<><> XXIV <><>
All that they saw was the cobweb lace of moon-illuminated ferns and the mossy dells that loomed ahead. ‘Are you sure it’s safe to go to the Grudellan Palace at this hour?’ the rabbit mother asked Maleika.
Maleika nodded. ‘We would be better off in the Dream Sphere at this point, Karee, but ’tis only a glimpse of the palace that I want. I wish to make certain our sons aren’t trapped in the grounds.’
The rays of Sol were not far away, and the moon was a sad fragment of its former self. Karee, lolloping beside her, strove to conceal her distress. She would rather have stayed away, and yet here she was, bound for the foreboding Grudellan gates.
What would they want with a rabbit baby? Perhaps Fripso would be overlooked. Apart from dragons, and the unfortunates the dark-hearted had mesmerised, Elysium Glades was almost, although not altogether, a sanctuary of protection.
‘Ah!’ cried Maleika. ‘Do you see those luminaries—the artificial ones I mean to say.’
‘I do indeed.’ Karee twitched her whiskers and blinked at the overly bright array of citrus yellow that swirled around an ominous silhouette of geometric lines.
‘That is the gold-skins’ royal residence, which includes this monstrosity of a construction and the sand dunes over yonder where the mines are. I expect all are sleeping. We'll try to alert our loved ones to our presence should they happen to be there.’
‘Fripso and Pieter might not be in the palace at all,’ Karee remarked, although she said it more to reassure herself.
‘Dear Karee, you are right. ’Tis hardly likely they’ve ventured this far, but let us eliminate suspicion no matter how small it might be, by searching from a distance.’
‘Perhaps we should look closer, go inside the palace gates?’ whispered a cautious Karee.
‘We won’t concern ourselves with anything so perilous this night. If we see anything unusual, we will discuss our next steps on the morrow.’
Sighing gently, Karee relaxed at the mention of vigilance from a distance. She could never forgive herself if she were captured. What help would she be to her baby then?
The statue in the grounds appeared to be a raven stationed upon a bough, but as Karee neared, she discerned it to be a stone eagle upon a tall pedestal that competed for height with the palace’s towers. ‘Maleika, do you see anything?’ When it came to spying upon the Grudellans, stature was hardly to Karee’s advantage.
‘Ooh! I see troopers: eagle-men guarding the gates.’
‘And?’
‘And there’s a pond-ish pool of water in a container that sparkles of gold. It has spouts and cascades. It is, I think, what they refer to as a “fountain”, the essence they drink to keep their skins that dreadful colour. And I see...oh yes, it is she.’
‘Who, Maleika?’
‘The maiden. One of the daughters. I vaguely see her outline in the paneless window. I see artificial light brightening half of her face. She is reading...she is reading aloud. Karee this is very strange. Shouldn’t a gold-skin be afraid of the moon? The people of that species are ever intolerant of the fresh night air.’
‘Yet the guards are out here, all the same.’
‘Guards are hybrids. Not full-blooded.’
‘They do have dances, I understand, and those are held in the evening.’
‘Yes, Karee, this is true, but their dances are enclosed within the walls of their fortress. Artificial luminaries containing a portion of captured sun shine upon them. The moon, to gold-skins, is a loathsome scallywag.’
‘You mentioned this maiden had similarities to Orahney.’
‘I did think this at one stage, although why Orahney would journey away from her peaceful life in the Dream Sphere to play the earthly role of a princess, I cannot fathom. In fact, I swear by the light of Luna that she’s unlikely to do such a thing. No, I believe this girl at the open window delights in imitating passed-on sprites, simply to taunt us. They are cruel, the gold-skins. Never be swayed by their charms, Karee, for they have many. I almost felt sympathy for the wretch when I visited her residence. Demure, she was, and terribly polite, but gold-skins are never who they seem. They camouflage the bad to lure in the good.’
‘Too-hoo,’ wailed an owl. ‘Hoo-oo! Hoo-oo!’
