Book One – Chapter 13

An impulsive thought surged through Midnight’s mind — she could abandon her hunt, swoop back up, and warn the batherga. The possibility flickered, the choice to intervene, to change her course and theirs, perhaps even to impact the balance in the ongoing ork invasion that had befallen the Midlands. But as swiftly as the thought came, it was gone. Her decision was made in the brief moment it took her to assess the situation. This was not her fight. While orks were a notorious threat deserving eradication, they were neither her responsibility nor her concern. Her duty lay with the mission assigned by her wizard, and her priority was the sustenance and mastery of the dark existence granted by her Gods. The world of humanoids and beasts was not hers to save or to suffer.

Midnight pressed on, her focus narrowing back onto the fiator, who had plunged into an even fiercer battle against the elements. The wind screamed with a beastly ferocity that skinned the mountain slopes of their snow and exposing its everlasting bones of ice and jagged rock beneath. The temperature dropped further, turning the biting rain into sharp pellets of ice, flurries whipping past and through Midnight like millions of shards of glass that struck and ricocheted off the stone with a harsh clatter. They were illuminated by flashes of lightning, stark bursts of condensed light fragments that shot across the dark sky, chased by the deafening roars of the emerging thunder.