Behemoth (The Jharro Grove Saga Book 6) Read online

  The Jharro Grove Saga: Book Six

  BEHEMOTH

  A Bowl of Souls Novel

  By Trevor H. Cooley

  Trevor H. Cooley

  Copyright 2017 by Trevor H. Cooley

  Cover art © Renu Sharma www.thedarkrayne.com

  Map by: Michael Patty on www.trevorhcooley.com

  Books by Trevor H. Cooley

  Noose Jumpers:

  Book One: Noose Jumpers

  Book Two: (Upcoming)

  The Bowl of Souls Series:

  The Moonrat Saga

  Book One: EYE of the MOONRAT

  Book 1.5: HILT’S PRIDE

  Book Two: MESSENGER of the DARK PROPHET

  Book Three: HUNT of the BANDHAM

  Book Four: THE WAR of STARDEON

  Book Five: MOTHER of the MOONRAT

  The Jharro Grove Saga

  Book One: TARAH WOODBLADE

  Book Two: PROTECTOR of the GROVE

  Book Three: THE OGRE APPRENTICE

  Book Four: THE TROLL KING

  Book Five: THE PRIESTESS of WAR

  Book Six: BEHEMOTH (2017)

  The Dark Prophet Saga

  Book One: Sir Edge (Upcoming)

  Dedication

  To my cousin, John, one of my oldest and dearest friends. He was there from the beginning of Tarah’s creation. His ideas and suggestions brought out many of her strengths and weaknesses and he helped to edit every book in the Jharro Grove Saga. So . . . feel free to blame him.

  Thank you, John. This one’s for you.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  It was Xeldryn bin Leeths’ eighth birthday. He was a human child with dark hair braided in the traditional Roo-Tan style and his clothes were those of a warrior in training. The clothes were new, something he was proud of. They were proof that he was ready. This was the day he would begin learning at the hands of the elves.

  Xeldryn stood quietly but eagerly at the edge of the Jharro Grove. He could see the enormous gray trunks and twisted roots of the Jharro trees in the valley before him. The heady smell of the place caused his senses to tingle and filled him with restless energy. He felt the urge to shout or run around, but he dared not even fidget. Not with the patient forms of his mother and father standing like monoliths on either side of him.

  Xeldryn’s mother was Herlda bin Hoon, his father’s first wife and well respected among their people. She was tall and slender and wore the hide breastplate of a warrior. A Jharro sword was belted at her waist and black ribbons, just like the ones Xeldryn wore, hung in the braids at either side of her face.

  His father was Xedrion bin Leeths, Protector of the Grove, leader of the Roo-Tan people. Xedrion was a powerful and fierce-looking man. Well-muscled, he carried a long staff of Jharro wood. A breastplate made of that same wood covered his torso. The ribbon that hung in the braid at the left side of his face was currently blue, designating that his favor was with his third wife, Faldreth, who had just been announced pregnant again.

  Xedrion put his hand on Xeldryn’s shoulder and though the Protector hadn’t chosen to favor his mother this day, Xeldryn knew that his father was proud of him. Xeldryn was the Protector’s first born son and thus was the first of his children to reach this vaunted day. He had the same fierce green eyes as his father and, according to the other adults, had the same sort of authoritative demeanor.

  There was movement in the forest ahead. A dark-skinned elf approached, loping casually towards them on the top of the paths made in the Jharro roots. Xeldryn’s heart began beating rapidly as the elf drew closer. This was Yntri Yni, the ancient and revered weapon master of the Roo-Tan people.

  “This is it, Xeldryn,” said Herlda. She smiled down at him. “You will go and find your tree now. Are you nervous?”

  He shook his head. “I am ready, Mother.”

  “Of course you are,” Xedrion said with an approving nod. “He’s been ready for some time, Herlda.”

  A frown crossed her features. “That was not my question.”

  Xeldryn looked away from them and back to the approaching elf. “I am not nervous.”

  Of course, this was a lie and his mother knew it. It had taken all of his willpower to keep a tremble out of his voice. He would spend the next two years of his life in the Grove with the elves. In that time he would only see his parents occasionally, at important ceremonies or other rare visits.

  Soon Yntri Yni stood before them. Ancient and wrinkled, he was not much taller than Xeldryn. The dark-skinned elf was completely bald, the hair on his body having been absorbed by his tree. Unlike the other ancient elves, many of whom wore a living suit of Jharro Wood on their body, he wore nothing but a loin cloth and the bow and quiver which were slung over his shoulder.

  He greeted Xeldryn’s parents with an excited series of clicks and whistles. It was the language of the Grove Elves and though Xeldryn had heard it many times before, he did not understand it. His parent’s did, however.

  The Protector nodded to Yntri and gripped Xeldryn’s shoulder again. “It is time, son.”

