A newly published author

damiynn

hello to all I am new here in a way and just wanted to introduce myself.. I am the author of a book called A Kings Quest. I am going to post an exerpt from my book here and if you like it please go to my website www akingsquest com

Chapter 1
The Beginning

The setting sun glinted brightly off of the rapidly spinning dagger’s blade as it flew through the air, towards the face of the dark haired young man standing by himself at the edge of the wood line. Mere inches before actually hitting him, the dagger struck an invisible magical wall and bounced off harmlessly into the underbrush surrounding the young mans feet.
Damien Daverge a newly robed and newly graduated battlemage, fresh out of the academe for mages in Westlake, allowed a slightly nervous smile to play across his lips. He was glad that the shield spell he had cast about himself before actually revealing his presence to his attackers had worked outside of the academe’s classrooms and out here in the wilds even if it was against a not so formidable enemy.
Of course he was a fully trained battlemage, having spent the past six years of his life at the mages academe in Westlake, in a highly disciplined and rigorous environment. Under excruciatingly difficult conditions, he had learned the arts and skills of his chosen craft and acquired his black and gold robes.
Now things were for real and he was facing off by himself against eight orcs armed with rusty swords and battered clubs, with the idea of his blood in their eyes. Understandably this at first caused him to be a little nervous and he had felt a few pangs of anxiety.
The actual dagger thrower was only one member of a band of eight orcs gathered around their campfire dividing up loot from a farmhouse that they had raided earlier in the day.
Damien and his traveling companions had discovered the remains of the farmer’s family tortured and mutilated in their fields and had set off after the group seeking vengeance.
Orcs are sly, cunning and somewhat intelligent humanoid like creatures, large, with grayish green skin standing about six feet tall usually with yellow piggish eyes snout-like noses and boar like tusks that protrude up out of their lower lips. Orcs are cowardly when encountered alone, particularly when outnumbered. In confrontation, they tend to shirk away, but will attack on the sly whenever able. At times when they are found in large groups, like this one sitting here in the clearing around the fire and t he numbers are on their side, they tend towards courage. Especially, when they see only one lone young man in the wilds, step out of the woods near their camp, far from civilization, or any other means of help, with no type of visible weapon showing other than what appeared to be a simple walking staff.
Grabbing their weapons and brandishing them high over their heads, three of the orcs charged towards the battlemage in a headlong rush.
A lot more confident in himself and in his abilities now, Damien allowed a slightly larger smile to cross his lips. This was going to be easy, almost too easy. Then he remembered the farmhouse that these vile creatures had raided earlier in the day and about the family that they had slaughtered and the smile slid off of his face like water off of oil treated leather. As his dark blue eyes hardened into hard cobalt chips, Damien unleashed the second of the spells that he had prepared for this confrontation.
An explosion of bright light erupted from his outstretched hand and a bolt of silver lightning streaked out across the field in a vicious tendril of twisting electrical energy. A sizzling, crackling hiss filled the air. The speeding bolt smashed into the leading orcs chest, the magical force of the lightning’s energy driving straight through its body, leaving a gaping cauterized hole in its wake where the orc’s chest had been. The silver bolt continued on to engulf the other two charging orcs behind the first, in its sizzling crackling fury.
Screams of pain echoed briefly throughout the clearing before the bolt finished consuming them with its energy. It left nothing but sizzling husks and charred leather lying in the grass surrounded by crackling tendrils of electrical energy that writhed around the smoking remains like little silver snakes.
The remaining five orcs stopped short in their charging and started whispering amongst themselves in a huddle for a moment.
Damien could tell that they hadn’t expected the lightening bolt by the way that they kept throwing furtive and frantic glances in his direction and then over to the charred remains through their narrowed yellow pig like eyes.
After a moment the orcs all moved again. This time they fanned out in an arms length line and started to advance a lot more cautiously towards him.
Two very loud, warlike ferocious screams erupted from the tall grass behind the orcs, catching them completely unaware. Jumping in startled surprise, the remaining five orcs spun around to face this new threat that was now attacking them.
