by A N Sandra
DAWN OF REVELATION
Living Relics Series 1
A.N. SANDRA
For Lori Osburn Jeter
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
CHAPTER 1
Ancient Earth
Barden… Barden… Barden! Where are you? Barden!” Elania called into the garden as she frantically searched for her son. She was trying to sound calm and not frighten him into deeper hiding, but her heart was racing.
She had already turned her luxurious stone home inside out looking for him, but he was nowhere to be found inside. Now she was squashing the squash in her desperate attempt to find him outside. Her servant woman was standing guard at the entrance waiting to seize him if he returned to the house. Elania had little hope that Barden would simply turn back up, tired of his adventure and wanting a snack, like an ordinary child. Barden was not at all ordinary.
The heat outside was blistering her fair skin and the sun hurt her blue eyes, but Elania didn’t care about herself as she smashed through cabbages and swatted pomegranates in her search. Barden was the most important thing to her and Rory, and if she lost him… if she lost Barden, what would Rory think? She had never been good enough for him, never been worth the sacrifices he made to be with her. If Rory didn’t love her life wouldn’t be worth living at all.
A large golden rabbit nibbled at leafy greens a row away, glancing at Elania’s manic search with only casual interest. Somehow the rabbit knew it was safe from harm today, no matter how much it ate. Elania had to stop herself from marching over and kicking the rabbit high into the air in frustration as it kept chewing while she thrashed about among the vegetation. Elania had never hurt an innocent creature in her life, but sleep deprivation was weighing on her, turning her into someone she couldn’t recognize. She had just reached deep sleep when Greeja, her serving woman, had woken her up to announce that she hadn’t turned her back, yet Barden was missing. Again.
When she found Barden she might have to tie him up to keep him from running off so she could sleep. She was feeling desperate enough to do it, but that would involve showing him how to tie things. Anything she demonstrated to Barden only had to be shown once before he grasped the concept completely. If she tied him up today, tomorrow she might find herself tied up. A vine whipped across Elania’s face as she ventured into the vineyard, and she angrily ripped at it before tripping over another vine growing along the ground. She was in the dirt, covered with plant debris, and she thought maybe she had twisted her ankle.
“Mother, are you, all right?” Barden looked down at her with concern in his beautiful amber eyes. He was clean in spite of the adventures he must have been having, and even his dark curls were unmussed, framing his plump face perfectly. He was the most beautiful child she had ever seen. It was easy to suppose he was the most beautiful child that would ever exist.
“Where were you?” Elania scrambled to her feet, feeling a flash of relief that she could stand on both of them, before seizing him up to her bosom as he struggled against her embrace. As well he should. She was dirty, sweaty, and jittery. He was fresh and bright. As always, simply touching him eased her anxiety greatly. Her fears ebbed away even as he squirmed down from her arms.
“I wanted to see the lights!” Barden told her. “They were flashing!”
The lights… Elania tried to think what he could have meant. It was broad daylight, there were no fires or stars… Then she realized the battle must be close. He could see it though she could not. Gripping his hand firmly, she pulled him back toward their house.
“You don’t need to hold my hand!” Barden said indignantly as they stumbled through vegetation. “I can hold my own hand!”
“I am holding your hand to keep you safe, not to keep your hand warm,” Elania told him. “You could have been hurt!” She didn’t know how to explain to him that a war was going on all around them, that the battles were unseen, and that they needed to stay inside their home. The enemy would love nothing more than to destroy Rory’s beautiful young son.
“Hurt?” Barden had never really been hurt. He didn’t understand the concept. Things that caused an ordinary child pain would never affect him. But he was mortal, even if his father was not, and he would die if he were injured severely enough, just like any human. His biggest sorrow so far in life was not getting as much honey and current pudding as he would like.
Elania was too tired to explain about the pain humanity bears to a ten-month-old child, even if that child was mostly as developed as if he were four or five. Elania couldn’t have explained mortal suffering to another soul, so there was no chance it would happen right then. A normal five-year-old would have some sense of danger, but Barden did not seem to have any at all, just like the infant he was. He had eaten a somewhat poisonous decorative plant earlier in the week because it looked really green, and Rory had managed to save him with otherworldly knowledge. The week before that he had almost drowned in the fountain four times. The bubbles! Rory had dismantled the fountain when it became apparent that Barden could not resist it. Previously Rory removed a flag from the gate when Barden scaled the stone wall to an alarming height trying to touch the waving fuchsia silk. Like a bird!
“We need to go in now,” Elania said firmly. Barden frowned, but stumbled beside her, tripping along cheerfully with no idea he was in trouble. His legs were shorter than hers, but Barden kept up with Elania as they mounted the carved granite stairs.
