NovaForge Read Online Free Page A

of them ran to escape Kaskal and its attackers. “Where… where am I? Am I in Kaskal?” he asked the woman he recognized from the city.
    She came to him, putting a moist cloth on his forehead.
    His eyes slowly adjusted. “Where is Julieth? Why are we here?” He braced his arm shakily on the cot’s side, fighting back nausea as he stood.
    “She has returned to fight our enemy and has come into contact with the essences.”
    The essences… he thought, his memory murky. Where would they have been? Bayne was young; barely ten years of age, but in this world of wars and famine had been forced to grow up quickly.
    “I need to go to her.” He looked up at the woman standing over him. “Since my parents died, her and my brother are all I have.”
    “Bayne, neither of us can do anything to save Kaskal.” The woman put her hand to his forehead, checking for fever. “We must stay here and hope they return safely.”
    “I will do as you say,” Bayne said, watching the woman’s eyes and calculating what he needed to do. “Do you have anything to eat?” he asked.
    “Let me check the storage chamber,” she said, turning and heading away from him toward a hollowed-out hole in the room’s wall.
    He took his opportunity, moving as swiftly as he could without making a noise, shuffling quietly up the staircase leading to the sunlight.
    “Bayne! Bayne!” he heard the woman shouting for him to return.
    Light blinded him as he left the destroyed structure and stepped onto the street. He squinted, looking up to the suns above and then tightening the mesh mask over his face. Bayne ran swiftly towards the end of the alleyway, bounding through the streets closer and closer to the city’s front. Where has Julieth gone? he wondered.
    He knew he had to find her. If what the woman spoke the truth, then he did not know what would happen to his life, but he yearned to be beside the woman who had shown him such care.
    Bayne stopped for a moment and looked down at a man’s dead body in the shadows close by. Blood seeped from an arrow wound in the man’s chest. It sickened him. The boy reached down and touched the man’s open eyelids, pulling them down over his eyes.
    “Rest,” he said, “and send my love to my mother and father for me.”
    He ran on, weaving through streets and ducking away from conflicts until he noticed the beautiful winged creature in the sky. Sunlight illuminated her form as he looked on her in awe. It took a moment, but as he stood there watching in the middle of the vacant street he realized he knew her form, without the wings behind her. “Julieth,” he spoke, half voicing his knowledge and half questioning reality.
    The screams of his people dying sounded in the distance and he shivered with fear. I will die in these streets today, he thought, somehow resigned to that fact after watching his people fend off many attacks during his short life, but none like what came upon them now. His older brother was somewhere in the city. Are you alive, Andral? Julieth had insisted they had no time to search out Andral before they fled. And yet she brought me back to this place. Wherever you are, Andral, I hope you live. I hope you would forgive me for leaving you.
    A sudden flash of blue light cut across Julieth’s winged body in the distance. Bayne’s heartbeat quickened and his feet were heavy on the street as he ran in her direction. She fell from the sky and out of his view.
    He darted through a series of backstreets, moving quicker and quicker, determined to assist her. He had no weapon, no physical strength, but somehow he would help.
    A loud noise cracked nearby, and soon he pivoted onto the street where Julieth fell.
    Bayne froze, seeing two men fighting each other in the middle of the street not far from him, and Julieth, clearly wounded but coming toward a man with metallic limbs.
    He watched in horror while seeing the cyborg level its weapon at her. Fear took over. “No!” he shouted.
    A wave of energy