She opened her eyes and stared at the brilliant green strands of grass dancing in front of her face. With a sigh she sat up and shielded her eyes against the sun.
‘Not even a cloud,’ she murmured, staring up at the endless blue. Woetala, one of Maioria’s two moons, sat full and heavy on the horizon, though hazy and dimmed of its splendour in the daylight. She heaved herself up, feeling none the better, and at a loss as to what to do. She was supposed to be at the smithy. Laron would be worried. Though she did not work for the blacksmith, she helped keep his smithy clean in return for the use of his yard and shed.
The breeze picked up. It was filled with the sweet scent of wild flowers and sea salt. She grasped her hair with one hand to keep it from flicking into her eyes and glanced behind her. Beyond their orchard stood their house, its red slate roof only partially visible amongst the trees.
To the west was the ocean glimmering in the sunlight, and there was nothing but ocean until you reached the Uncharted Lands, though some said it existed only in myth. Indeed the fishermen spoke of the End of the World, existing hundreds, or maybe thousands, of miles to the west.
Little Kammy was the smallest of the inhabited islands that made up the Isles of Kammy. It sat at the most western edge in the warm turbulent currents of the Fariant Fey, which meant the Warm Flowing Torrent in the Old Tongue. To the east, beyond a stretch of fast-flowing sea, was the larger flatter island of Bigger Kammy. Beyond it were six more islands, and far into the distance well beyond view lay the mainland, Frayon.
Issa longed to visit the mainland, but sea passage to it was expensive, and it was so far away it might as well be on a different planet. The ocean currents that swept through the Isles carried water north and circled it west, taking ships away from rather than towards Frayon, in a sea that was treacherous at the best of times.
Like most people on Little Kammy, she had never ventured beyond its shores, but it didn’t stop her from dreaming. She and Tarry had already made plans to buy a boat, though Ma would never approve, so they kept it a secret. If they ever got to the mainland, it would be fine because they all spoke Frayonesse, albeit with a different dialect. Though it was said the mainlanders struggled to understand the islanders’ lilt.
She gasped and doubled over as a sharp stab of pain struck her in the head. The world slid sideways and it sounded like a great gale was blowing. The pain went, but everything had changed.
She was no longer in her own body on the hilltop. Instead, she was flying high above a chain of islands in a shimmering sea. The wind rushed through her black feathers, and every gust she countered with a twitch of her wings and tilt of her tail.
Great Goddess, I’m a bird!
She looked to her left at the strange ruddy clouds bulging forwards and was afraid. She dropped towards the smallest island at the end of the chain. Upon it, somewhere in the centre, was the one she sought.
The sharp stab came again but lasted only a second. She stood back in her own body, swaying for balance, legs trembling and stomach queasy. A shadow swished low overhead and she ducked. The raven swooped and came to a hopping stop, black wings stretching out for balance as he stumbled wearily. Sunlight gleamed off slick black feathers, a grey lid snapped across an eye, its blunt head turned and tilted to regard her.
She caught her breath and tried to calm her racing heart.
‘It’s just a bird.’ But I saw through its eyes. The raven pitched forward and squawked, its dark pink tongue curling out.
‘My, you’re a big one,’ she whispered. She was close enough to reach down and touch him if she wanted. She had the strangest feeling that the bird was about to speak. He cawed, making her jump, and launched into the air, swooping down the path away from home. He landed again and turned to look at her.
He wanted her to follow? The idea was ridiculous. What bird ever wanted a human to follow it? She laughed, but the raven lowered his head. She swallowed. It was wrong to mock any of the goddess’s creatures. Where was it going anyway? And why wasn’t it afraid of her like other birds? She took a few steps down the path, and the raven took off again. She stopped and looked back at the house.
‘What about Ma?’ she said. Her friends used to laugh at the way she talked to animals as if they were human, but she knew the animals were listening and that they understood. When they saw how she could heal them, no one laughed anymore. Worry twisted her stomach, but the raven’s caw came again and held an urgency that she could not seem to ignore.
