Dark Horse

Three

The demon stirred. Its sleep had been long, but in its sleep it had grown restless. The pull of the island was strong. The island of Cressia was part of Illyria, a great land stretching from the Alps in the north across the mountains to the east, as far as the border with Thrace. A thousand years ago, the Greeks believed Istria, the heart-shaped peninsula which separated Italy from the arid shores of Dalmatia, to be the edge of the world. It was there, they thought, that the Daughters of the Evening Star dwelt in the walled Gardens of the Hesperides, protected by the hundred-headed serpent who guarded a tree of golden apples.

A gentle legend, for a gentle country teeming with lush valleys and forests bursting with game. But the living on Istria was easy. On Cressia, as with the twelve hundred other islands in the Adriatic, life was a constant struggle for survival and there was no room for myth. Only fact.

Cressia's history ran heavy with blood. Every inch of her soil was steeped in treachery and drenched in betrayal, chronicling stories of murder, trickery and revenge…

The demon stirred and licked its lips. The pull of the island was strong. Too strong to resist any longer. It had smelled the blood of her past in its dreams. Now it wanted to taste it.