Unleashed Read online

  Unleashed

  Valos of Sonhadra

  Tiffany Roberts

  Contents

  Unleashed

  Our Beast Valos

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Also by Tiffany Roberts

  About the Author

  UNLEASHED

  Valos of Sonhadra

  A Novel

  By Tiffany Roberts

  Copyright © 2018 by Tiffany Freund and Robert Freund Jr.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form by any means, including scanning, photocopying, uploading, and distribution of this book via any other electronic means without the permission of the author and is illegal, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the publishers at the address below.

  Tiffany Roberts

  [email protected]

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Illustration © 2018 by Cameron Kamenicky and Naomi Lucas

  Proofread by Cissell Ink and Ronika Williams

  Interior Illustration © 2018 by Robert Freund

  Created with Vellum

  To all of you, our readers.

  Thank you to our cover artists, Cameron Kamenicky and Naomi Lucas, for dealing with the nightmare that was this cover’s creation. Your dedication, hard work, and talent have once again come through and produced amazing results.

  A special thanks for Ronika Williams for that extra spit shine!

  And thanks again to our fellow Sonhadra authors. Without you ladies, this world would not exist.

  Our Beast Valos

  Prologue

  5 Years After the Crash

  Orishok walked through the undergrowth toward the wall of thorns ahead. He’d known as soon as he spotted it that the wall was humanmade; its thorny branches were too tightly bunched, its positioning too regular. Sections of it had been smashed through, leaving gaps and dangling, broken branches.

  Grass brushed against his leg, and he paused momentarily to glance down with wonder at the living, green plants around him. For so long, his touch had meant death to anything he came in contact with. Even years after Quinn had afforded him control over the deadly power within, part of his mind still expected to see decaying vegetation in his wake.

  He moved around the circular wall until he found a gap wide enough to walk through, using his spear to push aside some of the twisted branches. The bare patches of dirt inside the small clearing were deeply worn, suggesting a group of humans had camped here for several weeks, at least. The distinctive prints of their odd foot coverings were evident in several places, and the stone-ringed pit in the center of the camp was full of ash and charred wood.

  He searched the clearing quickly but thoroughly. There were other tracks that paired with the breaches in the wall to tell a chilling but all too common story — the long-toed, talon-tipped footprints of shriekers.

  He tilted his head and stared down at a set of gouge marks in the dirt, noting something buried beneath. Using the tip of his spear, he dug the object out and bent to pick it up. It was a scrap of fabric. Despite its years of wear, soil, and sun bleaching, he recognized it as the same orange material Quinn had worn when she first came to Bahmet five years before.

  This wasn’t the first abandoned human encampment Orishok had discovered in this forest, and it wasn’t likely to be the last.

  Shriekers had attacked the people who’d dwelled here. Fire and thorns would not deter those beasts when they were hungry.

  Apart from a few more bits of bloody cloth and some grayed bits of rope, the camp had been cleared out; whether by the survivors or scavengers made little difference. The attack had occurred sometime in the ten days since the last rain, which would’ve washed away most of the tracks otherwise.

  Why hadn’t these humans gone to Utopia for shelter? The thriving human settlement was only days away from this forest and was secure enough to protect its occupants from such attacks.

  Orishok exited the camp and walked around the rest of the perimeter, stopping only when he discovered three mounds of dirt in the woods nearby, each marked with a thick, upright branch jabbed into the ground.

  The human tradition of burying their dead had confused Orishok at first. It was in some ways a more direct means of returning the fallen to Sonhadra, but humans put their dead in the ground and moved on, leaving no one to hold vigil. Who would guard the departed from the prying claws of hungry beasts? Who would implore Sonhadra to accept the dead until they were finally welcomed into the world’s embrace?

  He’d ventured from Bahmet that morning to hunt, but he could not ignore this. He could not hold vigil for these humans, but he could offer them some protection.

  Orishok planted his spear in the dirt and followed the well-worn path leading from the camp to the nearby stream where he gathered an armful of large stones. He brought them back to the graves and arranged them carefully atop the mounds, returning to the stream for another load, and another, feeling the weariness of his work only in his heartstone.

  Death was natural, but in this instance, it seemed needless. Why had the humans come here? Why did their kind insist on braving the forests that lay in the shadow of Bahmet, the City of Death?

  As he placed the final stone, the vegetation behind him rustled. He spun, his body instinctively changing to the spiked, armored form he’d worn for so long, and tugged his spear out of the ground.

  He froze when his gaze met the wide, blue eyes of a tiny female human. She peered up at him from within the thick brush, through which only her face was visible. Her round, blue eyes were filled with terror, and her mouth hung open with soft, panting breaths. Her skin paled. She was looking at him, but he sensed that she didn’t see him.

