Eve of Destruction Read Online Free PDF

going to murder a friend’s daughter based on something she hasn’t even done yet.”
    The shadow said nothing. She didn’t need to; Maltus already knew where she stood. 
    “Besides,” he added, “she’ll have plenty of enemies looking to do that already. I trust you dealt with the interlopers here?”
    “Four of them are dead, one escaped.”
    Maltus swore under his breath. “They stole the journal. You might have been able to get it back.”
    “Are you angry with me for not killing them all, or yourself for not seeing this coming?”
    He grunted. “Pick your poison. The children’s train should be arriving soon. You need to be on it.”
    She hissed. “You know I don’t like trains.”
    “You’ll like Eve and Zach being dead even less,” he countered. “Make sure no harm comes to them. I still have faith she’ll become what we need her to be.”
    “When will you decide that?”
    “Soon.”
    “And when she fails?”
    He turned to face the shadowy figure. All he could see beneath her hood was the glimmer of her green eyes and a single lock of white-streaked auburn hair dangling from her forehead.
    “Then you get to kill her,” Maltus whispered. “And may the Goddess forgive us.”
     

Chapter Two
     
    “The Exarch tells us that it took the Goddess an eon to create life and many more to refine it into what we see today,” Simon Chaval said to the audience filling the Hall of Innovation. “In her divine wisdom, Edeh understood the necessity of interdependence—she knew that for her children to survive, our fates needed to be linked. And so she gave us the Fane, the grand temple of life that inexorably binds all of us as one.”
    Chaval leaned forward, his eyes drifting back and forth across the crowd. “But now, in these dark times, the Fane suffers as we all suffer. It teems with discontent, for the children have turned against their mother. They have abused the gifts she gave them, and we only have a small time in which to repent for their sins.”
    The crowd broke into thunderous applause, and from her perch on the balcony above the stage, Amaya Soroshi watched it all with morbid fascination. A handful of men in the audience cheered audibly, but the rest were content to let their hands do the talking. It was considerably more dignified than the boorish, bellowing street-side crowds Chaval so often gathered, but this was a group of wealthy investors and entrepreneurs. They at least tried to feign some measure of civility.
    “The Enclave Magisters like to remind us of all the wonders their magic has brought us, and certainly our civilization has grown and flourished since our independence from Esharia. But consider how much of that progress has come not from those privileged enough to walk through the doors of a university, but from the back-breaking labor of real men and women over the last few decades. This room, this hall, this entire city—they are all testaments to the power of the human mind, to the power of visionaries like yourselves who dare to dream of a new Arkadia, one stronger and more self-sufficient than ever before.”
    More applause, this round much louder than the first. It was a pattern Chaval followed with precision. He would start softly and then gradually swell towards a riotous climax. By that point, those who were already part of the Industrialist movement felt more confident in their choices than ever before, and those who straddled the fence found themselves leaping off it to join him. Chaval might not have been a mage, but the spell he wove was just as powerful as the eldest magister.
    He waved a hand to silence the crowd. “We must all take a look around ourselves and examine the state of the world in which we live. We are at war…but it isn’t just our way of life that is under attack. Our very existence is now threatened by the magi and their Enclave. Even in the face of unparalleled tragedy, they continue to insist that they are not our enemies. They claim that