Skyclad (Fate's Anvil Book 1) Read online

  Skyclad

  Book One of Fate’s Anvil

  By Scott Browder

  Chapter 1: The Drop

  Morgan Mackenzie was having a very bad day. By the end of her shift waiting tables, her relief had yet to show up. None of the other waitresses had been willing to answer their phones, so Morgan was stuck picking up a double shift. As nice as it was collecting tips on a Friday night, she’d already had plans, which she’d had to cancel.

  As if they don’t do this shit on purpose every week, she thought to herself with a bitter smile as she closed out her register and turned it in, collecting her tips before she headed out the door. This was the third week in a row she’d been forced to cancel her own plans, and the same waitresses who’d failed to show up as it’d been both times before. I think I’m beginning to see a pattern here, was her next sarcastic thought. Already in a sour mood, she fumbled her keys twice before managing to unlock the driver’s side door to her car. Once she got the seat belt buckled, she just laid her forehead on the steering wheel, sitting and stewing in her own cynical misery. Her phone buzzed in her purse, heralding what she was certain were angry messages from her on-again, off-again, sometimes-boyfriend, angry at taking second place to her job.

  “Them’s the breaks, buddy; you don’t pay my rent,” she muttered to herself as she cranked the engine and pulled into the late-night traffic to head home. It’s not like we’ve ever been any more serious than a few drinks here or a wild night or two every other weekend, she mused silently to herself. She just wanted to get home. Her feet hurt, her back hurt, and she was extremely eager for a long bath and a comfy bed. The drive home passed in the forgettable blur experienced by anyone familiar with a routine commute to and from work.

  She belatedly trudged her way from the parking lot up two flights of stairs to the door of her small studio apartment. Kicking the door shut, she stepped around her couch to the unofficial bedroom side of the single room dwelling and flopped down on the unmade bed. With a sigh she finally rolled over to retrieve her incessantly buzzing phone from her purse. Instead of angry messages from her boyfriend, it was a message from her best friend Michelle, with a picture attached.

  >hey isn’t this your boyfriend Dylan?

  The picture showed what was certainly a block party or back room of some club somewhere, and her so-called boyfriend sitting with a grinning blonde in his lap. Even with the other woman’s top pushed down to her waist, Morgan had no trouble recognizing Sara, the waitress who hadn’t bothered showing up, sticking her with a double shift. For a few moments, Morgan just stared at the image, not quite able to process it. She found herself equal parts angry and apathetic. On the one hand, things hadn’t exactly been stellar between her and Dylan in the first place. On the other hand, she’d been sleeping with him on a pretty regular basis for nearly a year. Territorial instincts warred with her natural tendency to just not care.

  It’s not like we did all that much other than have sex, she thought. Dylan was the extroverted socialite, always doing something, always the people person. Morgan was a working college student, and preferred staying in on the nights she had free. I should have expected this sooner, if I’m completely honest with myself, she told herself. Her emotions flickered back and forth between feeling used, and feeling like she deserved it for not being willing to indulge his plans more often than she had been. But the longer she looked at that picture, the more she felt the balance beginning to tip. Not only had the other woman poached Morgan’s man from her, she’d foisted her shifts at work onto Morgan in order to do so. As she stared at the other woman’s happy smile and generous bosom, anger began to beat back her apathy and self-loathing. And then anger won out, and her phone hit the far wall hard enough to shatter the screen and break something important inside it, turning the screen black forevermore.

  Peeling off her work uniform, Morgan gazed at herself in the mirror, and soon felt the anger burning out, leaving apathy behind. With an expression like she’d just bitten into an unripe lime, she tossed her bra aside and slipped out of her panties. The woman staring back at her in the mirror wasn’t ugly by any means, but she’d had always been quietly envious of her more curvy and well-endowed peers. With her hands on her hips, she arched her back and puffed out her chest…then relaxed her posture again with a sigh. At five feet four inches tall, with ghostly pale skin and her hip bones and the outline of her ribs just barely noticeable, she was just a little too slender to be called curvy, and a little too tall to consider herself petite.