She could follow it a little way, just to see where it was going. She turned back to the raven who had landed a few yards away. With a sigh she trotted forwards and he took off again.
As she followed it into the woods she felt glad to be away from the house and the smell of illness, away from her mother who was not her mother, and from everything in her life that no longer made any sense.
Chapter 2
The Hidden Glade
ISSA followed the raven away from the orchard and along a footpath winding through chestnut trees. Every time she slowed and looked back, the raven’s caw spurred her on. She wound through some particularly thick ferns and her feet hesitated. No one knew this place better than her, so why did she not recognise where they were?
The path was still there, but it was difficult to see through the ferns. The trees crowded together more thickly than she remembered, they seemed bigger too. Had the raven somehow led her along a sidetrack she had not noticed before? But there weren’t any other tracks between her house and Farmer Ged’s, and the wood was never this densely wooded.
‘Wait,’ she called out to the raven, but he flew on from tree to tree, moving deeper into the thickening wood. At every hop he turned back to look at her.
She huffed, but followed anyway, mystery and intrigue leading her on. Laron would be all right for a while. Besides, how often does a raven approach a person and lead them on some unknown quest? Ravens were quite rare, she could only remember seeing one once a few years ago on the wildest western side of Little Kammy. On the jagged cliffs a pair roosted, but she had never seen them on the eastern side, where the main port and most of the villages were.
Here the trees were huge gnarly oaks with a few beech trees dotted between. The path was thick with old leaves and ageing roots, and not really a path at all. It was harder to keep up with the raven as she clambered over drooping boughs and pushed through thorns that tore her trousers and scratched her legs.
She glanced up at the sky, but could barely see it through the thick canopy. It must have clouded over for it was all hazy and a soft mist clung to everything. The air was thick with the damp earthy smell of the forest. She grinned, feeling felt like a child again, and each step was bringing her closer to discovering a secret hideaway, or a long hidden and forgotten treasure.
She was working her way through a particularly gnarly patch when the root she was standing on snapped. She yelped and fell head first into thorns. The branches gave way under her weight, and she pitched forwards, rolling down the bank to the bottom.
She groaned and sat up. Her hands were scratched and splinters stuck in her palms. Grimacing she began teasing them out, then extracted an entire branch from her hair.
She glared at the raven. ‘I’m surprised you bothered to wait.’
He ruffled his feathers and would not look at her, focusing instead upon an earthworm that was trying to hide under a leaf.
‘Humph,’ she said, heaving herself up. Thankfully nothing hurt too badly. She brushed at the dirt on her torn trousers. Nothing but a long scrub would get them clean and they’d need darning now.
It was the silence that made her stop and look around. She was in a small glade surrounded by huge oak trees.
‘They must be very old,’ she said in a hushed voice to the raven, looking up at their massive trunks and thick branches bowing down with age.
No birds sang and no breeze moved the leaves, all was still and serene. She straightened and her eyes rested upon several huge standing stones
looming beyond the ferns. What in Maioria were they? They shimmered silver blue and towered above her, over twice her height.
‘They weren’t here before.’ She glanced at the raven. ‘I’m sure of it.’
Ma and Farmer Ged talked of hidden glades, they called them “Fairy Pockets,” and spoke of them as places where the veils between this world and the worlds of fairy were thinnest. They said there were many all over the place, but they mostly existed in woodlands where the tree spirits were strong.
Of course she believed them, she had even seen a fairy or two; a flashing ball of light dancing among the twilight flowers, tiny slender arms and legs and transparent wings. They disappeared as quickly, and few people were fast enough to see them, so she must have been lucky.
Such “thinning of the veils” could also be stumbled upon in the ocean, though these were less likely entrances to fairy worlds and more where the Ancients’ mythical land of Aralanastias lay, or the Elven Land of Mists. And there was always that nightmare place called the Shadowlands far to the north of the Isles of Kammy.
