John Gregory Betancourt - To Rule in Amber
Here you can read online John Gregory Betancourt - To Rule in Amber full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. genre: Art. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:To Rule in Amber
- Author:
- Genre:
- Rating:4 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
To Rule in Amber: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "To Rule in Amber" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
John Gregory Betancourt: author's other books
Who wrote To Rule in Amber? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
John Gregory Betancourt
John Gregory Betancourt
John Gregory Betancourt
John Gregory Betancourt
John Betancourt
John Betancourt
John Betancourt
Michael Rajczak
Betancourt Ingrid
St. Gregory the Great
Ingrid Betancourt
John Gregory Betancourt
John Gregory Betancourt
John Gregory Betancourt
Katherine John
To Rule in Amber — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "To Rule in Amber" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Annotation
Oberon takes on the reins of leadership, and he carves an empire from the new universe created by his father. Enemies new and old lie in wait, and creating a kingdom for himself and his heirs requires delicate political maneuvering, a will of iron, and the might of a born warrior. Power-mad siblings, a madman for a father, assassins, and the King of Chaos are just the beginning of his troubles. Oberon must learn to master them all, if he is "To Rule in Amber".
John Gregory Betancourt
To Rule in Amber
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Byron Preiss for making this project possible; his editor Howard Zimmerman, who has done a superlative job through a sometimes grueling schedule; and Theresa Thomas, Warren Lapine, and Lee F. Szczepanik, Jr. for providing commentary, criticism, and advice on the early drafts.
Chapter 1
Grayness surrounded me. Gray the color of morning twilight. Hours and days and years and centuries of gray. A featureless, all-consuming, all-encompassing gray that sucked the strength from your limbs and the will to live from your heart. So much gray that you couldn't take it all in no matter how hard you tried.
I fell through that gray, thinking of my crazy brother Aber, who had run out on me. Then I thought about my crazy father, Dworkin, who had left me guarding his back while he destroyed the universe.
For a while I wanted to kill them both. That lasted a long, long time. Then I wanted to hurt them. That lasted even longer.
Finally I didn't care.
And still I fell.
Uncountable ages passed. My mind wandered; I dreamed unhappy dreams. Now and again my father's voice spoke to me.
"Be patient," it would say. "The end has come, and the beginning lies ahead."
"What's in it for me?" I asked warily.
"Nothing," he said. "You were a tool, nothing more, used and discarded."
"No!"
I jerked around and tried to grab him, but my arms windmilled through nothingness. He hadn't really been here. I had imagined it.
Dreams, nightmares, hallucinations, imaginings. Call them what you will. They were one and the same.
And still I plunged through that gray, a never-ending sea of it.
Forever passed. At least twice.
The end came with no sense of motion. Had I really been falling? Aber would know, some distant part of me remarked. Aber knew everything about magic.
Frowning, I tried to remember something important. Something about having to kill someone...
I couldn't recapture the thought. My head hurt. My muscles seemed to groan and my bones to creak, as though they hadn't been used in a long, long time.
Lurching, I almost fell. Suddenly I had direction again: a clear sense of up and down, left and right, forward and back. Thick, impenetrable grayness still surrounded me, but something had definitely changed. Something big.
"Aber!" I shouted. The air seemed to swallow my words.
"Aber! Where are you?"
No reply.
Besides, I knew my brother hadn't done anything to save me. He would have gone... where? I frowned. Back to the Courts of Chaos, probably. Who else could help me, then?
A face, a name on the tip of my tongue...
"Dworkin?" I whispered. That sounded right. "Dad?"
Memories suddenly flooded back. Our flight from Juniper to the strange Courts of Chaos. Someone named Lord Zon trying to kill my whole family. My half-brother Aber, who painted magical cards called Trumps that could be used to travel between worlds... my half-sister Freda, who saw the future... and most especially our father, the dwarf I'd grown up calling Uncle Dworkin. It turned out he'd been lying to protect me. He really was my father, and he commanded magical powers I had only just begun to understand. Someday soon I too would command those magics. I knew it.
