Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles) Read Online Free PDF Page B

She ignored the dryness in her throat from taking no drink, and she prayed even until her voice cracked.
                  She knew the pain served its purpose. The discipline of enduring it, the suffering, brought one through to the other side and, there, to enlightenment.
                  After hours and hours, knowing the sun had not only set but had risen, Chaheff spoke the final prayer and they were done.
                  She stood smoothly and with decorum, the only hint of her discomfiture the smudge on her white robes around the knee.
                  Uman servants appeared as if from the stone walls with food and drink. Glynn took a goblet full of red wine and waited for her mentor to drink. When he did, then she sipped, the tart liquid soothing her raw throat.
                  She didn’t thank the Uman. It wasn’t their place to be thanked. They would serve, she would cast, that is what they did. You didn’t thank the Caste of Warriors for killing, the Caste of Merchants for selling, or the Caste of Artisans for making these goblets every time you used them.
                  It was simple in its grace, and all parties understood it.
                  “Sore?” kindly old Chaheff asked her.
                  She bowed her head and smiled. “I persevere,” she said. “It is a matter of the mind and what it will hear from the body.”
                  “We are about to let you sing a song, Glynn.” Chaheff’s kindly brown eyes focused on Glynn’s violet ones. “You were chosen to be a Caster, because you came to your father on your own, and like me with mine, you told him, ‘The most powerful thing in the world is not a knife, or a sword, or a spell, or a god, but a thought.’”
                  “A song is a thought you sing out, in a way to get others to believe in it. Lose control of your thoughts, and you will unleash the most powerful thing there is, and be at its mercy.”
                  “I can sing it out, my Lord teacher,” Glynn promised him. She searched his eyes, silver on silver to anyone else and lovely violet to her. Even now, exhausted from the prayer, the song remained burning in her mind.
                  “I have no doubt you can,” Chaheff squeezed her shoulder. “But what will you do with the thought?”

 
     
     
    Chapter Two:
     
                  The Evolution of Woman and Man
     
     
     
     
                  Lunch on the company dime was at a sit-down restaurant—specialty burgers, curly fries and double-large sodas served in glasses, not paper cups.
                  They sat together on the outdoor porch, where they could smoke. Melissa had her Marlboros from her car.
                  “Stupid no smoking laws,” Bill complained. “Like we aren’t Americans.”
                  “Tell me about it,” Melissa said. She took a long, satisfying drag. Bill had learned she was twenty-four, dropped out of college, followed some band around for two years, ended up here for lack of a better place and lived with two roommates.
                  “This your only gig?” Bill asked.
                  She took another drag and exhaled it. “It is for now,” she said. “I tried working in an office but I don’t have the clothes.”
                  “They can be pretty strict,” Bill said.
                  “Yeah, they can,” she said, accentuating the ‘yeah.’ “Like, show one bit of cleavage and it’s, ‘Adios, slut.’ So I said, ‘Screw that,’ and came here.”
                  “Never sold before?”
                  “Girl Scouts. Can you believe it? Me in one of those uniforms? My sister said I was a total geek and she wouldn’t join.”
                  “I don’t know,” Bill said. “I