The bird glared and blinked a golden eye.
‘If so requested, I’ll educate you wonderfully on worlds outside.’ Pieter flung his arms out. ‘From where I come, we care for your evolution.’
‘Care!’ mocked the bird.
‘If it is not your concern, so be it. I shall depart to my own world and bother you no more.’ Pieter knew he mustn’t linger. If he got too empathetic with the eagle’s singular-world consciousness, he could become mesmerised and trapped in that dimension. Then it would be a pretty shame, living in isolation and forgetting his traveller’s identity.
‘You have proven yourself to be deluded,’ snapped the bird. ‘Leave my sight at once, you nonsensical brat!’
The door of the Devic Great Hall opened. Alcor’s wiry hand plucked the elf up by the collar and whisked him from the eagle’s mountaintop world.
Alcor added Pieter’s visit there to a record, which indicated the type of assignment the elf had set himself. Each act of compassion towards another via the Dream Sphere earned a certain amount of Kindness Merits. The merits enabled sprites to wield magic in their waking state on Earth, although magic was more commonly termed beauty-creation. All assignments eventually gained accolades, celebrated regularly at Alcor’s Kindness Merits Ceremony, at which time the receiver was afforded a change. Some chose it to be bodily—many elves liked to be taller, thus becoming elfin adults—others chose aura expansion to match more challenging assignments. It was all a matter of choice. Whether physical or ethereal was entirely up to the chooser.
Two cherubs guided the elf boy to the Dawntide corridor. A faint wave from Alcor. A tumble over an insipid pink cloud. Lighter and flightier, passing day-fleeing sprites who wished him luck. The closer Pieter got to his sleeping self the more that horrible stuff called logic infringed on his Dream Sphere adventure, causing the two worlds to become neatly separated. Otherworld longings had been renamed dreams or non-reality by the golden-skinned invaders. Celestial freedom frightened them.
The only memory Pieter carried back to the dying fire in the forest of his night-time dwelling was of a bleak sky and the whisper of feathers. The memory was as dim as his recollection of a dream the day before: the disgruntled fellow with hair the colour of perished leaves. The fellow’s strange and cocooning chariot, one of those ridiculous wheeled boxes of the future, had amused Pieter greatly. He’d chuckled each time he’d recalled it, but apart from the odd man in an even odder vehicle, all else remained a mystery. Equally mysterious was whether he’d dreamt it at all. Perhaps the scenario was little more than a wondering, a fancy of his own invention.
Maleika’s recollection of her slumbering travels was a piece of the puzzle surrounding something she referred to as The Silvering. She handed Pieter his mug of Remembrance Essence. ‘Alcor says that in the distant future beauty-creation will be gone from the Earth.’
‘Unimaginable,’ said Pieter’s younger brother Kloory, another member of the Brumlynd clan sitting beside the campfire.
Maleika took a sip of Remembrance Essence and gazed longingly at the star-speckled sky. ‘There is hope, however. I now recall Alcor telling me that The Silvering will restore our currency of kindness.’
‘And what is The Silvering?’ asked Pieter.
‘The Silvering is a time of repair in the extreme future. It is expected to occur when the gold-tainted illusion of greed equalling lack and lack equalling greed has multiplied to an unbearable point.’
‘Hasn’t it already done that?’ grumbled Kloory.
‘Apparently not,’ said Maleika. ‘According to Alcor, beauty-creation will one day return. It will heal hearts of body-king inflicted despair once it re-emerges.’
Pieter quietly wondered how the people of the future would rediscover the magic that he and his fellow sprites often took for granted.
Cousin Croydee responded to Pieter’s musings and addressed his answer to Pieter’s mother. ‘I have heard this prophecy in the Dream Sphere also, Aunt Maleika. As I understand it, beauty-creation will be discovered by those with memory enough to recover devic wisdom, although for many aeons it will slumber unrecognised, deep beneath the soil of a faraway southern land.’
<><> V <><>
The next night, as campfire smoke rose and the planets above bounded into existence one by one—Jubilance in his golden ray and Venustus sparkling pink and silver, wielding their way around sleepy Luna—Maleika poured bottles of berry cider, tied them with leaf ribbon and combed Pieter’s hair with a pinch of waking dust. The elf boy, she noticed, was not so much his alert little self. Worry perhaps? A dreadful body-king bred disease!
