She stepped upon what could best be described as grass, but it was the palest silver green and as solid as her own semi-ethereal form. Clouds not made of water moved over it, though there was no wind. Instead, they moved with the currents of energy that flowed through the place where she was cursed to exist.
The ethereal planes were beyond Maioria, but intimately linked to it through the astral planes - the place people went to when they dreamed. Here, the unseen energies of the world flowed through all matter, both dense and etheric. She had learnt long ago to read the ebb and flow of Maioria’s energy. It was the last place where it still flowed pure, and it was shrinking daily, an ever-decreasing island of light in the growing darkness.
Here was where she clung to life, where she had walked for thousands of years, cursed by Baelthrom to never set foot upon Maioria again, but also never to die and to never see her kin again. It was an eternal damnation.
Yisufalni sighed, and held a hand to her face. ‘I must be strong.’ She clenched her fist. ‘There is hope now.’ For if she, the last of The Ancients, wavered in her strength and purity, the island of light upon which she walked wavered also, and she would not give in to the dark, not after so long. Millennia in isolation had shaped her. She had done the dark nights of the soul, and some of those nights had lasted centuries. She was beyond that now.
‘There is hope,’ she repeated, golden silver energy swirled around her in response.
Cursed as she was to dwell here, she was not without some power. Baelthrom could take everything else, but he could not destroy the eternal living spirit within her. She had found a way to walk Maioria, but it involved taking on a form of much greater density, and not only was it very hard to move around in, it was a drain on her energy.
After many attempts to take her own form to Maioria, the form of a small human child was all she could ever manage. Though she looked like any other child, she was so pale as to be almost albino, with snow-white hair, pale translucent skin, and big pale eyes. But it served to keep her true identity hidden.
If Baelthrom discovered she had a physical presence upon Maioria, he would find her easily. He was skilled in hunting down and destroying each and every Ancient, and she would suffer a fate far worse than death - an oblivion of her being. When she was at her strongest, she found she could walk upon the solid lands for an hour a day, though doing so was exhausting.
In time, she seldom went to Maioria, preferring to sit and read-feel the energies that flowed through the ethereal planes. A day in Maioria was only an hour in her world. Whole years had passed in the physical world whilst she had sat here in meditation, reading the energies. They told her many things about Maioria; where the darkness moved, the general health of body and spirit of each race, and of them all as a collective. Yisufalni was watching for the time when great change would come. She saw the cycles of the moons and the stars and the sun moving into alignment, and knew the change was soon.
She walked over the grass towards the trees. Their trunks were dark liquid gold, their boughs moved to the energy flow, and their green leaves swirled. Amongst the trees was a small pool of silver water, and she knelt down beside it as she had done countless times over millennia. She had brought the water here long ago. It was water from a sacred spring, all that she had salvaged from her land before Baelthrom destroyed it.
Though water was not as dense as solid matter, she’d been surprised when it stayed here rather than dissipated. Perhaps it was its sacredness and purity that allowed it to remain, cupped lovingly by the roots of the trees, encircled by the shimmering grass. Perhaps it was a gift from the Great Goddess. She believed it was both.
The water reflected her ethereal features, and she looked at her pearlescent skin, long oval face, and a longer head than the humans and elves had. She was over six feet tall, though she remembered always being shorter than her friends. Friends long gone, she sighed, and pushed their faces away before the pain of loss could touch her.
Her eyes were slanted, large, and gleamed luminous violet. Her ears were long and pointed upwards like an elf’s, only longer. Her long straight hair was nearly white with the faintest hint of blue, and held back in a silver circlet high upon her head. The circlet was the other item she owned from her past. She did not speak to the silver waters, but thought to them.
“Sacred waters from my beloved home, Zanufey moves amongst us, I can feel her divine presence.” The water rippled as if a wind had blown over it.
‘Hope sparks a light within the darkness encompassing Maioria. If the Goddess of the Night is rising, then her Raven Queen will soon move amongst the people as one of them,’ she said.
