Rainbows and Portals

by Elaina J Davidson

  Thirteen: “He must be elevated forthwith, and get him working on the door theory. Meanwhile, we need to discuss this space with due forethought, knowledge and wisdom. One day someone will walk there who will need certain road markers.”

  Fourteen: “Sorcerers start at one point, the point of will and talent, and attain the time of choice, where nature is stronger and the one path is selected. This we have now agreed upon. This we didn’t know before the shadows in the heavens of Avior. We also agree there is a place where shadows reign supreme, where a sorcerer has chosen the dual road, or the realm of magic has chosen him or her to see from every angle. This, too, we didn’t know before. And now we have the door theory, something never speculated upon. We have made great strides, and we have the event of nature to thank for it. It is time now to enter into the detail …”

  AVIOR

  4

  SHADOWLAND. Path of Shadows. The Shadow Road. The Shades. Shadow and Shade. The Path of Shades. Many names for the space between.

  And Avior sought to make a door for entry.

  THE PROCESS OF CREATING doors commenced soon after that meeting. A certain adept was elevated to master and given a workspace and team to achieve what theory dictated.

  It was not going to be that easy.

  The door with the fourteen markings was brought in and studied anew from every angle. It revealed no fresh insight.

  They thus started with material. The artefact door was metal, but perhaps another compound would work better, maybe a different metal. Wood, plastic, paper, foam rubber, glass - none of those were successful, and not a one would stand the test of time anyway. Time, it was realised, was important to a door of this nature. Therefore iron, but iron rusted; bronze, but bronze was too soft; copper, but copper tarnished in time. Gold, too expensive; silver, too malleable; aluminium, too lightweight … and thus it remained steel, as per the original door.

  In conclusion, it was not the material. It had to be the markings. This was a breakthrough. It was, after all, the markings that determined fate. Numbers had meaning.

  YEARS LATER, THEY UNDERSTOOD something more. They needed to cease emulating the original door. They therefore chose to write upon the surface in the Avior language, a system of glyphs. A glyph, in whatever language, was also a glyph of magic in Reaume, although no one on Avior was aware of the existence of that encompassing space.

  Almost immediately they had success.

  Door one creaked open to a blue sphere.

  Door two swung into a wormhole … and was so unstable they were forced to bury it. That act of burial had them looking askance at each other, and caused them to grow extremely wary of the artefact door. They thanked all gods they could not actually read what was upon that door, for who knew where it could take them? It was locked away again, and was eventually lost to time.

  Door three led into a past time, Avior time, and they learned much of what to avoid with proper hindsight in that act.

  Door four scared the living daylights out of everyone, as it led into a dark place where creatures swirled greedily in mist.

  Avior discovered the danger in portals, then, and greater wariness prevailed. They also found it was difficult to close a door, and even harder to keep it closed. There were continuous knocking sounds from the dark place, and often the door moved as if to open into their reality. It was guarded night and day, as that door was considered too dangerous to simply bury.

  There had to be a way to seal a door. And it needed to be found swiftly. For every door there had to be a failsafe, for every mistake a way out.

  An acolyte made the connection. How come the artefact door never opened, he asked his team? Could it be that the number fourteen, being of such high magic, was also a means to sealing out danger?

  They commenced working on that. Copper strips were manufactured and inscribed, for copper could be swiftly heated and fused to a steel door.

  They began with the original fourteen markings, but that had no effect on the door to dark mist. Knocking still sounded. They wrote words of sealing in Avior glyphs, but that, too, was unsuccessful. And then they inscribed something really simple. They wrote the glyph for 14 on copper and the knocking stopped. Movement ceased.

  It was too dangerous to apply the ultimate test, that of attempting to open the door, and thus they manufactured a new one and it led to a bright, empty world. A safe place, then; safe to test their hypothesis. The copper glyph was attached, and the door no longer opened. After four more tests on other doors, they knew that had discovered the failsafe.

  And because they had a failsafe, tried and tested, the creation of doors flourished. Many portals were opened and great strides in magic followed as a result.

  Avior doors gradually became known to other sorcerers in other places, and thus the exchange of knowledge among worlds commenced. It was a good time for Avior. They never explained how they manufactured their doors, although they did expound on the sealing factor in the number fourteen.

  A fair few hidden places in the present have an Avior door still, although most of them were permanently sealed a long time ago. Most of them.

  AVIOR

  5

  About the Siric

  IT IS AN ACCEPTED truth that there cannot be light without dark. For everything there is an opposite. Summer for winter, rain for sunshine, male for female, young for old … the list is long, and each is appreciated more fully due to its opposite … or despised. Action has reaction; cause has effect, and lumin has darak.

  Sentience has been faced with this dilemma since the beginning of cognitive thought.

