Being my first story, please enjoy a small snippet of what hopefully will be a longer tale.
“Wait,” he ordered her softly, lifting his steadying hand off the rifle for emphasis. The thick air which rolled in through the broken window panes burned his nose and blurred his vision.
“Dad,” she said slowly as she crouched low beside her father, “what is that?” Ferrah was staring at the back of her father’s hand watching each little hair begin to stand straight out.
“Get down!” he bellowed, shoving both of them to the hard wooden floor of what used to be one of the most glorious townhouses in all of Oakvale.
Before Ferrah could get her breath back, the air hummed, vibrated, and then seemed to split in two; a searing, blinding, beam of white-blue light exploded the jagged remains of the window, showering them both with tiny globules of molten glass, and lodging pieces of the rusted iron frame in the wall where she stood moments before.
The space around and above him again began to pulsate, this time a much slower, albeit more familiar, sensation. Duncan shut his eyes and slammed his now blood-lined palms against his daughter’s ears, and waited for what he knew would come next. The air was pierced once more and this time the hair on Duncan’s neck stood up out of sheer terror and the entire house shook in response to the careening death cry of what had to be nearly two dozen blood thirsty female Balvarines.
Cursing his own cowardice and stupidity, Duncan cleared his mind, rolled from his position on the floor up to the window and focused. A small tingling sensation brought his ears to ringing in less than a second and immediately the world around him changed. The most noticeable sensation was the subtle lightness, a sort of ease about things. The air was lighter, filled his lungs quicker, gave him more energy; dust that had yet to settle from the shattered window now hung nearly still in the light air; the horrid howling had nearly ceased altogether, his own heartbeat proved to be an ancient metronome, and his daughter's provided the harmony with which he would momentarily balance every shot from his rifle.
Duncan immediately saw the horde about 180 paces from the window. Perhaps in another world, most definitely at another time, the sight would be considered beautiful. Indeed, there were twenty-one massive beings, heads thrown back and bathed in the haunting white glow of the moon, living statues. Oakvale always seemed to have a larger moon than the rest of Albion. Duncan cursed under his breath as he unconsciously took aim, "There will be no harvest for these demons under the moon tonight," he thought.
He pulled the trigger. As the molten pellet of silver glided effortlessly through the air, Duncan released another missile from his barrel. Three times he pulled the firing mechanism at three different monsters before the first bullet met its intended targets. While the first killed three beasts standing in line with one another, the sixth shot he made was his most effective, dispatching three through the left breast, leaving one without the means to bear more litters, and cleanly removing the gnarled head of one from it's grotesque body. Moving with a practiced and oblivious efficiency, Duncan tried not to think about what had just happened while maintaining his effortless symphony of fire, load, fire, load.
Duncan has seen enough magic in his long life to know exactly what had just happened. One of those barbaric balvarines had let loose a terrifyingly skillful lighting bolt.