Magic caused the war. Magic is forbidden. Magic will save us. The Relic Guild is the award nominated first book in The Relic Guild trilogy.
It was said the Labyrinth had once been the great meeting place, a sprawling city at the heart of an endless...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Fabian Moor stood inside his sterile cube of silver metal.
The cube had been constructed by thaumaturgy, and it had been Moor's safe haven since the end of what the humans called the Genii War. For forty years, he had sheltered inside it, hidden from those who did not know that a handful of Genii had survived the war against the Timewatcher; and its magic had suppressed his maddening need to feed on blood, which, in all other places, was the sole necessity for preserving his life. The long decades of isolation had at times threatened to drive Moor insane, but he had persevered, retained his sanity by never losing sight of the day when his undoubting faith and unwavering patience would be rewarded.
Now that reward was at hand and the purpose of the sterile cube of thaumaturgic metal was almost served.
Behind Moor, Mo Asajad focussed her attention on an empath who was slowly dying in the clutches of the serpentine tree that grew at the centre of the cube's silver floor. Lady Asajad, tall and stick-thin beneath a priest's cassock, long, straight black hair flowing down her back - she stood still, frozen, tense, watching the empath as keenly as a carrion bird circling a battlefield, searching for bloody spoils.
It wasn't that Moor didn't share his fellow Genii's fervent eagerness - high expectations had been placed on this human magicker called Marney. She was to reveal her secrets and fulfil the desires of the Genii. But if the isolation of the last four decades had taught Moor anything, it was the virtue of patience. Occasionally, one could do nothing but wait for events to happen as and when they were ready.
Leaving Asajad to her crow-like observations, Moor gazed out of a wall of the silver cube which he had cleared to shimmering air to reveal a silent and hostile view into a House of nightmare.
The Retrospective was such a huge and violent realm, home to countless monsters fighting each other in never-ending battles that raged across a scorched landscape beneath a hateful sky filled with poison and lightning. It had been the Timewatcher – a being supposedly the embodiment of benevolence and equality – who had created this place at the end of the Genii War. The monsters roaming the House of damnation had at one time been Aelfirian soldiers who had fought bravely alongside Lord Spiral and his Genii. The Retrospective was punishment for their choice, for their treachery, a prison in which dead time perverted their bodies and minds with ceaseless fury and blood-lust.
Moor had to wonder if the Timewatcher, while serving her brand of vengeful justice upon Spiral's armies, had ever paused to consider what the true implications of creating the Retrospective were. Across the scarred and beaten landscape, Moor could see innumerable beasts of every shade of nightmare fighting and killing, hacking and maiming, stabbing, slicing, biting and feeding upon each other. Lust, raw animal lust, revelling in lawless pandemonium. But if the wild demons could be tamed and united into one mighty army, they would form such an unbeatable force that even the Timewatcher's Thaumaturgists would tremble before them.
