The Wrath Of Silence Read online

  The Monster Of Selkirk Book 6

  The Wrath Of Silence

  C.E. Clayton

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Thank You

  About the Author

  Also by C.E. Clayton

  Also From DevilDog Press

  For you, dear reader, who saw Tallis to the end of her journey, and for my family, who was there even before the start of this crazy adventure.

  I love and appreciate you all.

  Acknowledgments

  It is hard to believe The Monster of Selkirk has come to an end! Thank you for joining me on this journey. While Tallis’s story may be over, I assure you more stories, worlds, and fierce characters will be coming soon from yours truly!

  This is the part where I thank the same people I’ve thanked since Book 1, but honestly, they still need acknowledgement because, without them, you might not be holding this book right now: my parents, brothers, sister, sibling-in-laws, and in-laws—thank you for your support, and thank you most of all to my husband, even though I know you won’t read this.

  A massive thanks to all the bloggers and my #bookstagram friends for your love and support in getting Tallis’s story out in the wild: Kathy, Paige, Amber (Baj), Tyffany, Becky, Joanne, and April (Bunny), and everyone else who ever shared a picture of one of my books or left a review. Thank you as well to my dear, and awesome friends Colleen, Sophie, Kim, Andy, Nicel, Karla, Brie, Erin, and Dave, your support means everything plus some. And of course, none of this would have been possible without Tracy and Sheila. Thank you for your guiding hands throughout this amazing experience. I hope you’re as pleased with the result as I am!

  Thank you to my phenomenal beta readers and all those who gave feedback during the creative process: Megan, Kristy, and Debra, you ladies are rock stars! And, once more, I am going to thank my pets because at least one of the three (usually my dog, Dobby) is always beside me as I type and curse the endless revisions I do before being comfortable enough to let others read my work. Adopt, don’t shop, for your next fury friend!

  I can never thank you enough for reading my words and following Tallis. She has been a pleasure to shape and watch grow alongside her friends the past several years, and I hope her strength and love continue to give you entertainment and comfort long after you turn the last page. If you would like a soundtrack to go along with your reading, check out the “Selkirk Revisited” playlist I created on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2ueBOzr

  Chapter 1

  THE PERILS OF HOME

  Selkirk’s first snow crunched beneath Eletha’s feet as she crept through the forest. She paused only once to curl her toes into the slush and poke at the dying grass. She relished the honest cold for a moment longer before trudging ahead.

  Eletha breathed deeply, working hard to clear her mind. Soon, the chill of the grass and the slickness of the ice were forgotten as she marched toward the Vanir.

  The Vanir’s singsong mezzo-soprano voice welcomed Eletha, trickling through her in a cascade of wordless melodies. It felt like the sound of color. She sighed blithely, letting the song carry her skittish thoughts high into the sky before dropping them back at her feet as its sweet voice became darker.

  It will get worse.

  Eletha pondered the Vanir’s words, unsure if her charge was simply stating the obvious. As winter fully embraced the island, the forests would be filled with a chilly silence. Animals went to ground to hibernate, and the bronze and amber foliage of autumn died, clearing the way for bright spring blooms. But Eletha did not believe the Vanir was simply commenting on the weather.

  Her charge often spoke in riddles, Her words drenched in hundreds of implications. It was Eletha’s job to listen to the Vanir’s messages, to make sense of Her heavy melodies and recount them to the High Priestess with a list of the Vanir’s possible meanings.

  Eletha bit her lip, dreading going back to her sisters and transcribing the Vanir’s words. Instead, she elected to watch the deepening fog as it twisted through the trees and transformed the moss and lichen-covered silver birches into green giants lurking out of view.

  She felt the warmth of the Vanir’s song flow through her, blooming through her chest and prickling her skin. The Vanir caressed her mind and soothed her troubled heart in blissful ease that made Eletha believe that, despite her charge’s foreboding words, everything would turn out all right in the end. That the Saurar—as her High Priestess dubbed it—would not return.

  Without fail, the Vanir shifted through her mind and heart to unearth the cause for her concerns like a gardener pulling out weeds. Eletha felt her chest and back tighten as if embraced before the Vanir’s mezzo-soprano voice flowed through her once more.

  She returns. But the Gayaer is here, colder and harsher than winter. Prepare, child.

  She saw flashes of images. They swirled and twisted in a chaotic dance, far too many for Eletha to see clearly. She latched on to images she’d seen before: flashes of golden beaches, mechanical limbs that sent a shiver from the tips of her long ears to her toes, her brethren with golden rings in their lobes transforming them into dinaerea, loyal elves battling ones with yellow eyes in a land not so different from Selkirk. And images of a girl—no, a woman now—with moon blonde hair and eyes like an ocean before a storm, two daggers shaped like tridents at her waist.

  Eletha focused on her memory of this woman, her fingers trembling like they always did when her mind drifted to Tallis. Tallis could have given into a prophecy intended to encase the world in a gust of fire and death. Instead, she freed them. She saved them all.

