A Dream of Mortals (Book #15 in the Sorcerer's Ring) Read Online Free Page A

all around him, and
he turned in every direction to see his men being cut down everywhere. It was
surreal. They swung with great blows, and his men fell by the dozens, then the
hundreds—then the thousands.
    Darius suddenly found himself standing on a
pedestal, and as far as the eye could see lay thousands of corpses. All his
people, piled up dead inside the walls of Volusia. There was no one left. Not a
single man.
    Darius let out a great shout of agony, of
helplessness, as he felt himself grabbed from behind by Empire soldiers and
dragged off, screaming, into the blackness.
    Darius woke with a start, gasping for air, flailing.
He looked all around, trying to understand what was happening, what was real
and what was a dream. He heard the rustling of chains and as his eyes adjusted
in the darkness, he began to realize where the noise was coming from. He looked
down to see his ankles shackled with heavy chains. He felt the aches and pains
all over his body, the sting of fresh wounds, and he saw his body covered in
wounds, dried blood caked all over him. Every movement ached, and he felt as if
he had been pummeled by a million men. One of his eyes was swollen nearly shut.
    Slowly, Darius turned and surveyed his
surroundings. On the one hand he was relieved that it had all been a dream—yet
as he took it all in he slowly remembered, and the pain came back. It had been
a dream, and yet there had also been much truth in it. There returned to him
flashbacks of his battle against the Empire within the gates of Volusia. He
recalled the ambush, the gates closing, the troops surrounding them—all of his
men being slaughtered. The betrayal.
    He struggled hard to bring it all back, and the
final thing he remembered, after killing several Empire soldiers, was taking a
blow the side of his head from the blunt end of an ax.
    Darius reached up, chains rattling, and felt a huge
welt on the side of his head, coming all the way down to the swelling in his
eye. That had been no dream. That was real.
    As it all came back, Darius was flooded with
anguish, with regret. His men, all the people he had loved, had been killed.
All because of him.
    He looked around frantically in the dim light,
looking for any sign of any of his men, any sign of survivors. Perhaps many had
lived, and had, like him, been taken prisoner.
    “Move on!” came a harsh command in the
blackness.
    Darius felt rough hands pick up him up from
beneath his arms, drag him to his feet, then felt a boot kick him in the back
of his spine.
    He groaned in pain as he stumbled forward,
chains rattling, feeling himself go flying into the back of a boy before him.
The boy reached back and elbowed Darius in the face, sending him stumbling
backwards.
    “Don’t touch me again,” the boy snarled.
    There stared back a desperate-looking boy, in
shackles like he, and Darius realized he was shackled to a long line of boys,
in both directions, long links of heavy iron connecting their wrists and
ankles, all of them being herded down a dim stone tunnel. Empire taskmasters kicked
and elbowed them along.
    Darius scanned the faces as best he could, but recognized
no one.
    “Darius!” whispered an urgent voice. “Don’t
collapse again! They’ll kill you!”
    Darius’s heart leapt at the sound of a familiar
voice, and he turned to see a few men behind him on the line, Desmond, Raj, Kaz,
and Luzi, his old friends, the four of them all chained, all looking as badly
beaten as he must have looked. They all looked at him with relief, clearly
happy to see that he was alive.
    “Talk again,” a taskmaster seethed to Raj, “and
I’ll take your tongue.”
    Darius, as relieved as he was to see his
friends, wondered about the countless others who had fought and served with him,
who had followed him into the streets of Volusia.
    The taskmaster moved further down the line, and
when he was out of sight, Darius turned and whispered back.
    “What of the others? Did anyone else survive?”
    He prayed