Black as diamond, p.1
Black as Diamond, page 1
Praise for
Black as Diamond
“Black as Diamond is haunting and ethereal, balanced with the warmth of found family. This is a cast of characters you are bound to fall in love with as they fumble their way toward one another, seeking connection in a world that is falling apart.”
—Andrea Stewart, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Bone Shard Daughter
“U. M. Agoawike combines truly epic world building and breathtaking action to create a wholly original, harrowing dark fantasy. Black as Diamond is a gut punch of a debut novel.”
—Chelsea Abdullah, author of The Stardust Thief
“With vivid prose, bone-rattling action, and a queer romance as tender as it is thunderous, Black as Diamond is a dark fantasy gem from the glittering heart of the genre.”
—Sophia Slade, author of Nightstrider
“This is the sort of fantasy I love. Layered, detailed world building, lush prose, lovable but flawed found family, and a central magical mystery tying it all together. Black as Diamond is a triumph!”
—M. H. Ayinde, author of A Song of Legends Lost
“A wickedly original epic fantasy bound by the familiar threads of friendship, family, and fate. Agoawike’s masterful worldbuilding is in rare balance with characters who shine bright within a world where nobody quite fits, and nothing is as it seems. Dark but boldly hopeful, Black as Diamond is fantasy at its most brilliant!”
—Fiona Fenn, author of The Crack at the Heart of Everything
Published by Ezeekat Press, an imprint of Bindery Books, Inc., San Francisco
www.binderybooks.com
Copyright © 2026, U. M. Agoawike
All rights reserved. Thank you for purchasing an authorized copy of this book and for complying with copyright laws. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews, without express written permission of the publisher.
NO AI TRAINING: Any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
Acquired by Jaysen Headley
Edited and designed by Girl Friday Productions
www.girlfridayproductions.com
Cover illustration and hand lettering by Christian Chang
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-967967-00-1
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-967967-01-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data has been applied for.
First edition
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For anyone terrified of living up to legacy, heritage, or expectation
I
In the
Rough
Asaru
The bodies were fresh. They hadn’t been dead more than a day.
They were strewn about the room, the corpses. Six corpses frozen in the throes of death like grotesque statues of onyx.
Darkening the doorway of the embassy, Asaru loomed—and saw only death. Sunlight streamed around him, his silhouette painting the ground with long shadows. He glanced back at the valley in the distance. Sterrock was filled with tiny dots, as humans, Estyrians, bustled by unaware. His ears twitched at the faint din of their laughter, chatter—life.
His hands were clenched so tight a thin line of blood welled where his claws pierced the skin. As he stepped inside, the furred tip of his tail whisked at his heels. Rigid brown wings dappled in gray and white were tucked close to his back.
The floors were wet with a tacky black substance, which stained his feet as he examined the embassy. Both the interior and exterior had been built to resemble an Aedyton temple, a slice of the island incongruous with the Estyrian landscape. Four round columns stood at the middle of the room, painted with symbols in an eggshell white that matched the color of the walls. On either side of the room lay overturned tables and seats, and sunken into the far wall was a false door with several trunks beside it.
In a certain light, the embassy actually resembled a charnel house more than a temple, decorated with bodies rather than jars of ash ornamented in gemstones.
Though his heart ached at the resemblances to home in every corner, Asaru refocused.
None of the bodies, at first glance, looked to be his brother, yet they were his kind, eresh keyel. Necks ringed in jewels that formed halos, limp tails, cracked horns, and wings—what was left of them—a broken menagerie.
This was the familiar part.
Unfamiliar were the creeping black marks speckling their arms and their cheeks. A faint scent clung to their flesh, sour like maggot-infested meat rotting in the heat. Terror was etched into their faces, eyes wide open. Some had their hands near their necks, reaching desperately for something in their final moments.
Asaru crouched by each body to confirm that none were Alvarys.
The four wearing broad collars of faience beads appeared to be ambassadors of Aedyton, recently sent over to do what they could to make life a little more bearable for those back home on the island. The other two, though . . . Asaru’s jaw worked as he rubbed the wejat tattooed on their inner wrists. The empty eye stared back at him, barely distinguishable from the hard material coating the dead skin as if it had been brushed in ink and frozen.
Their faces—he knew their faces. They made up half of the four members of the elite Tetrarchia. Both were missing the gems that should have formed their halos. Asaru tilted the head of one to peer at the bloody gaps left behind by the fallen stones. The threads of khetry that usually surrounded a body—the web of life that wove itself over the world, visible only to those who could manipulate it—had rotted away. Limp string curled like dry, gray worms away from the dead, while still-living threads clung that much harder to Asaru himself.
At the back of the man’s neck was a triangle of black diamond, still warm. Touching the gemstone didn’t burn Asaru like it would other eresh keyel—a trait that had always set him apart, since it was dangerous for his kind to encounter black diamonds. Death is a commonplace of life, he reminded himself. These were once his kin, his comrades. To see them in such a state, in such a strange land, tightened Asaru’s throat with remorse.
