When all hope seems lost, the truest of souls take up the sword.
Helesia is an empire divided. The last of the Godless Kings rules the land with an iron grasp, instilling fear and fanaticism in equal fervour. But the skies still belong to the angels, and though they are hunted to near extinction, they have one final chance. A prophecy.
When the earth bleeds and the sky burns, the last Herald of the Age will walk the mortal world.
While her friends plan for marriage or scholarship, Renira Washer dreams of heroism and adventure to carry her from the wintry confines of her village, though she trains with broom instead of spear.
But when an angel with wings of bone arrives in the village, chased by the Wolf Princess and her Dogs, Renira must make a choice: to defy prophecy or risk the wrath of kings.
History is written in blood.
Her fate is forged in fire.
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Herald - book 1 of The Age of the God Eater, is Classical Epic Fantasy perfect for fans of Robert Jordan, Raymond E. Feist, David Gemmell, and John Gwynne.
"A truly unique way of writing a series."
The God Eater Saga is a trilogy of trilogies, set across 3 time periods, being written and published concurrently, and set in a world where humans can steal magic and immortality by devouring angels.
Start your Epic Fantasy journey today with HERALD: book 1 of the Age of the God Eater.
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Prologue
When the Godless Kings sacked Heaven, two hundred angels escaped their wrath. A thousand years later and only ten of the winged divinities remained. King Emrik Hostain was about to make it nine.
Soldiers of the Third Legion died in their dozens as the angel swept through them. A sizzling blade of alabaster light, longer than the tallest of men, trailed lightning in its wake. Men and women threw themselves at the divinity, driven on by a battle lust beyond natural. And Emrik watched the slaughter with grim satisfaction.
His horse whinnied, nostrils flaring at the smell of blood on the wind, and he put a hand on its neck to calm it. Beside Emrik, his Red Weavers worked. Their blood-stained hands plucked at the air, pulling on threads only they could see, eclipsing all fear and doubt within the troops, leaving no room for anything but the call of battle, the lust for the kill. A thousand soldiers, those of the Second and Fourth legions, waited at Emrik’s back. Their desire to join the battle was a nervous crackle of energy, and his own blood pulsed in anticipation.
The fires were spreading. Incinerated bodies left behind by the angel’s lightning setting the field of barley aflame.
They had been tracking the creature for weeks, following rumours and abstract signs. The Elder Seers had pointed the way, and they were never wrong. Their sight went beyond any mortal vision, dipping into the prescient. Finally, Emrik had caught up with the angel on the cusp of evening in a small farming village. The village would have to be put to the torch, of course. Emrik could not allow the seditions of worship to take hold in his lands, and the farmers had undoubtedly been harbouring the renegade divinity. Never again would he allow his people to worship.
Mortal weapons did little to the angel, just scrapes and grazes which healed almost as quickly as they were dealt, but that wasn’t the point. The vanguard were nothing but a sacrifice. The more mortal lives an angel took, the more vulnerable it became.
Two more soldiers of the Third fell, and a brief lull in the fighting allowed the angel time to raise its crackling blade to the sky. A column of searing lightning broke through the blanket of grey clouds. It struck the ground, sending up plumes of dust and fire. Everything the electric light touched burst into flames, and another hundred soldiers died screaming, fires from within ripping from mouths and melting eyeballs in their sockets. Lives given for the cause, and there could be no greater cause than this. Emrik would see to it their families received recompense.
He squinted against the light, a gauntleted hand falling to the pommel of his blade. The angel would not have called down its sigil unless it was weakening. It was finally time for Emrik to join the remnants of the Third in battle.
The last of the lightning struck and faded, the clouds spiralling away from its heavenly source to reveal the crimson sky above. The angel knelt on one knee in the centre of a circle of ash and fire, its lightning-wreathed sword planted in the earth. Soldiers crumbled to charred skeletons, the flesh all burned away to nothing but husks. The divinity’s sigil was etched in deep lines all around it. A permanent scar the land could never heal.
Emrik blinked into his hawk sight, his vision now provided by the bird soaring above. From there he could see the sigil clearly, a horseshoe shape with a lightning bolt striking through the centre and feathery wings spread out behind it. Emrik blinked back to his normal sight and let the corner of his mouth tug into a grim smile. Now he knew which divinity he was dealing with.