“There you are!” Greeja cried, stepping down from the doorway to hug Barden fiercely. She was exhausted and had used energy she didn’t really have in the panic of trying to find him. Greeja staggered a bit as she stepped back from the embrace. Elania could see that she drew relief from her stress by embracing the boy. His aura wasn’t nearly as powerful as Rory’s, but touching him was just slightly intoxicating. Greeja was a slightly plump young woman with a huge smile and kind brown eyes that often got lost under the messy brown hair she could never quite contain.
The two young women fed Barden a large piece of fruit and tried to decide how they would proceed with the rest of the day. Neither of them had slept much for several days. There were no reinforcements to bring in, they were just going to have to do something extreme—
“Rory!” Elania squealed like the teenage girl that she had recently been. Somehow he appeared where he had not previously been visible, filling the kitchen doorway with his muscular frame. His features were bold although perfectly chiseled, his brown hair shoulder length, and his eyes almost defied description. She rushed to him with abandon.
Rory reached over and pulled Elania close, leaving Greeja a complete outcast, as if she were of no consequence at all. The two of them shared scorching passion that could never be understood by those who had not felt it. Those who had felt a similar passion wouldn’t wish it on anyone else, under any circumstances at all. Elania was driven by a deep want of Rory that was meant for worship, not for sexual desire. The unnatural intensity seemed to pull her very bones from the marrow. Rory, on the other hand, was consumed by base and carnal feelings toward Elania that an eternal being is never supposed to feel; yet he did. With deep regret Rory defied nature to take on a mortal body to consummate his passion with Elania. He never told her what unspeakable things he had done to bring their frantic wants to fruition. She had fears and suspicions but did not examine them.
T
he acts of their passion brought Elania great joy, Rory deep satiety, and further entangled them in unseen snares that they could not escape. Barden eventually came from their intimacy and neither of them could help but adore him even more than each other, loving the remarkable baby who matured at a shocking rate, more quickly than they could have imagined.
“You’re here,” Elania murmured into his chest. She didn’t have the courage to admit that if he had not come back she had no idea how to keep Barden alive for the rest of the day because she was losing her senses from lack of sleep. When Rory was there he watched Barden so that she and Greeja could catch up on needed rest.
“The battle is more treacherous than ever,” Rory said shortly. “I brought a companion for Barden, from my realm. His new guardian will keep him safe when we cannot.”
This was not what Elania expected to hear and she drew back in surprise as Rory made a discreet hand motion and a large animal covered in rich deep brown fur appeared in their stone living space.
Elania instinctively shrieked in terror at the size of the beast, but very quickly she felt her pulse slowing, and her emotions smoothing out. When she caressed her other pets she often felt a sense of wellbeing. This creature from another sphere brought her a sense of peace right away. The sort of mental tranquility that she usually achieved when lost in work at her loom or sewing settled over her like an invisible blanket.
From out of the corner of her eye Barden exploded on the scene. But instead of running for his beloved father, previously the center of his universe, he ran to the creature with obvious joy. Under ordinary circumstances Elania would have reached to protect Barden from the monstrous animal in front of her. She felt no fear, however, as Barden dug his fingers into the thick fur of its leg and squeezed the huge (bear?) in a loving embrace. Barden had no sense of fear at the best of times, but it was touching how quickly he took to the great creature. The boy was almost two cubits tall and he did not come to the bear’s shoulder. He clung to the bear’s muscular foreleg with a rapturous look on his face.
“Can you just stay for a bit?” Elania asked Rory hopefully. Both his presence and the aura projected by the huge beast in their dining area eased her state of exhaustion. The pull of her libido began to fire the way it always did when she touched Rory.
“No.” Torment was clearly written across Rory’s very handsome face, his chiseled features were not animated the way they always had been when Elania was with him. “The battle is worse, the damage is worse. I don’t know what can be done to win… I shouldn’t have left to bring Ursu to you. All of us who have children here brought guardians for our offspring and the battle got even worse.”
“Oh.” Elania had nothing else to say. She had never seen Rory look anything less than ready for the next thing he meant to do. His admission of inadequacy was sobering.
“Ursu is part short faced bear, part animal spirit from my own realm. You can sleep and rest while Ursu is with Barden,” Rory promised Elania. He kissed her deeply, his warm lips touching more than her lips. The current of electricity they generated reached her soul. As she clung to him, he dissipated into the atmosphere.
“Go to bed,” Elania told Greeja, coming back to herself. “I feel better. I will stay with Barden.”
Greeja’s worn countenance had picked up when Ursu entered the room, but she retreated to her bed with a grateful smile, leaving Elania, Barden, and the enormous bear together. A strange family moment to be sure, but none of their family moments were ever on the scale of normal activity.
“We did have our wonderful years.” Elania remembered Rory’s kiss before he vanished back to the battle.
There was so much that she didn’t understand about Rory’s life, the realm he had come from, the rules he had broken to enter her plane of existence. But she had never needed to understand. His presence diffused any anxiety, and she only wanted to be with him, not to understand why things worked the way they did, or how they did. She was a mortal, after all. She was not expected to interpret matters of other realms. Mortals were very new to the earth and did not expect to have eternal answers.
