King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) by Michael John Grist Page A

disasters, at all of which he worked some manner of enslavement, plying strength from the suffering of others, storing mementoes all about. Here a scrap of leathered scalp, a broken spear-point, the unfinished novel of a genius stymied by his touch.
    It is a victory lap of past glory, sad in its faded sting. I feel him feeding off the relics of things he'd done, like a ghoul. All these once belonged to him, and I was to belong to him too.
    But I see nothing to help me. In all of these memories, he is alone. There are no trails that cross his that mean a thing to me, no sign of others like us.
    Further still I reach, until the paths are so misty with hoar and time I can barely discern them. I dive the full ten years back, stretching myself gossamer thin, until I am with him standing outside the shark arena on skulk 53, contemplating the web he would spin, to entrap me.
    I am cut out of it, as is the Don, but still I watch his ghost murder the Don's son, holding him close while the garroting wire works its slow magic. I watch him afterward, once the corpse has been dressed and used to ensnare me,, carrying the body out to sea in a boat of his own.
    Along the tide-drifted wafts of his trail, I follow, to an abandoned jut of rock in the mid-Allatanc, surrounded by ancient rusted hydrate-rigs. There he pulls into a natural culvert in the rock, and carries the Don's dead son into a tunnel bored into the rock. There I lose him, but there's something else in the air around him, something sharp and bittersweet and faintly redolent of pain.
    A frame. It is a vast frame of a vast experience, with the sense of other minds like my own around it, surrounding it. I diffuse my focus to better sense them, as though hunting movement through peripheral vision, and they leap to the fore. A dozen feral scents bloom all around like the stink of shark-spoor in the water, predators all.
    Hundreds even. I feel them move through the frame smacking their lips, and gain some sense of what happened here. I sense the boundaries of a massive loss radiating out, of a thousand deaths in a genocide so large it should burn like a sun, but instead there is only the frame, with the weight of it gone.
    A feast.
    They came together here years ago, and they dined. I can feel their sated paths branching out afterward, and among them a single band so thick I know it must be the one that came for me on the train.
    It pulses. None of the others pulse, they are all shades only, but not this. It is alive. I approach, touch it, and in that moment see into it like a strike of lightning in my soul. Within I glimpse millennia of suffering, and millennia of rule. I glimpse order and chaos interweaving. I glimpse the fall of empires and the rise of empires, the never-ending turn of the world shot through with the rise and fall of man.
    And it sees me.
    It is impossible, unlike anything I've felt before, but somehow it grips me. It flails for me, and every second its grip grows stronger. I have reached too far. I feel it rearing back along its own line, its attention bearing down. Fear floods me, and my trail grows thick with it.
    I yank and buck like a fish on the hook, tearing my own lips bloody to escape. I Lag my trail, Lag all of my search and my fear, and moments before the thick band opens its eyes upon me, I escape.
    I race back to the skulk, back to my own mind, cutting my trail as I go. I open my eyes in the white room, to my own panting in the silence. I lie there terrified and adrift, trying to understand what I have seen and what I have done. How much of me could it see, and how much does it know? How could it be alive in its past, how could it be waiting for me, and does it know where I went?
    I dare not reach out. I barely dare breathe. Have I been found out?
    My answer comes within moments, by way of the thunderous applause of bombs going off overhead.
    It takes a moment for me to understand what is happening. Disoriented and weakened by reaching so far, I look