Dawn of Swords Read Online Free PDF Page A

necessary, and those that had been ousted from Neldar were welcomed into Paradise with open arms, for mankind hadn’t even decided on a king yet, and many in Paradise still debated over whether they should even have one.
    He took another sip from his skin before kicking at a loose stone, which bounced down the steep riverbank, crossing from reddened clay to brown mud. The stone plunged into the water, and Jacob watched the ripples it created expand in an ever-widening circle.
    Jacob had been formed from the magma at the center of the planet, birthed beneath the light of Celestia’s star as a fully grown man with the intelligence of the ages. His very first act had been to bow before his creators, the brother gods made flesh. His next was to bear silent witness with his two fathers as Celestia, the goddess who’d originally created this world and populated it with beings of her own design, stood before her two elven races, the Dezren and the Quellan, and asked them to act as wardens to a new race of beings that would soon be created by the brother gods. The leaders of both races declined, pleading with her that their numbers were still depleted from the great war many years before, and that if any beings required assistance, it was they. The goddess turned her children away, disappointment painting her glimmering, otherworldly features. With or without the elves’ help, she said, the decision had been made.
    Jacob stood by in awe when, a day later, Celestia forged this very river to split the land for the brother gods to share. He watched as a fissure formed in the center of the world, slowly widening like the maw of a great serpent, separating the land into east and west.The sound of splitting crust had been deafening, the echo of the boulders tumbling into the new crevasse like the constant beating of a drum. And when the gap was broad enough to please the goddess, water rushed into it from the snow-capped mountains in the far north. The rushing tide resonated with the deafening hiss of a massive windstorm, and with it the ecology of the land changed in an instant. The northern expanse, which had once been Kal’droth, the lush green homeland of the elves who had populated the world in the two thousand years since its creation, was particularly altered. The new twin rivers, the Rigon and Gihon, dried the Formian Lake and sucked the nutrients from the fertile soil, depositing them farther south along the new rivers’ banks. The trees shriveled and died in the elven homeland; the grasses browned and rotted; and the wildlife fled to the Northface Mountains, where vegetation still grew. With little choice, the Dezren and Quellan elves moved south, along the banks of the new rivers. Kal’droth became known as the Tinderlands—a wasteland of rocky soil nestled above the northern wedge of the conjoined rivers—where crops refused to grow, and neither god bothered to lay a claim.
    That had happened on the third day of his existence. On the fourth he embarked on a ten-year-long journey, one that took him from one corner of Dezrel to another, crisscrossing the landscape by foot. He was privy to wondrous sights: the southeastern coast, where the surf dashed against the shore, chiseling giant cliffs into wide beaches of fine sand; the Knothills and Craghills of the northwest and the giant grayhorns that grazed between them, beasts of thick gray hides, horned noses, and docile temperaments; the Kiln mountains on the outskirts of the far eastern Queln River, where flocks of multicolored brine geese migrated, forming living rainbows in the sky during the summer; the desert that would become Ker and the infinite prairies that surrounded it, oceans of flowing golden wheat that stretched far as the eye could see; the Pebble Islands off the southern coast, brimming with tropical flora and fauna andsurrounded by crystal-blue waters; the snow-capped mountains of the northeast, offering frigid temperatures and deep caves in which Jacob