by A. Evermore
But beyond that vibrancy she glimpsed subtle darkness moving, scratching at the corners of life, waiting for its time, infecting the peace. It was like a disease slowly eating away at everything, barely perceptible but there nonetheless. She wondered if spending time in the Shadowlands had made her more sensitive to such subtle energies.
They came to a brook that bubbled and flowed between ash, oak and willow trees growing along its banks. Bright magenta dragonflies hummed gracefully back and forth just above the surface. Issa focused on the peaceful beauty and pushed the darkness aside.
‘It truly is a sacred place,’ she breathed.
Freydel smiled, ‘Indeed. I always feel relaxed here and my body reinvigorated.’
‘Maeve is right,’ she added, looking back at the pale red brick castle, ‘it is less like a fort and more like a stately house.’ The grand house was large but only two storeys high except for a tall round tower at one end. Dotted here and there within the pale red bricks were decorative pale blue bricks cleverly placed to create swirls within the walls. The roof was made of light grey slate that glinted in the light as if flecked with quartz.
‘Yes,’ Freydel agreed, ‘it was built with much love by the Lady Eleny and her husband, and that love still seems to emanate from the very walls.’
They walked along the brook until they came to a gap between an ash and willow tree. Freydel turned to her and spoke, smiling warmly.
‘Your companions are safe, I scryed for them; two men of your description on a coast far from here. They are on Frayon, on the Main Land, I am most certain.’
Issa breathed a heavy sigh of relief, and then frowned, ‘But Frayon is a long way from here. How did we come so far apart? Are they all right? Hurt? Wounded?’ she blurted.
‘Well they are a lot better off than you were,’ he said with a wink. ‘I recognised one of them but I was at a distance, and could not be sure.’ He shook his head, ‘never mind. It would help me greatly if you could tell me a little of yourself though, if you can trust me of course. We are quite safe here.’
Looking up at him Issa shielded her eyes against the low morning sun. Considering everything she had seen of the man surely he could be trusted. Besides, it wasn’t as though she had anything to lose.
‘My home is on Little Kammy within the Isles of Kammy, well it was, until the Dromoorai came. I had no idea such monsters were real,’ her hand went to her throat, ‘but the raven came and it led me… I followed it into a… a Fairy Pocket if you like, though it wasn’t a Fairy Pocket, it’s difficult to explain,’ she shook her head and frowned but Freydel urged her on.
‘Well, when I returned everything was destroyed, burnt to the ground and all the people were… were gone, dead,’ the memories were still raw and she blinked back tears. ‘Ma is gone.’
‘So many people, so many places, have suffered the Immortal Lord’s destruction,’ Freydel said sadly.
‘But a Dromoorai came back because I…’ she glanced sideways at Freydel, if anyone would understand a Wizard surely would, ‘was so overcome with grief some kind of magic flared from my hands, terrible destructive magic.’ She glimpsed Freydel’s eyes grow wide but then he swiftly guarded them and she wished she hadn’t said anything.
‘Well it never happened again,’ she clasped her hands behind her back as if to keep them safe. ‘But the Dromoorai detected the magic. I ran from it and the raven, silly bird, tried to fight it. I jumped from the cliff rather than be caught but survived the fall and, well anyway, I gathered supplies and tried to leave but no one can navigate that tide and I was swept onto another island I did not know. There was a Witch there who helped me and gave me a potion to seem as dead to the wraiths of the Shadowlands.
‘But, like everything in my life since the Dromoorai came, it didn’t go to plan and Keteth trapped me in the Shadowlands. Then Asaph came to help me,’ she suddenly felt exhausted from the memories and talking, ‘we managed to escape the Shadowlands but Keteth followed and destroyed the boat. I don’t remember any more than that. I know you think I’m mad but that is the truth of it.’
Freydel was looking at her intently. He nodded often as she spoke, as if everything she had said had somehow confirmed what he was thinking, though for some reason, she wished that it had not.
‘No, I do not think you are mad, I think you are blessed to survive so much,’ Freydel smiled and as she squinted at him she could see no mockery in his eyes.
‘There is…’ she sighed heavily, dropping her eyes to stare at the grass unseeing, ‘so much that has happened that I do not fully understand. I feel as if I have lived many lifetimes in just a few days. In the Shadowlands I was hunted by Keteth, I feel that he hunts for me still, even here, but there is something else that also searches for me, something so powerful and terrifying I dare not think about it.’
At the mere thought of it she felt that destructive force moving out there somewhere, just as she had in the Shadowlands, a black cloud within which two triangular eyes and a three-pronged helmet formed. She shivered and turned to look at the brook as if doing so would hide what she saw from Freydel.
‘I don’t know how to begin this so I shall simply speak,’ Freydel said, his amber eyes unblinking. ‘I will try my best not to overwhelm, you have suffered much already, but there are some things you must know of.
