The Last Immortal : Book One of Seeds of a Fallen Empire Read online

The Last Immortal

  By

  Anne Spackman

  Copyright © 2012 by Anne Spackman

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover Art by Boris Rasin

  Prologue

  Blood. Warm and salty. Leeching through the gaps between his teeth. The blood filling his mouth sent shivers of panic through him. Death lingered above him, clinging like a shadow ready to embrace him. The impending cold of her dark presence terrified him to his core. But he had no time for panic—he was suffocating. His eyes flicked around the shattered cockpit and found his crushed air-hose.

  “I’ve got to get out of this—now!” he thought desperately as he struggled to unlatch his helmet. With a wild movement, he cast the dark blue, gold trimmed helmet aside, and gulped in air, giving no further thought to the helmet that clattered away, bouncing over the edge of the cliff into the white-crested sea.

  He became aware that his plane was on fire, jammed on its side against some rocks. He began to smell smoke as the flames flickered towards the cockpit. With every ounce of strength that he could muster, Eiron pulled himself out of the wreck and crawled as far as he could before dropping onto his belly, gasping for every breath. As he lay there panting, he felt a wave of heat from the flames of the dying plane, and his nostrils flared with the acrid sting of smoke. As his mind cleared from a haze of confusion, he felt sweat run down along his neck disappear into his wilted collar, and at last he began to drag himself away towards some large rocks.

  Exhausted and in pain, Eiron turned onto his back and rested his head on a boulder and saw for the first time the widening crimson stain on his white flightsuit just above his groin. He groaned and laid back, his eyes rolling wildly. Slowly, he realized that the crazy lines in the sky were the tell-tale trails of approaching planes. He knew that he was the last of his patrol to be shot down and that these could only be Orian fighters coming to investigate the smoking crash site.

  “Damn, I’ve got to get further away or they’ll find me,” he thought as he felt adrenaline begin to rush through his veins.

  “What’s that?” He could just barely see a sheltering crevice ahead in the cliff face, cloaked in shadow from the overhanging rock.

  Digging at the ground with his elbows and dragging his body along, he scraped his way slowly over the sand and rocks towards the crevice. He felt his legs begin to go numb as he dragged himself along, and his strength slowly began to ebb away. A cold sweat broke over him as he collapsed. Before his eyes closed for the last time, he stared ahead at the sheltering crevice, the unmoving, unchanged, disinterested oasis before him, just a body’s length away.

  He did not catch the movement in the dark crevice of a darker shadow lurking far back in the inner darkness of the crevice, watching him. Moments after he fell still, when there was no longer any possibility of him stirring to life again, the living shadow emerged cautiously. It glided with uncanny agility over the coarse, rock-strewn ground. The apparition caught hold of him firmly and then quickly carried him to the crevice behind the giant boulders, pausing only once, in nervous fear, to look back across the waters.

  There was no one to see what had happened, no one to see the living shadow that haunted these lonely cliffs, no one to ever know that the pilot hadn’t died out here with his fallen craft.

  There was no one there, no one except the five enemy space fighters flying high above the turbulent waves, their sharp-edged wings tinged silver by the setting sun. At last satisfied of the destruction of their last prey, the fighters shot into the violet sky, trailing contrails of dark smoke as they disappeared into the rose-tinted clouds.

  And the thundering ripple of their engines echoed triumphantly over the sea.

  The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is when good men do nothing.

  —Burke

  Chapter One