The Obsidian Crown, page 1
THE OBSIDIAN CROWN
Essence Wielder Book 6
DAN MICHAELSON
D.K. HOLMBERG
Copyright © 2024 by ASH Publishing
Cover art by Damonza.com
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Author’s Note
Series by Dan Michaelson
Similar Series by D.K. Holmberg
Chapter One
The sense of essence filled Dax Nelson, leaving him aware of power and feeling the energy as it coursed through him. It was not all his essence, though. These days, he barely had to draw upon his own essence, as he could tap into the nodal power around him. Still, he was cautious about doing so. He did not want to draw power the wrong way, though he still wasn’t entirely sure what that meant.
Distantly, he felt somebody tapping on him.
Dax had been manifesting, or attempting to manifest, looking down upon the city, spread out in something of a fog as he had been doing so. But he had hesitated to form his own structure.
He had to be careful.
Careful because the act of manifesting was one that could be too revealing, and he did not want anybody to see him in that form. He had already revealed too much of what he was able to do, and he had to be cautious about revealing even more.
“Come on, Dax,” a familiar voice said, drawing him back. The voice was distant at first, but as he heard it, he realized that some aspect of it was amplified, probably through essence.
It had to be Rochelle, though he didn’t know that she had the ability to amplify essence in such a way. Had he shown her that?
So much had changed since the attack on the border. So much that he was responsible for, at least when it came to others learning about essence, and learning about how to wield their essence in ways they had not been able to do before. He had attempted to convey an understanding of some of the essence creatures so that others would know about that power, and so they would not be tempted to attack them, but Dax wasn’t sure now if he had done quite what he had intended, or if he had made a mistake in sharing what he knew.
He drifted, pulling himself back. As he did, he caught a glimpse of familiar wind essence and was drawn toward it. He resisted the call from Rochelle and floated on the wind toward his sister.
He consolidated down into a form just outside the edge of the city, near a copse of trees, where Megan was seated. He could see her essence before he saw her physical presence, with a hint of translucence from wind surrounding her gray-cloaked form. She was slight like their mother, though powerful like her too.
“There you are,” Megan said as Dax began to take his form. “I noticed your little cloud.”
“My little cloud?”
“That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? You become a cloud of wind essence?”
He shook his head. “Not particularly. It’s more that I just become essence.”
“I would love to learn the technique, but I get the sense that you aren’t willing to show me that.”
“I’m not trying to hide it,” Dax said. In fact, he had been teaching his friends as much as he could about manifestation. None of them had seen any success in it yet, but he believed that it was possible to eventually gain an understanding of what he was doing. Out of anybody he had met, Megan might’ve been the best person to try it. She’d had the same training that he’d had when he had been younger, learning about his core essence and what it meant for a person to have an underlying sense of the power inside of themselves that they could call upon. “I’m not so sure that now is the right time for me to demonstrate it, though. Unless you want me to take the time. I suppose I could.”
“You suppose?”
“Like I said, I suppose I could. I don’t think that the concept is beyond you. The time it takes might require a bit of effort, and I don’t know if you have that.” Dax regarded his sister with a bit of curiosity. “Unless you do have more time. Has the Emperor decided that you are no longer needed?”
Megan got to her feet, and she flicked her gaze over to the city. She took a deep breath, then let it out. When she did, a bit of wind swirled with it, as if she were exhaling some of her own essence. He didn’t think that was quite what she did, but the technique struck him as similar, nonetheless.
“No,” she said. “The Emperor has not dismissed me from my responsibilities, though there’s a part of me that wishes he would.” She shook her head. “I should be careful saying that, especially here. Anybody could be listening.”
“But you’re a Whisper,” Dax said. “Who is going to be listening to you?”
Megan fixed her gaze on him. “There is always somebody listening, Dax. That’s one thing that you come to learn as you spend time around the Empire. So…” She breathed out heavily. “Anyway. I just wanted to see what your plan was. Are you really going to see him?”
Him being the Emperor, Dax knew.
“That’s what I understand. Why?”
“I just want you to be careful there. Once you get involved in politics, things become more complicated.”
“Oh?”
“I speak from experience, Dax. I know that you don’t want to listen to me because I’m just your older sister,” she went on, shaking her head, “but I know what I’m talking about.”
“I never would’ve said otherwise,” Dax said.
