Bloodflowers Bloom (The Astral Wanderer Book 2) Read online

  Bloodflowers Bloom

  The Astral Wanderer™ Book Two

  D'Artagnan Rey

  Michael Anderle

  Contents

  The Bloodflowers Bloom Team

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Author Notes - Michael Anderle

  Books By D'Artagnan Rey

  Books By Michael Anderle

  Connect with Michael

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © 2021 LMBPN Publishing

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  A Michael Anderle Production

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  Version 1.00, May 2021

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-64971-735-1

  Print ISBN: 978-1-64971-736-8

  The Bloodflowers Bloom Team

  Thanks to our Beta Team:

  Rachel Beckford, John Ashmore, Larry Omans, Kelly O’Donnell

  Thanks to our JIT Team:

  Peter Manis

  Diane L. Smith

  Paul Westman

  Angel LaVey

  If I’ve missed anyone, please let me know!

  Editor

  SkyHunter Editing Team

  Chapter One

  “Are we there yet?” Jazai asked as he, Devol, and Asla continued to walk down the winding road. The massive field of golden grass around them was the only thing they could see.

  “Why are you the most childish one of the three of us?” the wildkin questioned in return as she pointed farther down the road. “There—in the distance. Do you see the forest?”

  Jazai squinted, his expression somewhat offended. He formed a circle with one hand and peered through it as a soft glow of blue mana covered his hand. “Damn, how good are your eyes?”

  “Are you using a cantrip?” Devol asked and looked over his shoulder at the diviner.

  “Yeah.” He nodded and moved his hand away from his face. “How is that surprising?”

  “I didn’t hear you use an incantation. I thought you had to say the cantrip’s designation to get it to work.”

  “For the more powerful ones or those you aren’t familiar with,” he explained and waggled his fingers in a parody of doing magic. “Anything you’ve done over and over, or simple things like using mana to light a wick, eventually simply become instinctive.”

  The swordsman nodded and considered his use of magic. “Hmm, I guess I have done that, but I thought of it as a trick, not a cantrip.”

  “I’m able to do a few without the incantations,” Jazai stated and peered at the forest again. “Most are simple things like this spell—farsight. The one I use the most is blink, obviously.”

  “Both of those are transmutation spells, correct?” Devol asked and the scholar nodded in confirmation. He looked down the road at the forest far in the distance before he turned his head slowly to look at the other boy. “Have you had to look at things up close often?”

  Jazai frowned and lowered his hand as he turned to address his teammate. “You’ve met Zier.” He shrugged as if that fact alone provided sufficient explanation. “Well, let me tell you, that posh dryad often has me read passages repeatedly and he likes to talk for hours about something that can be summarized in two or three sentences.” His teammates nodded in sympathy. “Is it a surprise that he would have me study things…” He jerked his head forward so he was only a couple inches away from Devol’s, whose eyes widened instinctively. “Very, idiotically, close?”

  The young swordsman moved back a little and nodded slowly. “Oh. Well, when you put it like that, I guess I understand.”

  “Your relationship with your mentor is rather concerning,” Asla commented as she continued to walk ahead of them. “The fact that you seem to get so agitated over such trivial things is not healthy.”

  Jazai sighed, snapped his fingers, and blinked beside her. Devol had to lengthen his stride to catch up. “If it were only a few trivial things, I would let it slide. But it. Is. Every. Day. Asla!”

  The wildkin frowned and she lowered her ear to shield against the irate magi’s words. “I worry that you will lose patience and attack Zier one day.”

  The boy scoffed and folded his arms, his gaze fixed on where he’d seen the forest ahead. “No, I wouldn’t do something like that.” He grimaced and stared at the sky as if looking for answers. “I’m very sure that would mean he wins…something.”

  Devol jogged past them, turned to face them, and walked backward. “You know, I don’t think we’ve come up with a plan for the mission. We should probably go over that before we get too close.”

  “We only have to deal with some flayers, right?” Asla asked. “It should not be an issue.”

  “I’ve seen a flayer in action,” he told her. “About three months ago, when I was on my way to the order, I walked through a forest when I met Mr. Lebatt. He took care of it in a single strike.”

  “You can probably call him Vaust now,” Jazai suggested. “We might be younger but even Zier and Wulfsun are younger than him by about a century, at least.”

  “We are supposed to be comrades in arms,” Asla agreed as she held her gloves out and examined them.

