The Beginning of Everything Read online Kristen Ashley (The Rising #1)

Categories Genre: Fantasy/Sci-fi, Paranormal, Romance Tags Authors: Series: The Rising Series by Kristen Ashley
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Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 137958 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 690(@200wpm)___ 552(@250wpm)___ 460(@300wpm)
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“Tint, take the men and get out,” he ordered his most level-headed seaman.

“Let’s go, men,” Tint said without delay.

There you go.

Level-headed.

“Tint, my brother, this is bound to be good,” Oreti, Aramus’s least level-headed seaman protested.

Xi was looking up at his king, thus catching his expression, and therefore repeating after Tint, “Let’s go, men.”

Aramus got looks from Nissi, Navagio, and Catedrais. They read their captain and king and spared no time rounding up the dissenters.

Aramus watched as they walked across the cavernous expanse of the room, their boots sounding, then echoing in the massive space.

He had learned, at his father’s knee, a father who sat in that very chair with Aramus’s arse on a cushion on the wide dais surrounding it, sheltered by the six colossal ibex-whale horns that formed the base which measured at least fifteen feet across, the ten-foot tall tips curved around it, that the throne of the King of Mar-el had been built to intimidate anyone who walked in that room.

Ibex-whales, outside angmostros (though, thankfully, those massive eel creatures did not have horns), were the hardest thing in the sea to kill. That throne up on its five-foot wide, eight-foot high pedestal carved out of coral (that also had the stairs up to the damned thing pared out) having the mighty horns of three of said beasts was impressive even to Aramus, who’d killed four times that many in his lifetime.

But this was lost on just about everyone, considering the only being on the mainland he liked was Prince Cassius, thus Cassius and his men were the only ones who’d walked into that fucking room, and none of that lot were intimidated by anything, so it was a waste.

Days of yore, all right.

Now it was just a place the bounden had to mop since now, they might accept visitors on their shores to attend their merchants or collect fish to take to the mainland, but no one not of Mar-el came inland.

And no one not Mar-el came to his castle.

On this thought, one side of the two enormous doors that were three stories tall and thus, if one of his men wasn’t opening it, it took at least two bounden to do it, opened, and he saw the tall, slender, lithe, bloody-sirens-damned regal body of his wife wander through.

Born to be queen, if that body was anything to go by.

And her demeanor.

And bloody fucking everything about her.

She wandered amongst the four-story high columns that held up the domed ceiling, each column’s width spiraled up with identical carvings of what looked like floating vines of seaweed.

And she did this like she had all bloody day.

The dress she wore clung to her body. Sleeveless. Sparkling. With some lace, some see-through sea-green at her calves, and a drape of netting at her middle that could be construed as being ready to cast for fish. But it was hung with some coins that flashed, torn in places that looked deliberate, and the whole fucking thing made a man wish to take long moments dissecting it visually before he ripped it off with his hands.

She stopped at the foot of the pedestal, tipped back her head, and the abundance of long, springy, soft, tight, black ringlets tipped back with her as she gazed up at him with her big, crystal-blue eyes.

“You’ve returned,” she said in her siren’s voice.

And that, Aramus had determined, along with her hair, those eyes, her elegant hands, her perfect lait café skin, her long-arse legs, and her rounded behind, had bewitched him.

Unfortunately for her, through her own endeavors, he was bewitched no more.

“A week ago,” he grunted.

“Ah,” she murmured disinterestedly.

Gods.

“We had another wave last night.”

He noted the tension that hit her shoulders at his announcement.

This was because she knew, as they had, and those waves were difficult to miss. As they’d been doing for months, it came but minutes after they felt the tremor. Fortnight after fortnight, stronger and stronger with each wave hitting the western shores of Mar-el.

The cities, ports, and villages there had been built to withstand just that—waves, and the worst of storms. And his people had learned to batten, long before the regularity of the current strikes.

But even being hewn from the rock of Mar-el to withstand such occurrences, doors, shutters, windows, even latched strongly and barred even stronger, couldn’t withstand a tidal.

And Aramus knew that was coming. Each wave higher and higher, it would take but months before they would face a tidal. Regularly. Every two weeks.

His people were seafarers. Their life was the sea. They could swim. Surf. Ride any wave in boat or by body.

They could not ride a tidal.

No one could.

“Lena has come to see me,” he told his wife.

She could not hide behind disinterest at that, as she wouldn’t. She was a bloody witch herself. The most powerful of her kind having an audience of the king, her husband, would be of interest.


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