The Path to Loss (Approaching Infinity Book 4) Read Online Free PDF

stone to crash into his piles of loot. Blood geysered from both of Ialo’s eyes, not the eyeballs themselves but from the soft unprotected flesh beneath. The pressure of the blood against the compromised structure of the eyeballs further ruined their shape, and as Iaolo rubbed with his his scaly arms, great gelatinous chunks of blood-saturated yellow fell to the floor with a terrible, wet sound.
    Ialo roared in his rage, frustration, and pain. He forced himself to calm down and left his eyes alone. “I told you,” he said through his panting, “I can take the shadow of anything I can see. Well, I don’t see shadows with my eyes. I will fill these sockets with your eyes.”
    Stoakes didn’t know how Ialo’s sense worked, but it seemed that the dragon still had to “look” for what he sought. He moved quickly, leaping back up into the air, landing on Ialo’s right shoulder for the briefest moment as he drove his Secret Sword fist into the narrow cavity of Ialo’s ear. Unnatural or not, this dragon was flesh and blood and could be hurt, so he hurt it. His fingers touched nothing, but the loud boom blew a channel deep into Ialo’s head. Blood erupted back onto Stoakes, bathing him down to his waist. Ialo canted with the explosive thrust and started to sway, but Stoakes was already leaping clear, his eyes fixed on the fallen Suicide Knife.
    He landed in a crouch, his fingers splayed across the Knife’s hilt. He could already feel the strength it provided returning to him. He gripped the Knife, held it so the flat of the blade ran just beneath his eyes, and focused intently on Ialo. The dragon shook its giant head, sending spirals of blood out its right ear and looking something like a dog trying to shake itself dry. Ialo wasn’t done yet. He sniffed at the air and then he did exactly what Stoakes had hoped: he scanned the room with empty sockets, with whatever it was that allowed him to detect what he called shadows. When his empty gaze fell upon Stoakes, upon the Suicide Knife, Stoakes captured his image in the Midnight Mirror.
    Ialo began to laugh. It was an awful rasping sound, full of triumph. “I see you, little man.”
    “I know you do,” Stoakes said with grave finality. He took the Knife in both hands and pulled the chisel-point deep into his own breast, just above his heart. There was no blood. With a sharp, forceful jerk, he traced a circle around his heart, and yanked the blade back out. In time with the blade’s motion, a thin red circle of beading blood surfaced upon Ialo’s breast, and with the sharp, final exit of the blade, a perfect cylinder of meat, capped with lead scales, leapt from Iaolo’s chest to the floor. Ialo’s front was washed in blood in an instant and he collapsed dead.

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    Frosted wisps of cloud parted as the Vine rushed down. It fell from the heavens, through the blood-red sky, and finally to the cracked volcanic landscape where it struck, sending ripples through magma and raising the rock tiles, which formed the planet’s surface, as they rode those ripples. The planet held no plant life, but was host to a rich variety of fungi, some of which grew to monumental proportions, forming great ranging mushroom forests or vast spans of mold carpets.
    Here, though, where the Vine touched down, where the Root Palace was even now beginning to expand to its full proportions, there was little but rock, smoking lava visible in some of the larger breaks in the ground, and a stone structure upon a crag overlooking an expansive lava sea. Farther beyond that was what appeared to be a population center, home to anywhere between fifty and a hundred thousand people. Pre-landing estimates put the planet’s entire population at nearly two billion. That figure would not hold, however, not after the Vine introduced the exotic bacteria culled from hundreds of alien systems into the atmosphere with its arrival. The Empire had detected no technology of note which might pose