Here is a small sample of the first book in The Sirin Chronicles, with the full book now available on Amazon in both normal and large print.

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Talvae was falling over the lands of Khalilja, and the night was coming in unnaturally fast. The wind blew from the east, bringing a biting touch and the threat of snowfall down from the mountains. The ancient oil lamps flickered out of life as a boy who seemed no more than twelve came running through the streets, his feet silent on the cobbled stones. The vast city of Suiren now lay in complete darkness and velvet clouds covered the stars from sight. Suddenly the boy stopped, his eyes almost glowing in the dark with their unnatural blue colour. He stood against a wall and disappeared within the shadows, waiting patiently.

As the night wore on, misty tendrils of watered light began to form on the horizon and illuminate the city as the first hour of sundawn approached. A group of inebriated men walked past the boy without even noticing him, their raucous voices carrying back to him through the silence of the empty streets. As the sun slowly climbed into site, the boy finally moved from the shadows and padded back in the direction he had come from, his luminescent eyes searching intently for something.

The girl he had seen in a vision was exactly where he had envisioned her five moons before, when her eyes had glowed fiercely like fires as the world burnt around her, her lips forming a curse. His left hand moved to the mirror black and phantom crystals on his other wrist and covered the first of many bracelets. He had been sent here to kill her after what he had seen, but she was already sprawled across the floor and so close to death; and not by his hands. He hesitated where he stood for a moment, contemplating what he should do next. Everything about this moment was wrong, and suddenly he found himself uncertain about fulfilling orders.

Curiously, he moved slowly towards the girl and noticed her moving slightly in the dust of the old road. She raised her head slightly from the floor and her eyes opened to look unseeingly up at him. Glancing down at her pale face and dying grey eyes, the urge to kill weakened. He wondered briefly if she too was one of his kind, and why she was here alone; and as the girl’s head fell to the floor again, any remaining thoughts of killing her left him entirely.

*

Silver eyes flickered open to a moonlit wasteland. All around her lay the dead and the dying. Dust hung thickly in the air and debris of the once beautiful city lay scattered and ruined around her, and the rats scratched all around her in a frenzied race for the freshest offerings. Two days before, there had been an awful screeching roar that pierced the merriness of town, and was followed by an all mighty explosion not far off the old street she was living in; and the next day followed with the water running poisonous. The whole town was devastated by the attack, and only the people from the underground seemed unaffected.

Apart from that small pocket of insidious and diabolical unelmuns that lived below, Suiren as she’d known it briefly was a peaceful place, and an important route for traders and caravans as they crossed the vast expanse of arid land. She’d spent the days after the chaos hiding among the dead and living as a ghost, trying to make sense of things and ignore the foul stench of death. As she lay once more among the corpses and rubble listening to the sound of the final rasping breaths of someone not far off, the poison from the water started to paralyse her body and set her limbs on fire. Death, it seemed, was coming for her as well.

Everything was fading rapidly into darkness, and the cracked stone floor she lay on felt like air beneath her. The rusty oil lamp above, which had been the only source of light, finally gave up and went out with a hiss, leaving her to contemplate the agonising remains of her life in a dark and starless night. She could feel the poison working its way into her heart, making it beat furiously and burn like the coldest ice. It felt like her breast would surely explode before the end, as her breath laboured and hardly came.

Sometime later as a watery light began to creep slowly into the desolate city, she heard someone moving towards her with cautious steps. She raised her head with what little energy she had left and could just make out a pair of stunning blue eyes that seemed to see straight into her soul and glow in the half light. She couldn’t see any more detailing of the person before her in the faint light, and suddenly her chest tightened painfully one last time as her ability to breathe stopped entirely.

“Hey! Are you alive? Wake up!” A soft yet firm masculine voice asked from somewhere above her, pulling her out of her stupor by the shoulder. She yelped feebly before turning out of the person’s grip to retch violently away from them, tears spilling like acid out of her eyes and stinging the cut beneath one of her eyes. Her throat was burning from the poisonous bile and she wondered how she was still alive.

