Mountains of Dreams
by C. L. Bevill
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Published by C.L. Bevill
on Smashwords
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Copyright 2013 by C.L. Bevill, LLC
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Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission, except for brief quotations to books and critical reviews. This story is a work of fiction. Characters and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Mountains of Dreams is the second book in the Dreams Trilogy. The first novel is Sea of Dreams.
Thanks to Mary E. Bates, freelance proofreader of ebooks,
printed material, and websites. Her help is always appreciated
and she may be contacted at [email protected].
Chapter 1
Once Upon a Time…
Once upon a time, or so the story is supposed to go, the world stopped being the world we all know. In fact, no one really knows what happened. Sure, there’s conjecture. Everyone’s tossed down their opinion. If I had a dime for every time I heard someone’s suggestions of aliens, communists, or secret projects from an enigmatic government, I’d have a lot of dimes that are pretty much worthless now. For a long time I thought there had been an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse. A sudden burst of electromagnetic radiation released from a nuclear bomb explosion would have halted everything that used electricity. However, the side effect of a nuke didn’t really explain why there suddenly was a herd of unicorns prancing around the forest. (Not the friendly unicorns with rainbows shooting out of their tushies either.) It also didn’t explain why a huge chunk of people just vanished, leaving the clothing they were wearing in piles on the ground or wherever they happened to be. And it certainly didn’t explain why the people with an extra-special set of senses were the only ones left behind.
Everyone’s got a story of where they were when it happened. I woke up on the side of a mountain. The sleeping bag beside mine once had my father in it. All that was left was some clothes he had been wearing and his wedding ring. I didn’t see another living person for a month or so. But I saw other things. The herd of unicorns was just the first. There were also the gryphon, a thing that looked like the Loch Ness Monster frolicking in a reservoir with its two babies, and a horde of miniature dragons that took up residence on a coastal Oregon bridge. Before I encountered the individual I called the Burned Man, who lured me to a bluff with a bonfire intent on homicide and a cannibalistic feast, I was beginning to think that I was completely alone and utterly bonkers.
Being nuts made the new world sound like something that was justified and understandable. People disappeared? You’re insane. New animals bouncing around? You’re cuckoo. Psychics are the only people left? You’re a few clowns short of a circus.
See? Insanity didn’t sound so bad. But I wasn’t insane. Not then. Not now.
Once upon a time sounds like it was the beginning of a fairy tale, but puh-lease, that wasn’t a fairy tale, and it certainly didn’t transmogrify into one later. Trust me. I was living in it, and I was definitely not Snow White nor was I Cinderella. My shoes weren’t glass slippers and seven happy-go-lucky dwarves weren’t cavorting with me in a magical forest singing a perky song. To be perfectly precise, I was lucky that I was wearing leather combat boots, considering the situation I was in.
Here it goes…
* * *
The mucky ground singed my feet through the heavy boots, and I made a jump onto a nearby rock. I leapt on it and scrambled up the side to get away from the fiery earth. Well, the earth wasn’t truly on fire, but apparently, the magma underneath was closer to the surface here than most other places. (Except maybe volcanos, and what do I know about geology? Furthermore, what did I know about geology after the change? The change had really changed everything!) Where I was, it made the ground feel like I was walking on a stovetop, and even the thick soles couldn’t stop the buildup of burny toes. Let me add that the air smelled like sulfur, and the overpowering humidity was like being in a sauna. Those, however, were the good aspects of being around these parts.
Looking around, I could see a series of large boulders surrounded by a steaming, boggy marsh. There was some solid ground, but I had left it behind.
I jumped from one rock to another and cast a quick look over my shoulder. Yep, situation was the same. Not good. No fairy tale world here. The prince wasn’t going to ride in and save me from the despicable monster. Specifically, the prince was still in California learning how to be a doctor while the princess was roaming the countryside learning how to be a grown-up and a human being, hoping the prince wouldn’t hook up with another random babe who didn’t have the princess’s mental baggage.
Rapidly slicing claws missed my arm by a slender margin. Instead of meeting my flesh, they scraped against the rock and made an array of exploding sparks. That impressed me for some reason. If something had to have claws, then one needed the claws that would make sparks when connecting with rocks. Hey, who needed matches when you had fire-starting claws? Plus it looked pretty cool.
I didn’t really stop to think that, but instead lunged for another significantly sized rock, bracing my hand against a tree, one of the few trees that managed to survive in this hellish environment. It was gnarled and bent with only a few green puffs of evergreen material to show that it was alive. I looked over my shoulder and saw that the beast was abruptly otherwise occupied.
Otherwise occupied was good for me. I had to think of a solution, and I had to think quickly. “Throw a candy bar at it!” I yelled.
The cause for the beast’s occupation swung a large stick at it. Splashing through knee-deep murk, it rapidly retreated into a thick stand of the same gnarled trees and then yelled back at me, “What? Snickers or Almond Joy?”