But these deaths were unnatural. Worse than unnatural.
He followed the dark liquid to the center of the room, where it was thickest, seeking out the source. A cracked vial was buried under a congealed mass of the substance, and when Asaru reached in to pluck it out, it felt distinctly like old blood. The vial, crafted from a single faultless piece of glass only slightly longer than a finger, had cracked in two, leaving little of the substance to examine. Raising the glass to the light, Asaru watched the way the spots of black clung to each other. The fluid reacted strangely, as if it were magnetic, unlike any substance he’d seen before.
Beneath the smell of rot lingered something else. Something he never thought he’d encounter, even as a warrior.
A curse.
Asaru dropped the vial. If that was truly what it was, there was the possibility it could spread. It might have already. Some curses could be disseminated through touching a cursed object. They were rare—a nuisance at best, fatal at worst. This was the first he’d ever seen in person.
He quickly strode to the false door, threw open the largest trunk, and hissed. It was empty, the Chronicler’s beacon nowhere in sight.
When the warden had tasked him with finding his brother, he’d been told the Tetrarchia’s last known plan had been to make their way to the Chronicler. If Alvarys and the other warrior weren’t among the dead, they must have escaped with the beacon. That was good, but not great.
He glanced back at the bodies and knew he couldn’t leave them in this state. Not without respect, not without some semblance of the proper rites, which they wouldn’t receive so far from home.
Khetry hummed as if sensing his intentions. Asaru grabbed the red strands in the air, manipulating them between his fingers as if they were silk on a loom. Like a spider’s web, the woven strands reverberated with the motion. Faint red lines shone, connecting him to the living world, and the living world to him. In rote motion, he brought his hands, palms flat and fingers threaded with khetry, to the sides of his jaw. Heat pulsated in the back of his throat as he cast the spell. It grew, from a bulb into a tongue of flame that enveloped his own. Fire spilled from his mouth and shot toward the bodies, drawn like a devouring beast.
Colors swirled to create a golden flame that consumed and cleansed. He spit out the last of the spell and watched the fire do what it did best.
“Your mind by Hukhetyel, your body by Chert Ouadjet, your aether by Khertote. Return home to dwell in the Red Web of Life once more.”
Asaru’s voice was thick with emotion and warped from the smoke that clung to the insides of his throat as if it were a refinery. Jaw clenched, he watched the fire spread hungrily. Flames danced in his eyes, turning the hazel suns bright. Soon Asaru stood amid a garden of heat and hurt, able to think only of his brother as he forced down this loss, squeezed it as small inside himself as he could. Emotions had to be contained, controlled, and commanded lest they derail his duty and compromise him.
His pointed ears flickered, picking up the footsteps of the White Sand soldiers who had escorted him from the Sea Gate. Only after he glared them into submission and, more disappointingly, fear did they stay behind to wait on either side of the embassy’s pylons.
“Everything all right, sinj—sinjorno!”
Asaru stepped outside and extended his wings, ignoring the frantic shouting of the soldiers as they tried to stop him. Their senseless racket slipped from his mind, like water streaming through cupped hands. Nobody could stop him—there was work to be done. With a powerful pump of robust wings, he soared into the clear Romian sky.
Both he and the embassy burned.
Wind across his cheeks, lightness singing in his bones, Asaru scanned the lands below. Even so far above, he noted the threads of khetry connecting him to every living thing on the earth and in the sky. Never again would his kin fly. And he was determined to find out why.
At the border where Sterrock Valley met the hinterlands, Rhodiola Palace came into view, perched on the outskirts as a symbol of humanity’s tentative control over nature. There, he would find the human king; there, he would find the start of his path, and answers.
Rhodiola Palace sprawled in a wide arc of manses columned with marble that cast an impressive shadow over the fountain at the center of its courtyard. Each manse was crowned with a dome of unmarked glass, and every inch of the structure spilled with the lush blooms of its namesake. Crimson rhodiolas clung together in massive bouquets that, even at Asaru’s height, smelled of wealth.
As the sun trailed beneath the horizon, preparing for dusk, Asaru descended in a scatter of dust. With hooded eyes, he traced the path that led around the courtyard fountain to the central manse, before landing among four sentinels of the Black Order.
Once their shock wore off, three of them drew their swords, their gazes as sharp as their steel. Leather straps across their armored chests held more blades. The fourth sentinel stepped forward, hand over her chest in salute. “Lieutenant Maruroze Silje, sinjorno. Where are the White Sand that were escorting you?”
Asaru ignored her, contemplating how much force it would take to bring down the doors behind them. The lieutenant repeated herself, and a bubble of irritation fizzed across his skin. They were not going to make this easy, not that humans historically had a habit of making anything easy.
The Sea Gate was a testament to that.
When she tried to speak again, he stopped her. “I do not care.”
