Excerpt: Leptiri

Prologue

It didn’t begin with a lady, a butterfly and some mud, as most people would suspect. Oh no, it certainly didn’t start that way. It began long before that. There were strings being pulled, puppets being manipulated, and words that were selected and sharpened until they became swords in their own way, able to give life or to take it away. Words were his greatest weapon, even more lethal then the poisoned dagger he carried. He knew the power of words.
Selected words could cast a spell over the ears that listened. Words became the strings that bound his victims, his play-things, to him. If he wanted to make these creatures move, he need only to speak a few words, pull a few strings, move the marionettes around. It was all a game and he always won. He had to win.
Of course, there were a few puppets that fought back. They always upset him. They were his, just as the world was his. He was conquering it with the power of words and silence. Oh yes, he appreciated silence as well. When used correctly, silence was the poison on the tip of the dagger. Those who fought back were…corrected. After all, he was above them.
He wasn’t one of them.
He remembered one of the beasts in particular, a human that he tried to use to get to the ear of the human leaders. He almost succeeded. However, due to a few undirected words, a few miscalculated tosses, the human escaped the words that tried to bind him. In the process, each had left his mark on the other, one a physical mark, the other a wound that festered inside, one that would not heal. That human was almost as good with words as he was.
He hated that.
But this story isn’t completely about him, though he helps sets things in motion.
The story that’s about to be revealed to you shows just how wide of a web that he had spun, and that it was the acts of a band of creatures that brought his twisted reality crashing to the ground.
Ladies and gentleman, once upon a time…