Parasite Soul Read Free Page A

commiserating with her on her loss, but few of them
had been sincere. The nobles were never sincere. They’d simply
deemed it politically sound to make an appearance at such an important
event. Merequio had always held the nobility in the utmost of
contempt. Following the funeral, so did Tiera.
    The jaggermund’s head, she’d been told later by her old maid
Grentha, had afterward been paraded around the streets of Vingate on the tip of
a spear. When Grentha had grown too old to serve, save in the most basic
of tasks, Tiera had been left with no one to talk to. Her father, never
an affectionate man, left her to her devices. She became a ghost in the
palace, hating everyone and everything.
    Then one day she was no longer a child. On that day, she came
to the decision that she was no longer a ghost, either. She went to bed a
lost, confused, angry girl. When she emerged from the cocoon of her
bedchamber the following morning, it was as a fully-fledged princess.
     

I
    One day, Simon promised himself, he would pen a memoir. Sure,
he didn’t know how to write, but he’d seen scribes scribbling away with their
quills, and he couldn’t imagine it was a difficult art to learn; at least not
in comparison with what he currently hoped to accomplish. If worst came
to worst, and he was missing a hand or two by the time it came to splotch paper
with ink, he could hire some learned fellow to do the job for him and take the
credit afterward.
    Ultimately, it didn’t really matter to Simon how his biography came
about. All he knew for certain was what the first sentence would
say: You can’t possibly imagine how deafening a dragon’s roar is until
you’ve had one of the fat bastards howling in your face .
    The fat bastard in question, a colossal gold-armored beast with
unthinkably foul breath, was stomping in mad circles trying to maneuver itself
behind him. His torch caused it greater alarm than his sword, which was
odd for a fire-breather, but a fact Simon took full advantage of as he swept
the burning brand back and forth. Dozens of beady black spider eyes
glinted in the flickering light. Disquieting as they were, Simon would
have stared into them all day to avoid contemplating the terrifying ivory
blades lining the monster’s cavernous mouth.
    This may, he admitted to himself as he
stumbled back to avoid a slashing talon, have been a bad idea . But
the reward! Focus on the reward .
    Simon was having difficulty concentrating the life of wealth and
privilege which awaited if he successfully completed his task when every breath
he took might be his last. He was hardly the first fool to tackle this
dragon, and far from the best armed or most competent. The beast’s great
bulk and ferocity was a sobering reminder that he was no knight, just a peasant
with more guts than brains.
    Even his sword – which he’d found abandoned in the ditch of the road
which snaked past his father’s farm - was second rate, blunt and
tarnished. Smothered by weeds, it had lain rusting in muddy water for who
knew how long. Simon would surely never even have spotted it had he not
been chasing a coin which had escaped the pockets of his threadbare pants and
rolled into the same ditch. The coin was lost forever, but the sword
stamped the loss clean from his mind.
    A knight would have scoffed at the blade. It was battered and
dull, the runes inscribed into the metal nearly indistinguishable. In the
eyes of a peasant youth, however, it was a windfall. Simon had spent
countless evenings waving the sword at enemy fence posts, trying to get a feel
for it. As he’d thrust and hacked in the general vicinity of his
imperturbable foes, he’d imagined the exploits of the great warrior it might
once have belonged to; the great warrior he might become if he could
learn to wield it with similar proficiency.
    Sadly, no one in the village was qualified to teach him. A
tiny rural community, Brand was exclusively home to farmers and
craftsmen. Even the local blacksmith