Her body began to shiver and convulse violently, her elbows nearly giving way beneath her until the boy grabbed hold of her shoulders and pulled her backwards just as her strength gave way again. The girl fell back into the stranger’s arms, finding it strangely comforting to feel the warmth from his body as her body numbed away from her again. She could feel that this person was somehow like her.

“Khafune, what are you doing?” Another voice asked from further back, elegant and laced with a softer, musical tone. As the girl rested against the boy, she felt herself drifting again, wishing for the other stranger to continue speaking so she could slip peacefully into oblivion again.

*

“Nothing, they’re all dead or beyond our help.” The boy replied, hand twitching towards the series of crystal bracelets covering his wrists. Khafune looked down at the girl currently resting lamely in his arms.  Her hair had fallen like a silken drape across his arm and seemed to glow faintly in the brightening sunride. She didn’t seem unelmun like the rest around her, and perhaps the reason the disaster in Suiren hadn’t already killed her; yet somehow she didn’t seem spehirikin like he himself and others he knew. He could feel her life ebbing away as the seconds passed and there was hardly any breath left in her. Weak as she was, she would only need one bracelet released for a few seconds to stop her heart entirely. The sun was now starting to shadow on the walls at the end of the street, the diffused light only a ghost of what the sun really was away from this smog covered ruin.

He thought back to his vision again. She was the one to destroy life and bring death to the world. After that, he had seen her in the present and living here in Suiren. The city was full of vibrant life and her hair had sparkled in the sun. He hadn’t seen what had happened next, but had been instructed to wipe away her life after telling the head mage of the Liretika of his dream.

What if he had read the dream wrong? Her eyes though full of anger were filled with passion as well. What if it was him; with his powers of death that destroyed life by leaving her here to die, ravished by poison. He kneaded his temple, wondering just what had happened in Suiren to make the girl’s fate change so drastically within the passage of five days.

As soon as the chain of thought had gone through his mind, he knew he wouldn’t be able to kill the girl, and his fingers instantly fumbled with the clasp on his bracelets until the first one came free of his wrist. He fastened the bracelet around her tiny wrist; splitting the marble white skin as he did the clasp up. A small drop of blood splashed into the palm of his hand, and the girl’s eyes flickered open once more to meet his own eyes, an intently curious look mingled with hope that sent an intense wave of pain through his chest.

“Are we going then?” The other man said, still out of sight.

Khafune sighed and laid the girl gently back on the road before getting back up. He could feel the poison in her blood scorching into his hand, branding him in return. As the throbbing finally eased away he mused over the next time they would meet. He had been ordered to kill her and instead bound the girl’s life and fate to him, a slender leaf-like scar forming within the line of life in his palm.

Aengal opened her eyes and pushed her wild fringe out of her face, her fingers catching slightly in the matted ends before she yanked her hand away. Looking around her, she saw the same desolate street she had woken up on fifteen years previously; the same street she’d spent every night on since. In a dreamlike haze, memories of a different life flitted through her mind, of golden walls and delicate coral hued flowers, the sound of waves crashing somewhere in the distance ... confusion over why she had suddenly been on this grey and empty street.

Ever since that morning when she had first seen Suiren, something had clouded her mind. The town had seemed kind enough, and the people merrily got on with their days’ work. She tried to recall that day. Why had there been the fires and the explosions suddenly out of nowhere? Why had the water then been poisoned? How had she managed to survive it? Kneading her forehead somewhat savagely, she attempted again to recall anything from before those awful two days; to banish the tendrils of mist that clung to the shadows of her memories, but still there was nothing more than a faint smell of salty air and aromatic coral flowers; and those golden walls of her dreams. There was just one thing missing from her memory. One thing that would make things start to make sense, she hoped.

She recalled drifting through mounds of rubble and death, drinking water from the well in the town’s square. There had been several others there - they had rejoiced that the famed springs of Suiren had survived the ordeal; the ancient spring that had first given life to Suiren would do so again, how could it not? “Aengal” one of the elders had said to her, commenting how her hair glimmered like a celestial being sent to watch over them.