The waters stilled and Yisufalni gazed upon green islands in a sparkling ocean. Unnatural clouds of profane magic swirled over the image. She glimpsed a raven flying through the clouds, diving up and down as if something chased it.
‘His shadow draws near, but the raven protects Zanufey’s own,’ she breathed into the pool, her smile fading. She bent closer to the water and gasped. A Dread Dragon snaked out of the clouds towards a young woman. The raven swooped to attack the dragon as it descended upon the woman.
‘Great Goddess help her,’ Yisufalni cried.
Chapter 6
The Unchartered Lands
ASAPH dreamed of her again, the dark-haired girl with eyes the colour of the sea. The same girl that had plagued his dreams since he could remember, but it was a welcome plague and his soul yearned for her.
She was always visible at first as a soft blue light captivating him in the darkness. As he neared, her form took shape and she turned to him, her face pale and flawless like Maioria’s white moon Doon. He longed to touch her hair and hold her close. She was as slender and wraith-like as the shadow world she inhabited - nothing more than a ghost in a ghostly realm. He stared into the blue-green depths of her eyes, but she looked right through him as if he did not exist. It hurt that she could never see him.
The darkness faded and a bloody battle began to unfold around them. Thousands of people of all the races of Maioria, some wielding swords and axes, others in shining armour mounted atop screaming horses, all fighting a desperate battle against an unrelenting tide of Maphraxies. The black armour of the immortals shone in the dull light. Screams of pain and rage filled the air alongside the din of clashing metal. The battle waned. All about were the faces of the dead and dying, friend and foe alike, their fallen bodies spread out for miles under a weak red sun that seemed as if it too were dying.
Far away in the distance his eyes rested upon a place he had never seen in the real world, the triple-peaked mountains of Maphrax clawing up into a smoking red sky. He fell back with a yell at the sight of the Immortal Lord’s domain. But in a blink, Maphrax and the battle were gone and there was only the girl.
‘Why do you not leave this place?’ he asked her, his voice was hollow in the emptiness. ‘There is nothing here, only death and desolation. Come with me before you become like the shadows.’ But she did not hear him, she could never hear him. Asaph reached out to touch her, but she turned and fled.
‘Wait,’ he cried, but then he felt the dread too. He turned around and an ocean appeared behind him. That awful feeling came from its depths. Terror and madness clawed at his mind. The ocean turned wild and waves rose and crashed, spraying him with salt water. In the turmoil, he glimpsed a massive white beast moving and his heart began to pound.
His eyes travelled beyond it to where a black cloud massed on the horizon. In that cloud, a masked face formed with two burning red eyes. Cold fear settled in his stomach. His soul shrivelled from the abomination in the sky, for it spoke not of death, but of undoing. He turned away and tore after the girl, along the path and up to the cliffs. He caught her up, but as soon as he neared she leapt from the cliff’s edge. He screamed and lunged to grab her, but it was too late and she plummeted away from his out-stretched hand.
The white monster loomed up and broke through the waves to meet her. The beast was the size of
a whale, but it was ugly, deformed and covered in cancerous lumps, and snaking twisted tentacles. It wailed a piercing maddening sound. Asaph fell to his knees clutching his ears, but the screams seemed to come from inside his own head. Black eyes caught his, and the monster grinned, showing a mouth lined with needle teeth.
Asaph screamed, but nothing came out except a ragged voiceless howl.
Asaph jolted awake gasping and sweating. His heart pounded in his chest, and the world spun sickeningly. He swung his legs over the bed and held his face in shaking hands as the nightmare released him. How many times had he had that dream? But never had the beast revealed itself until now, always it was just a white shape lurking in the ocean. He knew that beast. Coronos had spoken of the White Beast, Keteth, many times. But he didn’t know who the girl was, or why the beast hunted her.
He swallowed and took a deep breath, willing his hands to stop shaking, his throat felt as if he had been screaming all night. He glanced over at the man on the other bed, but Coronos still slept soundly, his screams could only have been silent gasps. He was relieved not to have woken him with another nightmare.
