The Last Ranger: Ranger of the Titan Wilds Book 1 Read online

  CONTENTS

  A Note on Appendices

  World Map

  Prophecy

  I. Smoke on the Frontier

  1

  The Hidden One

  2

  The Wilds’ Protector

  3

  Pride & Shame

  4

  Home

  5

  Huntress

  6

  Rash

  7

  The Writ

  8

  Titan’s Awakening

  9

  Forgery

  10

  Skin-Walker

  11

  Smoke

  II. The Last Ranger

  12

  Twenty-five Years Before

  13

  Ashes

  14

  Alone

  15

  Trails

  16

  Treachery

  17

  From Below

  18

  Final Resort

  III. Friends & Foes

  19

  Sixteen Years Before

  20

  The Hidden Curse

  21

  The Gazian Moors

  22

  The Baishin

  23

  Decision

  24

  Trust

  25

  Under the Moons

  26

  Flee

  27

  Rising Waters

  IV. Heart of the Wilds

  28

  Ten Years Before

  29

  Damned

  30

  Sacrifice

  31

  Glade

  32

  Awakener

  33

  A Light in the Night

  V. Open Scars

  34

  Seventeen Years Before

  35

  Folly

  36

  Unlikely Allies

  37

  Titan Caller

  VI. The Journey South

  38

  Thirteen Years Before

  39

  The Tamed Tiger

  40

  Hanged Braids

  41

  Perils of the Road

  42

  Saints’ Crossing

  43

  Torn

  44

  Whispers of Yore

  45

  Reckoning

  VII. Hope & Despair

  46

  Thirteen Years Before

  47

  Southport

  48

  The Lords of Baltesia

  49

  Solace

  50

  Trapped

  51

  A Soldier’s Duty

  52

  Claws on Stone

  VIII. Retribution

  53

  Lessons Learned

  54

  The Price of Freedom

  55

  Rebellion

  56

  Justice

  57

  Salvation

  58

  The Call Beyond

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Read the Free Prequel

  Books by J.D.L. Rosell

  Appendix A

  Appendix B

  Appendix C

  Appendix D

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  A NOTE ON APPENDICES

  You can find appendices on the characters, creatures, and world of Ranger of the Titan Wilds located near the end of the book.

  All series lore and commissioned art also appear on my website, jdlrosell.com.

  Western half of Unera

  Eastern half of Unera

  The arrow will not always find the mark intended.

  - Horace, Ars Poetic

  PROPHECY

  'Ware, comes the Wither!

  The seas weep, red and black

  The sky shatters, storm and sorrow

  The land burns, fire and brack

  It passes, it comes on the morrow

  'Ware, comes the Wither!

  Tortoises trample, krakens roar

  Serpents slither and dragons soar

  The children call them to their drums

  The Titans come, the Titans come

  'Ware, comes the Wither!

  The undying rise for the final feast

  The Titans awaken from the depths

  For any to survive, all must be sacrificed

  Life begins with death

  THE RAVE OF GRAN ANTONA II, THE TERMINAL REVELATION, YEAR 442 OF THE EPOCH OF EPIPHANY

  PART I

  SMOKE ON THE FRONTIER

  1

  THE HIDDEN ONE

  The silver fox watched the Hidden One travel along the wooded trail.

  He had followed the human and the horse for some time now. This human had always had a peculiar scent, an aroma that contained many things. The fragrance of the forest. The predator's stench. A second life burning within the first.

  The fox sniffed again but could sense nothing more. Once, when the human was a kit, lost and vulnerable, she had been open to him and he had brought her comfort. Now, the Hidden One closed herself off, both to him and the surrounding wilderness, in a way he had never felt before.

  And so, he followed, seeking to understand what had gone wrong.

  The silver fox was not accustomed to creatures isolating themselves. Around him, the woods were alive and open. Trees smoldered with ancient persistence. Insects sparked brief lives along the loamy ground. Birds and squirrels, tempting the fox's hunger, were bursts of essence as they scattered at his approach.

  But the Hidden One held her lifefire close, only a hint of it escaping her bounds. As she scanned the surrounding forest, her eyes were sky-bright and wary. Her mane, reaching past her shoulders, was bark-brown but for a single russet tress, like the color of a common fox's summer coat. She had tangled it like interwoven vines, and the auburn threads created a striking striped pattern. Like all humans, she had bundled herself in the skins of slain beasts and bore items of shaped wood and stone that shone when the sun caught upon it.