At first the water tasted sweet, and the iciness had quenched her thirst and woken her up just like the chewing of a young freshmint leaf does. As she had moved further from the centre looking anywhere for some quiet to try and ease away the beginnings of a headache, she had felt a tingling sensation in her throat that turned to fire as it reached her stomach. Poison. Her breath caught and her lungs refused to work, her heart fighting furiously to keep her alive until the smell of fetid road and decay beneath her became nothing as well. She’d spent two days lying among death, moving scarcely from time to time to get away from the rats, to try and get away from the repulsive stench of everything around her that chronically nauseated her.

In the last moments before oblivion consumed her, she had accepted that death was all that was left, that her mere confusion for two days was just the waiting for the last moment to come, and what little she remembered of Suiren full of life must have been a perverse dream and she would wake up in that hazy otherworld.

Then those glowing blue eyes had pierced deep into her soul like lightening, disrupted only by a few strands of ivory hair. She vaguely recalled that it had been a male and young, though his features seemed to shift between the ages of unelmun the way clouds carefully change the shape when you look for too long. She’d thought him to be Death, coming to her so she could know the way to the next world; but he had not taken her life away and he had tried speaking to her, to rouse her. But the poison had savaged her body too far. His body had been warm, and strong beneath her; she had felt safe in that embrace. She recalled his voice, soft and teasing to her ears and then joined by another’s melodic voice that soothed her back into darkness. She pushed further into the memory, desperately trying to fill in the edges. She remembered his name being mentioned and stared once again into the ghost of his eyes as she tried to take herself there, and hear his name whispered again.

She had been shocked to find herself being warmed by a watery sun; the harsh reality that she was still alive burnt in her throat and numbed her limbs. On her wrist was a beautiful crystal bracelet threaded together by delicate silver chaining. Warm ambered smoke coloured crystals were interspersed with ice cold and stormy grey stones. She wondered if the boy had given it to her for some reason as it had appeared that same night, along with a slender leaf-like scar at the base of her thumb.

It was a bracelet that had the power to kill the week. She had learnt quickly what it did as she became one of the few feral children of this new Suiren that was run by underworld. She’d given into her craving for meat and spent most of her days giving chase to the now plump rats; and she’d tripped over a bit of rubble, landing with her face just before the rat that that snarled and hissed through chattering teeth at her dangerously. She’d felt the bracelet seemingly twitch, and grabbed at it thinking it was about to fall off only to find the ambered smoky crystal emitting a slight hum, which faded as she’d touched it out of curiosity. When she looked back for the rat, it was dead before her.

There was something else there, another lost memory. She’d fallen to the floor, a sense of shame as she tried to protect herself from...something. Darkness; and then a body at her feet as the beads pulsed against her wrist, a strange crackling sound within her ears.

As she forced herself to sit up through the constant dull aches, she clung to the memory of the lightning blue eyes in her mind; it was the only clear memory she had of anyone, or anything. Everything was shrouded by fog. Even Suiren never seemed to free of it. She desperately wanted to meet him again; she felt destiny tugging in her belly whenever she thought of him. Sometimes she felt she loved him entirely and would die without his company, and other times she knew it wasn’t love, or maybe it was infatuation born from curiosity; but most of the time she knew deeper within it that it was some other underlying connection. As she looked again at the crystals around her wrist, and the scar, the felt that was the connection. The crystals were his, and so she wore a tiny shard of his soul around her wrist; a tiny shard of his soul that had saved her from death. Whenever she thought that, she could feel the crystals hum in what felt a content way; and she wondered if He felt anything, or if she was long forgotten as he travelled a life and a world away.