That was great. I never thought my companion had a sense of humor, but there it was, at the worst time. Of course, it was possible that the person wasn’t joking.
I thought about what I knew about the beast. The only thing that popped into my head was a series of faraway lectures from a teacher who liked to discuss legends and myths.
The greenish-black animal in question lumbered back and forth in front of the trees, trying to figure out if it would be best to yank the trees out of the ground and consume its prey or to simply mow the trees down in order to get to the chewy nougat middle. (That was my interpretation of what it was thinking.) Lean muscles rippled under scaled flesh. Gleaming orange eyes glittered possessively at its objective.
Truth be told, I wasn’t up to date on my Greek mythology. And that was assuming that the Greeks had it correct. They had been the ones to put it into story form, for sure, so they got credit for that. But how much was true, and how much was literary license? “Try the Snickers!” I yelled.
“Gee thanks!”
Okay, then. I adjusted my position and thought furiously. The beast was one-minded, which was ironic, considering, and had forgotten about me. Possibly it hadn’t forgotten about me but didn’t see me for a threat. I had judiciously avoided pulling out my Japanese broadsword until there was justification for using it. (I could have been using it. Having a set of diamond hard claws coming at you with the intent to disembowel was a very good rea
son to use my sword, but I was trying to be diplomatic.)
Back to my Greek mythology line of rationale. Swamp. Check. I looked around. It was a swamp. A swamp with large residual boulders everywhere. I don’t know what it was before, but I had a good idea that it wasn’t a swamp. The area was located alongside the Potomac River and I had seen a National Park sign only a mile away. A few miles before that had been a roadside marker indicating that George Washington had been born nearby. Haha. Magic had a sense of humor.
Back to my list of things I knew about said beastie. It had the body of a serpent except it had four giant legs. Check. I guess that meant it had the body of a lizard, except much larger. Maybe it was more like the body of a dinosaur, and it could, and would, rear back on its hindmost legs in order to take a swipe at whatever was vexing it. I had seen this personally and could say it with complete confidence.
There was undeniably more than one head. Check. The legend said nine. The heads were moving around too much to tally. I wasn’t about to ask it to stay still while I did a headcount. The intel we had said that for each head that was cut off, two would grow in its place. But then the intel also said that many people had cut off at least twenty heads. Logic would dictate that to mean that there would be forty heads or more, if one had forgotten about some errant head-cutter-offer. Although I didn’t have a final number, there weren’t actually forty heads. But someone had cut something off. Lying on the ground like an unwanted piece of trash, I saw one of the decomposing, dissected heads as we had approached the lair. Examining the many necks writhing about, I didn’t see one without a head, so I came to the conclusion that the heads did grow back. (Wow, how’s that for a killer ability to have?) The idea that there might be another one did occur to me, but no one had said anything about two, so I let that go.
Someone had hacked off a head and lived to tell the tale, but the rest of the survivors had then said, “Oh, the heck with that,” and passed the buck.
Unfortunately the buck fell on my head. My head, which if were decapitated with a very hard black claw, wouldn’t grow back. I had become something different with the change, so did I really know that my head wouldn’t grow back? No, but I wasn’t going to wager on it.
Okay, Sophie, I thought to myself. What would Hercules do in this situation?
Hercules would fire flaming arrows at it and rip off its last head to bury it under a boulder. That was pretty much what I remembered about the hydra. Killing off the nasty tempered mythological creature from a swamp had been one of Hercules’ trials. He killed it somehow or another and moved onto the next trial and paraded gleefully into mythological legendry.
I wasn’t Hercules, and I had given up my crossbow for the Japanese broadsword. I couldn’t light the sword on fire. (Pretty sure about that.)
My companion threw a Snickers bar at the beast, while it tried to tear two trees apart in order to get at the elusive treat.
I said a bad word. In the last five months since the change, I had learned a number of new ones. I also had made up some that made me feel warm and fuzzy inside. After all, if the world underwent a massive magical transformation, then I could make up words.
The hydra stopped. Two of its heads stooped to sniff at the candy bar. I watched, transfixed. A long forked tongue emerged from one head as it investigated the offering.
“You gonna do something?” my companion yelled. I shook my head. Shouldn’t have done that. The hydra’s attention went back to the other person. The candy bar was forgotten.
A brief buzzing moved the hair at the base of my neck. Something landed there and hung onto a strand of my hair. “Soophee cannot be without trouble for five minutes,” a sweet-toned voice sang to me.
“Spring,” I sang back, “it’s not like I dove into it.” No, I had ridden into it. Sixty or so miles here on the back of a horse that liked to stop to eat freshly sprouted grass. My ass would tell that story for years, if I made it through the next hour or so.