In an instant, Asaru shifted his stance. Khetry wrapped around his wrists, invisible to the humans, as one of the sentinels charged. Asaru was quicker. He threw his arms forward, palms flat, to cast a simple but powerful air spell at the sentinels. Unable to react fast enough, the four were blown back by a barrage of sound, pinned against the ironwood doors. The doors groaned under the pressure, cracks forming along the edges.
Arms outstretched, wind gusting around his form, Asaru crept closer. He closed one hand around a thread and, with a motion like pulling rope, wrenched it over his shoulder. The humans went flying as if grabbed by the indelicate hands of a child. The doors bent, then burst, ripped from their hinges with frightening ease.
Groans of pain arose behind him.
Above, the sky was a bruised purple. Cold hands of dread warred with the anger within. An itch crawled up his nape as something prodded the edges of his mind for an entrance. He shook his head to focus.
Inside the manse, rows of wide-eyed humans watched as Asaru strode past. Ambassadors, dignitaries, nobles of all types and dress in the middle of discussions he couldn’t care any less about. Though his eyes flickered across their faces, he didn’t really see them. He had only one target.
Portraits of the seven past rulers of Estyria, each as regal and severe as the last, loomed high on either side of the throne room as he entered. In each space between the paintings was a sentinel standing like a column, weapon drawn. At the end of a narrow carpet spanning the length of the room, the king of Estyria sat upon his simple throne on a tiered dais. The king stared from behind the crossed swords of two sentinels at his sides. An arbalester behind the throne nocked a bolt and pulled back the winch on her crossbow.
To Asaru’s surprise, the king raised a hand to placate the sentinels. “Rest easy.”
After a long moment, and as if it pained them, the sentinels sheathed their weapons. While the swordsmen beside the king complied, the arbalester only lowered hers. The bolt sat loaded in the channel.
Silence, long and winding, filled the room. Then King Zaosha du Velanescu addressed Asaru directly.
“If we recall, sinjorno, the White Sand were meant to escort you from the Sea Gate to the embassy—not the palace.” Zaosha leaned forward and stroked his sparse beard. His gray-touched hair was braided into thick twists with a few strands draped loosely over his shoulders. A golden circlet rested above his brow with an opal so bright it could only have come from Aedyton. “What are you doing so far from the embassy?”
“Your Majesty!”
From the faceless crowd a man shot up. A human, Asaru noted, with salty black hair tied into a short tail and an ametrine brooch pinning his cloak over his shoulder. “Surely we—you—can’t be suggesting to let—”
“Sit down, Governor Devall.” The king almost sounded bored, his baritone tinged with what Asaru registered as a long-standing threat. The king turned back, looking amused, as if the uselessness of nobles was something they could commiserate over.
Instead the embassy burned in Asaru’s mind. From the blazing flame, red, red hot, a presence grew. Its unseen hand caressed his mind, testing, claws like needles that sent static along his senses. He clenched his fists but couldn’t feel his fingers.
Focus.
“Why have you disrupted high court with such fury?”
A barrage of thoughts—the bodies, the black, the beacon, his brother. Pain traveled down his spine and into his seizing hand as Asaru regarded the king.
“I found everyone in the embassy dead. All with the indicators of a curse.”
Someone gasped, several others murmured in shock. He held himself from rolling his eyes. They didn’t truly care about the eresh keyel. This was a spectacle, a play at empathy for them, and nothing more.
The numb static of his hands slowly spread to his legs, feet—everything that he was. He gripped his wrist, pressed his heels into the ground. His mind was a battlefield as the presence pushed and pushed and—Possession, he realized. Someone was trying to possess him. And he didn’t know how to fight the presence as it pawed at his vulnerabilities, prying into his thoughts with malevolent ease.
Zaosha tapped his chin. “A curse, you say. In our own realm? Curses are complex spells, are they not?” In the twilight, the king’s eyes seemed to glow gold. A thin stream of green smoke escaped the king’s mouth, visible only to eresh keyel. Only to Asaru.
The man was lying.
Asaru stared over the opal crown. Unbalanced, he staggered as he took a step forward, trembled against the unbearable pressure squeezing the margins of his skull. The room blurred, a fuzzy canvas of light. He shook his head to try to clear it, but the presence of the possessor increased. They exploited the vulnerabilities that left him raw from thoughts of his brother. Tamped down on his sense and self until he was at the mercy of their sole command.
“They are.” His words were faint and strained.
Static and pain. All he knew was static and pain. Then his body was no longer his. It was as though there was an impenetrable barrier between his mind and his actions. A nightmare he was horrifically all too aware of but could do nothing to wake from, his limbs bound like a living doll.
On light feet, Asaru dashed forward, too quick for the sentinels. He struck the one on the right with a quick jab to the throat that had them stumbling back, gagging. Then he pivoted and swiped the other sentinel’s leg, sending them tumbling. The movements felt distant, almost foreign in his own skin. No—he tried to drop his arms, tried to shake the static away. The possessor’s will, their mastery over him, was stronger, its control absolute. He was a useful tool and nothing more. He could hardly string together a thought, much less resist.