Coronos’ long hair was nearly all white, but whenever Asaph felt bold enough to ask his age, Coronos could never remember, saying simply, “Oh something over a hundred,” and no more. He suspected Coronos could add at least twenty to that number, but he kept his thoughts politely to himself. Though it was old, it was not ancient for them. Draxians lived half again as long as other humans, attributing their longevity to the ancient dragon blood that ran in their veins. Only the elves lived longer by half a century or so.
Despite his age, Coronos was still tall and hardy, with a healthful coppery complexion common to most Draxians. Coronos was as a father to him, having loved and raised him as his own son after his parents were murdered. He had taken Asaph, just a newborn babe, and fled their beloved Drax with only a handful of others.
Coronos told him it had been over a month later—near-starved and two-thirds of their number lost to sickness—when they reached the foreign shores of the mysterious Uncharted Lands—a place that had been their home ever since. No one had ever crossed the Abha Fey Sea to these lands and returned alive to tell the tale. But once there they found a flourishing land filled with fruit-laden trees and clear flowing rivers. They also met the Kuapoh people, just one of many tribes thriving upon the fertile land.
It was the beginning of a new life for Coronos, but the beginning of Asaph’s whole life. Of those twenty Draxians that made it to the Uncharted Land’s shores, three more died from festering wounds of battle and sickness at sea. Seven tried to return to Drax six years later but were never seen again. Five left to explore the south and later became part of other tribes. Only two other Draxians, middle-aged women including Asaph’s wet nurse, lived peacefully amongst the Kuapoh. The young girl with them had been captured by goblin hordes ten years ago and never seen again.
Twenty-five years had passed since the day they had first set foot upon these shores, and Asaph knew no other life. It was a good life, Coronos constantly reminded him, for within the tribe there was mostly peace and harmony. A life lived relatively free from disease and sickness. With food abundant in the trees all year round, the Kuapoh had plenty of time for the family, the spirit, and fun.
The Kuapoh language was very similar to Frayonesse, so Coronos had pointed out. It was almost as if the Kuapoh had originally come from Frayon, or thereabouts, and their language was an older version of the Common Tongue, but with new words for plants and animals that did not exist in the Known World. Indeed their legends spoke of their people coming from the Great Water.
Asaph grew up learning three languages. When it was just Coronos and himself they spoke only Draxian, and when with any others it was always Kuapoh. Coronos taught him Frayonesse easily enough, saying he might need it one day, and he wondered if his father secretly hoped that they would return to the Known World, but Coronos never said anything to confirm it.
Their only plague were marauding goblins. An old enemy, but manageable for the Kuapoh lived in houses built in the trees, and no goblin dared climb a tree for fear of the tree shaking it from its boughs. Trees did not like goblins. The Kuapoh’s tree-house empire was vast. They had a profound knowledge of woodwork construction, enough to make even the elves gawp, Coronos had said.
He glanced down at the thick wooden floor, knowing that the ground was some thirty feet below, but the house would not so much as creak in a storm. Beyond the wooden walls of their bedroom, platforms and ropes spread out for a mile in each direction, linking each house and communal area to the other.
Though he knew no other life than that amongst his generous Kuapoh family, he felt a far different future calling to him. It was as if Drax, the land of his birth, a place of massive snow-covered mountains and harsh winter blizzards, called for his return, and try as he might he could not ignore its call. He felt a change in the air these past few days and it filled him with excitement.
A glint caught his eye. He reached over to pick up his mother’s ring on the table beside his bed, a silver flame upon a silver band. She had passed it on to him when he was born, and now he was a man it did not even fit his little finger. It was well-made, and of the finest silver, bearing the hallmark of Goldhand the dwarf smith, but it was not overly precious, more a thing of sentiment. It had been a gift from his father to his mother long before they were wed. A token of love and nothing more, but that in itself made it invaluable, it gave him a link to his parents.