Danger perpetually lurked near the Brumlynd clan. Since the body kings had settled for themselves a suitable niche of control, a quiet brand of lament had marred each return from slumber. Maleika had received sorrowful news two evenings earlier. Grudellan Palace courtiers had invaded the Wondalobs. Genetically-tampered troopers, who took the form of eagles each twilight to surveil the Grudellan Palace’s grounds, had stormed the sprites’ secret location. They had drained many of the rocks for their own purposes. Faerie clans keeping vigil, clans who’d managed to protect the sacred spring water for fifteen season-cycles, had been forcibly taken to the mines.
‘We have no choice other than to lessen our consumption of Remembrance Essence,’ Maleika had told her clan. ‘And so we shall only drink this again after the Clan Consolidation. Until all clans have gathered and agreed upon how often it can be drunk without depleting the Wondalobs, we shall not drink any.’
Pieter shook the starry dust from his hair and told Maleika he was off to the stream to see how two of his fellow clan members were faring. Maleika told him to say his five mantras before departing, reminded him to hum the auric protection song, then pointed to the owl in the tree who had succumbed to that ‘worry’ illness and couldn’t stop hooting—a sobering reminder to keep emotions pure.
She then packed in her bracken-leaf bag a small bottle of Remembrance Essence and three large bottles of berry cider in preparation for a brief journey of delivery to a sprite family at the other side of the forest whose access to the Wondalobs had always been limited.
When setting off, she turned and looked back at her larger flagon of stored Remembrance. Why had she poured the family a small bottle this time? ‘Because we are limited now,’ she told herself. ‘I am only being sensible.’ And yet, remorse at her own meanness continued to gnaw. The amount she had allowed her friends, a clan of seven, was far less than the amount she had allowed her own little clan. She returned to the flagon and filled a second bottle. ‘I have caught the contagion of lack,’ she concluded, ‘and now I’m resorting to greed.’ An adherence to the belief of deprivation nearly always drew sprites into clumps of misfortune.
On the way back from her errand, Maleika rediscovered at the other side of the forest a path leading through a winding cavern, a place she remembered well. As a child she played hide-and-seek there with the daffodil faeries.
The cavern’s atmosphere concerned her. No longer did it exude the scent of damp moss and mineral. Pervading the air was the faint odour of decay.
Maleika peered into the cavern doorway. Nothing there. And that was just it. Nothing! Nothingness did not feature much in the world these days and inevitably aroused suspicion if happened upon. Everything was gone from this cave.
Should she consider stepping in? Outer space to her people was far friendlier. Safer, too, than this bleak void. In the heavens, lightness and distance were obliquely understood. Planets and asteroids weren’t a puzzle to be solved. They were old friends visited via the Dream Sphere, all with their own bustling devic population. Celestial bodies weren’t perceived through a lens at the end of a cylinder and deemed globes of molten rock suspended in infinity. How the galaxies and their absence of floors and ceilings could be so baffling to those of the future was amusing indeed to the sprites.
‘Limited is three-dimensional thought, sadly limited,’ Maleika murmured. ‘Truth insists that w
orlds are within worlds, merely as the cells are within each earthly creature.’ Were not the cells of every life-form independent worlds of their own? And weren’t Earth’s peoples little more than a speck when viewed from a distance? ‘All of us links in a greater chain,’ she mused. ‘All ignorant of the immensity within and without.’
A physical field emptied of everything! To determine if any life-force existed in the cave’s etheric field, Maleika conjured a scattering of lemon and lilac lights, small and silver-edged, which she accessed from her supply of Kindness Merits.
Allowing the lights to guide her, she stepped in. Two goblin sprites crossed her path and sniggered at her, bony hands of grey cupping hollow mouths, hair like lava, eyes of black stone. Nodding pleasantly to them, Maleika shrugged and pressed on. Nothing as intangible as a goblin would deter her.
More eyes, a thousand eyes it seemed, blinked on like stars. Although unable to see these, Maleika could sense them. An emerald tinged blackness enveloped her. The lilac and lemon lights she’d called forth promptly vanished, the bothersome result of scanty Kindness Merits.
