Time thief, p.1
Time Thief, page 1
TIME THIEF
ECLIPSE BOOK ONE
Lindsay French
To my husband, who I would choose time and time again given the chance.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from Podium Publishing.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2025 by Lindsay French
Cover design by Dawn Adams and Aleta Rafton
ISBN: 978-1-0394-9130-4
Published in 2025 by Podium Publishing
www.podiumentertainment.com
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
EPILOGUE
PREVIEW: WORLD SHIFTER
About the Author
CHAPTER ONE
I shivered on the march to the Prophet of the Valley, my tunic loose with no armor and my body light without weapons. The boots of my fellow captives trampled earth as dark as a winter’s night sky into a slurry of mud.
After nearly a decade of fending off the conquest of our enemy, our village had finally fallen, and I had failed at what mattered most. My hands curled around a sliver of empty space that should have been filled by my bow.
The baritone hums of the villagers lining our path vibrated beneath my skin. Pounding drums hijacked my heartbeat, thudding within my chest, my temples, my soul.
It was a ridiculous sight—all these people draped in dark robes and gathered around us as we neared the village. What made them hate us so much? We’d only ever tried to live. Their Prophet had been the one to start this feud by taking over the Valley. Even so, I blamed myself, because I had once wielded as much power as he had and should have been able to stop him.
I had long since cursed the day my cowardly instructors on the Mountain of the Gods sealed my power, but never before had I cursed myself as badly as I did now for failing to break free of the limitations they placed on me. The so-called gods gave the instructors the ability to cut off our power for a reason, and no one had ever regained theirs once that happened. They said it was impossible. Still, I could accept no excuses. Not one day had passed since losing my power that I had not fought to free myself. If I had succeeded instead of failed, then our innocent wouldn’t have been captured and our warriors would not have fallen.
“Heretics!” The women snarled at us from beneath pale hoods gleaming with the glow of fire. The whites of their eyes burned red. Each held a torch between laced fingers, nestled against their hearts. One stared into my eyes. “Burn! Burn! BURN!”
One snap and I could have shot an arrow through her gaping mouth if I had my precious bow. And with my power, I could have struck her dead in an instant. The Prophet and his followers were hypocrites for using powerful demons to capture us when he was the most notorious demon hunter in the peninsula. I longed to crush his throat.
The thirst for vengeance gave me the strength to drag my heavy body forward. We’d walked throughout the day and night before nearing the Prophet’s village. Along the road leading to his gates, men stood over the women’s shoulders. Their faces were shadowed by black hoods that drank up the shadows of twilight, their mouths closed so their hums sounded as if they came from beyond—from the gods themselves. Their stares never shifted from us. Blood dripped from their eyes like tears, cracking at the edges as it dried.
I could think only of my adopted nephew, Rune, and his little fingers disappearing from view as the demons stole him away from our village into the night. His young voice screaming my name echoed through my mind.
“Max!”
The coarse rope that tore at my skin was nearly as grating as the glare of the Prophet’s faithful lining our path. What crushed my lungs with anguish, though, was how my best friend’s form ahead of me punctuated the twilight, how far away Leif felt. The same bonds that kept me from reaching for my people also tethered me to them, so I couldn’t help but love what I hated.
I hadn’t prayed since Dad died and the instructors at the Sacred School so poorly filled the void he left. I hadn’t prayed since I learned the truth about our world, about the gods, about how nothing at all was as it seemed. Now, such desperation clawed into my heart that I lifted my face to the expanse above and I prayed a prayer I didn’t believe to gods I believed in even less.
Let this not be real.
Tears wet my cheeks. A touch of warmth where none could be found.
I searched for a response in the space where navy sky and dark earth melted into one, where the barely visible spread of stars above us crashed into the glow of snowcapped mountains. It was easy to see why our people turned this direction to pray, with how the towering terrain appeared to guard our Valley from the rest of the Skia Hellig Peninsula, as if we were divinely protected. But I knew what was on the Mountain of the Gods.
We’d drawn so much closer to it while on this march.
The air ahead glowed brighter and brighter with red and orange haze until the domineering wooden spikes atop the wall of the village appeared. I craned my neck to see up to the guards posted like statues every few feet, their crossbows steadied against the stone edge. No one else in the Valley had defenses close to rivaling this.