  And she’d had no reason to since Eletha’s kind had taken much from her people and more from Tallis personally. But she returned their lives to them and gave them back their histories. Her clan—no, all the elves—owed this woman everything. Eletha supposed their savior could still be the end of them all one day, but she didn’t like thinking about that.

  But….

  But Tallis had slaughtered many of her people. They were enslaved at the time, and Tallis had been defending herself and those she loved. But Eletha still feared what she could do more than what she was.

  Eletha blinked into the fading light, sighing in resignation at her frail skill with understanding all the images the Vanir sent through her mind. The Vanir’s embrace was like a song in a language she once knew but had forgotten. It was beautiful, but mostly incomprehensible to novices such as she. Eletha thought it was a mistake to send her to the Vanir so soon, but her High Priestess asked, and she could not refuse. However, the Vanir explained at least part of the images with its message. It was something all the Vanir did more frequently after the Saurar was felled by Tallis.

  A tear rolled down her cheek as the black veil over her memory rustled in her mind, showing Eletha the few memories of her past she’d tried so desperately to forget. Her people had almost no recollection of their enslavement under the Saurar, making it a painful necessity for the Vanir to remind them, to re
educate their children not with the wordless song they once all knew but with actual words in the clunky common tongue that was so foreign to their deities.

  When she thought of those desolate times, the hunger for raw, dripping flesh, and the roiling hatred the twisted Vanir forced on her people, still left Eletha with a rotten taste in her mouth.

  But what she remembered most was the loneliness. The isolation of not being connected with her brothers and sisters, with the other Vanir, and the pining she felt to be connected again.

  Despite what the Saurar had created Tallis for, what she had tried to get Tallis to do, Eletha would be forever grateful to the elandili for finally freeing her mind and returning not just the culture they so very nearly lost, but the connection she’d been missing.

  Eletha still could not understand why Tallis left Selkirk. The Vanir would not comment on Tallis’s departure, but High Priestess Bonnalurie said the elandili had her own answers to find, her own wounds to heal. She’d encouraged them to take note of the progress Tallis made, but to put it from their minds and focus on hiding, and reclaiming what was lost during those long and evil centuries.

  The first things they needed to reclaim were their names.

  Eletha was born under the Saurar—the Foul One—and was not aware her mother had even given her a name. So many of the elders had perished when Tallis slew the Foul One that Eletha thought it impossible to recover something as simple as their names. But Bonnalurie had done it by tirelessly searching through the Vanirs’ memories and researching the seasons and times of day that elves like Eletha were born. Through her efforts, she had succeeded where many other voronwerea—Loyal Ones—had failed.

  And that was only the start.

  A pang of hurt replaced Eletha’s feelings of pride, thinking about how many of her brothers and sisters were felled so soon after being born again as the humans plunged into their forests looking for revenge.

  She felt the Vanir hum through her mind, lessening the ache Eletha felt when she thought about her dead brethren, of how few their numbers were. It didn’t matter that Bonnalurie assured them their numbers would swell once more with Tallis’s return, that she would bring elves from sunny Theda and remote Arcadia to help turn back the vengeful humans and stop the dark tide that, even now, beat against Selkirk’s shores. But nothing could assure Eletha enough to bring her the peace Bonnalurie said she must achieve if she hoped to prosper in their Sisterhood.

  Eletha bit her lip again, trying to focus on Tallis and what that impossible creature was able to do. She could have devoured the world as easily as a hard boiled quail egg. Instead, she’d traveled to Theda where she freed Mazara’s elves from being experimented on by the foul unguerea—no, it was unfair of her to use that word for humans when her people had once been the real Hollow Ones for centuries. Then Tallis went to Arcadia where she stopped the Gayaer before he could fully twist her brothers and sisters. Eletha wished that freeing them hadn’t turned the beast’s attention toward Selkirk.

  The fog continued to thicken around Eletha as she sat at the base of the Vanir thinking and listening to the muted sounds of the forest around her. The crack of a deer treading over the nearly frozen ground, the rustle of dead leaves as game birds fled from a pine marten, the gurgle of the Relmir River as it became clogged with debris, the low murmur of humans speaking—

  What? Unguerea, here?

  Eletha crouched low to the ground and closed her eyes, shifting through the images of the nearby animals connected to the Vanir for any glimpse of the humans. Any animals that had been near the group had fled before they were discovered, before they’d even spotted the unguerea.

  Eletha knew she should flee, that she should run back to Bonnalurie and their stronghold in the heart of the Guldar Forest. It was not all that far away, and yet Eletha did not move.

  Whomever these humans were, they were too close to their home. No other unguerea had ever come this close before, their nervousness about going into the heart of the forest still stalling them despite knowing the monsters they once feared were no longer there. Eletha allowed the Vanir to give her courage as she tugged her ceremonial dagger free and crept to where she believed the humans to be.

