“Prophecy proves that Elizabeth Haydon is a superstar and not a one-hit-wonder. The story line is intelligent, filled with action, but does not neglect the characters. Haydon’s world is so real the audience will feel that we too have been transported in time and space to a wondrous vision that makes it easy for readers to rhapsodize that the author is becoming one of the top wizards of the genre.”
—Midwest Book Review
“Three cheers for Elizabeth Haydon! One great book (Rhapsody) might be a fluke. But its sequel, Prophecy, keeps right on developing great characters in a believable fantasy world without sacrificing the momentum of a terrific story. Fans of epic fantasy will find Haydon a worthy successor to Tolkien, ranking with Robin Hood and Guy Gavriel Kay. Just don’t start reading too late in the day—once you’ve begun you won’t want to stop.”
—Amazon.com, Best Book/Editor’s Pick for 2000
“The second book of Haydon’s epic high-fantasy trilogy is as strong and compelling as its predecessor, Rhapsody. The action is exhilarating; and sometimes broad, sometimes wry humor leavens the story’s horror. As in high fantasy at its best, the sense of foreboding is palpable, the world building is convincing and consistent, the evildoers are truly wicked, and the battles are ferocious.”
—Booklist
“The characters are appealing and Haydon’s world intriguing…the novel has enough magic, good fights and thrilling love scenes to make it a keeper.”
—Publishers Weekly
Praise for Rhapsody
One of the Best Novels of 1999:
Best Fiction of 1999, Borders.com
(Top ten Fiction Titles of 1999)
Best Book/Editor’s Pick: Amazon.com
(Top 10 SF/Fantasy titles of 1999)
The Readers’ Choice List: SF Site
(The 10 SF/Fantasy titles of 1999)
A Best Book of the Year in SF/Fantasy:
BarnesandNoble.com
“One of the finest high-fantasy debuts in years.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A stunningly-told tale by a new fantasy author who is sure to go far.”
—Anne McCaffrey
“An epic saga worthy of Eddings, Goodkind and Jordan.”
—Romantic Times (4½ stars out of 5)
“A powerful novel…. This author will surely go far.”
—Piers Anthony
“An epic beginning to a major fantasy series, and readers will quickly pick up on the echoes of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth and David Eddings Belgariad series.”
—Toronto National Post & Mail
“Rhapsody is movingly-written, epic fantasy. I read this book with a growing sense of pleasure, impressed not only with the author’s deft plotting but also with her use of language. Haydon is a writer.”
—Morgan Llywelyn
“With Rhapsody, Elizabeth Haydon makes a magnificent fantasy debut. I can hardly wait for the next book in the trilogy!”
—Mary Jo Putney
“In Rhapsody, Elizabeth Haydon gives us strong, compelling characters in a world both mysterious and familiar.”
—J. Gregory Keyes
“Rhapsody is a very moving book…quite intriguing.”
—San José Mercury News
“In a genre choking with predictable worlds and characters, Haydon blows in on the fresh air of new insights and talents. She makes the old fantasy new again. A very auspicious beginning!”
—Jennifer Roberson
Author’s Note:
The author’s royalties from this book are being donated to the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. For more information about the Foundation, visit their Web site at: www.pedAIDS.org
To the peacemakers and the negotiators
The nightmare chasers and the kissers of knee scrapes
Those who build up the civilization of the world one child at a time
The legacy creators, the history writers
Those who honor the Past by shaping the Future
To those for whom being a parent is a calling
Particularly the ones I know most intimately
With profound love
THE PROPHECY OF THE THREE
The Three shall come, leaving early, arriving late,
The lifestages of all men:
Child of Blood, Child of Earth, Child of the Sky.
Each man, formed in blood and born in it,
Walks the Earth and sustained by it,
Reaching to the sky, and sheltered beneath it,
He ascends there only in his ending, becoming part of the stars.
Blood gives new beginning, Earth gives sustenance,
The Sky gives dreams in life—eternity in death.
Thus shall the Three be, one to the other.
THE PROPHECY OF THE UNINVITED GUEST
Among the last to leave, among the first to come,
Seeking a new host, uninvited in a new place.
The power gained being the first,
Was lost in being the last.
Hosts shall nurture it, unknowing,
Like the guest wreathed in smiles
While secretly poisoning the larder.
