Daygo's Fury
Page 34
Get the money and be gone, get the money and be gone …
Tears streaked down his face. His body trembled and shook. He curled up into a ball, his eyes wide, watching the flickering lights of Teruel. The inner city shone brightest, the outer city slightly dimmer, the slums barely at all, almost lost in the blackness.
******
Ensio nudged him awake with the tip of his toe. Liam’s eyes opened slowly on his still body.
“Time to go,” came Ensio’s gruff voice. The dawn light was peeking over the horizon behind Liam. It still had not quite found the city spread out before him. The night now felt like a long, terrible dream, but Liam knew that it was not.
He was slow to rise. By the time that he did, Ensio and Vara had their small camp cleared up, their movements brisk and efficient, performed with practiced confidence. Liam took a few steps from the camp, leaving his bedrolls on the floor. He looked out over the city before him.
“Hey! We’re not here to clear up after you! Roll that up or walk to Darwin!”
Liam ignored Vara’s dull voice.
“Did you hear me?”
From there, he could see that the slums were easily as large as the city proper itself, spread-eagled wide and haphazardly around the walls. The Great Roads were just visible from the hill they stood on, separating the sprawling mass, the only sense of order within it.
He glanced to his side, at the forest that lay there, surprisingly sparse. There was no unbroken ceiling of leaves, branches and flowers for him to walk beneath. The trees seemed to show as much reluctance to embrace as people, shunning one another instead in their climb to the blue light overhead. If he could but climb too.
He heard rushed footsteps behind him and then a hand on his shoulder, pulling him around roughly. Liam barely glanced at the angry-faced Vara as he walked, with a push, back towards his bedroll. A flick of his eyes saw Ensio leaning against his horse’s rump, watching him silently.
He rolled up his bedroll, tying it with the straw-like material sewn into its end. He hefted it onto his shoulder and walked to his pack animal, tying it onto the front of the saddle horn silently. He then lifted himself onto the wide animal and waited, teeth clenched, eyes straight ahead. Ensio stood watching him for a moment longer before he turned his head and nodded to Vara. They mounted their horses and left Teruel behind them in the dust.
Epilogue
Seventy-five generations of time, Niisa thought, as he opened his eyes and looked around the cave at the humming priests, lost within their commune. And is there no ending in Daygo? Is there no change? Niisa smiled.
“Return to nature,” he said softly. “You were lost. Be found again. Your suffering is at an end.”
He sat for a moment longer, staring into the green eyes of a panther.
When he left the cave, he left only peace. The water trickled tranquilly. The walls were damp, they were calm, content; they were stone. The ground was grass, rock, soil. The air was thick, warm, heavy with moisture; it was air. The leaves of the trees rustled gently on branches that swayed in the breeze, growing slowly from the trunk that rooted into the soil of the ground. It rose to the sun and grew green with its light. It was a tree. A leaf fell off and it was a leaf, no longer a tree, it would become soil, perhaps rock, or water.
Niisa smiled. He was a man, but more than a man. He held his palms out to either side of his shoulders and faced the sky. He stood open, for a time, bidding farewell to the space he had lived on.
In the southern lands, he would start a new order. An order dedicated to learning and greater knowledge, dedicated to uncovering all the mysteries of Daygo and the red moon. He looked up at the sky. He did not know how many years it would be, but he knew that Daygo would guide him to ultimate success. And then he might watch the grass grow again, until such a time as he died and was reborn. Then they could all live in silent serenity. Together, with large numbers, they could discover the fifth stage of communion, and the sixth, until wisdom and knowledge presented a solution to a problem Niisa did not yet understand.
He had changed since the killing of his sister. He was grateful for all that she had offered him, for all that he had learned through her life. He missed her on occasion, especially as he woke in the mornings and there was still a residual desire to stretch with her, to follow a routine he had known since birth. But for that, too, he was grateful, for it furthered his understanding of his fellow man. Through her death he had learned something of what loss was, what grief and the ensuing sadness was for many of his species. It was the loss of routine and habit, the loss of familiarity, the loss of company and support, the loss of things that one had become accustomed to. But to mourn change was an affliction of the self, an affliction of ignorance. Daygo, life itself, was change.