  “Not even B cups. I’ll never compete with that!” she snarled in the direction of her broken phone. Stalking back and forth in front of the mirror, she tugged her hair tie loose and let her raven-black locks free with a shake of her head. “What I need,” she declared as she ran her fingers through her waist-length hair, “is a rebound. A one-night stand to get over this shit. I deserve to get slutty every once in a while!”

  Turning her back on the mirror, she began to hum to herself as she dug through her closet. Not this. Or this. Or that, she thought to herself. Finally finding what she was looking for, she removed a sheer black dress with tiny, string-like straps from her closet and draped it lovingly across her bed. Simple and perfect. “Let’s see here. Just the dress, the heels, and my ID for the booze.” She giggled at herself, amused by her own sudden boldness. Then her hand trailed over her thigh, and the prickliness of her body hair caught her attention. “But first, a bath,” she declared to the empty apartment.

  Deciding not to waste time, as much in a hurry to get out the door before the local bars closed as she was to get going before she could talk herself out of it, Morgan quickly ran a bath and took care of her grooming as the tub filled up. Dunking herself to wet her hair, she lathered her mane vigorously with shampoo. Right as she was working some moisturizer into a froth in her poofy loofah ball, the lights went out in her apartment.

  “An outage!? NOW!?” she raged at the total darkness. “DAMN! I can’t see shit… How can this day get ANY WORSE?”

  And then the bathtub fell through the floor, and Morgan had just enough time to look up and see two moons wreathed in a few wispy clouds as she was falling.

  And, of course, screaming.

  Chapter 2: Survival, with a side of screaming.

  Morgan Mackenzie was falling through the sky in an old-fashioned metal bathtub, wearing nothing but soapy bathwater and an expression of total shock and panic. The fact that she was screaming in a state of pure and abject terror should come as no surprise to anyone who might have been present to witness her sudden appearance in mid-air in a strange and alien world. As a matter of fact, her arrival was indeed noticed by several local denizens of her new environs. The first creatures to be alerted to her presence were three [Giant Eagle Hatchlings], who were quite startled when over three hundred pounds of iron bathtub, filled with about eighty gallons of soapy water and just over a hundred pounds of screeching, naked human, appeared less than ten feet above their nest.

  Gravity immediately remembered its job, and the newborn eagle hatchlings promptly lost any chance of ever becoming proud and mighty [Giant Eagles] like they probably hoped. The unlucky hatchlings didn’t even have time to squawk a hopeless protest about their unhappy fate as the tub landed on them with a crunch Morgan didn’t even notice. The sudden stop of the bathtub and her follow-up splashy impact cut her screams short as she landed, not in the center of the tub, but against the side. Only random luck and slippery soap suds saved her from a concussion—or worse—as she slid down the side, then the bottom of the tub, and she was sloshed, bathwater and all, into the nest on top of scattered pieces of egg shells and scraps of rotting carrion.

  Morgan pushed herself up to
her knees as the sudden shock wore off in the stillness of the moment. Finally able to draw a breath, ribs aching from the impact, she immediately gagged. Her sudden coughing earned her further protests from her already bruised and tender ribs. “What the hell!” she exclaimed as the scents of rotting meat in various stages of decay assaulted her senses, lightly seasoned with bird droppings, as well as fresh blood and feather-coated viscera. She still held her loofah scrubby in one hand, and raised it to her face in a partially successful attempt to mask the stench of the nest with the familiar smells of her favorite body wash products. She looked around in confusion, battling through the sheer shock and surprise of her situation to try to make some sort of sense out of where she was. Her confusion was promptly renewed, though, as within moments of her landing she felt rather than heard a chiming DING! inside her head, followed immediately by two more sensations, exactly the same as the first. Just as she opened her mouth to blindly repeat her utterance, her attention was stolen by ethereal silvery text spilling itself across the center of her sight.