A tall lean man carrying a long sword in one hand and a formidable looking deadly spiked mace in the other was the first to reach them. Right behind him was a squat muscular, dark reddish brown bearded, barrel-chested dwarf with a slightly off-center long strip of white hair in his beard that ran its entire length from an old scar on his chin. He was armed with a very large axe hammer, an evil looking weapon that was both a hammer on one side and a wickedly notched single bladed axe on the other.
Both had been hiding in the tall grass behind the orcs and were now charging them with their weapons in hand. The first man to reach them was Damien’s adopted father’s blademaster, Travis Longblade. His head was as bald as an egg and traced with numerous scars. His face looked like it had been carved from mountain stone, with deep-set eyes and a crooked nose, which had been broken in more than a few different places. This face may have once been a handsome one, but through the course of time and life, it had become toughened and hard edged. A hard look from the deadly blademasters dark eyes could usually set lesser men to scurrying, but it wasn’t the look on his face that caused men to feel wary around Travis Longblade. Instead it was the way that the dangerous man moved and carried himself that set him apart from the others.
Slightly over forty years old, Travis Longblade moved with a predator’s grace, quick to strike and even quicker to kill if he deemed it necessary. It was this that caused other men to be fearful. No one really knew all that much about him. His past was sort of an enigma around Castlekeep and Damien had always suspected that there was a lot more to Travis’ simple story than what he or his adoptive father was telling. All that he knew for certain about the blademaster was that Travis had fought in the pits as an arena slave for many years and had even more scars covering his body than what was currently showing on his head.
That was until his adopted father, Lord Richard Daverge, had seen him in the slave pits and had at once without question bought him from his owner, freed him from his bonds and had hired him as his blademaster and as a tutor in weapons and combat for him and his sons. That was about ten years ago, now Travis was in charge of all of Castlekeep’s military forces and served his adopted father without question. At this moment, he was serving as an escort to bring Damien safely home from Westlake. Which Damien suspected was something the blademaster didn’t want to be doing. It seemed to him that Travis was in an ungodly hurry to get back as if there was something going on back home that he felt that he needed to be involved in.
Without even thinking, Travis used both of the weapons in his hands like living extensions of his own body. He whirled into the orcs like a dervish on a mad rampage. Damien watched from across the field as the blademaster deftly ducked under the swing of one rusty sword that had been aimed at his head and brought his own sword in his left hand across his body and across the orc’s stomach. In one swift motion the keen edge of the blademasters sword cut through the creature’s abdomen, easily disemboweling it. A bloody spray filled the air accompanying the long swords stroke and the orcs entrails fell out onto the ground where it stood, viscera looping about its feet until it collapsed dead.
Following the momentum of his first strike, Travis kept spinning to the left. As he straightened back up out of his ducking crouch, he brought the mace in his right hand around at head level in an arc that carried the sharpened spikes into the neck of another orc. The deadly spiked mace tore completely through the second orcs unprotected throat ripping it out, effectively killing it. All of this happened so fast that the second orcs body didn’t even realize that it was dead and it just stood there for a few moments spurting blood out of its throat all over the green grass in a bright red rainfall, before it also collapsed.
Damien’s other companion was a little less tactful than the skilled blademaster, not quite being either the swordsman or showman with his two weapons. Nevertheless, he was still deadly and made quite an impression, literally.
Abandoning reason, Kendle Stonebreaker charged headfirst into the battle, his short thick legs and arms churning like windmills in a storm. Dropping his head low, he drove his shiny steel skullpiece directly into another surprised orc’s midsection with a thunderous crash that was accompanied by the sound of its cracking breastbone and the shattering of its ribcage. The heavy bodied dwarf drove straight through the first orc with his own powerful body, knocking it over with his weight and driving it backwards onto the ground. Still using the momentum that he had built up during the charge across the clearing, Kendle continued his forward motion.