‘I wish that I could do half of the things I have seen you do in your dragon form,’ he breathed, his mind reaching into the huge reservoir of their shared memories. There he watched a copper-red dragon flying over a snow-covered landscape turning orange with the setting sun. For a moment he could feel the glory of soaring over the high towers of Castle Draxa. The exhilaration, the freedom, and the power were all his as he lived them again through his mother’s memory.
The shared memory between all Dragon Lords was called the Recollection. The Recollection was part of the gift of the Great Binding that bound all Dragon Lords together through their shared memories. Each Dragon Lord could see and feel the memories of all other Dragon Lords, even into the distant past. Some Dragon Lords could even see the memories of pure dragons, and he knew that he could, though they were hazy. They had a wild, unpredictable feel to them and were more like the memories of powerful beasts.
He had never seen a dragon outside of the Recollection. Pure dragons could not change form and were smaller than Dragon Lords, their magic ancient, feral and wild. They were more numerous further to the north in the Kingdom of Ice, where it was too harsh for humans to survive. Though Dragon Lords could command them, should they have need, pure dragons were forever independent and free of the laws of humans.
Asaph found the Recollection both a blessing and a curse. Though he often sought solace in the shared memories, it was not always easy to access it when he most wanted to, or it came upon him when he least wanted. Many memories were painful, particularly those concerning the doomed battle of Draxa against the Maphraxies.
Asaph had never known his mother, but it was through the Recollection that he knew her more deeply than any child could know their parent. His own memories were the clearest and there was always this feel of a thin membrane between his and another’s memories so he never got confused. The next clearest were his mother’s, but he had to be careful when he looked because they often led to her final battle, and that was too much for him to bear.
There were endless memories from his ancestors besides hers, but they were more distant and faded, by time or by blood he could not tell. It was very difficult to distinguish whose memories belonged to whom without being schooled in traversing the Recollection, and Coronos had said it took most Dragon Lords many years of training to gain such skills. Asaph had no such skills, and no one to teach him.
Coronos used to ask him often if he could access the Recollection, always trying to de
termine if he was a Dragon Lord like his mother. But he’d always feigned ignorance and evaded such questions, despite having full access to the memories of his Dragon Lord kin. He had long since mastered the art of hiding the truth of his dragon being, and for that he was ashamed.
Coronos still tried to reach that truth, but after his bouts of boyish anger and feigned hurt at not being a Dragon Lord, Coronos no longer pushed the topic, saying that if he “were a Dragon Lord, it surely would have shown by now.” He suspected that Coronos knew he was a Dragon Lord, but was waiting for him to say it himself. He had left it so long hidden from the man who was a father to him in all but blood, that he felt he could not reveal it now. He kept it hidden for no small reason. The reality and shame of it was that he was afraid of his “gift.”
A dragon afraid. He snorted in self-disgust, but he knew of no other shape-shifter, and the Kuapoh had many myths damning any creature that took more than one form. To them, it was dark sorcery, the magic of demons. They always spoke of “evil shape-shifters,” demon succubi and incubi in the form of spectres lurking in the forests, waiting to lure their victims close enough to possess their body.
He still remembered the time when a young man came stumbling into their village, mumbling all sorts of nonsense and struggling bodily against some unseen foe. When anyone came near him, he would howl, his skin bulged and stretched until the man was no more, and instead there stood a two-legged devil with brown slimy skin, three horns and six black eyes. The beast howled a terrible sound that made everyone scream in terror.
It had taken all of the shamans and Coronos to break the incubus’ spell upon the entranced people, but the possessed young man was beyond saving. Asaph had watched in horror as they slew him with poisoned arrows from afar. No one dared even touch his lifeless body, and instead, wood was thrown upon him and a lit torch hurled to burn him where he lay. Even the ground he was burned upon had to be reconsecrated before anyone would go near it. To this day people still veered left or right to avoid walking over it. Such was the threat and the fear of the incubi.
Night Goddess (The Goddess Prophecies Book 1) Page 5