  You have defeated [Giant Eagle Hatchling (Lvl - 1)]

  For earning your victory while [Naked] and [Unequipped], experience gain doubled.

  +40 experience gained.

  You have defeated [Giant Eagle Hatchling (Lvl - 1)]

  For earning your victory while [Naked] and [Unequipped], experience gain doubled.

  +40 experience gained.

  You have defeated [Giant Eagle Hatchling (Lvl - 2)]

  For earning your victory while [Naked] and [Unequipped], experience gain doubled.

  +70 experience gained.

  As an increasingly confused Morgan gazed slack-jawed at the words superimposed over her vision, they quickly began to fade. As several extremely un-ladylike expletives exploded into the silent trees, an even more intense DING! slammed into her mind like a gold and silver starburst.

  You have reached Level 2! Health and Status partially restored!

  For reaching this milestone while [Naked] and [Unequipped], rewarded points doubled.

  10 distributable Stat Points awarded.

  10 Skill Points awarded.

  Skill purchases unlocked! (Check available skills through your Status Menu)

  As interesting as she found these new messages, Morgan didn’t have time to properly consider the information. As the last glowing message faded from her vision, the nest she’d fallen into swayed sideways with a vicious lurch, spilling her once more into the detritus. Suddenly unbalanced, broken eggshells and jagged branches tore into her hands and knees as she struggled to keep from falling face-first onto the muck-covered floor of the nest. A piercing screech rekindled her shortly forgotten terror. The nest shuddered once more with the sound of cracking tree branches.

  Morgan scrambled backward toward the trunk of the tree that cradled the nest in its branches, not even noticing the new scratches and the smattering of rotten meat and filth she was crawling through in her panic. Only two important details occupied her attention at that moment. The first, and actually less frightening, thing she had on her mind was that the nest was tilting further and further down away from the tree as the branches cracked and shook. The second and, to Morgan’s frantic mind, more immediately important detail was the gigantic eagle shoving her bathtub off of its ruined wing.

  The colossal bird of prey was easily twice the size of an SUV, and it jerked its head to turn a baleful eye in the direction of the one who’d slain its young and so grievously wounded it. The angry bird then drew in a massive breath and gave vent to its rage with a screech far louder than Morgan was capable of comprehending. The sound hit her like a solid wave of force, for indeed, that was the effect of the oversized avian’s skill, [Thunderous Screech]. Not that Morgan was in any state to realize any of this, or care, even if she’d had the information. The pressure of the cry slammed her out of the nest and into the trunk of the tree, shattering her eardrums. The bathtub came to rest almost on top of her previous position against the wall of the nest itself. Stunned, deafened, and feeling sharp jagged lances of pain through her whole body, she fell forward onto the tree branch and almost failed to latch onto it in time.

  Her vision blurry and ears hearing nothing but a painful, silent ringing, Morgan held onto the branch of the tree with the last vestiges of effort left in her broken and exhausted body. A different kind of message pulsed in her awareness with a dull, throbbing cadence.

  You have taken critical damage!

  Status afflicted: [Deafened]! Your eardrums have ruptured!

  Status afflicted: [Internal Bleeding]! You are bleeding internally!

  She felt her precarious perch shift and crack more than she heard it, and looked on with a sudden blank detachment as the bird that had just killed her flapped its remaining wing, flopped itself right over the side of its own nest, and fell out of her sight. The big eagle’s last lurching movement was the final bit of stress the tortured branch could handle, and less than a foot from Morgan’s face, the groaning limb finally gave out. Looking down, she saw the eagle hit the ground in a puff of oversized feathers like the world’s largest pillow exploded, followed by the nest and forked tree branch. As the broken bird tried to fight its way free from the debris, Morgan’s big metal bathtub landed right on its head with a crunchy GONG! that Morgan might have found rather humorous in better circumstances. And if her eardrums hadn’t been ruptured, rendering her deaf. Eardrums or not, she most certainly heard two back to back notices as more blocks of text appeared in her vision, one after the other, and she suddenly felt much better. She felt better than she’d have thought someone in her situation should be feeling.