It was time. They had served their purpose. Ignorant of it, their lives, the lives of the countless forebears before them, had brought them this far, to teach him, so that he was now as he was, ready to move forward. They had brought him to where he needed to be. They could rest now. They were returned to the source, joined in peace with the all-thing, of nature.
First, he would visit that centre of learning talked of by the priest, the city of Darwin.
~~~~
Please, please, please review
Please, please, please write a review on amazon. Even just give it a star rating and write, it’s good/bad/or indifferent, whatever you think. I know it’s a pain in the ass, but you’d be doing me a huge favour if you did so. I’d really appreciate it. Reviews are huge for the book’s success. As an indie-author it’s very hard otherwise to get people to pick it up and give it a chance.
And then, if you want to, connect with me on any of the platforms listed below. Tell me you have written a review-regardless of the star rating or how you judged it- and I’ll gladly send you on some bonus material, and surrounding chapters, that will not be appearing in the books of “The Daygo Stream”
Thank you!
Now to the next book!
Connect
Please don’t hesitate to get in touch, I would love to hear from you and would be glad to answer any questions or reply to any thoughts and enquiries you might have about the series or anything in particular! You can reach me on all the below platforms.
If you would like to subscribe to my mailing list on my website, please do, and I will keep you informed on all things “The Daygo Stream”. I promise to only send about 3-4 emails a year. Also if you would have any interest of receiving advance, free reviewer copies of the sequel of “Daygo’s Fury”, let me know with an email.
Find me below
www.johnfosullivan.net
john@johnfosullivan.net
https://www.facebook.com/John-F-O-Sullivan-125495377802317/timeline/
@johnfosullivan8
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14363528.John_F_O_Sullivan
Coming Soon
The sequel to Daygo’s Fury, the next book of The Daygo Stream, will be out in 2016. Work is well underway and I expect to release by September 2016.
The Daygo Stream is an Epic Fantasy of large proportions, so expect to see many more books. Over the course of the next year, I will be updating the website and my other platforms with further snippets and information on the world of Levitashand and its histories, as well as side plot chapters and stories that will not feature in the books, so please connect with me if you want to learn more.
The scope of this series is huge and there are many major players that have yet to be introduced, which is going to be fantastic to develop as I know there are going to be many huge clashes! I believe in organic growth, so wildness will ensue!
Acknowledgements
I would like to sincerely thank my parents for all of their support. And also my Beta readers, who helped inspire me with confidence and offered some great feedback with developmental issues, plot-holes and general issues and feel of the book. My brothers Brian, Eoghan and Conor, my friends Kieran and Mitchel, and Liz.
I also rec
eived a great cover design by Carolina Fiandri, Circecorp Design,
A beautiful map by Sebastian Sanchez https://www.facebook.com/dibujosdesebastian?fref=ts
And a copy edit and proofread from Kevin @ http://theprobookeditor.com/
About the Author
I was born and raised in Ferns, Co. Wexford, Ireland, where I lived until I was seventeen and went to college/uni in Dublin, where I live now. My first love and dream, since I was eleven years old, was to write books and become a writer, but there were no creative writing degrees to speak of in Ireland so I studied Property Economics in DIT. Here I learned first-hand about the drivers of property cycles during the greatest property bust in decades.
Through school and all the way through college, I dabbled in writing, in both first person literary fiction and fantasy. And once college was over, I moved home to my parent’s house for a year to make my first attempt at it, which predictably ended in disaster- it seems almost a rite of passage for any writer.
After this I spent some time living in Canada and working in Dublin before I set out my stall and decided to try again. Close to three years later, I bring you Daygo’s Fury. I hope you enjoyed it!