It's 1918, and Matty returns home to the family farm from the trenches only to find his brother Arthur dying of an unknown illness. The local doctor thinks cancer, but Matty becomes convinced it's connected to the mysterious books his brother left strewn around the house. Rob knows something other than just Arthur's death is bothering Matty. He's know him for years and been in love with him just as long. And when he finds something that looks like a gate, a glowing, terrifying doorway to the unknown, it all starts to fall in to place. Matty's looking sicker and sicker in the same way Arthur did. What is Rob prepared to sacrifice to cure him? The answer is in the esoteric books ... and with the mysterious Lin of the Frem, who lives beyond the gate to nowhere. It's taken Matty and Rob more than a decade to admit they have feelings for each other and they are determined that neither social expectations or magical illness will part them now.

Inheritance of Shadows

He took a breath and shut his eyes as he did so, focusing on his energy field. As he breathed in, he breathed in kias. As he breathed out, he released the kias he had gathered into his own system, imagining it as a rubber balloon with him at the centre, expanding as the kias filled it. It wasn’t hard. He’d done this before. Matty’s hand rested firmly, immutable, connecting them together.


When he opened his eyes, he could see Matty’s energy field as a faint, glowing cloud of kias around him. The silver thread that was leeching his kias led away from him, off to where Rob could faintly sense the shimmer without actually being able to see it and thence to who knew where. As the book instructed, Rob visualised an imaginary hand, reaching for it and pulling it toward him. He’d never really liked fishing and he certainly wasn’t going to take it up as a hobby after this, he thought, grimly.


Chapter 32