Chapter 1

Groggily Tamara stirred opening her eyes and silently glancing around herself taking in her surroundings. She had been stripped to her small cloths and shackled. The cuffs around her wrists were etched with runes that pulsed deep blue. As she reached within to access her Magik she found it blocked by some unseen force.

Tamara was on her first solo Realm Shift seeking to find and bind a Familure to herself as the final test to become a journeyman RealmWalker, when she shifted into the Shadow Realm at the very last second she lost her concentration on the spell guiding her due to the excitement of finally doing a Shift on her own without her Master Eucerne Watching over her back. She had done this thousands of times under his watchful eye and should not have made the mistake that she did but such is the follies of youth.

Tamara had picked the Shadow Realm to hunt for her Familure because wile not the strongest of the creatures of the Other Realms, the inhabitant of the Shadow Realm tended to be the most cunning and specifically the Meir, whom look a lot like the lynx from home except in the place of a fur coat shadow boiled like frozen flame along their bodies and they had large pointed ears twice the size of what one would expect on a normal cat.

Tamara had planned to take all the Kahda she had begged borrowed and scraped together on her many trips throughout the Realms with Eucerne, as he taught her the craft of the RealmWalker, to head to one of the lesser trade hubs in the Shadow Realm and buy a young Unbound Meir to take as her Familure.

Instead of Finishing the shift where she planned fully equipped and within the nonaggression zone of the trade hub, Tamara shifted in several miles away and the backlash of the spell gone wrong knocked her unconscious.

"Oh Fuck" Tamara mutters to herself as a massive Wraith floated over to her lifting her off the ground by the shackles. As other wraiths of similar size did the same thing with the other prisoners scattered about the clearing where they had apparently spent at least one night.

As Tamara hung suspend from the cuffs held by one massive arm of the wraith a short balding man road up on a usk the large lizard commonly used as a mount in the Shadow Realm. The six wraiths formed 2 ranks behind the man on his large lizard mount and the caravan started moving quickly towards a city that could barley be seen off in the distance of the gray landscape.

The caravan of what Tamara now understood were slavers slowed then stopped a the gates of the trade hub that was Tamara's original destination she looked around seeing it from a new perspective, that of a slave being delivered rather than the apprentice of a Realm Walker few would be willing to challenge and fewer able to actually win that challenge, the trade hub had a much more ominous appearance this time around.

Chuckling to herself in morbid humor Tamara realized the irony that she came here to capture a Familure and she herself became the captured. Returning her attention to her surroundings she can see the Gate Guardians, Large Golems built and maintained by the Shadow Lord that held dominance of this hub, inspecting the caravan as if they knew this slaver was carrying contraband and they were going to find it. The guardian reached her and paused Tamara felt Magik pulse over her but without access to her own she was unable to determine what the spells were.

Quickly the Guardians completed the inspection and waved the caravan through. As the caravan traveled through the streets of the hub Tamara tried to get her bearings so that if she could manage to escape she would know how to escape the warren of streets back to the section of the hub she had previously traveled and eventually back to the safety of home. At this point she was willing to take the first unbound creature she came across once she got free and travel back home to the warmth of Eucerne's Tower.