“Anyway. I would appreciate it if you let me know when you go.”
“Why?”
“So that I can make my own arrangements. I’m going to make sure that I’m there when you are there. I think it is going to be safest for you.”
“Safest?”
“I’m not going to intervene on what you’re doing, but having another ally in the city with you is always for the best.”
“You could just come with us,” he said.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think that I could. Anything that I do is likely going to draw attention, and I certainly don’t want to do that to you as you are trying to find your way, and your place, with him.”
He started to smile. “Is it really that dangerous?”
“For somebody of power—and you are definitely somebody of power now—yes. I don’t even know the extent of what the Emperor can do. I’m not so sure that anybody does. Everything that I’ve ever heard of him suggests he is incredibly powerful. And that is the kind of thing you need to be careful with.”
“I will do my best.”
She laughed, and there was a hint of darkness to it. “You need to do more than that, Dax. I know you think that I’m being overly dramatic here—”
“I never said anything about you being overly dramatic. I was just saying that I understand. I appreciate the warning, Megan. I really do. And I’m going to have Desmond with me, and as far as I know, I get to at least have one of my friends with me.” Hopefully Rochelle, as Dax appreciated her insight. Gia might be good because of her fighting ability. And Cedrick… Cedrick was a different challenge, mostly because Dax wasn’t entirely sure what Cedrick would bring to the table, nor did he know whether there was anything Cedrick would be able to do that would make much of a difference. There probably wasn’t, but having Cedrick’s loyalty would be valuable.
“And the Essendar?”
He tensed. “I don’t know. I presume that there are going to be Essendar coming with us.”
“No. That was my way of saying that the Essendar are definitely going to be going with you. They remain stationed in the city here. But then again, they are stationed in all cities now. The Essendar have decided to take on a greater role all around us.” She shook her head. “It is maddening. I still think they are responsible for what happened to the Whisper network, but I can’t prove it.”
“Can you rebuild it?”
“I can’t, but maybe you could help with that.”
And the offhanded way she said it suggested to Dax that was the primary reason she had come looking for him.
He snorted at that. “You could’ve just asked, Megan.”
“What?”
“I can tell that’s what you really want. Are you not at all concerned about me?”
“Oh, I’m very much concerned about you, Dax, but I also recognize that even if I am concerned, there is very little I’m going to be able to do to keep you from whatever it is you decide to do. You have a stubbornness to you.”
“And I come upon it honestly,” Dax said.
She snorted. “That you do. Well, regardless of that, I still think you need to be careful.”
“I fully intend to.”
“And like I said, if there is anything you can do to help with the Whisper network…”
“It’s just a series of links,” he said.
“Maybe to you, but it’s not quite so simple to someone like me.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “Maybe I can help you reestablish the Whisper network before we go.”
But even as he thought about that, he had no idea if there would be time for him to do it. And more than that, he didn’t know if he had an interest in doing it. The Whisper network was useful to his sister, but it wasn’t just his sister who took advantage of it. There were other Whispers who Dax didn’t know, others who were involved, and he certainly wasn’t about to help somebody use a network that might be dangerous against him if he didn’t really understand who they were and what they were trying to do with it.
“Do you know when you’re leaving?”
“You asked that already, Megan.”
“And you didn’t answer.”
He smiled. “I don’t know. It’s all been up to Desmond. And honestly, I thought that I was going to go and visit the Emperor a while ago. But that whole idea got sidetracked once before.”
“This time, you don’t have to worry about it,” she said.
“I still have to worry,” Dax said. “I just feel like it’s more likely. If that makes any sense.”
“It makes all the sense in the world,” she said, her voice soft. “Well, you can get going.”
“Oh, I can, can I?”
“I have others who I’m meeting with.”
He started to smile. And he wondered if he could push his sister, and if he could, what it would do, if anything. But he doubted she would tell him.
At this point, he wasn’t even entirely sure that it made much of a difference. He didn’t have to stay in this form, and he didn’t have to remain here. Besides, she couldn’t see essence the way he could, so he could disperse so that he was barely more than a filament of essence, and she probably wouldn’t even be aware of what he was doing.
He nodded, then drifted apart.
As he did, his sister muttered something under her breath, something that Dax barely heard, but he still laughed at it.
“I don’t think I can get used to that.”