  To Xeldryn’s surprise, his mother bent and embraced him. “I am proud of you, boy. Remember that you represent your family in all that you do. Time in the Grove passes quickly. Focus on what Yntri teaches or two years will not be enough.”

  This was unusual. Herlda giving a hug? In addition, there was genuine sadness in the tone of her voice. He realized that she was going to miss him.

  Slightly embarrassed at his mother’s show of affection in front of Yntri Yni, Xeldryn stepped back from her embrace quickly. He swallowed back the lump that had risen in his throat. “Yes, Mother.”

  Yntri Yni then took his hand. The elf placed a smooth band of Jharro wood around Xeldryn’s wrist. He clicked and whistled again and this time Xeldryn understood, hearing the elf’s intentions in his mind.

  “Come. Follow.”

  The elf trotted quickly into the Grove and Xeldryn ran after him. They soon stepped off of the rich soil of the forest and ran up the slight incline of a Jharro root. The gray wood had a spongy feel under Xeldryn’s feet.

  Xeldryn stopped, his gaze drawn to the canopy of leaves high above him. The undersides of the leaves were a powdery blue, lending the light in the Grove a dreamlike blue tint. He turned back to look at his parents. They had already turned away and were heading back to Roo-Tan’lan. Xeldryn fought off the impulse to shout out to them, to run back.

  “All children feel this way when leaving their parents,” Yntri clicked, having paused to glance back at him. “There is no shame in it, but you must keep moving.”

  Xeldryn continued to watch his parents until they passed out of sight. The boy’s l
ip trembled. “I-I feel nothing.”

  The elf chuckled and grasped Xeldryn’s shoulder, turning him back around to face him. “Talk and run, little one. Talk and run.”

  “Yes, Weaponmaster. I-.”

  The words were ripped from his lips. There was a wrenching feeling in his stomach. “I-I . . .”

  Everything went suddenly dark. His thoughts were thrown into confusion.

  “I . . .”

  He could no longer feel the Jharro root beneath his feet. He was weightless in the darkness.

  “I am . . . Xeldryn bin Leeths,” the Troll King said, shaking his head as his childhood memories fled to the background of his mind.

  Reality crashed back in on him. The heady smell of the Grove was replaced by the humid stench of the swamp. He was standing ankle deep in murky water and surrounded by heaping mounds of junk. The wood of his newly retrieved Jharro staff and bow was clenched tightly in his hands.

  “I am Xeldryn bin Leeths,” he said again and the warmth of the wood seemed to pulse against his fingers in agreement.

  He realized that he didn’t know if it was the tenth or the fifteenth or the hundredth time he had said his old name aloud since retrieving the weapons. While he had been lost in his memories, the words had been slipping from his mouth over and over again, the only change being the tone of his voice. Sometimes he had said his name with a note of awe. Sometimes, it was said in disgust. Other times it had been with a mourning howl as if there was something horribly sad; a tragedy waiting at the edge of his memory to be discovered.

  Still dazed, he looked down at the hands that gripped his weapons. His right hand was stout and muscular with the familiar rounded fingertips of a human, while his left hand was long-fingered and tipped with wicked black claws. The left side of his body was just as muscular as his right, but in every other way was that of a troll with skin that was slick with a light film of slime. He had learned quite painfully that the slime produced by the left side of his body was as flammable as any troll’s. He reached up with his human hand and touched his face. It, too, was a dichotomous mix of troll and human features.

  “I am-.” The Troll King clenched his jaw shut, realizing he was about to say the name again. There would be no more of that. He had to remain in control of himself. But how was he supposed to process these new memories?

  He told himself that this revelation shouldn’t have been such a surprise. He had long known that he had once been a human, but the newly uncovered details carried confusing emotional weight. The presence of the Grove. The faces of his human parents . . . He had been the eldest son of the Protector of the Grove himself.

  The Troll King scowled. The past was irrelevant. He had been born again. He had emerged from the Troll Mother’s womb with one purpose. He was to lead the Trollkin and tend to the Mother as she grew and grew until she one day covered the earth.

  “I am the Troll King,” he said, trying to build conviction in his voice. Now that he had regained his thoughts, he could feel the Mother’s presence in the water assuring him that this was true. The ancient behemoth’s form resided just ten feet or so beneath the surface of the swamps and the chemicals that her body excreted carried her feelings throughout the waters.

  Eagerly, he focused in on those chemical messages and sent out a message of his own, hoping that she would be able to ease the confusion in his mind. The Mother did not respond. Her thoughts were focused elsewhere. She was busy digesting and reforming the thousands of people she had swallowed in her attack on the treaty meeting between the Roo-Tan and Roo-Dan.

  It shouldn’t have mattered, but the reminder of that massacre turned his stomach. Each one of the people swallowed would be irreparably changed and he now knew that a great number of them had been his former countrymen. Had so many lives needed to be torn asunder? He shivered as a new possibility entered his mind. Was the Mother wrong to swallow others to create her people?

