Korun and the Tower of Smoke
(2026)(The second book in the Korun and the Forgotten Scrolls series)
A novel by Charles Eugene Anderson
The obsidian walls were splitting.
Not crumbling — splitting, the hairline fractures racing upward from the floor in branching runs, each one leaking the color that had been building inside the rock since the production level failed. He watched one open at hip height to his right, climb to the ceiling in under a second, fork, and keep going in two directions at once. The light that bled through was wrong — too warm, too alive, the color of something that had been sealed in for years and was only now remembering it had somewhere to be.
Nothing closed behind him. The Tower was not collapsing. It was opening, the way a body opens when the thing holding it together stops.
Two guards lay in the corridor ahead.
They had killed each other. One still had his hand on the grip of the sword buried in the other's throat — not gripping it in death, but wrapped around it the way a man wraps his hand around something he has just finished with and has not yet decided to let go. Their faces wore the same expression. Not rage. Not fear. The locked, finished certainty of men who had won. Who had put down the enemy and knew it. The vapor drifted around them at knee height, and where it touched their skin, the color was already going — leaching out from beneath, the way warmth leaves a stone.
Korun stepped around them and walked on.
Genre: Fantasy
Not crumbling — splitting, the hairline fractures racing upward from the floor in branching runs, each one leaking the color that had been building inside the rock since the production level failed. He watched one open at hip height to his right, climb to the ceiling in under a second, fork, and keep going in two directions at once. The light that bled through was wrong — too warm, too alive, the color of something that had been sealed in for years and was only now remembering it had somewhere to be.
Nothing closed behind him. The Tower was not collapsing. It was opening, the way a body opens when the thing holding it together stops.
Two guards lay in the corridor ahead.
They had killed each other. One still had his hand on the grip of the sword buried in the other's throat — not gripping it in death, but wrapped around it the way a man wraps his hand around something he has just finished with and has not yet decided to let go. Their faces wore the same expression. Not rage. Not fear. The locked, finished certainty of men who had won. Who had put down the enemy and knew it. The vapor drifted around them at knee height, and where it touched their skin, the color was already going — leaching out from beneath, the way warmth leaves a stone.
Korun stepped around them and walked on.
Genre: Fantasy