Secrets of the Grand Grimoire: Destiny

Excerpt from Secrets of the Grand Grimoire: Destiny by Susan Basso McCauley

Will gasped. He stepped back, pushing himself into a shadowed crevice of a circular stairway of cascading stone blocks. His body felt strange as if it weren’t his own. He looked at his hands. They were not his, but that of a grown man. His muscles felt larger, strong. He grasped the hilt of a broad sword with unexpected ease. It had a sturdy handle with two large sapphires and beautiful scrollwork on either side of the pommel. Its ruggedly elegant scabbard hung at his side. As beautiful as the weapon was, it had known battle and death. He knew it was an instrument for killing.

His heart was thundering in his chest, his breathing laboured. His body was prepared for an attack.

Then, awareness came to him. He was being stalked. He was hiding from an intruder. The darkness pressed in on him like a smothering cloak, yet he knew he could not give away his position and pushed himself more firmly into the crevice of the stairwell.

He could hardly breathe as the writhing, spiked tail of the beast slithered past his hiding place. Its lustrous black scales were hypnotic in the moonlight, coaxing him to come forward and touch their knife-like sheen.

The sword slipped from his grasp, clanging to the floor as he reached out. The cacophonous noise of his fallen weapon shook him from his trance. His chest heaved, and he dared not move to wipe the beaded sweat from his lip and forehead.

He pushed himself snuggly into his hiding place. Muffling his horror, he picked up his fallen sword.

The minutes crawled by like hours as he waited for the spear-like teeth to bite at him.

Nothing happened.

Carefully, he peered out from the shadows so that only a sliver of moonlight fell across one of his piercing brown eyes.

The beast hadn’t turned back, but was dragging its body as it slowly ascended the staircase.

It was a dwarf dragon. This one looked odd, though. Its scales were covered in a strange hoary coating, and its eyes like black, unseeing marbles.

His nose burned as the beast’s acrid smell wavered in the air. Its smell was not that of a healthy dragon, not like smoke and the blood of a fresh kill. It was fetid and necrotic. Its movements were slow and laboured, as if being unwillingly coaxed to stalk its prey.

Why was it looking for him? But even more importantly, who had sent it to find him?