Rune’s pleas for help blared in my mind. His fingers reaching, straining.
I lowered my head.
The haunting tones of the villagers beyond the walls died as we entered the gate, replaced by an eerier quiet. Wooden, multistory buildings lined the cobbled road, leading all the way to the gently sloping hill near the back where the temple rose over everything in sight.
I squinted, eyes stinging from artificial brightness of lights atop steel poles. It’d been so long since I’d been around electricity. As a child, I’d stood on jagged rocks along the shore and watched the sparkles of sunlight glitter off each ripple, like our own daytime stars. Dad had dipped to run his fingers along the water and lamented at how the light scattered. How he’d never catch the sun’s rays like the Prophets did.
Our young world was like a small child with the feet of a man. Awkward and deformed. Deformed by an incredible power we weren’t ready for.
Fury flushed through my veins.
The Prophet of the Valley—that damned Eskel the Ruthless—would pay for what he’d done. I’d make sure of it.
Sometimes, the faintest inklings of my power kindled within me, out of reach, but warm like a flame. The heat of it burned within me now.
Our line turned right to a wooden stage tucked into an oval courtyard. The Prophet stood in the center with a thick canvas sheet stretching behind him and a coarse rope in his left hand. Seven disciples stood like statues at the base of the stage, wearing the same dark cloak as their leader. Above them, the Prophet held a spear with his free hand, face shadowed by his hood as he watched us. I knew his image so well, and even better, the nausea it filled me with. Sealing my power had not ended the visions that haunted me. And it was those very inky black eyes that I saw in those visions every time. Strands of black combed through the straight gray hair creeping out from his hood, lying beside the wisps of his beard. An image I had never been able to escape.
The guards forced us into a line before him.
I swallowed down the hard knot of fear lodged in my throat.
The slender man towering over us spoke. “I am the Prophet of the Valley,” his voice boomed. Echoes of his words bounded around us. “The gods awakened me in the night with a vision of their enemies’ faces no more. Ash and charred skin replaced their blaspheming mouths.”
Beside me, Leif’s hands twitched into fists.
“We will cleanse your people with your lifeblood. In two weeks’ time, when darkness falls and the moon consumes the sun, we will seal the souls of your innocents and cleanse the Valley with a mass sacrifice.”
An eclipse was coming. The Prophets always knew when they’d come, but closely guarded the secret. This was really it. My entire life, visions of the eclipse and the Prophet had loomed over me. Visions of my blood pooling on the stage as I died. I could not leave my people behind like this. I wouldn’t. I would save them.
Burning washed over my entire body, out of my control.
The ground beneath me darkened into wood planks. The dirt I stood upon looked like a layer beneath another. I shifted slowly into that place, caught between now and a future I’d long dreaded.
No! I had to stay here. As much as I wanted to escape, going there was even worse.
Fire that no one else would be able to see licked the tips of my fingers. The flames burned up my hands and over my arms. I winced in pain, holding back my scream.
The Prophet’s inky eyes stared into mine here in his village and in the place that haunted me in my visions—the same eyes from two different times.
The village snapped back in place. No flames. No heat or pain. I was among my people once more. A gasp shuddered my shoulders. The terror of a death that had loomed over me since childhood clawed for the softest parts of my soul, sinking into flesh torn open time and time again. As swiftly as I’d slipped into the future, my mind drifted, the tightness in my body faded, the fear blurred, and I could hide so deeply within myself that no one would be able to see me. Not even myself. Couldn’t think about it. Couldn’t feel it.
But I could survive. I could survive anything, no matter how it shredded me.
My people needed me to stay strong.
“You will be a sacrifice to the gods,” the Prophet said. “Then your people will go free.” He ripped the rope down and the thick canvas fell to the ground in a wave.
There stood our people: the children, the elderly, the innocent. The young mother and her sons who lit the town lanterns every morning, the old man who loaded my bag with sweet bread when I went to train, the children—so many children—hiding beneath the arms of every adult. Our innocents stood with hands clasping one another, mouths closed obediently, tears shining against the red of the torchlight, though none of them dared utter a sound.
