C. Sebastian Nutt

Chapter 223 - Potion Man

The door snaps closed behind me as I trudge into the penthouse. It wasn’t until the last half mile back that my feet began to drag. With how tight the spiraling stairwell is up the interior of th...

Chapter 222 - Fishing

“How is this possible?” 

I stare down at the device on my laboratory table, my newest addition. It is similar to the one the dwarven man flouted to me less than two hours ago, only c...

Chapter 221 - Golden Return

Light streaming in through the eastern-facing window wakes me. It filters through the crack in the velvet curtains, a line of radiance falling across the bed. For a moment, I don’t want to rise. ...

Chapter 220 - Family Dinner

I am lost in thought for the entirety of the trip back to Corinth’s penthouse in the city. The ache in my eye won’t disappear, and a strange anxiousness to sleep comes over me as I travel along...

Chapter 219 - Repairs

Her words bounce off the walls for a moment, slowly working their way around the room and through my mind. She makes no move to protect herself from my blatant hostility, nor does she use any magic...

Chapter 218 - Lady Talagast

“Yes, I understand.” I can cut the tension in the air with a knife. 

Around me, six men dressed in dark orange clothes I now recognize as the uniform for the Faethian Police Force, s...

Chapter 217 - Hidden Armory

Once I have the table set and moved into the precise placement I like, I spend another hour contending with moving and ordering all of the instruments I have collected atop it. That done, I can’t...

Chapter 216 - Faeth

Blooms white block my vision as the ship starts to rise. We are lost in the shadow of Faeth, an eclipsing penumbra too large to understand from below. Then, we break through the surface of the clou...

Chapter 215 - Drops on the Carpet

“Charlie, quiet,” Jess hisses. Behind her, Sasha, her cousin, snickers, earning an equally penetrating glare from Jess. I mumble an apology, picking up the garden tool from the stone pathway an...

Chapter 214 - Hell and Academy

I breathe a long exhale, but focusing on my breath does little to help. I can smell it, the char in the air. Even a week later, Danfalla reeks of fire as we sail over it on our way out. Dovik stand...

Chapter 213 - Heading

I feel weird, just lying here and listening to him breathe. There is something about the way that he does it which is so different, but I can't put my finger on it. The short rise of his chest foll...

Chapter 212 - Goodbye

In the manor that once belonged to his brother, I sit with Jor'Mari, the two of us alone around a wooden table. They've gone now. Haford was the first to leave. Bali came, Gods it feels like foreve...

Chapter 211 - Gods and Monsters

“The Trial of Soul and Bone?” I say.

“How?” Dovik asks at the same time.

Illigar reaches into his robes, removing a small, metallic cylinder. Infused rings of copper wire wrap t...

Chapter 210 - Debriefing

The clash of steel echoes from the yard. Droplets of water from the drizzle a few hours ago cling to the fabric covering the furniture out on the lawn. The back fence of the estate stands low, stre...

Chapter 209 - First Victories

I’m still on the roof of the Mari manor when he arrives. I don’t notice when Corinth makes it up to the roof. Just one moment, I am alone, and the next, he is standing on the slight slope of sh...

Chapter 208 - Scarring

My eyelids are heavy. Reaching, my nails rake over the sheets fit to the mattress beneath me, my fingers skipping with tiny pops as they scratch over the wrinkles on the fabric. Something in my sho...

Chapter 207 - Warfire

A crossbow bolt moving so fast that the air visibly parts in its wake rocks through the air. The strange monster turns it’s head, smiling at the incoming missile. The bolt releases a flash of lig...

Chapter 206 - The Servant's Arrival

Illigar arrives on the top of the stump, his boots clicking against the hard wood. I never saw him in the tent before, but I can’t imagine he looked much better then. He stands, bare-chested exce...

Chapter 205 - Final Congregation

Heat seeps through the transport chamber, too many bodies crowded in to wait impatiently around the silver disc in the center of the room. Hundreds of large runes are painted in flowing lavender li...

Chapter 204 - Golden Boy

This is the first time I feel as if I am back in that day again. As the boughs of the giant tree creak, swaying ever so softly in the warm breeze, the memory grows like a gnawing insect in the back...

Chapter 203 - End of Madness

The demon screams its rage at me, swiping now with its hands while its tentacles are occupied, scaling the tree. The claws of its hands impossibly cut the air, slicing far further than their reach ...

Chapter 202 - Alerted

Dovik feels a buzz tingle through his fingertips. It is a slight thing, barely registering, but he feels it all the same.

He sits inside the vault Charlene had deposited in the dome, his chai...

Chapter 201 - Beanstalk

The field is an agony to cross. The land is at once both a clear path, yet there is no easy way to navigate between the bodies strewn mostly along the paths of the once expansive garden. They hurry...

Chapter 200 - Demon

“I think I lost myself somewhere in there,” Jor’Mari says as I pull away from him. His hands linger on me, the points of his claw-like nails

“I think I lost myself somewhere in there,...

Chapter 199 - Light Under Shadow

There is something that moves. It grinds like a misaligned link in a spooled chain, like a stubborn thorn of rock scratching against the lim

There is something that moves. It grinds like a mi...

Chapter 198 - Battlefield

I start to see it now, and I’m entranced by it. Once, Tacit the Grim told me that he would show me what the world truly was. It is only now

I start to see it now, and I’m entranced by it....

Chapter 197 - Return to the Field

I'm not certain what I expected to find when I ascended toward the palace grounds, but nothing could have prepared me for the reality of it

I'm not certain what I expected to find when I asce...

Chapter 196 - Miracle

I don’t know how long I stand there, staring down at the charred body of the monster, probably only a few minutes. I’m so damn tired.  My so

I don’t know how long I stand there, st...

Chapter 195 - My World and My Dark Dream

Ferro tries to stand, but his body moves strangely. The weight that he had shrugged off just before presses down on him now with a new force. He twists, trying to shift to his hand, finding some st...

Chapter 194 - The Path

The soft earth crunches beneath my boot as I climb the hill. I always find him here after supper, staring out at the orchard, smiling to him

The soft earth crunches beneath my boot as I climb...