The tiny firefly pixie hanging onto my hair made a noise I barely heard. I didn’t need to see her miniscule face to understand that it was twisted with depreciation. She let go and flew out in front of me. She was almost the size of a butterfly but with a small humanlike body. Like a vision out of a Disney cartoon, she was pale leafy green with iridescent wings and a fierce demeanor. Someone from the group I had originally joined had called the firefly pixies “Tinker Bells.” Tinker Bell didn’t really cover it. It was more like Tinker Bell Extreme.
Spring was the name of the firefly pixie that was my closest friend. Her name wasn’t really Spring, but One-Who-Flies-Fastest–In-Spring-Showers. The pixies had a way with names, an elongated convoluted way that made your head hurt. They were long, descriptive, and usually more than a little mouth filling. I shortened it because it would have driven me nuts not to.
It turned out that the firefly pixies were attached to me. They liked me, and they did things to me but only in a good way. They gifted me with some odd new abilities, and in return I saved their collective bacon when the Burned Man tried to make them pay for his getting burned in the first place.
But like all wars, that one ended, and life went on. Other things happened. For example…
One day in October of the previous year, a man had come to the Californian group and told us that one United States congressman had been left alive. He was the new President, and he was asking for representatives from the new and improved North America. I volunteered, much to some people’s dismay. When I left the West Coast to become a representative for the group from the redwood forest, I thought I had been leaving the firefly pixies behind, but Spring and a few of her crew had quickly joined me. It was an adventure, and their kind was all over the adventure part. Besides, Spring had irately muttered something about “—keeping Soophee out of trouble.”
Of course, the present situation didn’t really negate that statement. Here I was, in the thick of things again.
I was perched on a large rock in a swampy area in the vicinity of what had previously been known as Virginia. There was something I would have called a hydra threatening me and the beings with me. Whoever promised that life would be easy was a bald-faced liar.
“Any suggestions?” I sang at Spring.
Spring whipped out her sliver of metal and swished it at the hydra. It was the size of a toothpick but made of sterling silver. I’m not sure what it had been used for, but I had found a set of them in an abandoned secondhand store. They were exhibited in a blue velvet-lined case in a display of sterling silver dining implements. It probably was a toothpick. Now it was Spring’s weapon of choice.
Firefly pixies loved an adventure. They also loved a battle. Unfortunately, everything seemed to be a battle with them.
A few of the other girls fluttered into action. They made an arrow of iridescent green firefly pixies that launched itself at the hydra.
The hydra was pawing at the trees again while my other companion tried to further retreat into the strand of twisted, contorted trees. They buzzed the hydra’s heads, and the hydra waved at them genially, as if brushing off a mildly annoying fly.
One of the hydra’s heads said, “We hate living in the swamp.”
I stopped. It hadn’t been English. In fact, it kind of sounded like Greek. At least, it sounded Greek to me. There’s a joke in there, but I won’t lower myself to that level.
“We’re supposed to live in the swamp,” another head said.
“We’re hungry,” said a third. “Let’s just eat and go back to the cave. There aren’t as many little bugs there.”
“I have chicken!” I yelled, and it came out in the same language. The firefly pixies swooped away and returned to me. Spring landed on my head and held onto several strands of hair.
For a long minute the great beast didn’t move at all. Then the numerous heads turned to me in unison.
The synchronous movement seriously creeped me out. Creeped. Me. Out.
All of the orange-colored eyes settled on me and consid
ered me. All, one, two, three, eighteen of them.
I would have shivered, but my job wasn’t to shiver. I wanted to shiver. Chuck Norris and Hulk Hogan would have wanted to shiver. Navy Seals would have wanted to shiver.
Finally one head asked, “Did it talk to us?”
“I think it did,” said another one.
“What do we do?”
“Ask it a question,” another head said.
“You ask,” said another head.
I couldn’t keep the heads straight, and I didn’t bother to try.
“What’s…chicken, you two-legged thing?” the head on the farthest right asked.
“A bird. Very tasty. Especially fried with herbs,” I said in the same language.
“A bird,” the hydra said skeptically.
“A whole flock,” I corrected. There were twenty of the poor things back with the horses. I thought that maybe a peace offering might make a difference.
“We could just eat the two-legged things,” one head suggested.
“We aren’t food,” I snapped.
The hydra stopped for a moment again.
“Not food?” one asked.
I shook my head. “Not food.”
“Oh dear,” one head said. “I suppose we shouldn’t have eaten the other ones then.”
“They cut off our heads,” another head said.
“We did attack them,” another head said.
“After they squealed so fetchingly and attacked us.”
“Are you certain you’re not food?” the right-hand head asked me.
“My name is Sophie,” I said. “I came to negotiate with the great…buh…being in the hot swamps of Virginia.”
“Negotiate?” one head repeated.
“For what?”
“You’ve been eating my kind, and they don’t really care for it,” I said.
The many heads looked at each other. The right-hand one looked at me again. “They came into our territory. They cut off our heads.”
Mountains of Dreams Page 1