‘Ah, he who hoots reminds us of how worry can weaken the will. Our sage friend was taken in by them. Where he once uttered words of wisdom, he now moans in a language none of us understand, and his eyes have turned sorrowful.’
‘Do you think he might be warning us, Maleika, about venturing any further?’
‘I think he might. We shall go.’
‘Race you home!’
‘Only if you promise not to run as fast as you did when I sent you into the future.’
‘Promise. I hear the poor lady sprite got a terrible fright when I returned to the Dream Sphere. It would have appeared as though I’d vanished.’
‘In that part of time, magic is scarce,’ said Maleika. ‘And disappearing is considered to be impossible! Having you lead her to that fellow's red chariot, Karee, did not serve its purpose, but I'm sure I'll succeed in ushering her fate to her sooner or later. All right, then, dear. Race you home.’
The two forest-dwellers then hopped and ran respectively, back to their haven of harmony, a dew-glistening festival of foliage, to greet the peach-toned mists of morning.
<><> XXV <><>
Pieter could not recall how long he had been in the Grudellan Palace. Certainly it was a matter of several evenings.
He and Fripso lived meagrely. The rabbit was at least grateful that ‘home’ had become a larger prison. For Pieter, Eidred’s dressing-quarter was just a prison and gratitude was in fact the opposite of his regard for body kings.
‘Only if you use your magic in the way I advise,’ the Solen’s daughter had said to their request for freedom. Pieter had consistently refused each self-indulgent suggestion. To corrupt beauty-creation was unthinkable. The girl’s entrapment in a dynasty she did not care for was hardly Pieter’s concern. While he wanted to further her enlightenment he could not do so by enabling her access to more of the things she already had.
The commands for wishes remained unaltered. She wanted the linen to clean more easily, the voices of men-at-arms made quieter. A small amendment to her given name was also on the list. And much to Pieter’s disdain, she’d asked him to vanish into thin air.
Although he’d refused to partake in such petty showmanship, he knew that even if he’d wanted to, he was incapable of doing this. The Kindness Merits that powered his magic were all used. Being unable to access Remembrance Essence meant he had no way of recalling whether his Dream Sphere self had gained more merits through actively guiding those in the future.
The wishes granted might free Pieter from his jailing but would only serve to entangle the girl further in hers. Besides all that, he knew that sprite magic, the beauty-creation residing within his heart, differed greatly to the magic of Grudellan sorcerers. It could not work on selfish demands.
All that Pieter had at his disposal was a fragile bond of friendship. He hoped to cultivate this as a means of steering the poor wretch towards better knowledge. For the moment he must endure the suffocating listlessness of a residence devoid of all signs of flora. He must make the most of these restrictions. He and Fripso told stories much of the time, tales of their slumbering sojourns, to keep their spirits lively.
Their captor at least was kind enough to feed them well. She would talk to them with an odd brand of stilted affection and, mindful of their nocturnal constitutions, respected the sleep they required during the day. When they woke to the night, however, they would witness through the gate-like golden bars of the chamber’s clothing quarter, in itself the size of a small room, two opal-blue eyes scanning them keenly. ‘Oh goodness, the two of you have woken! How lovely to see you again,’ Eidred was wont to say.
‘Eidred, friend, these hours are yours now to sleep,’ Pieter would scold after the girl had converse
d with them almost to sun-up. ‘You must treasure the night as your time for renewal. Do not let us weary you with conversation.’
The girl would yawn and nod, then tiptoe to her bed. She would call ‘Good night’, and when her breathing became regular and slow, her reluctant companions spoke of escape and longed for the beauty of their starlit stream.
‘Might someone find us do you suppose, Pieter?’ Fripso asked one such evening.
‘Possibly so, but in the end it is up to us to free ourselves. It is not just you and me who are the victims.’
‘We must free her as well,’ agreed Fripso, his eyes aglow with admiration for the girl with the gentle heart. She had treated him as his own mother had.
‘All three...must be free.’ The elf paused. The words struck him as familiar. Echoes, perhaps, from the Dream Sphere.
‘Free all three
Then safe are we.’