  “I guess so, but I think he likes it so it is not a big deal.” Devol turned again to fall into step beside them.

  Jazai shook his head and leaned closer to Asla. “Is he naïve or merely good-natured?”

  “I think it is kindness,” she answered with a slight smirk as she fixed him with a teasing look. “Is that a foreign concept to you?”

  He rolled his eyes and leaned away as the swordsman stretched his arms.

  “You know, it is rather unusual to find a group of flayers,” Devol stated. He thought back to what he had read about them in the past and what Vaust had explained to him that day in the Wailing Woods. “They rarely travel in groups and are loners that prefer to keep to themselves.”

  “That is correct,” Asla agreed with a nod. “In smaller areas, if there is more than one flayer and not enough territory to share, they will often battle one another for dominance.”

  “It must mean the alpha of this group is very strong,” Jazai deduced.
He opened his tome and flipped through the pages. “It is uncommon but not unheard of. There have been flayers so deadly that lesser flayers will go against their instincts and follow it when they have no chance to kill it or defend their turf.”

  “We should probably be more concerned, I suppose,” Devol reasoned. “Even a young flayer can be vicious. How strong does one have to be to subjugate others?”

  They continued to discuss what they knew of the creatures while they walked. When they were only a couple of hundred yards from the forest, a loud, frightful scream caught their attention. Asla bent forward and revealed her claws as her ears twitched. “Someone is coming.”

  “Someone?” Devol asked as he slid his hand to the grip of his sword.

  A figure barreled out of the forest and ran toward them in a desperate, frightened dash to get out of the woods. The youngsters stepped aside but the young swordsman reached toward the man as he drew close.

  “Excuse me, sir, but what happened in—” There wasn’t a chance to finish his question as the stranger sprinted past them down the road. He uttered another fearful yelp before he raced out of sight. The three friends were baffled and they glanced at one another in confusion before they looked again to the place where the man had vanished around the bend in the path to the town.

  The young swordsman had noticed cuts in his clothes and no weapon. There was not a chance anyone would go into these woods without one so he must have lost it.

  “Did you…uh, get anything from him, Jazai?” he asked and gestured toward his friend's book.

  The boy looked down and nodded quickly. “Yeah, he was easy. Either he didn’t use his anima to protect himself or he was too frightened to care.”

  “He can run rather quickly without anima,” Asla remarked as she frowned, her keen gaze fixed on the road where she could now see the stranger in the far distance where the road curved again.

  “It looks like his name is Flynn and he is a member of a small hunter’s guild in Malo,” Jazai said, reading the information in his book.

  “Malo—that’s a couple of towns over from the village we got the request from,” Devol remarked.

  The scholar nodded again. “Yep. From what I can see, they didn’t send the mission to us immediately. The village put up a bounty first to try to deal with it. I guess his guild thought they could claim it if they hurried.”

  Asla shifted her gaze to the trees, “Are there others in the forest?”

  “There were at the beginning,” Jazai replied and closed his book. “The last passage says he is the only survivor—or as far as he knows, anyway.”

  The three teammates turned their attention to the forest again and studied it in silence for a moment. No animal calls or flayer screeches issued from the woods, only the gentle sighs of the wind that threaded through the darkness between the trees.

  “So are we sure we don’t want to have a plan before we head in there?” Devol asked.

  “I assumed we would simply go in and kill them,” Jazai responded with a nonchalant shrug and his anima flared. “But if you have something a little more detailed, I’m willing to hear you out.”

  The swordsman looked at Asla, who mirrored the scholar’s shrug and activated her anima as she and Jazai began to enter the forest. The young swordsman sighed, drew his blade, and brought his anima out as he followed his two friends into the shadowy woods.

  He had heard great tales of heroes going to vanquish foul monsters when he was a child. Now that he was a little older, however, it appeared that many of those stories were merely the grand retellings of a typical day in the life of an adventurer.

  Chapter Two

  As the group pushed deeper into the bowels of the woods, Devol noticed something odd.

  “I do not see any animals at all,” he said and peered around him with a frown. “Even in the Wailing Woods, giant rats and things like that lived there.”

  “I assume these flayers either devoured or scared off anything else that lived here,” Jazai reasoned. “It explains why livestock has been dragged away from the farms in the area.”

  “And people,” Asla added as her ears pointed up. “We are close and I can smell a horrible stench.”