  Suddenly, her eyes cleared. She tilted her head, lifting her eyebrows as though intrigued.

  The change was so quick, so fluid, that Orishok could only stare in silence. Though he couldn’t be certain, he had the sense that she’d been watching him for some time.

  He forced his body to its old, natural form — free of the spikes and armor, free of Kelsharn’s influence if only on the surface — and slowly sank into a crouch to put himself closer to the girl’s eye level. He lay his spear on the ground beside him, angling the head away from her.

  “Who are you?” he asked in Quinn’s human tongue.

  The human emerged from the brush and approached him without fear. She was thin and dirty, and her brown hair hung in tangles around her face. She stopped immediately before him and smiled, raising her hand and reaching for his face.

  Orishok’s eyes flared; his instinct, even after five years, was to leap away before she touched him. Before Quinn had blooded his heartstone, the slightest contact with him would’ve meant death for this girl, for any living thing. Hundreds of years of habit ha
d proven difficult to break.

  He felt out that power within him, wrapped his will around it, and actively suppressed it just to be safe.

  “You won’t hurt me,” the girl said in a soft voice. She brushed her fingers over the bone ridges along his cheekbone beneath his eye. “You’re not like him. You’re good.”

  Orishok furrowed his brow. Though he’d encountered human children, he still had too little experience by which to guess her age. He suspected she was quite young, but the certainty with which she’d spoken seemed well beyond her years. “I am not like who, little one?”

  “Kelsharn.”

  Everything within Orishok stilled. More than a thousand years before, Kelsharn had taken Orishok’s people and made them into constructs neither living nor dead, beings meant only to fulfill his whims and destroy all those he deemed his enemy. But Kelsharn was gone; he’d vanished centuries ago. Long before the humans had crashed on Sonhadra.

  “How do you know that name?” he asked.

  She touched his temple. “I saw him here.”

  “You saw into my head?”

  Frowning, the girl lowered her hand, dipped her chin, and stepped back. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to. I can’t help it.”

  The deepest, most primal part of him was distrustful of such abilities — abilities Kelsharn had possessed — clutching the old superstitions he’d been raised with, but that life was long behind him. The world was peopled by valos, some of whom had been formed of the elements — air, fire, shadow wrought into thinking, moving beings — and Orishok himself was no longer a thing of nature. Quinn was a human whose wounds healed almost instantly, and she’d recovered from injuries that had seemed, at first, to kill her. Many of the other human crash survivors demonstrated abilities far beyond what Quinn said was normal for their kind. The way his people had viewed Sonhadra before the Creators arrived had been too narrow to account for the wonders of the wider universe.

  There had been times when Kelsharn’s voice had spoken inside Orishok’s head, commanding him, compelling him; mind-to-mind communication was nothing new, but it was a thing to be feared. It had been amongst the ways Kelsharn had exercised control over his creations.

  Yet this situation was different, wasn’t it? He was not dealing with an all-powerful being determined to control the world. This was a child — innocent, gentle, and alone.

  “You do not need to apologize,” he said softly. “Where are your people?”

  She looked up at him again. “They all left when the shriekers came.”

  “They abandoned you?”

  “I was hiding. I did not want them to find me.”

  “The shriekers?”

  “No…the other people.”

  Something in her tone — a hint of fear — made Orishok uneasy. “Why did you not want them to find you?”

  “There were bad men, and they had bad thoughts. I didn’t like the way they touched me.” She crossed her arms over her chest. Her thin frame was clad only in tattered rags. “Miss Dana died and couldn’t protect me anymore.”

  “She is one of these?” he asked, gesturing to the rock-covered mounds behind him.

  The child nodded, pointing at the center grave before swinging her arm to indicate the mound on Orishok’s left. “And mama is there.”

  Orishok looked over his shoulder and frowned. Death was an inevitability, but to face it so young, so alone, couldn’t be easy.

  “How long have you been here by yourself?” he asked.

  She raised her hand, showing all five fingers.

  “You have held their vigil well. Though they were not born of this world, I think that Sonhadra will embrace them.”

  She tilted her head and furrowed her brow again. “Do you really have to stay with them until they are all gone?”

  The thought of this little girl standing here in the woods for weeks and weeks as Sonhadra accepted the dead deepened Orishok’s frown; vigil over the dead was the duty of adults, of hunters and warriors. “What is your name, little one?”

  “Nina.”

  “I am called—”

  “Orishok.”

