3 When Darkness Falls.8 Read Online Free PDF Page B

this was a time of such splendor and abundance as the Endarkened had not seen in centuries. Slaves and prey were available in plenty — and Savilla intended to open new hunting grounds very soon, which would distract her restless quarrelsome subjects further.
    When the last of the lesser nobles' petitions had been heard, she beckoned her son forward.
    Zyperis had been waiting with uncharacteristic patience while the others were heard. As always when she beheld her son, Savilla felt a pang of delight. So bold, so handsome, so much her match in cunning and daring. Time would make him her equal, and inevitably he would challenge her, for that was the way of the Kings and Queens beneath the Earth.
    In that way Savilla had taken the throne from her own father, Uralesse, lulling and beguiling him over the centuries. Uralesse would never have had the patience and the vision to take this long subtle path to destroy the Children of the Light. He had spent too many centuries mourning his own shattering defeat on the battlefield in the Great War. Yet Savilla, who had fought at his side, had not despaired as he had. In that defeat she had seen the need to begin anew in a new way.
    First she had needed to kill Uralesse, to gain the power to put her plans into motion. Then it had been necessary to move with maddening slowness, for the Endarkened had been weakened neatly to destruction by their last defeat at the hands of the Light-spawn, and should they have realized they had not truly won, all Savilla's plans would have been as a quenched candle-flame. For centuries, as generations of the race of Men lived and died, and the long-lived Elves turned back to harp and loom and forgot them, Savilla had worked through her human agents to unbind the great Alliance that had proved the undoing of the Endarkened. The human city raised its walls and closed them tight. The Elves forgot war and thought only of peace.
    And Savilla had planned.

    * * * * *

    "MAMA?" Zyperis asked.
    Savilla blinked slowly. Her son was kneeling at her feet, the picture of perfect humility. It was not precisely feigned… but it was something Zyperis granted, not something Savilla took. It was a shift in the balance of power, and both of them recognized it.
    But it is only temporary, Savilla vowed.
    "I was contemplating the great favors I shall bestow upon you," she said. "We have all worked hard for this day — you with your agents among the humans most of all. Now it is time to move forward… "
    Savilla spoke long and persuasively, mantling Zyperis with her great scarlet wings — a token of great favor. The Endarkened Prince's face glowed with delight, for he had long chafed at inaction — and at being excluded from her plans.
    "Oh, Mama, how wonderful!" he said, when she had finished speaking. "Surely the Elven King's allies will desert him to look to their own once we begin to act in the Wild Lands! But… you have always said… "
    "Oh, my son," she said, stroking his cheek fondly, "it will not matter soon. Just go slowly, as I have told you. Stay far from any lands the Mage-men have ever claimed as their own, for it would not do for them to suspect that their ancient enemy is anything but an ancient myth."
    Zyperis drew himself up proudly. "You will see, my sweet Crown of Pain. I shall do all as you would do it yourself. They will sicken, sorrow, and despair — and barely know at first that it is we who are to blame for it all. You shall feast upon unicorn and dryad, wood-nymph and selkie: I shall bring them to you with my own hands!"
    "I shall rely upon you," Savilla purred, stroking his long black hair as he knelt at her feet. "Sow dissension in their ranks, fill their homelands with sickness and blight, drive the game from their hunters' nets, and all the time let them wonder if we are to blame, or if it is terrible coincidence… "
    "Because they dare not ignore either one," Zyperis said happily. "Whether the cause is an enemy's hand, or simple misfortune,