The Godborn

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Pain wracked Varra, knife stabs of agony that kept time with her contractions. She lay on her back in a straw-filled birthing bed in the abbey-the Abbey of the Rose, Derreg had called it-her knees bent, the sheets damp and sticky with sweat and blood. Her blood.

Too much of it, she knew.

She saw her fate reflected in the worried eyes of the homely, middle-aged midwife who patted her hand and mouthed soft encouragement, saw it in the furrowed brow and filmy but intense gaze of the balding, elderly priest with blood-slicked hands who reached into Varra time and again to no avail.

Varra searched her memory but could not remember their names. The previous hours-had it been just hours? — had passed in a blur. She remembered traveling in a caravan across Sembia, fleeing before a storm of shadows, an ever-growing tenebrous thunderhead that threatened to blanket all of Sembia with its pall. Undead had attacked the caravan, unliving shadows, their keening voices announcing their hunger for souls, and, in a moment of thoughtless bravery, she had led them off into the forest to save the others.

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