Dominion Read Online Free PDF

shut on empty air where she had stood only a moment before. Startled, the white wolf began to back away from her, but the other members of the pack were gathered too closely behind it, and it was forced to stand its ground. As Faith’s blade pierced its flank it was clear she had failed to strike the killing blow she’d hoped for, but the wound was long and deep and crimson blood sprayed out of it. She put all her weight behind her sword, desperate to reach some vital organ. But the effort pulled her off balance, and even as the white wolf struggled to free itself from her blade she could feel herself falling. She dropped the torch and reached out to save herself, but it was too late. Powerful bodies buffeted her from both sides, and the fangs of one beast slid beneath her left bracer, piercing at the cloth and flesh beneath it. The ground rushed up to meet her even as the white wolf whipped its head from side to side, trying to jerk itself free from her blade—
    And then there was impact.
    And blinding pain.
    The sound of a wolf howling.
    And darkness.
    *  *  *
    If the region surrounding the Forest had seemed wild, its interior was chaos incarnate. Currents of creative and destructive fae collided at random intervals, setting the whole of the Forest alight with sprays of ice-blue power. Waves of emotional energy, raw and unfettered, surged across the landscape like angry surf. No living species could possibly establish a stable presence in such a realm, Tarrant thought, but that hardly mattered. Evolution would be driven forward at such a pace here that as soon as soon as any one life-form failed, a dozen new ones would take its place.
    To his eyes it was beautiful.
    The currents of power that surged about his feet might be chaotic in their manifestation, but they had the potential to become something else—something greater—and he wondered what kind of effort it would take to tame them, to force them to adopt a more ordered course. The creatures that hissed and howled in the darkness surrounding him might be warped constructs, but a strong enough sorcerer could redesign the faeborn ones, and the fleshborn ones could be urged toward a more reasonable evolution. Even the trees overhead, with their warped and tangled branches, could be forced to serve an ordered purpose. Twist the branches even more, divide them many times over to create a fine webwork of filaments, and the canopy would trap autumn’s leaves as they fell, creating a shield of vegetative detritus thick enough to cast the Forest into perpetual twilight. Would the constructs of the dark fae mature more quickly if they were freed from the threat of sunlight entirely? Or would that only increase the power’s volatility, making its creations even less stable, less likely to survive? To Tarrant they were all fascinating questions.
    Deep within his soul he could feel an ancient hunger stirring, human ambition surfacing in the black pool of his soul like a drowning man gasping for breath. He had been a scientist back in his mortal life, and his experiments in forced evolution had produced many of the Terran simulacra species that this world now took for granted. But his current lifestyle as an itinerant predator did not allow for the luxury of a laboratory—or a scholar’s library, or any kind of permanent place in which to store the specimens that scientific experimentation required. He’d had to relinquish that whole part of his existence when he left Merentha, and since then his intellectual inquiries had been confined to a strictly internal landscape. It was one of the most frustrating facets of his transformation.
    But this place could become his laboratory now. He could mold new species to his will here and test their adaptation, using the volatile currents to accomplish in a few generations what might take centuries elsewhere. His soul hungered for that kind of intellectual stimulation as powerfully as his altered body now hungered for human