The Tobine Chronicles Episode 6

Series Blurb: In the battle to save the planet she loves, one woman must discover the truth about her past, and if she has the strength necessary to not just save Tobine–but rule.

Episode 6  – Tenni seeks solace and information about the Markeran Prophecy in the old library. She discovers the Rikan headquarters were bombed and Cader is presumed dead. She’s not sorry, especially when she discovers what the Markeran Prophecy really is and how she might be the only one who can unite her planet.

Excerpt

Tenni stared at the concrete wasteland before her. Once this city had held most of Tobine’s population, encasing it in tall towers rising nearly to the sky. The seat of government had sat in the middle of Krall, with population and commerce spreading forth from the capital complex. Now, even the shacks marking the edge of town had fallen, leaving nothing in their wake.

The extent of the devastation humbled Tenni. I wanted to fight the Dorrines and the Rikans, make them stop killing Tobine. It’s too big, too great, for someone like me to handle. Licking her lips, she tasted the dust hanging in the air. Sweat dripped down her neck and slid between her breasts. No one lived here now.

She made her way through the piles of debris. The rubble piled above her head in places, and where it did, she moved cautiously, afraid of being seen. Nothing, not even rats, moved amid the destruction. She didn’t want to meet anyone or anything.

At last, she passed the division between the shantytowns along the outskirts of Krall to the low, concrete apartment buildings making up the residential sector. It had been in an apartment building like these where she and Jode had lived. It seemed so very long ago. Her hand fell to her stomach, where she’d birthed one child only to have it die in a Dorrine raid, and she’d killed a second. If all mothers watched their children die, then who would take over Tobine once the fighting ended? Tenni didn’t know and suspected neither the Dorrines nor the Rikans knew either. If they do know, they don’t care. No one could leave a planet like this and claim to care about the future. If her time with her husband hadn’t eroded her belief in the resistance, seeing the destruction leveled by bombs did.

The closer she moved to the center of town, the more people she saw. Mostly beggars like herself, looking even worse for wear. She grabbed what she could. A blanket pulled from beneath a pile of bricks may have once covered a sleeping body. Now, she wrapped it around her shoulders as a shawl. A square of cloth, possibly someone’s shirt, became a headscarf. With it pulled low over her forehead, she could hide her face. Blend in like just another beggar.

Everywhere she went, she looked for Rikans. Somehow she must tell them of the Vilos plot to kill Cader. Yet they won’t listen to me. To them, I’m only a beggar-woman. Where would I get such knowledge? If I reveal myself as Tenni, then Cader will make me his wife. Her stomach twisted at the thought. No, she wouldn’t go back to Cader. At least her husband had loved her at first. Cader loved only himself.

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