BOOK ONE - promised series
When a new family moves to Everett Valley, Catherine vows to find out what they are searching for in her secluded hometown that doesn't normally welcome new people.
Catherine must choose between the council and her pack le...
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Grinding his teeth, the grating sound reverberated through Dante's jaw. It was a sharp pain that shot through the bone—one that he didn't mind because he was used to it. It was a bad habit, but the pain reminded him that pain was a very real thing.
Pain was easily forgotten by those who didn't feel it.
He wondered if the children sitting in the classroom he was in had heard it.
Dante averted his sight and looked out of the window, a large glass front that flooded the room with light. The entire left side of the classroom was open in that way, which Dante found quite pleasant compared to the rest of the room. It allowed a lot of light to enter and made the room less dense.
His eyes wandered up to the sky. Only a few rays managed to reach the valley, the rest of the sun hid behind dark grey clouds. Some of them were so dreary that he knew it would rain soon. It was a good thing that rain would fall. It charged energy back into the ground everyone walked upon, gave it the strength it so desperately needed.
And afterwards, the sun would show itself again and provide the second ingredient it required for nature to survive.
Sitting on an uncomfortable chair in a room he never expected he would be in again—most definitely not in this setting—Dante's thoughts wandered back to their journey. Fields upon fields of grassland, forests and moors, all black with death. Dead trees toppled onto each other, painfully reminding those who watched from above of a mass burial site. Where the trees lay dead, once his family did.
His brethren. His kin.
Now it was nature itself being murdered.
The picture of one forest swam to Dante's mind. It was a gruesome sight that he would have rather deleted from his memory.
He could have, but when it came to it, he wanted to remember what they had done.
It was one of the reasons—if not the reason—why their task was so important. Why they were in Everett Valley in the first place. Why he needed to force himself to remain seated in an uncomfortable, metal chair, surrounded by hideous odours and children that knew so pathetically little.
A particularly dark memory passed before his eyes when he tried to turn off his sense of smell and his sense of hearing. The teacher, Markav, if he remembered correctly, droned on about wars in Espheros Dante had been in himself.
Astonishingly, most of the details he was repeating were somewhat accurate. Though the immortal set Dante's teeth on edge.
He hated immortals more than he hated humans.
But the destruction during the Ior'Gean war to the buildings and homes were nothing compared to the destruction the human race was doing to nature.
He remembered how the trees of the forests were mouldy, dying away.