  It was not only the furs that put the fox on high alert. It was her posture, her gaze, her keen awareness—all spoke of a huntress' prowess. She was a kit no longer, and he would not treat her as such. That she held her fire close only heightened the danger, allowing her to prowl almost unnoticed.

  The Hidden One reached the edge of a wide meadow, amidst which a mighty creature stood. But it was not this beast nor the Hidden One's tense posture that told the fox his lurking had come to an end.

  Death hung thick in the air.

  It was the odor as well as a subtler sense that warned him to be wary. The fox was attuned to both and heeded them well. Though his curiosity was far from sated, he backed away from the meadow.

  Prey did not linger when hunters were near.

  The fox knew his place in the world's fabric. He could not protect the huntress from herself. So as the Hidden One crouched in ambush, the fox bounded away and leaped through the bright leaves to seek the dark places in between.

  Pressing his way into the web of life, the silver fox wriggled for a moment, then disappeared entirely.

  2

  THE WILDS’ PROTECTOR

  She was a whisper among the leaves as she ghosted to the edge of the clearing.

  Leiyn's heart drummed on her ribs. Her muscles burned as they worked to keep her movements silent, her figure small and unseen. Her natural senses were awake and keen, taking in the nu
ances of the forest noises. Aspen branches rustling. Distant birds singing. The stench of slain prey. The stiff breeze that carried the smell to her and obscured her own from the creature ahead.

  Leiyn stared at the beast in the clearing as it feasted on a deer. A thorned lion, Tadeo had called it, and Leiyn judged it an apt name. Black spines bristled around its neck, sharp as any porcupine's, but large enough to gore a man. They marked it as male, for the females only had thorns along their back.

  The rest of the creature was no less impressive. His body stretched longer than a human's and was built with powerful muscles evident beneath a short, orange coat. When he looked up after ripping free a fresh bite of flesh, his amber eyes seemed to possess a sharp intelligence. Each of the lion's massive paws were tipped with sharp claws. Even his flicking tail was a weapon, smaller spines fanning out from the end of it.

  Here was a sight few in the world could claim to see, even among her fellow rangers. Won't Isla be jealous. Leiyn smirked as she anticipated her friend's expression.

  Her hand itched to capture in meticulous lines the impressive beast standing not twenty strides before her. But she'd left her charcoal pen and hidebound journal back with her horse. Now was not the time for idle hobbies.

  Still, she committed every detail to memory while she waited for Tadeo's signal.

  Their plan was simple. As thorned lions were a danger to any who happened across them, it was necessary to drive the beast back into the mountains. Fortunately, Tadeo, lodgemaster to the rangers, had done this duty once before, and had learned from the previous lodgemaster that thorned lions were particularly averse to the scent of fennel. A couple of torches smoking with fennel might drive a predator such as this safely away from the civilized lands of the Tricolonies and back into its native territory.

  Presently, Leiyn's torch was slung over her shoulder. Before they could enact their plan, they had to wait for the lion to eat his fill. Move too soon, and he would defend his kill to the death. So, she held her longbow instead, an arrow nocked and ready in case something went wrong and the lion sensed them.

  For the moment, however, all was proceeding to plan.

  She glanced into the brush to her left. Somewhere among the leaves, Tadeo waited as she did. Even without seeing him, she would know when it was time by his lit torch.

  Patience is a hunter's greatest gift, the lodgemaster would often say. Unfortunately, in Leiyn, patience ran in short supply.

  She restrained herself as the lion took a bite, chewed, laid down, then rose and took another bite. Light was bleeding from the sky as afternoon waned into evening. Hunger gnawed at her belly. Still, Leiyn didn't make any unnecessary movement. Long had she grown used to the privations of her profession, and she knew better than to risk exposing herself for a little relief.

  Then her nose caught a whiff of something that stiffened her spine.

  Leiyn tilted her head back and breathed in, slowly and fully. The odor was unmistakable, reeking of cadavers long since spoiled. It was how a slain deer would smell in a week or two, but fresh as it was, there could only be one other source.

  Jackals.

  She clenched her jaw as she slowly looked around the woods behind her. Tusked jackals were one of the many dangers in the Titan Wilds. Aggressive and violent, they hunted in packs that could take down any beast or human they set their minds to and would ravage the homesteads in the Titan Wilds as well as the Lodge until they were put down. In her five years as a ranger, she'd contended with them twice and always came away with a new scar.

  There was no driving jackals away with herb and torch. Arrows and knives were the only deterrence they understood.

