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    290 Results in the "Vacant Throne" category


    • Chapter

      Bright Eyes

      Bright Eyes Cover
      by Tower Curator “Your eyes are glowing.” “I know, mom.” “It’s been three days and they haven’t stopped glowing.” Alyssa sighed, pulling off her sunglasses. Apparently, people found glowing eyes to be somewhat off-putting. Even though sunglasses were essentially unheard of around Lyria, especially fancy modern ones, they were far less strange than bright white eyes. A quick search on her phone revealed that sunglasses, eyewear designed to block ultraviolet light from the sun, had really only been…
    • Connection Established Cover
      by Tower Curator “You need to get some sleep. You’ve been awake for two days straight.” “Can’t.” Multi-word responses were hard. They took too much effort. Alyssa had no such effort to spare. She had to focus all her concentration on the vial. Tzheitza’s most caustic counter-plague potion had almost no effect. At first, Alyssa had thought that it had done literally nothing at all. Until Irulon stopped by. She had measured the ember and found that it was shrinking. Just slowly. So slowly. “It…
    • Chapter

      Ember

      Ember Cover
      by Tower Curator “Ah, I should have listened to them. I should have listened. Why don’t I listen to people who know better than me?” Alyssa ground her knuckles into the sides of her head as she stared at the burning ember hovering in the air. They were well away from the bedehouse. Tzheitza was right. She shouldn’t have ever gone near there. Not only had she not gotten anything useful out of the trip, but she got something unwanted. Something potentially dangerous. The marble of a glowing coal was demonic in…
    • Chapter

      The Demon

      The Demon Cover
      by Tower Curator The main room wasn’t so bad. Not so long as Alyssa held onto the staff anyway. The second she started down the closest hallway, she started to feel nervous again. The staff couldn’t even block out the source of her nerves. There was moaning. Had she said that to some of her coworkers back on Earth, they probably would have stifled some of their giggles… or they might have been brash and irreverent. But this wasn’t that kind of moaning at all. It was like… Perhaps it was just because of the…
    • Chapter

      The Bedehouse

      The Bedehouse Cover
      by Tower Curator The bedehouse. It had taken a few days to find. Alyssa hadn’t wanted to ask anyone she knew about it. Kasita, under various guises, managed to get the location from a guard. The building wasn’t close to the city. Not like the blacksmith, anyway. That was within an easy walking distance. The bedehouse wasn’t as far as Teneville, or even the nearest village. It had still taken Alyssa and Kasita four hours of straight walking to get to it. Setting her eyes on it, she wished it had taken a little…
    • Chapter

      Busy Days

      Busy Days Cover
      by Tower Curator Alyssa carefully measured out a thimbleful of nightmare dreams. Literal dreams. From a monster called a nightmare. A nightmare was apparently a horse-like creature about as scary as a gaunt. How they got its dreams into a bottle was a question that Alyssa had long since stopped caring about. There were so many potion ingredients like that in the storage room that Alyssa had started simply nodding her head and saying nothing more. Seeing Tzheitza bottle flame from Fela was one of those oddities that she…
    • Chapter

      The Blacksmith

      The Blacksmith Cover
      by Tower Curator Alyssa wasn’t sure what she had expected to find when she thought of a medieval blacksmith. A fire of some sort. Anvils, probably. Obviously there would need to be someone at one of the anvils, hammering away at a piece of metal. She was right about all three things. She just didn’t expect the scale. The smithy was a massive stone structure set next to the river. On one side, a waterwheel turned with the flowing current. Black smoke billowed from a round turret the size of a hot tub attached to…
    • Potion Delivery Service II Cover
      by Tower Curator “This is the new batch,” Alyssa said, carefully handing over a series of midnight black vials. “Tzheitza believes that these should have a greater effect in killing plague infected… bodies.” Oxart, now wearing a black and purple uniform of the palace guard, leaned over, flicking one of the glass vials with a fingernail. “They better,” she grumbled, not looking anywhere near Alyssa’s face. “Even with that hellhound sniffing out the plague left and right, incidents have been on the…
    • Chapter

      Extortion

      Extortion Cover
      by Tower Curator Tess came to wake Alyssa at far too early an hour. Then again, it was well past noon according to her phone. Regardless, Alyssa groaned as she made her way to the baths. The discussion with her mother had been long and exhausting. She knew she had a lot to tell, but it still went on far longer than she had expected. Alyssa had spared no details. Every event of her misadventures so far had been laid bare. From Tenebrael first showing up the night the intruders broke in, Tenebrael eating souls, Teneville,…
    • A Lack of Concern Cover
      by Tower Curator It was night. At nighttime, people tended to go to bed. That was something Alyssa should have remembered. Luckily, Tess existed. If it wasn’t for the young servant girl, Alyssa would have needed to wake up Irulon on her own. Short of upending half a bottle of wine on her face, likely ruining her bed at the same time, Alyssa hadn’t an idea how she might have gone about that. Actually convincing Tess to wake up Irulon was another matter entirely. The girl hadn’t wanted to admit them to the floor at…
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