In case you were unable to make it to the July edition of the UNTERVELT collaborative at Prague night club in Austin, here is the excerpt I chose to read for the crowd to start out the night. The reading was exceedingly well received by those in attendance and I hope to have a video of the reading to post soon since one of the Hipnautica members was on hand to capture the event live. We are now in the final countdown before the official release of ETERNAL VIGILANCE III: BOUND IN BLOOD! One more week to go before the book will be available for pre-ordering from Immanion Press. I am absolutely thrilled beyond belief and for those of you who are hardcore EV fans, you’ll be please to know that I have already begun writing the fourth installment, MEDITATIONS ON DARKNESS, which will be the first book in a new trilogy all told from Tynan’s point of view. I hope you enjoy the excerpt from BOUND IN BLOOD, featured below. Thank you again for your continued support of my work! XOV””VOX

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Excerpt from ETERNAL VIGILANCE III: BOUND IN BLOOD
by Gabrielle Faust
**soon to be released by Immanion Press**

A sharp pain speared me through my chest suddenly shattering the blessed oblivion I had surrendered myself to. I pulled my head back from Moria’s neck, ripping my fangs from the wounds with a gasp, my lips and chin smeared with her blood. For a split second I thought I had been attacked from behind and impaled. Paralyzed in the grip of pain, Moria slipped from my grasp, crumpling at my feet, unconscious. I wanted to howl aloud, but even my voice was trapped, held suspended within me, a scorpion perfectly preserved in resin, its tail raised and ready to strike. I twitched, my hands tightening into claws, my eyes rolling back in my skull as I fought not to lose consciousness. Falling against the side of the altar beside me I pressed my forehead against the cold polished granite and began to pray for death, blood tears slipping from the corners of my eyes as the pain became unbearable. It pulled at my center beginning at the outside of my chest and between my shoulder blades, funneling inwards as if a black hole had begun to form there.

Reality flickered and fluttered, film creaking upon an old metal reel segmented with cigarette burns, black and haloed with bright orange spots dancing before my eyes as the pain destroyed my vision. Distantly, I was aware of a scream that finally broke free from my throat, echoing angrily about the chamber. The voices of the mortals did not skip a beat, the words of their chants blending into one another until only a spiraling, soaring wall of sound remained, encompassing me and blocking out the rest of the universe. Searing heat filled my body, the product of the Chronous’ increased feed of power and the force of the god pouring its essence into me as they fought for domination. The temperature rose until I believed my internal organs might liquefy from the fire. A strange papery fluttering sound filled my ears. The rustling, whispering noise began to transform, thickening and solidifying until it took the form of wings, dense and heavy with leather, lined in razor-edged scales of obsidian and flint.

You must fight. The voice of the Chronous reached out to me through the cyclone enveloping my soul.

I…can’t….I can’t fight it! I gasped, my body shuddering, my fingernails digging into the stone before me, cutting shallow grooves in its surface.

My soul was clinging frantically to my body as the Vicinus’ power swept over me, around me, through me howling and shrieking with a demonic vengeance. The ethereal promises of a new life from his consciousness had vanished, his desire to assimilate me as part of his essence replacing the recognition of me as his true progeny. Never again would he entertain my insubordination or stoop to offer his manipulative logic to persuade me to join his reign of terror. I would no longer have the opportunity to live on, in another realm, another world perfectly crafted for me as a reward for my submission. He would sever me brutally from my body and toss me back into the void from which all life came. No afterlife, no reinvention or reincarnation but only simple pure nothingness, the most terrifying fate of all.

I clung to the side of a chasm dangling from a crumbling ledge of earth as the souls of the damned called to me from the hell of pitch below. The cavern resembled the gorge created after the bombing of Fredericksburg, fathomless and horrifying filled with the angry, restless souls of the dead. My feet kicked against the side of the sheer face, scrambling to find purchase in the quickly eroding rock as it blew away, dissolving in the sandstorm wind cycling around the perimeter of the crater. This was not the way I had envisioned the fight. I had assumed the Chronous’ power would make me invincible, easily ousting the Vicinus from my body, but we had underestimated the Vicinus’ ability to puncture this realm and take hold of what he desired, what he needed to fulfill his quest for revenge.

Tap into my core, the Chronous shouted to me over the storm. Use the energy I am giving you.

The physical world had vanished. All that existed was the storm and the chasm of oblivion below me. Even in my first battle with the Vicinus, I had not been this terrified, utterly gripped in the vise of harrowing fear, for never had I understood death to be such a complete obliteration. I had always suspected that something must lie on the other side of this earthly realm, but now I knew that the Vicinus would not allow that to occur. Our afterlives were manifested by our own beliefs, the product of the accumulated energy of billions of souls desiring for salvation or damnation. However, in the greater cradle of the cosmos that concept could easily be crushed to dust. I knew I had to fight for I was not ready to face such an extinction, nor could I allow the Vicinus to stamp out the lives of those upon the earth and their hereafters, their heavens and their hells, whatever form they might take, wherever they might be.

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