  The thorned lion seemed to notice the jackals, for he, too, came alert. His jowls drew back, revealing bloody fangs. As if they knew they'd been detected, the jackals sounded their eerie howls. The din came from the north beyond the lion, though nearer with each passing moment.

  She didn't have to wait long. They bounded over the hill's crest, yapping and snarling, their eyes wide with bloodlust. Their tusks curled from their mouths like a boar's. Ears, ragged and torn from dozens of battles, twitched atop their heads. Bits of the carrion, in which they liked to roll for their characteristic stench, clung to their black and gray coats. There were dozens of them, a score at least, and by their scrawny torsos, they were starved for their next meal.

  Her skin prickled into gooseflesh. Though every creature had a right to eat, these were a scourge upon the land. They couldn't be allowed to roam free.

  A branch snapped.

  Leiyn froze. The sound had come from her left. Tadeo. She wanted to spit curses, but silence was more important than ever, for she wasn't alone in noticing the noise. The tusked jackals had stopped to stare at the patch of forest where the lodgemaster hid. She and her mentor had disguised themselves well, but all it would take was the interest of one to alert the others.

  She waited a breath, then two, daring to hope they would be preoccupied by the predator before them. One jabbered, then two more.

  The three began to pad cautiously down the hill, heading in Tadeo's direction.

  She moved by instinct, setting down the torch and reaching slowly for her quiver so as to not draw any eyes. There was no conscious decision.

  Death was the least she would risk for Tadeo.

  The arrow hummed as Leiyn drew it from the quiver at her hip. Nocking it, she set it to her anchoring hand against the nicked ash of her longbow. The three jackals were halfway down the hill, while the others still ringed the lion, waiting for the violence to begin.

  Leiyn bared her teeth as she rose to her feet. In one smooth motion, she drew back the bowstring.

  Then she loosed.

  3

  PRIDE & SHAME

  Her bow thwacked as the arrow released. The narrow shaft hummed across the meadow, taking the jackal in the throat. It spun to the ground where it lay jerking in its death throes.

  The clearing erupted into chaos.

  Jackals yipped; the lion roared; the adversaries clashed. But not all the beasts had been fooled. Half a dozen jackals had seen where death flew from, and they sprinted down the hill—making directly for her.

  "Fesht!" she cursed as she drew another shot. The next arrow took one in the eye; her third, close to the heart. Distantly, through the blood pounding in her ears, she heard Tadeo crying out, trying to draw attention to himself and away from her.

  She'd have laughed had she not been breathless. Between them, it was always a competition of who could sacrifice themself for the other.

  The remaining four jackals were nearly upon her. Up close, their size didn't seem so diminutive, nor their tusks small. Any one of them could kill her if she gave them an opening.

  Heaving the string back one last time, Leiyn put an arrow down one of the beasts' mouths before throwing aside her bow and dropping her hands to her left hip. There, she found well-worn leather grips and pulled the weapons free: twin blades, mirror-bright and almost as long as a Suncoat's short sword. They'd been forged by the weaponsmith in Folly, the closest town to the Lodge, upon her cloaking as a ranger. "Don't be rash," Tadeo had told her then, with a significant raise of his eyebrows.

  But rashness could be a strength as well as a weakness. As the jackals barreled toward her, Leiyn didn't hesitate. She'd been honed as sharp as her knives, and not even death could make her lose her edge.

  The first tusked jackal approached on her right, the second not far behind. Her right knife met the first beast as it leaped, whipping across its jaw and splitting it wide open. As it choked on its blood, the jackal crashed into her, tusks scoring her leather jerkin and sending her careening.

  At that moment, its ally joined the attack. Leiyn tried regaining her balance, but knew the hit was inevitable. She threw up her left arm and bared her teeth as the jackal's jaws closed about it. Swathed in a thick leather armguard, the canines didn't pierce as deeply as they might have, but it still hurt like Legion's hells.

&nbsp
; Snarling, Leiyn reversed her grip on her knife and whipped her arm around to slam the jackal against a nearby tree trunk. The blade pierced its neck even as her second knife worked between its ribs. The growl in the jackal's throat died to gurgling, though its jaws remained locked into her flesh. Even dead, the devils didn't yield.

  Prying the beast off, Leiyn looked up to see another trio charge down the hill. She gritted her teeth against the pain and backed deeper into the brush, hoping the foliage might funnel them toward her.

  It worked better than she'd hoped. The first two tusked jackals ran into each other as they tried pushing through the same narrow gap, and for a moment, they stopped to snap at each other. The third leaped nimbly over the other two, then went for her leg.