Dworkin had created his own universe, a huge sprawling place of Shadow-worlds, and in so doing had weakened the powers of the sorcerers who lived in the Courts of Chaos. So someone from Chaos--probably Lord Zon--had sent hell-creatures to kill our whole family and destroy the Shadows, along with the magical Pattern that cast them.
My head hurt just thinking about it.
Fleeing the Courts of Chaos, Dworkin, Aber, and I came to a secret place that contained the Pattern at the center of the new universe. Unfortunately, Dworkin hadn't understood the Pattern fully when he'd created it, and its very essence held a flaw. To fix things, he had destroyed the old Pattern and retraced it from scratch using his own blood. He had collapsed after finishing it, and I had fallen into a void.
Had it worked? Did a new and correct Pattern really exist now? I didn't know. How could I find out?
First things first. I needed a plan. Mentally, I made a list:
1. Get out of the fog.
2. Find the rest of my family.
3. Stop everyone from trying to kill us.
If I had time, I'd add:
4. Beat my father to a bloody pulp for getting us all into this mess in the first place.
The air flickered around me, brighter then darker, brighter then darker. Stretching out my hands, I squinted into grayness, trying to see my fingertips. Nothing. Was I imagining things?
The light flickered again, subtly. I couldn't tell whether I had dreamed it, but somehow it felt different.
I fought back a rush of excitement; no sense in raising my hopes. I had been disappointed too often. And yet a small part of me wondered--could dawn finally be approaching? Had something else happened?
Anything would be better than this gray fog.
Slowly I inched my hands closer to my face. Dim shadows appeared. I wiggled my fingers; the shadows wiggled. The gray really had begun to lift. I could see again, if poorly. There's nothing more useless than a blind swordsman.
Hunkering down, I waited impatiently. The grayness seeped away slowly, like a morning fog lifting as the sun grows high. A long time later, I could see my hands clearly. A heartbeat later, and I could see all the way down to my boots. Another heartbeat, and I could see ten feet in every direction, then twenty, then fifty--
Rising, I looked around, but saw nothing but rock and sand and sky. No trees, no bushes, no blades of grass broke the desolation. Not even lichen grew here.
Gray fog continued to rush away from me in all directions, an outgoing tide revealing hills and valleys and distant mountains, all as barren as the land around me. I had never seen a place as dry and dead before.
The staff I had been carrying when I fell lay a few feet away, mostly hidden by rocks. Strolling over, I picked it up and leaned heavily on it, feeling old and tired. All I needed was a long gray beard and I'd be set.
The last of the gray vanished, but it didn't leave a promising world behind. Even on the distant mountains I saw no trees, bushes, or even grass--not a single living thing of any size, shape, or kind. No birds chirped or winged past; no insects bred. Not even a breeze stirred the dust on the ground.
I had never felt so alone in my life. Where was I? Where had my fall left me?
The sky overhead turned blue, the deepest, purest azure I had ever seen, without a single wisp of cloud. I gaped up into the vastness of it all.
At last, forcing my gaze back down to land, I sighed and resigned myself to work. My first job would be rescuing myself. I had to get off this Shadow--if Shadow it proved to be. If nothing else, I had begun to feel the first gnawing pangs of hunger.
I took a quick inventory. Sword, knife, boots, deck of Trumps--all where they belonged. All my limbs; all my fingers. I had not so much as a single bruise. My mental faculties seemed as sharp as ever.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Similar books «To Rule in Amber»
Look at similar books to To Rule in Amber. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
John Betancourt
John Betancourt
John Betancourt
Michael Rajczak
Betancourt Ingrid
St. Gregory the Great
Ingrid Betancourt
John Gregory Betancourt
John Gregory Betancourt
John Gregory Betancourt
Katherine John
Reviews about «To Rule in Amber»
Discussion, reviews of the book To Rule in Amber and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.