  Generally lumin is the stronger force, but most of us land somewhere between. Still, strong or not, when lumin kindred are seriously outnumbered by their opposites, then that power finds itself in serious danger.

  THE SIRIC LEARNED that lesson in the worst way.

  They were once both good and evil. They were born to one or the other, a chromosome added or subtracted during conception. Unlike other Immortals they had the ability to conceive and give birth - although it was a process so mysterious it defied description. In this they remained unique.

  Through the ages more of the Siric’s population was born lumin and thus was their society largely tipped towards a benevolent way of life. This did not translate as ever peaceful, however; they were constantly at war. Their battles were not fought in a place, but were awesome, spectacular creations - or destructions - of the fabric of space itself, and was one of Mother Universe’ great challenges. Sentients would look up a million years later, when the spectacle had travelled the distance of time to their corner of the universe and wonder what fantastical phenomenon of ancient space had transpired.

  The Siric desired to destroy each other. For the Lumin Siric this proved a terrible dilemma. One could say it was a necessary evil, yet there was no evil in the desire for a peaceful future; it truly was a necessity. It was traditionally the Lumin Siric who sought and engendered war against the Murs Siric- if the forces of good were in control from the outset no evil could intrude. They believed also that the universe was a marvellous creation and desired it to remain the beautiful home that it was.

  Thousands of years would pass, sometimes far more, before a battle would be fought, and it was during just such a long period of calm and rest that the Murs began gathering the forces of evil. Not only did they learn the art of concealment so well that their Lumin counterparts remained unaware of the shifting balance, but they elicited support from other like-minded creatures. It would be the first time various factions and types of darak would band together, and it would be a terrible force.

  Time was but a blink of the eye for such as they, but in human terms it was a long, long time back that the Murs rose in great numbers and proved they were more numerous than the forces of lumin. The resultant war raged for millennia with neither side winning more than the periodic skirmish, a little point that was soon a bone of contention among the darak collaborators; they had thought to be victorious
swiftly … darak had not the capacity to maintain either long collaboration or far-reaching intent. Darak could be very lazy, fortunately. Yet, nobody withdrew from the fray, unfortunately. It could be said that this great war was the universal catalyst that created new galaxies and made new life possible.

  Finally the Lumin Siric chose the place to end it.

  The place was a huge space vacuum far removed from any galaxy. They lured the Murs and their forces to the chosen place, and even in Siric terms it was a hard-fought, stupendous battle that ensued. That section of the universe was ripped, twisted, reformed and torn again, over and over. They won eventually and banished what remained of the other side into the furthest reaches of space.

  Since that time no darak fallen had again risen to war on any significant scale and no symbiotic darkling force again agreed to stand together. It was good.

  AVIOR

  6

  BEFORE THAT FINAL battle, there were many confrontations and Avior became one such battleground. As battles commenced between Lumin and Murs Siric, stars appeared to burst in the heavens over Avior.

  At first it was spectacular, events far removed and cause for awe amid watchers on the ground. But the bursts began to grow larger by the week and a sense of panic took root. Avior realised it was something huge, something unstoppable. Real panic took hold as the day sky also was aflame. Mass suicide ensued, and other deeds. Rape and murder, theft and pillage … Avior stared approaching annihilation right in the proverbial eye.

  The Shadowland manifested in vision after vision.

  The masters of magic realised destruction of this magnitude would occur again and again in the future, and other races, other worlds, would stare death in the face. Only someone strong enough to walk the shadow path could stop it.

  A mighty door was seen in vision after vision.

  The masters of magic realised it was the theorised door to the shadowland. An entrance for someone far in the future to put a final end to wholesale slaughter such as was happening right then in Avior’s skies.

  And the great truth of opposites was seen in vision after vision. In the form of dark and light … or dark and fair in the form of two equal and opposite men. Sword and seat. Dragon and Spirit. They would save the universe; they would walk the Shadowland.

  They needed a door.

  Their final task was to create this great and dangerous device. As the masters of magic, this was their duty, their noble purpose. It would not have a failsafe attached, because it needed to remain accessible, and thus it had to be a one-way entrance.

  They turned to trance for those final answers.

  Weeks followed, weeks of ever increasing danger to Avior. A forge was installed in the ancient mountain enclave and the door was manufactured in secret and with great precision and care for every detail. The recess for hands, the protruding glyphs, the correct symbols for sword and dragon, the warning. The full vision was recorded on the surface, for the two men needed to understand without doubt the door spoke only to them.

  Finally it was ready.

  It could not be tested, for it was a one-way device. They had to trust they had followed every visionary directive and had applied their long experience and craft to making it so.

  There was one final task, and that was to ferry it to safety.

  Fourteen masters were selected for this task and, as Avior started to burn, they lifted the door and transported out to a far world where no one lived.

  BECAUSE THE SIRIC accidentally annihilated Avior in their battles for supremacy, those fourteen Avior were the very last of their kind in another place.

