Hive Knight: A Dark Fantasy LitRPG (Trinity of the Hive Book 1) Grayson Sinclair (book recommendations website .TXT) 📖

throne, the queen knelt to look her daughter in the eyes. Eris tilted her head to stare at her mother, whose eyes had lost the gleam of power. The queen seemed an entirely different person while she held the gaze of her daughter, both staring at each other before the queen reached up to fondly brush Eris’s cheek, meant to be a loving gesture—but Eris’s cheek came away stained red.

The queen stood up and went to sit on her throne to continue with the coronation, but my eyes never left Eris. When her mother walked away, I saw the mask slip on her face, and horror and sorrow filled her eyes.

Once more, my vision faded to darkness and to one final scene.

I stood in what once looked like a town center or shopping plaza. I saw the ruined and splintered remnants of what were once makeshift shops or stalls, now nothing more than splintered planks of wood. They’d been cleared out of the center of the square and brushed against the crumbling stone buildings that lined the plaza.

What looked like an execution was taking place.

Several hundred men and women had gathered around an impromptu jail, hastily constructed in the center of the marketplace by magic. The crowd that had gathered was a mixture of elven and dwarven people. As I reached the center of the plaza, I recognized the inhabitants of the cells.

Eris and her mother were side by side, each bound and chained.

Eris looked exactly like she had when we first met. Wearing the same tattered and torn clothing as she had on in when she appeared out of the crystal. Her hair was dirty, slick with moisture, and matted to her forehead with sweat and ash. She seemed to be staring at the ground, her eyes unfocused; she looked as if she’d checked out of reality altogether.

Her mother, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be taking her captivity lying down. She constantly railed against her cell. While she still held the same stunning beauty as before, it was marred by her utter and complete insanity. As I got closer, I could see Eris was only bound by one thin chain in her cell. Her mother, however, was bound in every possible way—dozens of thick heavy chains wrapped around her and were bolted into the ground.

She had both physical and magical shackles on her. The swirling ethereal blues and green of binding magic writhed over her irons...which looked to be comprised of pure shadowsteel.

The dwarves were taking no chances, it seemed, in letting their captive escape. The queen was even bound across her mouth to keep her from speaking. The only portion left uncovered was the top half of her face. Her hair was lank and strewn with bits of soot and flecked with blood. Her eyes were wild and unhinged. She seemed to be raving on the inside; her eyes were screaming at her captors.

She had lost all sense of herself to the madness of defeat.

She’d waged war, and she had lost.

The scene I had stumbled in on made more sense now. Eris had told me the story. Because of the mad queen, the entomancers had brought war and ruin to the world of the elves and the dwarves. This was the aftermath. The price Eris and her mother had to pay.

Several of the dwarven soldiers marched over to the cage that held Eris’s mother and unlocked the door. They unlatched the shackles on the bars of her cell. She surged forward once the final lock clicked free. With nothing to support her and her feet bound tight, she didn’t make it far. She careened out of her prison and crashed to the ground.

She tried to squirm her way free, but the chains held fast, and she found no purchase to freedom. Two of the men went and calmly bent down, hefting her onto their shoulders. From there, they carried her a short distance to a small post that looked like it had been created from the very street itself using earth magic.

Once she was as secured as a person could be to the post, the soldiers left with looks of scorn and disgust plastered across their faces. As the guards departed, the rest of the crowd followed suit, and soon no one was within fifty feet of the queen or the jail cells.

Shuffling from the far end of the courtyard caught my attention. A group of robed and hooded figures walked through the throng of bystanders to stand before the imprisoned queen. I counted thirteen of them and tried to get a better look at their faces, but even though they wore no masks, and I could see their faces, I couldn’t remember a single detail about their appearance. Man or woman, short or tall. Nothing.

The fact that they were mages was all I could discern, and only because of the robes they wore. As they reached the post, they gathered around the broken queen, spreading out in a perfect circle around her.

Without a word, they began their ritual, arms held aloft almost in praise, fingers mere centimeters from brushing up against the mage next to them as they began to chant. I saw their mouths move, but even if I could hear the words, I wouldn’t be able to understand them.

They kept up the chant for several minutes, an impressive feat on its own, but to combine it with the magic they were building up was a truly frightening prospect. As the spell reached its finale, a Script circle formed above their heads. The bodies of the mages perfectly formed the outline of the spell.

A small pentagram formed in the center. Framed within a circle, on the outside lay a constant stream of swirling letters. The words shifted and changed in a haze as they danced in lazy fashion. As the spell grew, it