The Embodied Trilogy
JB Dutton
YA Urban Fantasy/Sci-Fi
July 11, 2016
The Embodied trilogy is an unusual web of adventure, romance,
fantasy, and science fiction.
Book one, Silent Symmetry, introduces smart, plucky Manhattan prep
school student Kari Marriner, who becomes aware that mysterious aliens
called the Embodied and their pseudo-religion, the Temple of Truth, have been
influencing her family’s life for decades. As she falls for Cruz, a boy at
school, and meets warring Embodied siblings Noon and Aranara, Kari starts to
question her emotions and finds herself ensnared in a mystery that reaches
further than she could possibly have imagined.
In book two, Starley’s Rust, a charismatic young English artist named Starley, who is plagued by race memories of the Embodied, convinces Kari that he can find her missing mother if she flies to Paris with him to draw out her kidnappers. But the Embodied seemed to have vanished, and now there’s a new, more terrifying visitor from the Dark Universe – a Thoth high priest in the form of a dragon. Kari soon discovers the mind-blowing extent of the Embodied beings’ involvement in human history and her own family’s tragic past.
In the trilogy’s thrilling conclusion, Diamond Splinters, Kari has
a heart-wrenching choice to make: rescue her mother or save the Earth. And her
only hope to figure out a solution is to team up with the one person she can
never trust. When a submarine trip to the bottom of the Hudson River ends in
death and disaster, Kari is scarred, both emotionally and physically. She wants
to run and hide, but digs deep to find new sources of inner strength. As the
storm of the century hits New York, a child’s life hangs in the balance and
Kari gambles everything in a final confrontation with the genocidal Thoth.
Excerpt:
The sun was setting behind the buildings. A big barn with half the
roof missing. A grain silo. A couple of smaller shed-type buildings, one with
no door, the other with the door hanging off its hinges. And a farmhouse.
Windows shattered. Front door gawping at me. I gulped and sent an ILY back to
Cruz. He liked those.
Then I had the strangest feeling. Like a
disruption in the atmosphere, but also in my mind. The air changed somehow, and
I heard a rumbling of distant thunder. I could have sworn that the fading
daylight got brighter for a few seconds. The hairs stood up on the back of my
neck. It made me stop moving. Then reality seemed to snap back to normal. I
kept going toward the farmhouse.
I saw something move.
The setting sun had backlit the barn so it was
hard to be sure what it was. A horse, I think. A big, black stallion moving
around in the barn.
My mind filled in the blanks. Probably a horse
that had escaped from a neighboring farm and made a new home for itself here.
Okay, cool. No mystery. Maddie must have seen it and her mind made it fit the
legend.
I lay Maddie’s bike down in the grass, careful
not to make a sound. I tiptoed toward the barn, not wanting to startle it. I
turned on the flashlight app on my phone. Clouds were gathering, the light was
fading. More distant thunder. I just needed to find it, take a photo and show
Maddie. Her grandfather would know what to do, how to capture it safely and
find its owner.
I entered the barn, still creeping quietly.
Ew. It certainly smelled like a barn. There was hay strewn around on the
ground. My phone flashlight was practically useless. It illuminated a patch,
like, five feet in front of me. In the dim light, I could make out a row of
stalls on each side and a hayloft up ahead with a ladder propped against it.
Now I thought about it, the smell was kinda
weird. I grew up around here and although I’d never spent any time on a farm, I
sensed that there was some kind of extra, non-farm smell here. Hard to
identify. But yucky and familiar all the same.
Was that an animal noise in one of the stalls
on the left? Or just the wind blowing through the holes in the walls? I crept
toward the stall very, very carefully. My hand holding the phone was shaking.
Come on, Kari. Get a grip. The sides of the stalls weren’t high enough to
conceal a horse. Unless it was lying down in the hay, of course.
I reached the stall where I thought I’d heard
the noise. I waited a second, held my breath, then stepped in front of the
stall’s open gate. It was empty. And that’s when the hairs stood up on the back
of my neck again. But this time there was another, all-too-familiar feeling
along with it.
It was the feeling I had when Noon was in my
head. Yet not exactly the same. This was unpleasant, even disturbing, and
somehow stronger.
I spun around. In the barn doorway stood the
black stallion. Protruding from its forehead was a long, tapered horn. It really
was a unicorn. It raised its head and
my mind felt like a heavy blanket had been draped over it. It eyed me
purposefully. My irrational fear as a little girl came flooding back,
multiplied by a million. I almost peed my pants. Was this a bad dream? Maybe I
would wake up surrounded by My Little Pony’s in my 8-year-old’s bedroom?
If only…
The unicorn took a step forward. The feeling
in my head got even stronger and now I could swear that I heard the name Noon
repeating over and over. Not his voice, just his name. Was the unicorn
Embodied? I didn’t get a chance to wonder about this because now the feeling in
my head was becoming worse… painful. I was convinced that my mind was being
probed by this astonishing creature. In the space of a few seconds, the pain
increased and so did the repetition of the name Noon until it was so
excruciating that I felt like screaming. I put my hands to my temples and
opened my mouth. As I was about to close my eyes, I saw the unicorn start to
charge toward me.
Despite the pain, I managed to fling myself to
one side and into the empty stall just before it reached me. It galloped past
and I heard it stop. My head was still throbbing. I staggered to my feet, one
fist still pressed to my temple. Maybe I could make a break for it.
The unicorn appeared in front of me, blocking
the stall entrance. I was totally trapped. I looked around in desperation. A
broken wooden handle was poking out from a pile of hay in one corner. I grabbed
it and pulled out a pitchfork. The unicorn advanced into the stall, its head
lowered so that its horn was aimed directly at my head. The pain coursed
through my brain like a river of electricity.
I swung the pitchfork at the unicorn’s head. I
missed, but it backed up, startled. I swung again. It made a snuffling sound
and stepped back further.
“LEAVE ME ALONE!” I screamed.
The unicorn cocked its head to one side like
it was listening to me. The pain in my brain diminished.
I swung again and shouted the same thing.
The unicorn drew itself up to its full height
and then something even more incredible happened. It raised its tail. But this
was no stallion’s tail. It was like a huge peacock tail, shimmering with shades
of black, gray, and silver. The tail fanned out, probably ten feet wide, and
despite the pain in my head, I lowered the pitchfork, just standing there in
awe. What was this being? It seemed to possess incredible power and at the same
time be unimaginably beautiful. In fact, it was all the more terrifying because it was so beautiful.
About the Author
After graduating from film school in London, England, JB Dutton emigrated
to Montreal in 1987, where he still lives with his two young children and their
even younger goldfish. He spent over a decade as a music TV director before
moving into the advertising industry as an award-winning copywriter for clients
such as Cirque du Soleil. JB Dutton has written novels, short stories, blogs,
screenplays and a stage play. He also writes adult fiction under the name John
B. Dutton.
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