  The Troll King was suddenly grateful that his goddess was not paying attention to his thoughts. If she sensed his confusion, she would turn her attention on him and he was not sure how she would respond. Perhaps it would be best if he found higher ground where her chemicals could not reach him. At least until he had sorted these new memories and feelings out.

  Swallowing, he looked around for somewhere he could hide from her presence. The section of the swamp that he stood in was someplace he had not known existed before this day. It was the Mother’s midden heap. Anything she did not wish to digest, she disgorged it here. Large piles of wood, treated leather, metal implements, and weapons protruded from the shallow water. Some of them were heaped higher than his head.

  He could climb atop one of those piles, but he found the thought of perching on the remnants of so many lives somehow unnerving. He frowned at this unconscious reaction, reminding himself that the Mother did not truly kill those that she ate. They were merely repurposed. She gave them new lives as trollkin.

  Of course, he knew that wasn’t the complete truth. Though she put the souls of the people she ate into new bodies, so much of who they had been before was forgotten. It was very possible that she digested some parts of their souls for her own use or perhaps even discarded the parts she did not want. He had long believed that what his people had once been was lost forever . . .

  He shook his head, dropping that unhelpful line of thinking. His eyes focused in on the center of the area. An enormous manGrove tree had grown amongst the piles of refuse. The ground around the large tree was covered in stout knots of roots and high above the water, thick branches extended from the gnarled and knobby trunk. It wouldn’t be difficult to climb.

  Still clutching the Jharro weapons that had belonged to his former life, the Troll King strode towards the tree. The footing was treacherous. Scattered in the water between the refuse piles were swords and daggers and other various types of jagged and sharp bits of metal. The thick skin of his feet were cut several times along the way, twice quite deeply. Blood clouded the water, but he spared the wounds no more than a wince. His flesh would heal quickly.

  The Troll King easily scaled the knobby trunk of the dense tree. He sat in the crook of a thick limb, allowing his still bleeding feet to dangle over the water below. He could see the whole of the Mother’s disposal site from here. It stretched for hundreds of yards in every direction.

  A thousand years of rejected items had made for an impressive pile and he imagined that this site was going to continue to grow quite a bit over the coming weeks. What an extravagant resource for his people to plunder. Though much of it was useless, having rotted or rusted in the shallow water, this would be a great boon for the trollkin.

  As he watched, a section of the swamp between two piles shifted and bulged. A glistening green mound of the Mother’s flesh rose to a height as tall as the other piles before splitting open and deflating, leaving a new pile of discarded weaponry behind.

  Many of these newly disgorged items were made of the same gray wood as the weapons he held in his hands. An inexplicable anger rose inside him at the thought of all those pieces of Jharro wood cast aside. So many promises had been wasted.

  “Promises wasted?” he said, frowning at the strangeness of that thought. He looked down at the wood in his hands.

  Removing himself from the influence of the Mother’s chemicals was allowing old feelings from his former life to surge to the surface of his mind once more. Again, he felt an eager presence calling to him from his weapons. Reacting on some sort of inner instinct, he closed his eyes and focused on that feeling. This seemed to be exactly what the weapons were waiting for.

  His mind was taken over by a feeling of warmth. All awareness of the world around him faded until it seemed as if he were floating weightlessly in a pink void. Then came a strange rushing sensation in his belly as if he were being jerked forward at an amazing speed. An undeterminable amount of time passed before the sensation passed, replaced by the impression that he was being squeezed in a crushing embrace.

  His
thoughts were overcome by the immense mental weight of two ancient beings. He realized that these were the minds of the Jharro trees his weapons had come from. One of them, a towering female presence, greeted him as if he were a long lost child returned to her. The other presence, a distant and irritable presence, chided him as if he were a servant who had been shirking his duties.

  Confused and somewhat claustrophobic because of the sheer bulk of the minds focused on him, the Troll King asked what they wanted. The motherly tree, realizing just how lost and unfamiliar his thoughts had become, grew saddened. She reached deep into his mind and pulled.

  A sharp pain stabbed through the core of him. He would have cried out and opened his eyes, but he was unable to do so. A shiver racked his body as a torrent of memories flooded his mind.

  Xeldryn was back in the Grove.

  Years had passed since he had first entered the place at the age of eight. High above the forest floor, he sat cross-legged on a shelf of living Jharro wood that protruded from the trunk of his tree. His arms were folded in front of him and his eyes were closed. He was now twelve-years-old and once again he was waiting for Yntri Yni.

  The ancient elf was far below on the forest floor working on the Jharro weapon that would be the tree’s gift to Xeldryn. The Roo-Tan boy had stood at Yntri’s side, watching him eagerly for much of the morning, but the weapon’s making was taking a lot longer than he had expected. The weapon making process seemed to mostly consist of Yntri placing his forehead against the tree’s trunk and murmuring.