SEVEN thousand days had passed like it was just seven years. But the fire that grazed the Marble Seat had not passed without scarring men.
It was twenty solid years since the Third Prince fell in war, as he battled for the throne by the fire in his eyes.
But here already he was back and faster. He returned as a fierce sweeping wind. And people called him Adonai, the Fourth Heir.
For he was the Wind that the Fire caused.
Chapter 1
A WILD rider sped his horse in a mad chase. He flew and leapt him over bales of hay across fields dead and deserted. He rushed with a gasping pace towards a haunted place.
The man was garbed in a thick coat worn over a robe. His girdle was of scarlet wool, along with the band he braced his head with.
Then as the end of his coat and hair blew after him, it was a commanding air that poured behind him. The kind that told every hurdle to bend.
This man was in no mood to stall or stop. So, although he stirred his stallion ahead of a company of his servants, he did no talking about what he was scaling those hills for.
Those deserted heights of the prosperous country. No, he owed nobody that sort of explanation.
Now it had been two decades since Israel lost the Third Son of her reigning king. And every year ever since, this grown man had taken it upon him to comb everywhere to find him.
But everybody lost someone in the Third Heir who died twenty years before. When he ended up killed, soon after his quest for his father’s throne turned a huge conquest.
Indeed, everybody lost a soul in the fallen prince.
Yet it was just the twentieth anniversary of S’alom’s death this day; and not a soul kept his wake or remembrance.
Not one person looked for him in the tomb and graveyard. Except this one, the tough seeker with the chase of a wind.
Now he kept the memorials every year in the things he did. He paid his tribute by searching the places the prince had walked.
But this man wasn’t looking for the dead entombed already. No, he was looking for something he thought precious. And he did those memorials digging for it.
Now the man arrived that haunted house he’d gone to see. He halted right in front of it, as his servants dragged to a stop too.
He jumped down from his horse, a thud hitting the ground. His men were down with him the next moment, and everyone stood staring at the structure.
That place was somewhere this searcher hadn’t considered before. He’d searched and tumbled down S’alom’s house in the city many times.
He’d even travelled as far as Geshur on the northern borders, where the prince had stayed with his maternal kinsmen when he was banished.
Yes, he had shamed what people call shame; and tumbled down everything the dead owned in a bid to find what he left behind.
But in those twenty years, no thought could get him close down there. Close to that place called the genesis of all the woes.
The desperate chaser breathed a sigh right then, as something told him he’d finally arrived.
For it was the cursed farmhouse in the countryside of Baal Hazor. Where the Third Heir of David had slain the First One.
And now that the seeker arrived, he stood a force to fear in Israel; but no one knew.
And he was the Fourth Heir, the next to power.
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