She became aware of foreboding sounds: whirring snarls and the scrape of scaled lids blinking. She peered over her shoulder. What sort of creatures lurked here? She had heard many chilling accounts of monstrous Grudellan carnivores. Sorcerers had created them from a dragon gene.
And then a tumbling rush of air like a wild spring gale whipped about Maleika’s skirts and flung her to the far side of the cave.
Uneasily, she rose to her feet.
‘Who is there?’ she called.
If only they were dragons! But dragons had been ridded from Elysium several season-cycles ago.
Maleika moved warily onward.
<><> VI <><>
Dragons had been savaged throughout countless season-cycles. Memories of their demise caused pain to Maleika. The last dragon she had seen was much distanced from the earth. Only its shell had remained; its spirit having fled far away to the Dream Sphere, for its physical self had been cruelly left to shed golden blood by the thorn thicket.
Oh, how the body kings had gloated! Fine power they’d gleaned from the dragons they ingested. And then these predators would try to harm each other, since abruptly and voluntarily ending another’s existence would only result in chaotic fates.
Dragon flesh, now imprinted on the body kings’ genetic map, caused the skin of its consumer to glow golden. All of them, even the newer ones, had skin of this tone. Without their native grey-blue colouring they looked odder than odd, as though they were dusty-hued snails intent on sporting shells of flame-orange, a silly disguise worn with pride.
Maleika’s thoughts, now muddied from these recollections, brought into the cave an army of bristly spiders the size of dinner plates. She whisked them back to their former homes with the blink-and-whistle technique and cautioned herself against creating negative fodder with her thinking, which poisonous creatures might be compelled to feed on.
An enormous bat soared to the cavern ceiling...yet was it a bat?
Doing her best to ignore the tremor of her shoulders, Maleika called, ‘I wish to make your acquaintance. Please come forth and introduce yourself.’
The phantom animal fluttered down, and the telepathic question that reached the elf woman was: ‘Do you mean to say you can truly see me?’
‘For certain,’ said Maleika to the still-vague form. ‘Why should I not? We all have our right to existence.’
‘Nay. Not I,’ the sad thing said. ‘Nor them.’
Turning, Maleika saw a number of filmy black wings. The sound of sobbing rose up and rippled through the cave. ‘You cannot be a dragon,’ she said. ‘And yet...’
‘Well, that I was, once.’ Becoming more visible was a creature with long-lashed, faded turquoise eyes. The rest of him was a sooty grey. The tiniest hint of silver shone through all that darkness, hardly discernible as dragon scales, the most splendid feature of the animal.
He sent her another thought, too muffled to comprehend. The only word Maleika received was nothing, and then he eyed her carefully as though doubting her awareness of his presence.
‘You’ll have to think harder,’ the elf woman said. ‘I can no longer intuit your words.’
But at that, the poor fellow became grief-stricken. He folded his long neck in half, the very weight of him seeming to sag to the ground. Maleika could no longer see him, try as she might.
Certainly she wanted to help. Why had he said he was a dragon ‘once’? Maleika would revisit. Her dwindled Kindness Merits meant she could no longer access the invisible. She would gain more merits once she returned to the Dream Sphere at sun-up. Alcor was sure to have some owing to her for the work she was doing in guiding the heartbroken and rosy-named Clan Watcher sprite, the one with the silvery feline and fire-haired daughter.
Dawn was piercing the exit. Rocky walls glowed yellow and purple as though mirroring the colours of Maleika’s magical stars. Birds and dryads basked in pools of light on rocks nearby. The atmosphere surrounding Maleika once again sprang to life. Leaving the gloom behind, she stepped out to breathe in the ferny air, the emerging daylight warm on her hair. Realising then that she was rather lost, she hastened towards another cave in the hope it would lead back to the Brumlynd wagons.
‘Had you just gone into the cave over yonder?’ a passing gnome with a wheelbarrow enquired.
Maleika nodded.
‘It’s filled with prisoners,’ the gnome said. ‘Passed-over dragons deprived of the Dream Sphere. Sorcerers have kept them grounded by clipping their celestial wings. So now the creatures live between worlds. They’re too transparent for this one and too limited for the Dream Sphere. I’ve oft spied body kings release another poor victim into that emptiness.’
