Chapter One
If there was a place in the quiet farming nation of Darsia that would seem home to nefarious deeds and corrupt magic, it was the Darkfangs. A pair of volcanic basalt peaks overlook a sheltered valley of homesteads, serrated and arced like the maw of a great predator. The wan light of a thin crescent moon glinted off the peaks, and in their depths a sickly yellow glow burst alight. Energy crawled along black stone like expanding fungus, forming a wide circle of interlacing patterns.
The stone began warping like hot air meeting cool on a summer’s day in its wake. Monotone chanting rolled sinuously from the mouth of a man wearing a hastily dyed crimson robe in the center of the now finished circle. From the band of writhing light, three tendrils crawled towards him, turning and feeding into each other, making a smaller circle around the human, and dividing the greater circle into three sections. His usually pale blue eyes radiated a hue that mirrored the malign yellow that squirmed over the ground, illuminating a plain, unremarkable face, and making his already blond hair wash out against the pale glow.
“Gilles, stop!” A desperate shout came from behind the young man. A group of eight men from the surrounding farms was jogging up the long, thin path. The man who had spoken, Gilles’ uncle, was a thick-set bald man in one of the few mail shirts the farmer’s militia had thrown together. The long boar’s spears they carried weren’t as fancy as the pike’s their Uthwen neighbors favored, but they’d do the job if Gilles hesitated. Steeling his nerve and closing his eyes, the young farmhand continued.
The monotonous chanting grew in volume, the human’s voice growing shrill with concentration and effort, bending energy that flowed through the lattice of power that suffused the world to his will. With no warning, two bulges appeared in the stone, the rock bulging and warping like a serpent’s egg about to hatch. Forms shifted and flexed within the stone; the basalt began to flow away as though it were wet mud.
Shaking the flowing stone away, a tall, humanoid figure with unnaturally white skin dragged itself free, and stood to over eight feet tall, dark, sickly green talons attached to death-pallor white fingers, pulled free of the black liquid stone. The slimy rock flowed off a visage that was something between human and undefined beast, with wide, burning red eyes and an upturned nose with near-vertical slit nostrils. Lipless, disproportionately massive jaws yawned wide, showing needle-sharp teeth and letting loose a howl that echoed through the mountains. The Evenstar mage who had rejected him as an apprentice last year had described these things as an Ogre.
Continued Here
Based on all of my various experiences in the fantasy genre and seeing what can be done to take the recognizable and torque it slightly.
Writing in the Gray Area 