She moaned and pulled herself up with the help of the splintered boundary fence and rested back against it, gazing down at her bracelet again. She still had no idea what the names of the crystals were, only that one felt warm to the touch, and the other always felt cool. Somehow in her mind, she knew what they each could do, and yet she couldn’t siphon that information out; that too was obscured by the ever present fog. She looked at her hands in disgust, somewhere beneath the dirt and dust was her pale skin that she had always quietly loved; but now to have skin that shimmered like a fresh pearl from the sea would be the same as walking into the ruined city with anything of value. She craved to soak within the pools of icy water beneath the city, but that was something else so entirely foolish. Water was the highest valued commodity now, and fiercely guarded black markets rivalled together in the underworld, taking advantage of the fact that the lands had been scorched to desert after the fires, and no traders passed this way anymore. They grew their drugs down there as well, and that was the second highest commodity. Rough farms existed sparsely around the city, bartering with one another whatever hadn’t already been stolen. She lived mainly on whatever had been lost or discarded, and occasionally cooked rat if she could find any glowing ember pits of someone else’s fire.

Stroking the scars idly, she gazed around her to check she was still alone. The collapsed house in front of her had become one of the many places of illicit action above ground, where women were a currency to barter with. A sickly sweet smell usually came from it, sometimes acrid like bad apples. The thick tendrils of smoke often smothered her as she tried to sleep, making her see horrendous visions and spiral uncontrollably through emotions. She hated that place, and clung to the shadows every night so that she was never dragged inside and with so many others. There was no point moving somewhere else in the fallen city, everywhere was the same. Each street had at least one den somewhere, this one she could at least keep an eye on from her own shadows.

Where once the smart stonewalled rubbish pits had stood to keep the streets pristine now remained an overflowing mess of anything that stalked out of nightmares; and crumbling remnants of debris and other festering waste all around her. Always accompanied by the constant sound of rats burrowing deep into them for anything they could find, and occasionally the rare silvered foxes came out like four legged ghosts to dig out the rats, or whatever else was left behind. Those were the sounds that constantly held her on the brink of sleep after the sounds of the den had faded into their unconscious stupors, and all that she could hear in the stifled sundawn of every passing day. Her only shred of comfort was that the rough fence made of some well weathered timber and stone that she rested against now ran mostly between her and the hellish den and obscured her sufficiently from their blackened eyes. It was the last standing wall and ran through the centre of Suiren now, the dividing line between hordes.

Thank the stars I’m this side. She whispered to her mind as she begun to crawl along her side of the fence on her elbows and stomach with shards of faded glass and chips of decaying bitumen irritating her pale skin until both old and new cuts were open fresh again. A couple of days ago she had seen a dark figure in one of the windows gazing out. She didn’t know for sure if he’d seen her or not as she shrunk slowly back into the shadows of her own den, but the vacant expression and hollowed eyes had unnerved her; travelling vacantly across the street, back and forth, over and over until he fell like a broken puppet back into the orange glow of that insidious place. And now she had every intention to remain hidden until the shadows of the place consumed the last remnants of his debauched life.

As she finally stood up at the edge of the street and looked back at her pathetic home made from another of the rubbish pits, she suddenly had the image of an ivory haired youth in a fine black surcoat over a white shirt and smart leggings. In his arms he held the limp form of a dying girl in his arms and looking curiously down at her before placing the girl back down on the road and turning his eyes towards where Aengal stood now, and yet seeing through her.

“Khafune…” The name tingled across her lips and gave strength to her heart as the ghosts faded into the weak fog, and back into the past. She fell against what was left of the dilapidated wall beside her, still staring at the empty space as her heart fluttered wildly in her chest. That had been him; the person who had held her soul in his hands fifteen years previously. Khafune. She whispered his name to herself like a mantra, forcing that moment to petrify in her memory so it couldn’t be lost again.

An icy breeze crept through her skin and into her bones, whispering to her of another time of deathly cold. Everything was grey. The only colours belonged to the otherworld she dreamt of occasionally. There had been warmth to that world with its golden hues and coral pink strokes, but the constant grey of this current life seeped all warmth away from even dreams and banished them to the darkest depths. Grey. Dark. It never seemed to end, just roll from one day into the next, bound eternally in never ending fog. Even though a desert embraced the broken city in its entirety, somehow the warmth and the sun never broke through to this place, like some foul curse rested over the corpses of the buildings.

