To Rule in Amber by Roger Zelazny, John Gregory Betancourt

torches had gone out.
    "'Hulloo!' I called several times. I got no answer. Where had the servants gone?
    "I used a quick spell and sent several balls of light spinning toward the ceiling. Their glow revealed a dozen corpses up there - on the ceiling. Each one had been beheaded. From their uniforms, they all belonged to the household guard.
    "After that, I moved cautiously through the house, looking at all the damage. Every piece of furniture had been smashed, and every door had been torn from its hinges - even the magically protected doors. That took a lot of power. Uthor's men - at least, I assumed it had been Uthor's men - had not been fooling around.
    "I counted thirty-nine headless bodies on the ground floor. The second and third floors had also been trashed. In my own rooms, someone had poured ail the paints, pigments, and inks onto the floor, then smashed the empty jars against the walls. It made a huge sticky mess. Of course, I could replace it all; what really hurt was the loss of my storage trunks - and, with them, my most treasured possessions, including hundreds of Trumps I'd painted over the years. Those Trumps showed places I'd been, friends and classmates, and, most of all, relatives. I could easily imagine Uthor's men using them to round up our family.
    "Dad's workshop had been cleaned out. Everything, from the largest of his inventions to the smallest scrap of notepaper, had been taken away. Not so much as a piece of lint remained. That didn't particularly worry me, of course - Dad hadn't looked at any of those things in decades. His last ten years of work and research had taken place in Juniper, after all.
    "Finally I made a methodical search of the building from attic to basement. It didn't take me long to determine that nothing of value remained anywhere. I counted ninety-four bodies in all, all guards.
    None of our servants lay among the dead - they must have either run away or been taken prisoner… or, considering how hard it is to find good help these days, perhaps they were, ah, shall we say - forcibly hired away?
    "Finding a mostly intact couch in one of the spare bedrooms on the fourth floor, I flopped down and tried to rest. I didn't know what else to do. From the looks of things, the shai le'one had gone through the house so thoroughly, they wouldn't need to come back. I felt safe enough for the moment.
    "Exhaustion overcame me. I fell asleep.
    "When I finally awakened, hours must have passed. But instead of feeling rested and refreshed, a strange uneasiness settled over me. I had never felt anything like it before. An odd pressure filled my ears. My nerves jangled in warning. The very air itself seemed curiously charged, almost as though a lightning storm were about to break. More than anything else, I wanted to crawl into a hole and pull it closed after me… and yet I could not have told you why .
    "Something was coming. Something bad . I felt it in my bones.
    "It took more courage than I thought I still had, but I forced myself to go downstairs. Cautiously, I crept to the front doors - one lay flat on the ground; the other hung off its hinges at an angle - and I peeked out.
    "The sky looked strange. Clouds boiled and churned, lit from within by constantly striking bolts of blue lightning. All across the courtyard, balls of fire rained down, smoking and smoldering. The air shimmered with odd hues of blue and gold. Then, as I watched, the ground shuddered and rippled like a lake in a windstorm. The rocks lay still.
    "When I looked up, beyond the outside wall I saw a shimmering yellow-gold curtain of light slowly moving toward me. It must have been a hundred and fifty feet tall - maybe taller. I stepped outside to see better. Through the open gates to our estate, I saw the ground beneath it churning and breaking apart as it advanced.
    "This was my first glimpse of a storm from the Shadows. I had heard tales of them before - they hit Chaos many years ago, I assume when Dad drew the very first