Not long after they had gone to sleep, Pieter and his fellow inmate were awoken by a sound. It echoed the memory of Pieter’s first evening in the palace when a poktador had been slaughtered by gold-skins so fiendish the very knowledge of their presence was enough to induce violent chills. Remembering this, he smiled at the next recalled occurrence. The Princess of Grudella back then had stood above him terrifyingly, looking to all intents and purposes like a creature driven to kill. Thankfully, the axe had not been seen since, and the carrier of it had immediately been sheepish, thereafter accosting him only with apologies. ‘’Twas strange,’ mused the elf in a whisper, ‘that she was unaware what possessed her to believe a monster dwelt in the corner.’ What to gold-skins could ever be considered monstrous when they themselves had capabilities of devouring ill-fortuned fountain drinkers? Their disregard for life was as alarming as it was perverse.
In fairness to his captor, he did not believe she had the same capacity for cruelty. It puzzled him that one from such a hideous race should exhibit personality aspects that were so decidedly faerie-like. Her love for the forest was all-encompassing. Had it not been for her demands to magically alter small parts of future history, Pieter felt sure she would have returned him much sooner to his home. Often when he spoke of the Brumlynd clan a flutter of guilt would mar her expression. She would then begin on a persuasive speech about being freed at the cost of a mere three wishes. Pieter would change the subject and talk to the princess about sprites gaining Kindness Merits, to which she would listen with fascination. He told her how they earned these through their work in the Dream Sphere, abilities that assisted them in their creation of beauty—or, magic as it was commonly known among those of the empire—much of which had been robbed from sprites many season-cycles earlier.
Back then, body-king sorcerers had placed a lock on the devic realm’s internal gateway to the Dream Sphere. Devic access to this dimension now was through slumber only. Locked off along with it had been the exquisite bodily senses that they all possessed, made possible through their unlimited connection to the slumbering world.
They were far more like mortals now. When sprites woke at the close of each day, they could only appreciate its beauty through seeing the fiery colours of sunset with only their eyes and hearing the call of night birds with only their ears. The feel of coolness that pervaded the air along with the fragrance of moonflowers and taste of berry cider were experienced separately also, through the other three senses. Enjoyment of their surroundings was now compartmentalised, causing them to be less intuitive.
Pieter continually nudged at Eidred’s conscience. He thanked the gods that she did indeed have a conscience to nudge. He and his rabbit friend could just as easily have been captured by one of her monster relatives. Then they would never again see the silhouettes of trees around the Brumlynd camp, nor revel in the aroma of dancing wood fires.
This gold-skin was benevolent. Her sympathy for other life-forms appeared to be aptly developed. Her eagerness, also, to please those she’d trapped, had Pieter pondering over her parentage. It was as though amongst the rubble of hatred, which tainted the much afeared Grudellan Palace, a small spark of goodness had been buried, a tiny gem that thought itself to be nothing more than greyness, as a pearl might regard the oyster-shell that cocoons it.
Heredity and cocoons soon became a subject of discussion between Pieter and Fripso. ‘Caterpillars do become butterflies after all,’ noted the rabbit upon one waking. He’d been referring of course to the creature that was only half darkened by body kings. It retained its goodly mind and thus was able to evolve out of its cumbersome, genetically-tampered vehicle by weaving together the rays of both moon and sun: an enveloping fabric made solid by the creature's capacity to transform the density of frequencies. Lo and behold, for all the sprites to marvel at, emerged a magnificent specimen of light, colour, freedom and hope.
Prior to its degradation, the butterfly had been a flower faerie who was, to the sprites’ dismay, seduced by an Atlantean solen’s radiance at the end of the Pre-Destruction Century. Such a delicately exquisite being was this faerie, so empathetic was the faerie’s regard for all living things, that through busying itself in understanding others, it forgot to identify with the self. Becoming susceptible to powers of possession: a faerie’s demise and a lesson to all sprites. Self-respect was precious armour. Behaviour of an all-trusting nature was detrimental to the continuation of what body kings called ‘the fey’. Was it possible this fair-haired maiden might be a hybrid like the butterfly? Could Eidred be partly devic origin or had she only recently been bestowed sprite qualities when unknowingly taking on Orahney's auric-field colours? Had a partial exchange of minds occurred?