  DING! rolled through her mind with a bright silver flair.

  You have defeated [Giant Wildlands Eagle (Lvl - 9)]

  For earning your victory while [Naked] and [Unequipped], experience gain doubled.

  +1800 experience gained.

  Which was immediately followed with the golden DING!

  You have reached Level 3! Health and Status partially restored!

  For reaching this milestone while [Naked] and [Unequipped], rewarded points doubled.

  10 distributable Stat Points awarded.

  10 Skill Points awarded.

  Skill purchases unlocked! (Check available skills through your Status Menu)

  DING!

  You have reached Level 4! Health and Status partially restored!

  For reaching this milestone while [Naked] and [Unequipped], rewarded points doubled.

  10 distributable Stat Points awarded.

  10 Skill Points awarded.

  Skill purchases unlocked! (Check available skills through your Status Menu)

  DING!

  You have reached Level 5! Health and Status partially restored!

  For reaching this milestone while [Naked] and [Unequipped], rewarded points doubled.

  10 distributable Stat Points awarded.

  10 Skill Points awarded.

  Skill purchases unlocked! (Check available skills through your Status Menu)

  DING!

  You have reached Level 6! Health and Status partially restored!

  For reaching this milestone while [Naked] and [Unequipped], rewarded points doubled.

  10 distributable Stat Points awarded.

  10 Skill Points awarded.

  Skill purchases unlocked! (Check available skills through your Status Menu)

  “What. The. HELL!?” Morgan gasped. While the actual time that had passed between being in her apartment taking a bath and her current situation well over a hundred feet up in the top of a tree could be counted in seconds without needing three digits, the sheer amount of new information and experience of the events had left her with such a horrendous case of mental whiplash that all she could do was hold onto her newfound friend, the tree branch, and try to process it all.

  “That…that happened… Did it? Or not?” she said to nobody in particular as she pushed herself up to a sitting position, straddling the waist-thick stub of tree she
currently occupied. Her wounds might have been miraculously healed by the mysterious “levels” she’d reached, but she was still covered in a disgusting blend of soap, blood, feathers, and bird droppings. And she was most definitely naked. She was acutely aware of that fact, with the rough bark of the tree scraping her tender thighs and bottom. Her skin was beginning to itch all over from the nasty mess. She had, for all intents and purposes, been rolled in it like a piece of meat being coated in a most fell sort of breading. The other thing she was unable to ignore was the terrible smell.

  Realizing she still clutched her scrubby loofah in one hand, she picked the larger pieces of sticks and feathers out of it and once again held it up to her face to try to inhale something nicer than bird droppings and the iron-tangy scent of blood. Carefully, she wiped the worst of the muck off her face and took a slow look around to try to figure out exactly where she was. It only took her a few heartbeats to realize where? was a question that would have no easy answer.

  The first thing she noticed was a confirmation of her first stunned look at her new world. Two moons chased each other across the sky, the larger leading the smaller by a thumbnail-wide gap from her point of reference. The next thing she noticed was trees. Lots and lots and lots of trees. Very similar looking trees to the familiar pines, cedars, and juniper trees she’d grown up seeing all around her home in Eastern Washington; the difference was one of scale. She could tell she was well over a hundred feet off the ground, and she was in a much smaller tree than the giant timber she could see all around her.

  The tree she currently occupied was in fact dead, with none of the verdant green needles, leaves, or anything else gracing its gnarled and stunted (compared to the other trees) form. She was still above the actual forest canopy, though, thanks to her temporary seat growing out of a rather pronounced hill of raised earth. The sibling moons cast a brighter lunar glow than any full moon she’d ever experienced on Earth, and in any other circumstances, her view most certainly would have been utterly breathtaking. Even with her sudden and frightening situation, she couldn’t help but let out an exclamatory, “Whoa…”