The Rider, God’s own stable master, or at least he had been while the Heavens still stood. It was Mathanial who first showed humans how to break a horse. He had taught them everything they knew about husbandry. Even the horse Emrik sat on was a product of that knowledge. All of it could be traced back to the wisdom of this divinity.
The leather saddle creaked as Emrik leaned forward. “Mathanial. I have waited long to taste your blood.”
The angel stood, pulling his blade from the earth and swiping a new trail of lightning through the air in front of him. The remnants of the Third hesitated, their numbers and will both broken. It mattered not, their job was done, their sacrifice made. The angel’s immortality shield was broken.
He was beautiful, the Rider, no man or woman could ever deny that. His robe shone white, no spot of ash or blood had touched it, and his feathery wings glistened in the glow of lightning. With charcoal skin, full lips, and eyes translucent as pearls, it was no wonder the villagers had fallen under the angel’s sway. They could hardly be blamed. But the blameless died just as readily as the guilty.
A wiser divinity would attempt to flee, stretch his wings and leave Emrik’s forces depleted and in disarray. But not Mathanial. The Rider’s arrogance and pride were legend, documented in texts from before the Crusade.
The angel pointed his crackling blade towards Emrik and smiled. “Godless King, do you fear to face me yourself?” His voice rang with power and glory, like a perfectly forged bell resonating with the soul.
“I do not fear your kind, divinity,” Emrik shouted. “I pity you. And I relish the power I will take from your corpse.”
“Come then, Godless!” The angel raised its empty hand to the sky, and a bolt of yellow lightning ripped from the clouds. He caught the bolt, and it resolved into a jagged, crackling spear. The angel took a single step forward and launched the spear with a clap of thunder.
Emrik caught the spear in a gauntleted fist and held it, crackling, just a span from his chest. It possessed a will of its own, a drive attempting to force it onward even grasped in Emrik’s hand. Bolts of energy sizzled along the surface of the spear, licking at his skin beneath the armour. The smell of burning hair was strong in Emrik’s nostrils, and his skin grew uncomfortably hot around the spear. No mortal hand could have stopped that spear, but the pain convinced Emrik his mortality had not yet forsaken him entirely.
With a growl, Emrik clenched his fist around the haft of the spear, and it shattered in his grasp. A shockwave of light and energy burst out, flattening nearby soldiers of the Fourth and even knocking a few of the Red Weavers from their horses. Emrik sat tall, unfazed. He wiped the fading light and crackling energy from his hand, then reached for his sword. It was time to put an end to Mathanial, the Rider.
“Father, let me,” Borik said, already dismounting. “Do me the honour of the kill, and I will make a gift to you of this creature’s divinity.” Honeyed words, spoken without guile.
Emrik glanced down at his son. Borik was strong. Young and more lithe than brawny, one of many traits he had unfortunately inherited from his mother. Borik, like all Emrik’s children, had feasted on more than one divinity in his time. His strength was undeniable. A war waged within Emrik, to protect his son or to believe in his ability. Borik would not be the first of his children to fall to an angel, and Mathanial was strong enough to have survived a thousand years of being hunted. Emrik decided to trust in blood.
“Try not to damage the body too badly, son,” Emrik said. “I do not wish to waste any part of his flesh.”
Borik drew his sword, a radiant weapon with a blade as black as night save for the bright bloodstains that would never wipe clean. One of the seven Godslayer arms used to end the great tyrant’s reign. He saluted to his father and stepped forward to meet the angel. Borik wore no armour, only riding leathers. They would not protect him from the angel’s wrath should the fight go badly.
“Let us be at it then, Godless pup,” Mathanial said. His sword trailed lightning as it danced in his hands. “I will show you divine purpose.”
The surviving soldiers of the Third backed away, forming a ring of steel and flesh around the mortal and angel.
They met with a clash of steel and sparks. Borik was not a short man, but angels often grew larger than any man could hope to measure, and Mathanial over topped Borik by a good head and a half. The divinity was all ebony muscle and fluid grace. The speed of an eagle and the strength of a pack of bears. Yet Borik matched him, dancing away from strikes and replying in kind.
At least for a time.
The difference in skill and stamina soon became clear. Mathanial was divinity, blessed and gifted by the God. He did not tire, and his technique was ever flawless. Emrik grimaced as he watched his son begin to flounder against the angel.
Borik stumbled, caught wrong-footed on a parry, the Rider drove him back, and Borik tripped and fell. Emrik tightened his grip on his sword’s pommel and stood in his stirrups. Too late.