He hovered for a moment. He dispersed just enough that he tried to hide from her and hovered above the ground high enough that he didn’t think she would have any way of linking to the wind in the process, though as he did, he could still feel something from her. It was almost as if she were testing something. Maybe she was using her wind essence to try to determine if he was doing anything, though he did not know if that was what she was doing. It was possible, though it implied a level of control over essence that he didn’t know whether she truly had.
He watched for a while, and then she moved off, toward the distant forest. He hadn’t gone very far before he saw another form moving toward her. A small, eight-legged, crystalline form.
She was meeting with one of the silkshatters?
That surprised him—mostly because he wouldn’t have expected her to have convinced any of the silkshatters to meet with her, though there was a possibility that she had been trying to get to the Queen.
Distantly, Dax swept his gaze toward the heart of the forest, testing whether there was anything out of place there that he might pick up on, but he couldn’t tell, nor could he feel, anything obvious. There was power, and essence, but beyond that it remained vague and difficult for him to identify.
Certainly nothing that suggested to him that the Silkshatter Queen was out there and watching.
The Silkshatter Queen was always watching, though. At least, from his experience. He didn’t know what it was she was trying to do, but he suspected that she must have anticipated that Megan was looking for something. He did not know what it was, nor did he know what the Silkshatter Queen did, just that she was calling in some way.
He floated, making his way back toward the Academy. As he drifted back above the Academy, he began to feel and hear a presence. There was a sensation. It was constant, like a tapping, and at first, he began to feel that power, feel the way that it was calling to him, and he began to recognize that there was some element to it that was drawing him. It was trying to pull him back toward himself, toward his body.
Then he felt something else.
A different pressure, something that was pulling on him. Something that was trying to draw on him. Not his sister this time, but something else. Something less structured, and something far more potent.
Had he just been learning how to manifest, Dax thought that this might have been enough to disrupt what he was doing, but he had been manifesting for a while now, long enough that he felt a measure of control over what he did, and a measure of control over his form when he did it. But there was still a danger to it.
He held onto his form, holding onto a structure, and attempted to keep himself intact. It took him surging back into his body before he felt confident with what was going on, and confident that he wasn’t going to lose control over himself.
Then he breathed out.
He opened his eyes, only to see Rochelle give him a punch on the shoulders.
“Next time you come back when I start to call you,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I was talking to Megan, and then I felt something pulling on me.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s what I wanted to warn you about. There’s something else here.”
“What do you mean, ‘something else here’?”
“Just that. I don’t know what it is—neither does Desmond—but there’s something else here.”
Dax got to his feet, glancing over to where he kept his essence blade resting against the wall. He strapped it on. He was ready to fight, if it came down to that, though he wasn’t sure whether that was going to be necessary. “In the Academy, or in the city?”
“I don’t know. But Desmond is concerned. And you know if Desmond is concerned about something, we need to be concerned about it as well.”
“Let’s go see what it is,” he said.
“Dax—”
“No,” he said, shaking his head as he reached the door. He looked around the inside of his room, frustration starting to surge through him, threatening to overwhelm him. Every time that it seemed like he was going to get close to leaving the Academy and finally have an opportunity to meet the Emperor, and to better understand more about what was going on, he felt something else pull him in a different direction.
This time he was going to deal with it before it had a chance to cause any problems. He was going to make sure that nothing prevented him from having his chance to see the Emperor, and to get his questions answered. Because Dax was determined to get answers.
“I’m going to go, either this way or by manifesting. Which do you prefer?”
“Fine,” she said. “I was just supposed to get you. I didn’t realize that you were going to come back out of this so…”
“So what?”
“Belligerent,” she said, and then she shrugged. “Maybe I should’ve known that.”
He arched a brow at her, but then he strode out of his room and headed down the stairs of his dorm, readying for whatever it was that was to come.
Chapter Two
Dax had spent the better part of the afternoon searching for the energy that was responsible for trying to draw upon him. He had not found anything. Neither had Desmond, nor any of the Essendar who were stationed in the city—Essendar who had been responsible for identifying some of the danger that was there yet had not been able to help figure out what was going on.
It irritated Dax, though he knew it probably shouldn’t. There was probably relief to be had in the fact that there wasn’t anything there. But he still couldn’t shake the frustration that was filling him for not being able to get the answers he wanted.