“I don’t understand all that is happening, but I remember our wonderful times,” Elania reminded herself.
Reclining on a silken eating cushion watching Barden touching and poking the huge bear and becoming acquainted with the beast, she remembered seeing Rory for the first time. Really seeing him. Before seeing him she sensed him sometimes. Walking by the sea, or through the forest, she would feel a sense of euphoria, just for a few minutes. Later she would learn that those were the times Rory thought her the loveliest thing he had ever encountered and would hover by her, aching to hold her. When he had come to her in physical form, as the most handsome man she could have imagined, she had given herself to him completely. Her parents, her siblings, her household duties, the man her parents meant her to wed were all nothing to her. She had abandoned them all for Rory and she would do it again.
Rory was just as taken with Elania as she was him. The charms she held for him never faded the way attraction fades for a mortal man once he possesses the feminine object of his desire. The two of them explored their passions and realized that existence without the other was not to be thought of.
With skill that Elania had never imagined, Rory and his friends shaped and moved huge quartz stones, building the two of them a large stone house that absolutely gleamed. He helped her make bedding and she wove basket-like furniture for it with willow branches using techniques that he taught her. It was the finest house she could have imagined, perfect for the two of them. Rory had helped his friends from his own realm of origin make houses for their own human partners, houses that were otherworldly also. Valon built a house of sand that he heated and spun so that it was smooth, glossy and almost transparent, but not quite, for Lexana. Randon wove a house for Xara of mosses and twigs that looked as though it had grown in the forest.
They were a small community, Rory and his friends who had taken physical form to share pleasures with human women, but they had been a deliriously happy one. The eternal beings had been fighting the Unseen War with beings from other realms for lengths that could not be measured by time understood by mortals. Their war, for reasons Elania didn’t know, was at a lull and the companions delighted in the respite.
Pleasure with women was not the only way Rory and his friends indulged their physical senses. Besides the houses they constructed by means beyond mortal imagination, they also created food and spirits to satiate deep appetites and cause delicate yet deep intoxication. They were masters of gently roasting and seasoning meats and vegetables. They made mead from all kinds of fruits. They had competitions to create the best of everything, often eating and drinking for hours at a stretch. The physical bodies they had created for themselves never suffered the ill effects of gluttony. With instruments designed in other realms they created music with unlimited power to fuel emotion. Ordinary music was ruined for Elania. She felt dreamy just remembering the enchanting themes created with melodies from the wide universe.
There were games they all played that went on for days and days. Hide and seek games in lush green forests, ball games on wide beaches, and games of wit around evening fires. But even for these men, the lavish revelry jarringly ended when their children arrived. Lexana had been the first mortal to conceive a child with her mate, then Elania, and last Xara had grown large with child.
At first the group of friends was consumed with love for their miraculous offspring and quit spending time together. Later they had been too preoccupied with the spectacular growth curve their babies were on and could not take their eyes off their children to socialize.
Lastly, the Unseen War found Rory, Valon, Randon, and others like them that Elania never met, and threatened their new lives. The men had gone back to the war that had searched them out, and their mortal mates who had been chosen for their beauty and fun loving countenance were left to care for remarkable children they didn’t understand, in magnificent home
s that felt haunted by the lovers that were gone.
“He is my friend!” Barden announced to Elania as the huge bear allowed Barden to ride on his back around the room. The bear moved carefully and Elania could see that the bear was in charge, but letting Barden think that he was in control. A very young boy and his gigantic pet bear getting to know each other.
“Yes he is,” Elania said tranquilly. Barden was fed and entranced with his new pet. The two of them loitered together on the floor in some sort of secret-telling huddle. For the first time ever, without Rory next to her, she felt completely safe and secure. Elania felt herself slipping into sleep, there on her eating cushion. Even though she had meant to wait for Greeja to wake up from several hours of sleep before indulging in any herself, Elania felt dreamland tugging at her edges. It pulled her in. She succumbed into the cushion while Barden and the bear became best friends.
Everything here is fine,” Rory sighed with deep relief. He collapsed onto the bed he had shared with Elania earlier in their lives. Now Elania mostly slept there alone. Rory hadn’t been home for weeks and Barden was closer to his bear than he was to her, but Ursu kept Barden safe, and his very presence kept the slight feeling of comfort that Rory brought to any situation permeating through their home.
Elania did not think everything was fine, necessarily. Living without Rory was just existing even though her love for Barden and Ursu’s presence kept her from climbing the walls while he was gone. The heightened awareness that Rory brought to her life was postponed until he was with her. It was one thing to understand that Rory was fighting a battle that was outside time as she knew it, but it was another thing to live without Rory for long stretches. She filled her time weaving, gardening, playing with Barden and Ursu, and cooking with Greeja. Those things kept her occupied, but without Rory, life was only partly lived. Without Barden and Ursu she would have been despondent in the house that had been created for laughter and sex.