Issa shuddered. That place was real and you didn’t need to find a Fairy Pocket to get to it either, if anybody wanted to go there, which no one did. It was a shadow realm filled with ghosts, the land of the Forsaken dead. Sailors who set foot there never left. The wraiths overcame them with grief and sorrow long before they could find their way through the fog to their ships.
Issa froze. What if she were trapped? It was said that many wanderers through the veils lost themselves and never returned. An hour in the land of fairy was a year in the real world. But she could see no fairies here, and she could find no reason to be scared. She tried to relax.
The stones seemed like figures standing there, watching her. How old were they? She walked towards one. Looking closely she could just make out carvings upon it. She traced the lines and curves of strange symbols and letters—a language long forgotten and faded by time. There was no date or anything she recognised.
She walked between them. They formed a pathway stretching fifty paces or so towards a large and perfectly round grassy mound surrounded by thinner shards of blue-white stone.
‘Maion'artheria,’ the faint whisper made her jump. Her eyes darted about as the voice echoed. It was just the wind, she thought, though there was none. The raven squawked and flew to the mound. She followed, wanting to be closer to the bird rather than stood on her own.
The entrance to the mound was formed of three stones, two upright and one a lintel spread horizontally atop them. Or rather, it would have been horizontal except that it was crumbling and hung down on the left, creating a crooked black hole of an entrance.
The raven landed upon it and watched Issa approach. She laughed at the bird, feeling foolish for following him all this way. But her laugh was loud in the silence and she closed her mouth.
She stood before the pitch-black entrance, but could not see anything inside, the light just stopped. Tentatively she reached out and touched the blackness. She gasped as her hand passed through what felt like water, but it was thicker and very cold. Her hand completely disappeared into the black liquid that filled the entrance. She wiggled her fingers on the other side.
She stared at the ripples circling out from her wrist, and as they moved she saw her reflection in them, with the forest and the stones behind her. The freezing cold became too much and she pulled her hand back. Her hand was dry and cool.
‘It’s not solid,’ she breathed, glancing up at the raven. He croaked. But how did the liquid stand up like that? She watched her reflection ripple until the black water calmed to stillness once more. But her image did not fade, somehow touching it had left an imprint of herself and her surroundings. She chewed her lip.
‘What’s in there?’ she asked the raven, but he only cocked his head.
‘Maion'artheria,’ the voice whispered again, making her jump. This time it definitely came from beyond the mirror. Her heart was pounding. The raven had led her all the way here, was he expecting her to go inside? She didn’t feel any danger, so what harm could it do? She could just take a peak and come straight back out. Always her inquisitiveness overrode any fear and was a cause of constant worry for Ma.
‘Well, I guess there’s nothing to fear, and you did bring me all this way.’ Her voice sounded hollow in the stillness. ‘You only live once, right? Hah. I’m not a coward and I can step straight back out.’
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and stepped forwards into her reflection. Freezing blackness engulfed her, darkness so complete she could no longer see her body, and every limb, finger and toe felt frozen. She had the strangest feeling, an unquestionable knowing, that something had been set in motion. She was frightened. Perhaps if her mother had not told her that she wasn’t her mother, she would never have stepped into the darkness. She probably would never have followed the raven at all, she thought, had everything been “normal.” The liquid cold vanished.
She let go of her breath and blinked. It was dark, but she felt an open space ahead. The freezing cold was replaced with a warm breeze. Heart thumping she breathed deeply. Definitely not a coward, she grinned. A muted light grew, driving back the dark, and she gasped at what she saw.
On the other side of the black mirror, there was no tomb or rock chamber that she had somehow been expecting, but a vast desert of pale sand expanding out under a star-filled sky. The sand itself gleamed indigo. A little way ahead there was another stone doorway. It was made of a type of stone she had never seen before, it shimmered all over with silver and gold specks. It was three times larger and higher than the one through which she had stepped.