  “Yes.” Her knowledge was unnerving. His mind held centuries of memories that no one, child or adult, should have seen. He could only hope she wouldn’t delve too deep. “Your vigil is done, Nina. Would you like to accompany me to my home? It is safe and warm, and we have ample food.”

  Her face brightened, and she displayed her little white teeth in a wide, hopeful smile. “Can I meet Quinn?”

  “Yes. I think Quinn would very much like to meet you, too.” Orishok rose and extended a hand.

  Instead of taking it, she held both her arms up, reaching to him.

  For an instant, his mind returned to the simple days he’d spent amongst his tribesmen, so many years ago. Before he was made into death, before Kelsharn and his kind had made themselves known. The trust in Nina’s eyes undid him.

  He squatted down and opened his arms. She stepped closer, wrapping her arms around his neck. Orishok slipped a forearm behind her thighs and lifted her off the ground. Nina leaned against him, and he was stricken by how tiny and thin she actually was beneath the rags. Despite his inexperience with humans, her condition seemed unnatural. Whether it had been a result of their inability or their unwillingness, her guardians hadn’t fed her adequately.

  Orishok took his spear in his free hand, stood, and started toward Bahmet. As he walked, he couldn’t help but wonder again why Nina’s people hadn’t sought sanctuary in Utopia.

  “The men got kicked out for breaking the rules,” Nina said, her expression solemn. “Me, Mama, and Miss Dana were forced to leave with them.”

  Though her ability was disconcerting, it wasn’t her fault. Perhaps, with time and guidance, she could learn to control it.

  Her gaze sparkled with excitement. “Can you teach me how?” Eyes widening, she ducked her head down. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to listen. Mama didn’t like it either, and she punished me when I did it, but I can’t help it. She could see into people’s minds, too. Bad people made her that way when she was up in the stars.”

  “Bad people made Quinn different, too.” Orishok used his spear to brush aside the vegetation, protecting Nina from clawing branches and thorns. “But there are no bad people in Bahmet. I will keep them all away.”

  She lifted her face to him again. The hope in her expression made his heartstone pulse. “Can I stay with you?”

  “Yes. There is plenty of space, and we have a large amount of food stored.”

  “Will Quinn like me?”

  The vulnerability in her eyes was staggering; her own people had left her scarred, and that was unforgivable. If he found the humans she’d been living with…

  He halted that thought before it went further. He’d need to learn to guard his thoughts, to spare her more exposure to violence and trauma.

  “Quinn will like you very much,” he said, “and you will know it is true, because you can see into her heart.”

  In time, they emerged from the forest and crossed the patch of grass separating the trees from the barren, rocky path into Bahmet. Orishok had maintained the barrier of death between the woods and the city for many years; it deterred animals and gave would-be visitors pause. But the city itself looked nothing like it had five years ago. He carried Nina into Bahmet without hesitation.

  The wall and arch leading into the city, along with many of the structures inside, had been repaired by the stone valos. Though the stone valos had once been amongst the many enemies Orishok and his ilk had been sent to battle by their Creator, Kelsharn, they’d become allies thanks to the friendship between Zoya — the woman who’d mated a pair of stone valos five years ago — and Orishok’s mate, Quinn. In the time since, several more stone valos had been woken by other women seeking mates amongst them, and a number had demonstrated the ability to create gemstones and shape stone like it was clay.

  Though Quinn and Orishok were the sole residents, Bahmet had been given n
ew life by Quinn’s presence.

  For the first time in centuries, the gardens were full of plants, and green and purple vines clung to the sides of many of the buildings, granting them a new vibrancy. Orishok and Quinn had planted similar vines at the bases of all his people, who remained like statues — dead but not gone — throughout the city. Quinn had said the vines would allow the fallen valos’ return to Sonhadra’s embrace sooner. Orishok was glad for that; they’d all waited so long already.

  “Don’t be sad,” Nina said.

  “I am sad and happy at the same time,” Orishok replied. “For many, many years I felt nothing at all. This is better. Quinn calls it bittersweet. I think it is a good word.”

  She smiled. “Me too.”

  They entered the square a little while later, where a massive statue of Kelsharn had once loomed over all visitors. Quinn had knocked that statue down when she first arrived, a fortunate accident that had resulted in her discovery of Orishok’s heartstone and the restoration of his emotions and memories. He’d hauled that hideous statue away, piece by piece, in the years since. Now, Quinn’s sculpture of Orishok stood on the platform in the center of the square, guarding the heartstones of the dead.

  Nina tilted her head back to look up at the sculpture. “I like this statue better.”

  Orishok’s gaze followed Nina’s; he liked this statue better, too, though it was strange to stare into his own face, which had been depicted with such loving, accurate detail.