  They stood their creation up as a door should stand and planted it in place to remain immovable through the coming ages. And then, trusting to that far future and grieving for the hell of the present, they committed suicide to protect the location of the magical entrance.

  Avior, people and world, was gone. But the legacy lived on.

  AVIOR

  EPILOGUE

  TIME PASSED AND natural events created a rise, then a hill and then the terrain encompassed the door.

  The world travelled into the Forbidden Zone and hosted evil creatures for a time, later those of good nature, and then it emptied again for a lengthy period. It left the Forbidden Zone and one day the Guardians of the Dome found it and regarded it as a world viable for habitation.

  Echolone was born and settled.

  Avior’s door has now been discovered.

  And a message is indeed inscribed upon it.

  ‘HE WHO ENTERS cannot leave by the same token. When all hope is lost, it will be renewed. When all life has ceased, the seed will sprout anew. In the whorl will appear all that was, is and must be. Balance is restored, and the new way becomes fresh. So it is foreseen as the stars settle into their patterns. So it will be when the dancing suns and dying moons meet, when all lost memory is rediscovered, when from sword and seat form is returned, and a city of light is gifted new light. This is the wording of oracles. When these events are seen, thus will be forthcoming a new journey. This will be the journey of unbalance, for it is known that in all things there are two parts, one the opposite of the other. In the whorl lay entrance and exit, in unbalance there is neither. This door before you, travellers, is but a devised means and may be used only once. Know now the journey is beyond and there is no return through this door. The dragon and the sword will enter together as they must, as is foretold. In the dark is found light, and in the light is found dark, and everywhere will be shadow. Beyond the veil lies the answer and in the answer lies the labyrinth where shadows mark the corners of curves. Lords of all, bring forth the shadows. Balance will fail, unbalance will sunder, and even shadow will have no power. Nothing exists. This is the wording of oracles. Bring forth the shadows.’

  Carlin of Cèlaver’s translation of the hieroglyphs found on the Avior door on Echolone

  AVIOR

  Afterword

  YES, IN The Echolone Mine Torrullin and Elianas stand before this door, this one-way portal. Beyond, shadows wait.

  Much heartache awaits them also, and terrible agony. As writer, I sobbed at certain points; as reader, chances are you will too.

  The journey beyond this door is an emotional one indeed.

  Here ends the inserts and extras

  removed from the larger tales that are the LORE books.

  There is SO MUCH for you to discover yet!

  Here’s to your journey through realms and time

  via rainbows and portals of every kind imaginable.

  Enjoy!

  Other Books by Elaina J. Davidson

  Lore of Arcana

  The Infinity Mantle

  The Kinfire Tree

  The Drowned Throne

  The Dragon Circle

  Lore of Arcana Omnibus

  Lore of Reaume

  The Kallanon Scales

  The Nemisin Star

  The Sleeper Sword

  The Dreamer Stones

  Lore of Reaume Omnibus

  Lore of Sanctum

  The Nemesis Blade

  The Echolone Mine

  The Nowhere Sphere

  The Master Mechanism

  Lore of Sanctum Omnibus

  Lore Short Stories

  The Rainbows of Pilan

  The Life-Wheels of Pendulim

  The History of Ardosia

  The Wolves of Valaris

  The Tower of Stairs

  The Glittering Darkness

  The Beyond for Vannis

  Avior’s Doors (Sanctum)

  Ancient Terra

  Eurue: The Forgotten World

  Short Stories and Novellas

  Our Friend Thomas Henson

  Town Thomas

  Ancient Illumination

  Latticework

  FingerNale Tales

  Minstrel of the Water Willow

  Redwood

  The Artist

  The Bartender

  Non-Fiction

  Justine’s Jou
rnal

  Translations

  Santuario Ilfin

  El Juglar Del Sauce

  Llamada Ancestral

  Luce Ancestrale

  Illuminacoa Ancia

  Paraiso de Ilfin

  O Menestrel Do Salgeuiro Aquatico

  Audio Books

  The Infinity Mantle –Thomas Bestwick

  Anthologies

  Another Bloody Christmas

  Standalone Novels

  TINSAL

  Ilfin of Arc

  About the Author

  Elaina lives in magical Ireland after leaving the surrounds of magical Table Mountain at the southern tip of Africa. Having lived in both Ireland and New Zealand, she now realises Ireland’s mists are close to perfection. When writing she puts into words her travels and dreams, because she believes there is inspiration in even the most outrageous tale.

  Ireland’s ancient past has influenced her writing, gifting her work a Celtic twist, while the majesty of New Zealand has led her to mountaintops and extraordinary vistas. The vibrancy of Africa has had much to do with the inspirational side of Elaina’s work. The colours and diversity of nature itself fires her imagination.

  Come with her to places familiar and far, far away!