The stones were not weathered, but immaculately smooth with sharp, precisely carved edges. The two monoliths tipped with a heavy lintel stone stood alone with no mound, no other stones, and nothing but the desert around it. The doorway was empty with no mirror door and went nowhere except through to the desert beyond.
She gasped as a tall, slender woman emerged from the entrance. She was robed in a flowing midnight-blue cloak and hood. The woman stood still. Though her face was hidden in the hood, Issa felt eyes upon her. She swallowed. Maybe she should turn back. She glanced behind, but the door through which she had come wasn’t there, only the endless desert stretched into the horizon.
The woman raised a pale hand and beckoned to her. The raven flapped over Issa’s head and landed at the woman’s feet. So, the raven had followed her inside. Had the woman sent him? She motioned to Issa again. There seemed no malice in the woman’s stance.
Issa shuffled closer until she stood a few paces away. The woman’s robe was a thing of beauty, shimmering with silver lights like thousands of stars. She peered closer at the robe and fell back with a gasp. The woman really was robed in stars. All over it, galaxies swirled in graceful arcs. There were clusters of stars of all shapes and sizes, some were the deepest red, others were shades of blue, some moved as twins through the darkness, and others stood alone, throbbing their brilliant light.
Issa’s eyes travelled up the robes and came to rest high upon the woman’s chest. Below the woman’s neck and above her bosom, was a black patch that should not be there. The beautiful stars were being sucked into it, their pulsing light fluttering weakly as they circled down and were swallowed by the blackness never to emerge again. She saw that all the stars and galaxies were moving towards the black scar and every star that disappeared made the darkness grow.
‘The stars are dying,’ Issa breathed. It made her sad. She looked up at the taller woman, but couldn’t see her face in the darkness of her hood, only a smooth luminous chin and pale lips were visible.
The woman raised her hand and made a circling motion. Beneath her fingers appeared a pale golden light that formed into a miniature swirling galaxy, like the ones within her cloak, only larger at three feet wide and all centred around a bright golden star. It expanded swiftly, engulfing them before Issa could step away. Stars flashed and spun around her. She looked down, but her body w
as gone, and instead she was a ball of silver light. She was travelling amongst the stars as one of them.
‘What is this?’ Issa gasped.
A horse formed beneath her, but its skin flickered and moved like black flames. Ahead flew the raven. A voice echoed around her, the same calm voice that had drawn her to the mound. Though she could not see the woman, she could feel her presence, it was filled with wisdom and compassion. Issa began to think that the stars and the galaxies and the space between them was the Source of All, and she was a tiny star within her mantle, a smaller part of the Great Goddess herself.
‘The darkness is coming, Maion'artheria, my sacred daughter.’ The voice echoed in the vastness. Its tone whispered of ancient wisdom and resonated with the purest love. ‘Take heart, I will be with you.’
Issa struggled to contain herself in the awesome presence, and she pulled away, overwhelmed. The swirling galaxies disappeared and her body returned along with the desert and the stone doorway. Issa stumbled and fell to one knee. She looked up at the woman.
‘I don’t understand,’ she gasped. ‘I’m not who you think I am.’
‘The darkness draws close,’ the woman said in a gentle voice. ‘Fear not, Maion'artheria.’
Issa shook her head, stood up, and staggered backward, her eyes never leaving the robed woman. The desert began to stretch and move away. Cold blackness, like the cold of the mound’s entrance, engulfed her. She stumbled and fell.
Issa hit the ground hard. Her head was swimming and she struggled to remember where she was. In a daze she found herself lying on the earth between gnarly oaks. A thick root poked into her back. She winced and sat up. Leaves and twigs covered her body and tangled her hair. Ma will kill me, I must look like a scarecrow. After pulling most of the forest off her body, she stood up and looked around.
Night Goddess (The Goddess Prophecies Book 1) Page 2