Jealously guarded of its own power,
Ne’er has, nor ever shall its host bear or sire children,
Yet, ever it seeks to procreate.
THE PROPHECY OF THE SLEEPING CHILD
The Sleeping Child, the youngest born
Lives on in dreams, though Death has come
To write her name within his tome
And no one yet has thought to mourn.
The middle child, who sleeping lies,
’Twixt watersky and shifting sands
Sits silent, holding patient hands
Until the day she can arise.
The eldest child rests deep within
The ever-silent vault of earth,
Unborn as yet, but with its birth
The end of Time Itself begins.
THE PROPHECY OF THE LAST GUARDIAN
Within a Circle of Four will stand a Circle of Three
Children of the Wind all, and yet none
The hunter, the sustainer, the healer,
Brought together by fear, held together by love,
To find that which hides from the Wind.
Hear, oh guardian, and look upon your destiny:
The one who hunts also will stand guard
The one who sustains also will abandon,
The one who heals also will kill
To find that which hides from the Wind.
Listen, oh Last One, to the wind:
The wind of the past to beckon her home
The wind of the earth to carry her to safety
The wind of the stars to sing the mother’s-song most known to her soul
To hide the Child from the Wind.
From the lips of the Sleeping Child will come the words of ultimate wisdom:
Beware the Sleepwalker
For blood will be the means
To find that which hides from the Wind.
Contents
Intermezzo
Meridion
Second Movement
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 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Preview
Author Bio
Acknowledgments
Intermezzo
Meridion
Meridion sat in the darkness, lost in thought. The instrument panel of the Time Editor was dark as well; the great machine stood silent for the moment, the gleaming threads of diaphanous film hanging idle on their spools, each reel carefully labeled Past or Future. The Present, as ever, hung evanescent like a silver mist in the air under the Editor’s lamp, twisting and changing moment by moment in the half-light.
Draped across his knees was an ancient piece of thread, a lore strand from the Past. It was a film fragment of immeasurable importance, burnt and broken beyond repair on one end. Meridion picked it up gingerly, then turned it over in his hands and sighed.
Time was a fragile thing, especially when manipulated mechanically. He had tried to be gentle with the dry film, but it had cracked and ignited in the press of the Time Editor’s gears, burning the image he had needed to see. Now it was too late; the moment was gone forever, along with the information it held. The identity of the demon he was seeking would remain hidden. There was no going back, at least not this way.
Meridion rubbed his eyes and leaned back against the translucent aureole, the gleaming field of energy tied to his life essence that he had shaped for the moment into a chairlike seat, resting his head within its hum. The prickling melody that surrounded him was invigorating, clearing his thoughts and helping him to concentrate. It was his namesong, his life’s own innate tune. A vibration, unique in all the world, tied to his true name.
The demon he was seeking had great power over names, too. Meridion had gone back into the Past itself to find it, looking for a way to avert the path of devastation it had carefully constructed over Time, but the demon had eluded him. F’dor were the masters of lies, the fathers of deception. They were without corporeal form, binding themselves to innocent hosts and living through them or using them to do their will, then moving on to another more powerful host when the opportunity presented itself. Even far away, from his vantage point in the Future, there was no real way to see them.
For this reason Meridion had manipulated Time, had sliced and moved around pieces of the Past to bring a Namer of great potential together with those that might help her in the task of finding and destroying the demon. It had been his hope that these three would be able to accomplish this feat on their side of Time before it was too late to prevent what the demon had wrought, the devastation that was now consuming lands on both sides of the world. But the strategy had been a risky one. Just bringing lives together did not guarantee how they would be put to use.
Already he had seen the unfortunate consequences of his actions. The Time Editor had run heatedly with the unspooling of the time strands, fragments of film rending apart and swirling into the air above the machine as the Past destroyed itself in favor of the new. The stench of the burning timefilm was rank and bitter, searing Meridion’s nostrils and his lungs, leaving him trembling at the thought of what damage he might inadvertently be doing to the Future by meddling in the Past. But it was too late now.
Meridion waved his hand over the instrument panel of the Time Editor. The enormous machine roared to life, the intricate lenses illuminated by its ferocious internal light source. A warm glow spilled onto the tall panes of glass that formed the walls of the circular room and ascended to the clear ceiling above. The glimmering stars that had been visible from every angle above and below him in the darkness a moment before disappeared in the blaze of reflected brilliance. Meridion held the broken fragment of film up to the light.