  Eletha was no warrior; she did not know how to fight. At least, she didn’t know how to fight properly. She knew she’d killed people while under the Foul One’s curse, but she didn’t think that was the same thing. Surely, there were better ways to fight than ripping your foe’s throat out with your teeth.

  Eletha swallowed the rancid thought back down and plunged ahead.

  She found five regal-looking men tethering a small boat to an oak to keep it from drifting down the Relmir River. The men had no fishing poles or nets with them, but they held a few bows and spears, so Eletha assumed they had come from the big city on the other side of Lake Aradan to hunt.

  But they didn’t look like hunters.

  The armor on three of the men was far too heavy for hunting. The combination of plate and chainmail would slow their progress when stalking a deer—not that they’d ever get close enough. The clanging they made would alert any animal to their presence long before the humans even knew it was there. And while these men had bows on their backs, they each held on to the hilts of their long swords as if they expected danger from a different kind of predator.

  Their armor was like nothing Eletha had seen before. It gleamed even in the dull light permeating through the fog. Swathes of indigo peeked from beneath silver armor with golden tassels hanging from its shoulders. Spiked helms sported a collection of white, gold, and deep blue plumage that Eletha was sure had some significance, given how ridiculous it would be otherwise. She had seen only a few humans before, and those men had been in little more than rags and old leather.

  The other two men were not in armor at all, but their regalia dazzled all the same. Instead of wearing light leathers and green-hued fabrics to help blend in with the forest, the younger of the two wore a deep blue tunic over black trousers that were tucked into good quality black leather boots.

  The tunic’s neck down to mid chest was covered in a golden filigree thread that sparkled with dew. The same golden design lined the hems of both his tunic and the ground length cloak he wore. He flicked the cloak aside, revealing white fur lining and the gem-encrusted hilt of a short sword at his side.

  The younger man glanced at his companion as he tightened the scabbard about his waist, and scowled. But as soon as the older man turned to face him, his scowl softened into an easy smile.

  The two appeared to be brothers. They both had the same dark red hair, small brown eyes, stubby nose, and strong chin. The older had a curly beard that was a shade darker than what was on his head, but that seemed to be the biggest difference to Eletha, who still thought most humans looked alike.

  The older man grinned and straightened his tunic. He, at least, looked prepared to hunt—in the vaguest of terms. His bright green tunic did not match the deep hues of the forest, the silver vest he wore with its golden latticework design would not aid him in the slightest when hiding in shadows. The white cloak with its crimson and silver trim would do nothing but become ruined, should he catch anything. His fawn colored trousers and tall brown leather boots were the only thing that seemed practical.

  “Well, Brother, what’s so special about the red deer here?” the older man said, fixing what Eletha assumed was a crown atop his head.

  It was an ugly circlet that sat low over his forehead. Its blue topaz, smooth pearls, and yellow garnets did little to brighten the dark steel they sat upon. The man’s headband was so different from what belonged to the High Priestess that Eletha had a hard time imagining someone of importance wanting to wear it; it had none of the delicate metal workings or natural splendor Eletha associated with power.

  “Roe deer, Fearghas. It’s the roe deer that can be found here. Elegant beast, the roe deer. Decorating the great hall with its slender antlers will please Father, and hopefully bring his mind back to us. Wodan wi
lling.”

  The older man chuckled. “Apologies, Dougal. Didn’t mean to offend the deer.” He tugged on a pair of fine, black leather gloves, and glanced at the guards. “Will your men stay here? That armor…don’t think it’ll help us much.”

  Dougal tilted his head, his fingers tapping on the hilt of his decorative blade. He sighed theatrically. “Nay, Brother. There might be tremps about. Can’t risk harming a hair on that princely head of yours, after all.”

  Fearghas rolled his eyes and turned his back on his brother, surveying the forest around him. “So, where should we start? You claim to know where this beast is.”

  Eletha shrank back against the oak she was hiding against, letting the deep shadows it cast hide her earthy skin and the mossy robe she wore. Holding her breath and shutting her eyes, Eletha held tightly onto her dagger lest the humans head her way.

  A squelching sound, followed by a surprised gurgle, had her eyes snapping open.

  “We don’t start anywhere, Brother. It ends here,” Dougal hissed, pulling his sword out from his brother’s back.

  Fearghas fell hard on to the ground before rolling over and clutching at the gaping wound. Even from her hiding spot, Eletha could see the pain and betrayal shining in the man’s brown eyes.

  Dougal wiped his blade on the ground, and knelt by his brother. “You’re surprised? Odd. It seemed so obvious, didn’t it? Insisting we take only my guards, that we come so far into tremp infested forests to hunt? I hate hunting. Mother taught us to trust no one, Brother. Not even family. Or perhaps she taught only me that? Hmm. Shame.” Dougal ripped his brother’s bloody cloak off and snatched the crown from Fearghas’s head before standing and turning away.