Another shriek scattered the stillness. It made Pieter especially uncomfortable knowing his trapped and mesmerised elfin friends were identifying with the dark ones just as a dark one had befriended and identified with him.
Remembering the hundreds of bony, soil-crusted figures moving about the dunes like mechanical twigs, he turned to Fripso. ‘Many elves have been taken by gold-skins,’ he told the rabbit. ‘Twelve of my friends are slaves in the mines.’
‘Pieter, I am sorry for you.’
‘And I am sorry for them. They were made to work during their time of slumber.’
‘Toiling under the sun!’ Fripso was aghast.
‘I sacrificed sleep once so that I could rescue them. I hid within the thorn thicket and stole across to the sand dunes.’
Fripso’s eyes were made large with concern.
Pieter slumped forward. He shook his head. ‘It was awful, Fripso. Their auras were knotted into hideous yellow coils, heavy with thoughts of lack and fear. I stayed by them through the day. Once night arrived and the guards slept, I made myself known. Sadly, few elves could see me. In their solidity they’d lost the ability to perceive anyone who hadn’t been robbed of heart power.
‘Those who did see me were vacant-eyed. I told them I was there to assist their escape.’ He recalled how the elves had refused; how each had insisted they were to labour for their birthright to appease their ‘protectors’.
‘You are sprites,’ Pieter had cried. ‘You do not live by the currency of gold!’
Protesting, they had said, ‘We need our food and shelter.’
Pieter had persisted. ‘The guards are sleeping,’ he had said. ‘Now is your chance to return to your forest.’
Pieter buried his face in his hands. ‘I couldn’t persuade them, Fripso,’ he said. ‘They insisted the forest would soon be built upon with the empire’s expansion and praised their captors for remaining true to the “Century of Progress”. I couldn’t convince them that body kings were only dwelling in Elysium due to the compliant nature of their captives. “You’re keeping them here,” I said, “by working for them! There are many of you and few of them. Discard your dangerous obedience, and you will be free!”
‘ “But that would be dishonest,” they’d said. “Our protectors provide us with all we need.” ’
Fripso snorted. ‘How silly of them not to escape when they were able.’
‘Yet I cannot blame my poor sprite brothers,’ Pieter said. ‘Any empowering decision would have been erased by the tangle of beliefs whittling away at their life-force.’
‘They have lost heart,’ said Fripso.
‘Heart and higher mind,’ Pieter said. ‘No longer are they able to create beauty.’
Later that evening, when the two sat in silence within a moonbeam filtering through Eidred’s window, Pieter was alerted to the sound of hiccupping whimpers.
‘I weep for your fellow elves,’ Fripso said.
‘I am sorry, my friend,’ said Pieter. ‘I should never have told you of this tragedy. When the maiden sends me to the mines, I shall do my best to escape.’
‘I do not believe Eidred would do such a thing.’
Relenting to a torrent of pessimism that clawed at his throat and constricted his chest, Pieter gazed woefully at the glittering chamber beyond the wardrobe’s bejewelled bars. ‘She is a body-king daughter, Fripso.’
<><> XXVI <><>
Dawn arrived glaringly. Pieter settled down to sleep and thought back to the last conversation he’d held with his dear Clan Watcher.
After having woken to the night, he’d sat by the fire. She had been at his side, passing him a cup of Remembrance Essence.
‘I vaguely remember,’ he said to her, ‘a crystal dome and a leader in the future who is to address a large number of people. Their congregating as such is known as the Sonic Unity Gathering.’
Maleika, eager to learn of his last Dream Sphere visit said, ‘And what does the leader say to these people at the gathering, Pieter?’
‘There is something to celebrate,’ Pieter told her. ‘A return to the currency of kindness. The leader then announces the name of an individual who has been greatly responsible for this.’
‘And who should this creature be?’
The Golding Page 18