  The foul odor had caught the attention of Devol and Jazai as well. They pushed aside the brush ahead of them and entered a cleared area in front of a large den that had been cobbled together from wood, stones, bone, and various other miscellaneous objects. Everything had been combined effectively but somewhat untidily to create a huge cave-like structure.

  “What in the world is going on here?” Jazai asked as he opened his majestic. “Flayers don’t make massive dens like this, do they?”

  “Not normally,” Asla agreed. She scowled as she looked at fresh blood that stained the grass. “They will either live in hovels or caves found in the areas they claim or make small dens suitable for only their use.”

  Devol studied the grotesque home of the flayers and took note of the bones that created the opening. Most seemed to be from animal carcasses, but he noticed several human bones twisted amongst those that formed the entrance. “This seems rather advanced for creatures like flayers.”

  “No kidding.” Jazai sounded disgruntled as he examined the bestiary. “Flayers can make a glue-like substance with their saliva to help build their homes. But like Asla said, they are usually little hovels, not something like this. I would expect to see this being the home of blood mages or cannibals, not flayers.”

  “Cannibals eat their own, correct?” Asla questioned and gestured to a section on the left of the den. “It would appear you are not completely wrong, Jazai.”

  The boys shifted their gazes to where she had indicated. Two skulls were visible, and from their sharp features, they appeared to be skulls of slain flayers.

  “Well, I guess they stepped out of line,” Jazai murmured and closed his book.

  Asla shut her eyes and sniffed the wind. She pulled a face of disgust before she opened her eyes again. “I smell death—both the scents of the long-dead and some that have only died recently.”

  Devol held his sword out. “Those must be the hunters. Are any alive?”

  Asla shook her head. “No, not from what I can tell.”

  “That’s probably a good thing,” Jazai remarked. “Can you tell how many flayers there are?”

  “There are several scents, a few quite similar,” she explained and attempted to cover her nose. “I assume those are the more lowly flayers and a much more noticeable stench almost masks them.”

  “Do you guys feel that?” Devol asked and lowered his blade slightly as he looked around. “I feel mana.”

  The other boy nodded. “I assumed it was the remnants of the hunters—their mana can linger for a little while, even after death.”

  “Maybe, but…” His thoughts were interrupted when a skittering noise issued from inside the den. The three young adventurers prepared themselves. It appeared their quarry was coming for them instead of the other way around. “So, will we still go with the simple plan?”

  Jazai sighed and held his hands up. “If I knew a cantrip that would let me blow this horror to pieces, I’d go with that.” He looked at the young swordsman. “Remember that fire of wrath you did against Koli during our first mission? Do you wanna give that another shot?”

  “I’ve tried during training,” Devol responded and shook his head. “I haven’t been able to recreate it although I have been able to do other things.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen the party tricks.” The scholar chuckled. “They must have some value, I suppose, but I’m not sure what you’ll be able to do with those.”

  “Quiet!” Asla ordered and crouched in readiness. “They are here.”

  They focused intently on the mouth of the constructed cave and a few moments later, four scrawny flayers stalked out. They were smaller than the one Devol remembered from the Wailing Woods—around six feet tall—and seemed to be underfed, which made the ravenous noises they emitted more understandab
le. The one in front of the swordsman hissed as it ran one of its boney blades over another to sharpen them.

  “Four?” Jazai sighed, “If it was three, we could each take care of one.”

  Devol drew a deep breath as he lifted his blade and the light flared. The beasts screeched in surprise and he swung it in a deadly arc. The blade extended immensely before it struck the flayer in front of him. When the light dimmed, the creature twitched and jerked, then split vertically in two. Its companions shrieked with unbridled rage.

  “That’s much better than merely a party trick, eh, Jazai?” he boasted with a smirk.

  The other boy chuckled and nodded to concede the point. “Fair enough. You got me there.” He pointed to the remaining flayers. “But if you had slashed horizontally, you could have killed them all in a single strike.”

  He turned away sheepishly. “Well…sure, but you two would have been bored.”

  Jazai laughed but Asla frowned. “I think we would have been content,” she muttered.

  The creatures shrieked their individual challenges and surged into the attack. Devol turned into a head-on clash with one of the flayers and its bone-scythe arms struggled against his majestic.

  The scholar blinked around the initial attack from the creature that had focused on him and launched a missile of mana that hurled it back. Despite the force of the blow, it merely landed lightly and sprang toward him again. Rather than engage directly, he blinked into the branches of a tree and began to fire cantrips at the beast.