‘At first I wasn’t sure they were dragons,’ said Maleika. ‘Such meek, nondescript things! And to think they are simply dying giants, once magnificent and full of fire.’
‘Dead,’ corrected the gnome. ‘With shackled spirits. And now as good as nothing, for they are emptied of their power. But heed my words, elf friend. The next cavern, the one you are about to venture into, has many dangers. Let the nothingness be. My brothers will transport you home via our own secret paths.’
The sun had climbed higher into the heavens when the gnomes led Maleika back to her clan. Much to her delight, Pieter and the other Brumlynds were already settled in their sleeping wagons.
‘At last I may journey to the Dream Sphere,’ Maleika said, after bidding the gnomes farewell and retiring to her wagon. She yawned, clamped her eyelids closed and removed her consciousness from the dazzle and jubilant bird sound of Elysium’s golden hours.
When she and her clan woke from their slumbering journeys, they ambled out to the campfire and sat, unspeaking, for a while, swathed in the early evening’s silence. A glimmer pierced the stillness.
‘Not their electrical tricks again,’ groaned Pieter, for lightning and thunder were the other ones’ creation.
‘Hush,’ Maleika said with a smile.
There before them weaved and darted the faint impression of a butterfly, transparent like a dying dryad, wispy and white, a projected image, the equivalent of stumbling across a daydream in the dark. The vision took on colour—metallic gold—and stretched into proper form.
‘Your presence feels familiar,’ Pieter said to the apparition, an eagle image floating above his head.
‘Elf boy, you know me from your dreams,’ replied the creature. ‘But now I dream. To be more specific, the aspect of me that dreams is the part of myself that is lost in limitation. And so I visit you in spirit form, and I ask for a little forgiving on your part.’
In response to the ghostly eagle’s request, Pieter said, ‘But you’ve not done anything to trouble me!’ The boy leaned towards Maleika and whispered, ‘How could I ever hold a grudge against a fine, harmless bird? One that I’ve apparently visited in the Dream Sphere?’
Maleika gave him a warning look.
�
��Perhaps I should not be so effusive,’ he murmured.
‘Perhaps not,’ Maleika said, keenly aware that the eagle was more than likely a body king. Genetically-tampered troopers who changed into eagles were the very people responsible for robbing the sprites of their Wondalobs water. ‘The appearance of innocence appeals to them,’ Maleika added in a whisper. ‘How often now have they attempted to embody devic or faunal grace?’ Nature’s harmonious beauty eluded the golden ones, and yet this was a quality they so strived to mimic.
The eagle continued to address young Pieter. ‘You do not recall having spoken to me, and so I shall explain. You offered to enlighten my perception of space. You hoped to unveil for me the lands that lie beyond my mountainous dwelling. While my solid self slumbers, I am unchained from limited growth. From the standpoint of this wiser state, I ask that you return. My soul has been imprisoned by a sorcerer’s spell and yearns to be free. In time I shall accept your offer of furthering my evolution.’
‘I am not at all sure, sir, whether I can believe I visited you in the Dream Sphere,’ said Pieter.
Maleika studied the eagle. The message was obviously nonsense intended to mislead. Even if Pieter were permitted to take a sip of the now rationed Remembrance Essence, Maleika doubted he would recall any visit to the fellow hovering before them. In contrast with these dubious claims, the eagle seemed not, in Maleika’s opinion, to be the noblest of creatures. His aura of mustard yellow rang of self-inflation.
A constant game of pretence! Maleika marvelled at the body kings’ endless attempts to confuse sprites. The female counterparts illustrated this perfectly. A great deal of their waking duration was spent painting their own lips and eyelids in a fierce attempt to resemble another species. Pieter had reported one evening upon returning from the Dream Sphere and sipping Remembrance Essence, that he’d discovered body kings knew nothing of those they tried so diligently to emulate. Those of the species from a world known as ‘Have’ on the other side of the looking glass, were seeing this and were going about their work with surprise in their eyes and smiling mouths. To be copied, of course, is the greatest form of flattery.
The Golding Page 5