The images were still there, but hard to make out. He could see the small, slender woman because of her shining hair, golden and reflecting the sunrise, bound back with a black ribbon, standing on the brink of morning in the vast panorama of the mountains where he had last sighted the two of them. Meridion blew gently on the lore-strand to clear it of dust and smiled as the tiny woman in the frame drew her cloak closer about herself. She stared off into the valley that stretched below her, prickled with spring frost and the patchy light of dawn.
Her traveling companion was harder to find. Had Meridion not known he was there prior to examining the film he never would have seen him, hidden in the shadows cast by the sun. It took him several long moments to find the outline of the man’s cloak, designed as it was to hide him from the eyes of the world. A faint trace of mist rose from the cloak and blended with the rising dew burning off in the sunlight.
As he suspected, the lore-strand had burnt at precisely the wrong moment, obliterating the Namer’s chance to catch a glimpse of the F’dor’s ambassador before he or she reached Ylorc. Meridion had been watching through her eyes, waiting for the moment when she first beheld the henchman, as the Seer had advised. He could make out a thin dark line in the distance; that must have been the ambassadorial caravan. She had already seen it. The opportunity had passed. And he had missed it.
He dimmed the lamp on the Time Editor again and sat back in the dark sphere of his room to think, suspended within his glass globe amid the stars, surrounded by them. There must be another window, another way to get back into her eyes.
Meridion glanced at the endless wall of glass next to him and down at the surface of the Earth miles below. Black molten fire was crawling slowly across the darkened face of the world, withering the continents in its path, burning without smoke in the lifeless atmosphere. At the rim of the horizon another glow was beginning; soon the fire sources would meet and consume what little was left. It took all of Meridion’s strength to keep from succumbing to the urge to scream. In his darkest dreams he could never have imagined this.
In his darkest dreams. Meridion sat upright with the thought. The Namer was prescient, she could see the Past and Future in her dreams, or sometimes just by reading the vibrations that events had left behind, hovering in the air or clinging to an object. Dreams gave off vibrational energy; if he could find a trace of one of them, like the dust that hovered in afternoon light, he could follow it back to her, anchor himself behind her eyes again, in the Past. Meridion eyed the spool which had held the brittle lore-strand he had spliced together, hanging listlessly on the Editor’s main pinion.
He seized the ancient reel and spun out the film, carefully drawing the edge where it had broken cleanly back under the Time Editor’s lens. He adjusted the eyepiece and looked. The film in frame was dark, and at first it was hard to make out anything within the image. Then after a few moments, his eyes adjusted. He caught a flash of gold as the Namer sighed in the darkness of her chamber and rolled over in her sleep. Meridion smiled.
He had found the record of the night before she and Ashe had left on their journey. Meridion had no doubt she had been in the throes of dreaming then.
After a moment’s consideration he selected two silver instruments, a gathering tool with a hair-thin point and a tiny sieve basket soldered onto a long slender handle. The mesh of the thumbnail-sized basket was fine enough to hold even the slightest particle of dust. With the greatest of care Meridion blew on the frame of film, and watched und
er the lens for a reaction. He saw nothing. He blew again, and this time a tiny white spark rose from the strand, too small to be seen without magnification even by his extraordinarily sensitive eyes.
Skillfully, Meridion caught the speck with the gathering tool and transferred it to the basket. Then, watching intently, he waited until the lamp of the Time Editor illuminated the whisper-thin thread that connected it to the film. He turned his head and exhaled. He had caught a dream-thread.
Working carefully he drew it out more until it was long enough to position under the most powerful lens. He never averted his eyes as he gestured to one of the cabinets floating in the air above the Editor. The doors opened, and a tiny bottle of oily liquid skittered to the front of the shelf, then leapt into the air, wafting gently down until it came to rest on the gleaming prismatic disc hovering in the air beside him. Keeping his eyes fixed on the thread lest he lose sight of it, Meridion uncorked the bottle with one hand and carefully removed the dropper. Then, he held it over the thread and squeezed.
The glass below the lens swirled in a pink-yellow haze, then cleared. Meridion reached over and turned the viewing screen onto the wall. It would take a moment for him to get his bearings, but it was always that way when one was watching from inside someone else’s dreams.
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