As her eyes readjusted to the present situation, she shook her head slightly as if to shift the cobwebs from her own head, and turned her back on the old street she had been calling home and stepped over the body of someone who had only recently fallen to some untraceable death, and pushed the body over with her bare foot. He had a small faded satchel hidden within his doublet which she searched frantically. A silver dagger that seemed far too elegant and slender for a male’s last resort, twenty golden coins strung together on a leather thong and a chainmail necklace with a stern looking wolf face pendant hanging from the bottom row of links, whose eyes were etched out of the silver and each set with two tiny faceted crystals that shared the similar warmth of her own smoke and ambered crystals on her bracelet. She was disappointed that there wasn’t even a slither of salted meat to chew in the satchel anywhere, but rocked back onto her heels and studied the coins. She had no idea what their worth was, only that it was different to the slate grey ones that occasionally surfaced in Suiren.

The man’s appearance was, like her, completely different to the people who lived in Suiren. His skin was coloured darkly like rich earth and his hair was blacker than the night. Perhaps he came from across the seas she dreamt of so often. He looked to have been a rich merchant travelling in the wrong place. Had he thought that Suiren was still a bustling town on a busy trade route as it had been fifteen years before? She knew nothing of the outside world, and how much was out there; or the speed in which news travelled, only that here, money meant death.

Aengal placed the coins back in the satchel and fastened the necklace so the wolf’s face sat proudly against her throat. Ashen snow began to fall slowly from the sky as she slowly placed the satchel strap across her shoulders and tucked the necklace safely behind the collar of the ragged shirt she’d been wearing for several years; her hand moulding to the dagger’s handle as second nature seemed to take a hold. Her eyes blurred and her mind slowed as she tried to contemplate the idea of escape, to break away from this haunted city and lie beneath the warm rays of the sun in soft mosses on the edge of some mystic forest of dreams. The idea excited her, her body feeling life pump its way into her legs and push one foot forwards.

Someone in the collapsed den behind her had woken up and seen her searching the dead man and was shouting abuse as he staggered towards her. She watched momentarily in horror, the colour draining away along with the ecstatic feeling from a moment ago; as more men not so lost within intoxication followed him out of the building, their eyes locking onto hers. From the corner of vision, she saw another man with sky blue hair look in her direction, full of curiosity whilst holding a delicate chain but then he too was gone, just as Khafune had vanished.

She was running suddenly, her ears blocking out the perverted words that tried to scream into her mind and her feet carrying her instinctively away from danger. Her muscles protested the sudden action and her legs buckled beneath her, sending her crashing to the floor. Hands snatched out at her, catching hold of her hair and dragging her backwards whilst sharp nails of one hand tore at her throat as another hand pinned her to his chest. Wriggling herself slightly free of the vice like grip, Aengal slashed frantically with the dagger without a care of where she pierced with it, or what damage was, until the man lessened his grip enough for her to slip free and force her body to continue running to put as much distance between her and the man as she could.

She had often fantasised of walking out of Suiren over the miserable years, and leaving the putrid fog behind for ever to walk into a new life where she didn’t have to fight to stay alive every night and live off feeble scraps of food that even the dogs would turn their noses away from if there were any dogs left. She had dreamt often of the companionship of others, of being a part of a community, of love, and being held close at night by a chosen lover. But then she thought of the cruel reality, that she had no memory of what was outside of Suiren, who she was, or any knowledge of anything other than staying alive from one day into the next. She knew nothing, and found comfort from what she knew for certain in Suiren, and chose to stay within the bitter comfort zone each time her foot touched upon the burnt sands that drifted into the remnants of Suiren.

This time as her feet fumbled over the last broken ruins of the harrowing city and touched the sands, it was with a finality of only going forwards. There was no going back now, and she thought again of those piercing eyes and wondered if she would ever see Khafune again; and if she could make it across the Agshun desert before the fiery sands took her. As she paused in hesitation for barely a moment and reached for the wolf around her neck, she could see from the corner of her eye another ghost looking curiously at her beneath a river of sky blue hair, with something held delicately between two hands, but as she half turned to see the ghost clearly, it faded away and she was running still.