The Knights of Everund

   The Great Kingdoms once stood with their banners flying high over the lands of Mythrim. But the dread kingdom of Duscar, ruled by the ancient dragons, looked upon the realm with a cruel and envious glare. The Dragonlord’s spiteful attacks were sudden and without warning. When Duscar’s war nearly burned the world to ash, a desperate alliance was formed, defeating their king in a final, cataclysmic battle. The dragons were exiled, and sealed away by the Magi, an order of powerful magic users who have since faded into legend.

Now, a century later, the world of Averon remains at peace—but shadows linger in the ruins of Duscar. Yet far away from the forsaken Mountains of Eld, Locke was enjoying a simple life. That is until one night when a wizard from Everund crashed into his stables and changed his fate forever. Locke soon finds himself in possession of a magical relic, one whose power could tip the scales in the conflict to come but only if he can uncover its secrets in time.

With the return of dark forces that threaten the world with war and ruin, Locke must bring together a new group of heroes to fight for their future. Averon teeters on the brink of chaos, and the knights of Everund, sworn to protect the realm, are all that stand between the creeping darkness and the fragile peace of the last kingdoms.

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 White-tipped mountains of jagged, black stone rose sharply into the sky, piercing the veil of stars which hung upon their peaks. The southern spine of the Mountains of Eld howled with frigid winds scraping through the twisted passes of the Drakkar Gorrundt. A man hooded by a regal cloak trudged through the crooked paths of what remained of the fallen kingdom of Duscar. The gale of the wind and the crunch of snow under his embroidered cloth boots were the only sounds that broke the chilling stillness of the tomb-like gloom that hung over the ruins.

   His attire was that of a lordly wizard with no worldly business traveling through the lands of Duscar, which were now little more than a graveyard. No mage had trespassed in those long-forbidden lands since the war that nearly destroyed the world. He was far from his homeland; the crimson cloak he wore bore the dawn of creation symbol of the kingdom of Everund.

 The mage found himself crossing cursed ground that no soul dared disturb in over a century. The dragon-forged city loomed menacingly across the mountaintops with its high walls and cathedral-like architecture. The castle city’s ornate designs survived a century of the elements but they seemed to be of little relevance to the wizard approaching the dead city.

   The man clutched a strange book to his chest that was made of flesh and branded with symbols of some unknowable language. His blistered lips quivered with madness as cruel mutterings escaped from behind his tongue.

“Born of blood from dragon lent, cursed with shadow his soul be rent.”

  The ruins were forbidden for good reason, not just because it was a mass grave for the unburied warriors of Duscar and Magi of Aeris-Terran, but also for the danger the mountains themselves posed. The passes through the Eld Ridge Mountains were perilous, especially dressed as lightly as Lord Dilandau Ravendark of Everund was. No one of sound mind would enter those forsaken lands and Dilandau was certainly not in his right mind.

  Voices whispered to him, though he could not tell where they came from. He ambled in a trance, stepping over frozen bodies of fallen soldiers and the remains of dragons buried in snow which went unnoticed. He tilted his head oddly to the side, listening to the voices while staring into the vast emptiness around him. His clouded eyes rolled uncomfortably independent of one another.

   The vessel is not far. He heard the book say, followed by innumerable voices in the back of his mind speaking in unison.

   ‘Find him!’ the voices repeated the command over and over, urging Dilandau on. His ragged breathing created wisps of vapor as he mouthed along to their whispers. When they stopped his mouth hung open awkwardly, his black beard full of ice. Ravendark secured the book to his waist and groped through the mounds of snow in a desperate search for the object of his fevered mind’s obsession.

  Fear, more than the bitter cold, made his hands shake, but that did not stop him from clawing through the snow in search of the corpse of the Duscan sorcerer for whom the voices hungered. He felt their malevolent presences at the edges of his deranged mind, biting at him in the dark in horrifying excitation.

  After several minutes of feverish digging, Dilandau happened upon the remnant of a crescent moon-shaped pavilion a short distance away from the main gates of Duscar. The roof of the small structure was burned away and the rest buried in snow, but even with his blurred sight he recognized the distinct damage inflicted by magically conjured flame. His bare hands trembled as he dug deeper through the snow, touching at last what he had come so far to find.  The voices inside his mind cried out with hideous joy. He stopped clawing, then stood slowly, stepping backward, readying a spell.

   His hands formed the sigils for conjuration, drawing unseen symbols through the air around him before uttering a single word which ignited the spell like a spark catching tinder. The wizard’s palms glowed with the heat and radiance of the sun. Blinding light reflected off the snow and waned as the frost melted. Ravendark’s spell revealed the area down to the very stones of the mountain.

  Water rushed around his boots as he waved away the spell and the weariness of its effort sank in. Much of the pavilion was marred and the corpse at its center, which was chained to the floor, had been burned alive. It was evident that the damage was not caused by dragon’s breath, for if it was, there would be no corpse left behind. The hellish flames that dragons spat turned bodies to ash and stone to molten glass.

   Open the book. The command was sharp and threatening. Lord Ravendark was in no state to resist the compulsion as his mind was already enthralled by the power of the ancient grimoire. He lifted the book from his hip and pulled open its thick pages carved with symbols older than the mountains he stood upon. The crazed wizard held the book over the corpse, whose mouth hung open in a defiant final scream that could no longer be heard.

   Dilandau did not know which spell to search for, but the pages of the book turned on their own until they rested upon a complicated ritual. He could not understand the arcanum within, nor comprehend the unfathomable dark magic on his own, so the insidious presence within the book steered him through it.

   Dark magic, such as he was using, had always been forbidden. Its secrets were sought out and destroyed in order to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands. But even a dark artifact hunter trained to deal with curses and other malicious spellwork - such as Dilandau was - could not handle the power contained within the pages of this baleful tome. While under the instruction of the evil emanating from the book, Dilandau dug arcane sigils into the ground in a large circle around the remains of one of the world’s most feared sorcerers.

  His mind fought against its demands to no avail. The mage struggled in vain to regain control of his limbs but he could not stop them from finishing the terrible acts that they were perpetrating. Black clouds formed overhead as the mad wizard uttered the blasphemous words of a spell that would bring Ir’zane, the Paragon of Duscar, back to life after a hundred years of slumbering death.