm and ignored the weight in my chest. I would go on. I’d go on because it’s what Quinn would want me to do. He…died so I could live. He forfeited his life so Alesh and I could defeat the Chaos Wielder. If nothing else, I owed him that at least. I owed that honor to his memory.

  I’m still trying, Quinn.

  ****

  “Ye’re still trying, aren’t you?”

  I whipped my head upward, absorbing with mild confusion the library around me and the piles of books on the thick oak table where I sat. Since the official move to Irzan, I’d taken to spending any and all free time in the castle library. Dark and dreary to most, I found the library a comforting place filled with books that were a wealth of information, some more so than others.

  I pushed aside the tome on the benefits of consuming goat stomach. That was one book we no longer needed to maintain in the royal library. Always good to make space.

  “Trying what?” I asked Quinn.

  He looked the way he always had, nearly black hair slightly unkempt as though he’d shoved a hand through it more than once, shadowed jaw dark with stubble, eyes as intense and curious as always as he viewed me. His tunic stretched over his shoulders in a way that reminded me entirely too much of how those shoulders looked when he wore no tunic at all.

  I furrowed my brow.

  This wasn’t…right. Why was Quinn wearing a tunic in the castle? Should he not have been in royal robes and with his advisors at this very moment? I sat back, the legs of the chair protesting against the stone floor as I pushed the chair from the table.

  “Still trying what?” I asked again, standing.

  “Ye’re still trying to find a way to bring me back. Researching even in your sleep.”

  My sharp inhale was audible in the surrounding silence. I looked from Quinn and the library shelves to the oil sconces and the thick stone walls. The library. The castle. We were in Irzan. Of course Quinn was…

  Sympathy flashed in his eyes as he read the sudden understanding in mine.

  “’Tis not possible, Reina.”

  “If we’re in the castle, it means we haven’t yet gone. There’s a chance. I could—”

  I could what? What could I change along the way?

  He extended a hand, and I recoiled, staring at those strong, capable fingers as though touching them might remind me he no longer drew breath, that none of this was real.

  I looked from his hand to his face, my eyes filling with tears as I met his gaze.

  “You’re dead.”

  A gentle shake of my shoulder sent me sitting bolt upright. I woke with a gasp, my heart in my throat, my pulse racing in my veins, an ache in my soul so deep I thought I might never breathe without pain again.

  “A dream. You are safe.” Alesh’s warm voice was as disorienting as it was comforting. Concerned eyes took in my frazzled awakening and waited for me to catch my breath.

  I nodded and swallowed with a cough, my tongue sticking to the back of my throat. Alesh reached for the water skin. He didn’t speak again until after I’d taken a long drink, but I could feel the weight of his stare in the weak light of the fire’s embers, the words he wanted to say.

  “Thank you,” I said, handing the skin back to him once more.

  He set it on the ground by his side, then settled back into his own makeshift bed on the ground, having given me the remaining bedroll from the supplies we hadn’t left behind in Kufataba.

  “It will not last forever.” His words were gentle, soft to cushion the sting of their blow.

  “I know.” It was the only response I could manage.

  I did know. My mother’s death was still clear in my mind, though she had died four years ago. And yet, sometimes I felt as though she’d been gone for a decade or more. Time could be both cruel and kind to the human heart. Quinn’s death, new and raw, was a wound from which I would never fully heal. And yet, as painful as that wound was, I wouldn’t bleed out from it.

  I would never be granted such mercy.

  I lived in fear of the future to come, waiting with dread for the day I would eventually forget Quinn’s voice. The sparkle in his eyes when he teased me and the way he’d shake his head when I was so involved in the formulation of my remedies that I didn’t hear him speak. Those memories would fade from my mind. I wanted to cry with the pain of it.

  Someday, I would no longer remember the shapes of the scars that lined his back, and the way I let my fingers linger over them when he finally allowed me to touch. My mind would forget the familiar smell of him that groun
ded me home wherever we might be.

  There were things about my mother I had forgotten in the years since she’d been killed. I knew her voice, and I could remember the way it made me feel, but I could no longer hear it in my head. Years without hearing her voice aloud had erased the sound from my mind.

  She’d always smelled of the herbs she compounded daily, of dirt and earth and green, growing plants and leaves, but I’d be pressed to name which herbs were hers. Since inheriting the role as Healer in Barnham, I’d resumed the compounding. More days than not, I smelled of all the same herbs and remedies myself. Without my permission, my mind had reclaimed those scents and reassigned them a monotonous, daily presence in my life, a life no longer associated with Esmé di Bianco.

  An unwelcome tear slid down my face. I placed a hand to my cheek to find it already wet. When had I started crying?

  Don’t cry, she would have said. But even now, I felt as though that wasn’t quite right. She would have said something else, something more personal. Something we shared between the two of us.

  And it was gone. Whatever it was, I had let my mind forget.

  “You had something special, the two of you,” Alesh said. “It is good to cry for missing him, but do not cry for him. He is with the sky. He is free from pain, free from harm.”

  I sniffed. “I know, Alesh. It just… Losing Quinn”—my voice broke over his name, but I plowed on— “so unexpectedly was a reminder of how I lost my mother. It’s overwhelming, I fear.” I blew out a breath at having spoken aloud the words stuck in my throat.

  “Ah,” he said gently.

  I suspected Alesh had lost a number of people throughout the years, more than his father, who had given his own life to heal Alesh as a young man. At twice my age, he had likely lost many a friend and family member in his time. I wondered how he coped with the loss, how he dealt with continuing to live and breathe while others he loved did not. I wondered if having power over death helped one accept it better.