Sanguinist, researcher, and tea connoisseur Nyraleth Aevensong is on an adventure, and she doesn't like it at all.
Nyraleth had long known that "adventures are what get people killed," so she avoided them in favor of steady blood magic research and endless pots of tea. Yet, when her friend's letters stop coming, she sets out (not on an adventure!) to get him out of whatever trouble he's gotten himself into and drag him back home as soon as possible.
She doesn't expect to be mixed up with duty bound Oathed, happy-go-lucky rogues, and a conspiracy that goes beyond a blood drinking murderer...
Avoiding adventures might be harder than Nyraleth thought.
Sanguine Scenario is the first book in a non-romance adventure fantasy series, featuring competent characters, friendship, and friendly banter.
Sanguine Scenario is the first book in a non-romance adventure fantasy series, featuring competent characters, friendship, and friendly banter.
Everything was annoying about everything.
It wasn’t just that Drenburg had all the qualities of a small town at the edge of the known world, complete with improperly paved streets and the expected surfeit of mud. What annoyed Nyraleth even more was that she didn’t want to be there in the first place. And that led even to more annoyance—with the fruitless search on which she’d spend her day, with the early spring weather that left much to be desired when it came to warmth and sunshine, and with the disturbing absence of hot tea to chase away the winter aura of the day…
Even the herbalist store on the other side of the street was annoying, though for a different reason.
READ MORELocated at the ground floor of a narrow townhouse squeezed between two other equally narrow townhouses, it looked almost inviting. On a better day, Nyraleth wouldn’t consider it a flaw, but with all the other annoyances, it irked her how much it reminded her of her wealthy college city where she frequented similar small shops, and how it made her long for home. And that, in turn, brought about thoughts on the source of all the other annoyances, namely her friend Kerrick.
She huffed as frustration replaced her earlier worries about him in what seemed to be a vicious circle of those two emotions, but she knew better than to let those feelings stew. Instead, she made her way across the street, pausing only to find the best path around the deepest puddles. The sooner she was done, the sooner she could break that cycle of frustration and worry, preferably by unleashing them both on Kerrick himself, and then go back home.
A tiny bell rang as she opened the door, and she refrained from giving it an annoyed glare as if that inanimate object produced such cheerful sounds on purpose, only to add to her annoyance. And as the scents of herbs hit her nose, along with all the notions of familiarity, she remembered her manners and offered a friendly smile to the shopkeeper, an older and rather stout man with short, dark hair and dark eyes, because it wasn’t the man’s fault that Kerrick had made it his life’s mission to conjure sources of annoyance for her.
He looked her over and scowled. “We deal with no blood here.”
So much for reciprocating good manners and the feeling of familiarity with home… Back there, sanguinists were common, and nobody thought twice about them, let alone behaved unpleasantly to one. It seemed that either the sanguine arts weren’t particularly popular in Drenburg or she just happened upon someone with all the wrong ideas about them. Normally, she’d be tempted to correct any misconceptions, even if it required a long lecture, but after an unsuccessful day filled with minor annoyances, her patience was wearing too thin.
“I’m not here about blood. I’m looking for information.”
“We deal with none o’ that either,” the man replied.
COLLAPSE