The God was never known for mercy, and it was a trait his angels shared. Mathanial raised a hand, and a bolt of lightning struck, forming into a spear in his grip. He drove it down into Borik with a shout of triumph.
Yet Borik was no longer there. His body flickered, and for just a moment Emrik saw two of his son, one impaled upon a spear of lightning and the other on his feet, slipping past the Rider. The impaled Borik faded away like embers blown from a fire.
Borik’s Godslayer sword flicked out, and Mathanial screamed as one of his wings fell lifeless to the ashen field. Before the angel could turn, Borik slashed at the divinity’s ankle and leapt away. Mathanial half collapsed, his sword flailing, one leg all but useless, and off balance without one of his wings.
“You monster!” Mathanial shouted. “That power was Aranthall’s.”
Borik circled the angel, keeping his sword up in case of any sudden attack. “Yes, it was,” he said lightly. “Tell me, angel, would you like to know how your sister tasted?”
“Savage!” The Rider hissed as he spun about, throwing his spear. Borik slipped around the lightning and darted in. He laid open one of the angel’s wrists and stabbed his blade through the other hand. Mathanial’s sword dropped from his useless hand even as the lightning spear hit the ground in the far distance. An explosion erupted from the impact, the heat of which Emrik could feel even from such a vast distance. Emrik decided he wanted that power for himself. He would claim the angel’s heart.
“Stop,” Emrik said before his son could move in to strike the killing blow. Borik backed up, bowing his head, ever obedient. Emrik urged his horse forward and plucked his bow from its place on his saddle. It was a magnificent thing forged from the bones of a pegasus.
“Savage,” Mathanial snarled. “Beast. Heathen! Was there no part of the Heaven you did not rape as you sacked it?” His eyes were on the bow. The stables of the pegasi were once the Rider’s pride and joy. He had raised each of the flying beasts with his own hands. All dead now. Emrik had not allowed even one of the winged horses to survive.
Emrik took an angel-feathered arrow from his quiver and set it to the string. “Almost all of the divine has a use, angel. Do you know what I will do with you? Your brain will turn children into seers to track down the last of your kind. From your bones, I will forge weapons beyond the power of mortal steel to slay your brothers and sisters. Your wings will make arrows that fly true for miles and never miss. I will feed your tongue to a minstrel, and they will sing songs of my glory that will make men weep. Your blood will extend my son’s life a hundred years. The only part of you I cannot use, angel, is your life.”
The angel laughed, a sound like a chorus of church bells from the ancient times before the Crusade. Before Emrik tore all the churches to rubble.
“I am Mathanial, the Rider. Herald of the Fourth Age. I die with dignity, Godless King. I only wish I could be there to see you cower and beg when my father visits retribution upon you.”
“The God is dead, angel!” Emrik spat. He turned and stood in his saddle, drawing back the bow string. “I was there when Heaven burned. I watched my grandfather take God’s head and mount it on my father’s spear. I drank the divine blood, and I feasted on God’s heart. Do you see your failure? You heralded the Fourth Age. An age in which we humans threw off your shackles, killed God and took divine power for ourselves.”
Again the Rider laughed. “How little you know. The Fifth Age is upon us. God cannot die. Humans can die. Even angels can die, but…”
Emrik’s arrow took Mathanial in the left eye.
“You’re right about that.”
The angel slumped over sideways. Dead. One less divinity in the world. Emrik was one step closer to final victory. A thousand years of war, of hunting divinities across the world, was almost at an end.
A cheer went up from the soldiers of the Third and Fourth. Carvers rushed forward quickly, eager to preserve as much of the divinity as they could before any of him spoiled.
Borik licked blood from his blade as he approached. It was uncouth, but at least it was not wasteful. Even a drop of divine blood was worth a fortune. “That was well done, Father,” he said. “A lengthy but successful hunt. One more angel dead. Only ten remain, I think.”
“Nine.”
“They’re dying. Your thousand year quest is almost at an end. Soon their divine heresy will be wiped from memory along with the name of the God. We should celebrate.” He clapped his hands. “Wine.”
“Maybe,” Emrik said, eyeing the red glow of the sky behind the clouds. He still remembered when the sky was blue, before the Heavens bled.
Mathanial’s words bothered him. The angel claimed the Fifth Age was upon them. But that was only possible if a new Herald had been born. Yet, how could there be a new angel if God was truly dead?
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