INBORN (The Sagas of Di'Ghon) Read Online Free PDF Page A

letting him know that if he yanked any harder he would walk away with bloody stumps. Then, beyond all reason, the pale gray stone carving took on color. It started around the eyes and bloomed like an ancient evil come alive. The entire dra's head burst into vibrant light. Dark reds, yellows, and a deep orange that looked more like gold on fire painted the scales along the length of dra's body, instantly bathing the dreary hallway in a fury of reflecting color. Then even the carved patterns bloomed.
    Someone was screaming. Wa s that Elycia?
    Yet when Thaniel turned, he saw people everywhere shouting, filling the hallway with echoes of alarm. Fear instinctively flooded through him, clouding his vision in a white haze.
    All at once Thaniel’s hands came free and he tumbled backwards. He scrambled back to his feet, ready to run for his life, when a boom reverberated through his bones, rolling down the hall like thunder, stilling the screams of the people he had forgotten were still there. 
    One hand shielding his eyes from the blinding colors, he couldn’t help but watch as the light coalesced into an azure line that split right down the middle of the dra's head and then stretched from floor to ceiling.
    With a crack the entire wall split in two.
    Immediately the split dra started fading back into gray granite, and with the grating of stone on stone, the wall opened, revealing a large dark chamber within. Thaniel knew he should run, but his legs had forgotten how, and he just sat there frozen in awe and fear.
    “Seize the Caller.” Irkhir’s hard voice bellowed.
    Everyone he looked at seemed scared witless. Han, the big mason, had protectively put his body between him and Heralin. Elycia frantically scrambled backwards away from him. He would have traded anything not to have seen the look in her eyes, as though he carried the plague, and being anywhere near him was the worst thing in all of Arth.
    An instant later two soldiers had his face pressed hard against the floor. Right there in front of his eyes the bright red ice blossom lay trampled on the cold stone.

Chapter 7
    Caller
    Once the magical colors fully subsided, at least the terror ebbed out of most of the faces in the hall. The emotions left in its wake were of every shade imaginable. He saw hesitant amazement in some. A few people knuckled their eyes, doubting that they had actually seen the stone dra transform or the wall split down the middle in a blazing azure line. It was as if they refused to believe that it swung wide open all on its own, revealing a hidden vast chamber beyond. Many people stared at him with their hands over their open mouths. The revulsion he saw there couldn’t have been any plainer. Elycia was among the latter.
    Thaniel couldn’t bear to look at her anymore. He stared at the blossom instead. It was little more than a crimson stain on the polished stone floor now.
    There was so much he didn’t want to think about. He wanted to forget his mother at the hands of those men … the white in her eyes… or his sister disappearing during the miserable trek into the north... how the silence answered him as he screamed out her name no matter how much the slavers hit him…the block where he was sold like a cow... the beatings once he got here.
    How else was he supposed to make the best of things? Forgetting what was behind allowed him to claim a life where there was so little of it to go around… Through it all he had managed to keep moving forward, knowing better things lay ahead. Yet when he saw terror and revulsion in Elycia’s eyes, directed not at the dra carving, but at him... He didn’t see how he would ever be able to forget that. Like Jorel said, might as well forget your sock was full of nails.
    It took a mountain of effort just to dare another glance in her direction, in case something had changed. … His heart sank and he immediately dropped his eyes, preferring the cold stone floor over what he saw there, but not before