And sweet Rune, clinging to his daddy on the stage, staring at Leif beside me, silently begging for their family to be put back together again. Begging me to keep my promise to protect them, always.
Of all the lies I’d ever believed or told, this was the worst.
Tears blurred my view of them. Beside me, Leif leaned forward, as if physically drawn.
“Step out of line, and it will be your people who pay.” The Prophet marched off the stage, abandoning us with his threat and our innocents out of reach.
Fire smoldered within me with nothing to burn except my tender insides.
I would kill him. No matter what it took.
It would be a slow, miserable death.
CHAPTER TWO
Shackles rang like temple bells. Four warriors knelt in a circle on the dusty ground in the cell across from mine, shaking their shackles as they chanted in prayer.
I wouldn’t break it to them that the gods had never been concerned with our suffering, despite that their endless supplication woke me every time I dozed off.
“We have thirteen days left.” Leif’s gruff voice managed to soften the hardness of the dirt floor. “Just thirteen before we’re sacrificed at the eclipse. No one wants to spend it listening to this.”
He should leave them be. We were all terrified. I’d managed to numb myself to it while in this cell, like when I’d wash blood from my hands in the winter after a long battle. That was the most dangerous pain. The kind that was too damaging to even feel.
It was also when I fought best.
A draft crept in through tears in the thatched roof. I shivered. The jailhouse had cells lining both sides of a wide hallway. They’d separated our eighty warriors into groups of ten with guards posted in the hall. Except our cell was the only one with a guard inside. One who’d brought in a sharpening stone and a leather bag of weapons, and, yes, tended to swords while we sat only a few feet away. Our shackles were linked and anchored to the ground, so we couldn’t get close enough to steal his weapons. Still, daring.
Our best were in our cell: the chief, her commanders, and her most trusted warriors. My two closest friends remained beside me. Leif and Wren. Some of the best warriors I knew. The Prophet may have been afraid to leave us alone without someone close enough to hear our whispers.
Chief Kaid spoke with us now, using a code I hoped the guard wouldn’t decipher. It sounded as if she only speculated about why demons would work with the Prophet and how the gods would react. About what the holy ones on the Mountain of the Gods would do. The Prophet hadn’t used his own power against us—one of the only limitations the gods placed upon these leaders who had their divine powers. But he’d indirectly done so by having the demons attack. Had he made a pact to stop hunting them if they became his shadow army? The Prophet had made such a public spectacle of executing all the demons he found.
Throughout the conversation, the chief’s index finger twitched with each word she wanted us to pay attention to.
No moves tonight. We needed to plan. Needed to learn why the demons helped the Prophet and how many more there were. Should not give in to despair.
Normally, Leif would have been in the thick of the conversation, but he only stared blankly at the ceiling. I reached for him and then stopped. No comfort could ease wounds like this. It would be better to focus on making my own plans.
The Prophet of the Valley was the most powerful in Skia Hellig. Though the Fjellfolk of the mountain and the Flatlanders proclaimed their Prophets to be the greatest, all Helligeans feared Eskel the Ruthless more than any others. I only had one option: finally break this damn curse. Even with my power restored, the battle against the Prophet and his people seemed impossible. But I was not allowing my people to die here.
When the instructors, thought of as holy ones by the common man, sealed my power, they forbade me from returning to the Mountain of the Gods where I had trained. To step foot there would mean certain death, they said. The gods largely left our world to its own devices, but my instructors claimed they would intervene in situations such as this. The moment I reached the Mountain of the Gods, it was possible they would strike me dead. I hated that place anyway, and had no desire to return there. I’d been convinced I would find a way back to my power on my own.
But the mountain always had a way of energizing me. Over the years, the inklings of my power had grown, so that even though I could not wield it, I had managed to use trace amounts. The mountain could give me the boost I needed to push through this curse. If the gods tried to kill me, I would simply have to survive. What other option was there? I didn’t have time to waste trying to find my power. I had to return to my past and face the curse head-on, even if it meant certain death. It would be better to die fighting for my people than at the hands of the Prophet in captivity.
After what I’d done back then, though, the instructors and the gods would surely do all they could to finish me. My banishment had been the only mercy they would extend. As long as I lived life as a normal warrior and kept all I knew secret, they would leave me be.