‘Over several years I have been researching, collecting and amalgamating: prophecies, religious writings, historical events and suchlike from all corners of known Maioria. I have become somewhat of an expert in certain prophetical scriptures, with particular interest in works relating to the Night Goddess, Goddess of the Waters, Goddess of the Dead, collectively known as Zanufey. If you are interested I can show you many of these things: I have kept documents.’
Issa gave a half nod, unsure if she did or not, but Freydel did not wait for her to speak.
‘Mad as I may be, I have for years studied the muttered ramblings of wise or insane men and women, listened to the old tales of hermits and Witches, the greatest Wizards and the lowliest serfs. Every cloudless night I have studied the Dark Rift and the constellations of our stars and closest planets linking them back to those mentioned in the most ancient of scriptures.
‘Most people today dismiss the old prophecies as rubbish and, in a similar vein, I too was sceptical. No one likes to consider the End of Days but when you have so many prophets over millennia all clamouring doom and each giving conflicting stories and a myriad of dates - it becomes quite tiring. When one date comes and goes and the prophecy fails to materialise, people no longer believe them, until the next charismatic prophet comes along.
‘It is a feeling of mine that perhaps all the prophecies are true, even though they conflict, because they speak of a probability of events occurring, a future timeline, so to speak. And, as we all know, there are many possible future timelines to which we align ourselves.’
Issa glanced sideways at him, giving a look that suggested she had never, in fact, thought that, nor even considered the idea of different possible futures.
Freydel coughed, ‘Well, some of us Wizards do. And Seers. But probably not Witches. Anyway, without going too deep into probabilities and simultaneous timelines....’
Issa nodded vigorously. Freydel carried on, though less jubilantly than before.
‘As I said, I was sceptical until a year ago when one of the prophecies came to pass right before my very eyes.’ His voice quickened again with excitement.
‘At first I tried to find some alternative explanation, some reason for it but there was none and, seeing it for myself, the events that slowly began to unfold left me with no doubt. Since that day I noticed other prophecies and signs being fulfilled, smaller ones albeit, but there they were there nonetheless. It left me wondering how many other signs and symbols have gone unnoticed, unrecorded...’ he spoke fervently but dropped to hushed tones, as if afraid of being overheard.
‘What was this prophecy that was fulfilled?’ she asked, feeling sceptical.
>
‘There was a child in one of the many forest villages of Frayon that I travelled through. She can only have been seven or eight years old, but the people were afraid of her for she would fall into these disturbing trances. They were simple people you see, afraid of magic or what lies beyond the empirical world, and so great was their fear that they refused to call her by her name, lest they invoke bad luck or worse, the wrath of some Demon spirit. Instead they called her “the Nameless One,”’ he sighed, sorry for the child.
‘As soon as I entered the village she came running up to me as if she somehow sensed my mission, nothing more than a tiny slip of a girl, with bedraggled curls like varnished mahogany, and a muddy dress. Her eyes glazed and her legs gave way beneath her, she trembled all over and began to speak. I couldn’t hear what she was saying at first but she repeated herself louder and louder, and I was shocked to the core when I recognised the language, for it was Old Tongue of the Ancients.
‘She spoke of a third moon rising in addition to our own two moons, Doon and Woetala. This new moon was not bright but dark, gleaming with an awesome blue light. It is not a new moon at all but an ancient one, older even than Maioria herself. This dark moon is the moon of Zanufey, the Night Goddess. A few ancient scriptures recorded the existence of this strange moon eons ago, during a time when magical beasts walked the earth and all men and women were as powerful as gods. And when it appeared, great changes happened.’ Freydel took a brief pause and a big breath, and then spoke quickly.
‘The child, the Nameless One, said Zanufey had chosen her disciple and she would soon walk the earth when the Dawn Bringer finds her. Her messenger will be a raven for she is the Queen of Ravens, the harbingers of change. Via her chosen one, Zanufey will lead us through the coming darkness...’ he shivered and his face paled, though the sun burned down upon them.
‘A terrible darkness is coming... indeed it is upon us now,’ he said staring into the distance, ‘and it is this Raven Queen who will lead us through that darkness into the light that is there but we cannot find, as surely as the Night Goddess leads the souls of the dead into the loving light of Feygriene. The child said we “must prepare and be ready”, to watch the morning skies after a storm for black wings over a “sacred place surrounded by water”.
‘Her exact last words were, “if we lose all is lost, into his shades of the Dark Rift we will go. Our bodies will live on, corrupt, twisted, immortal, but our souls will be as if they never existed”. Those words I later found written in an obscure section of the Prophecies of Kartola Antasa, almost word for word, yet of this book there is only one copy, which I now own, and no peasant child can ever have seen it. Well, a storm did come to our sacred Isle of Celene, and with it the black wings of a raven.’
Issa was lost in thought, wondering what to make of Freydel’s words. She looked at the ring on her finger. A shadow passed across it and she looked up to see a raven land upon a tree branch above her.
Freydel turned to stare up at the bird, ‘Is it the same one I followed or another?’ he murmured to himself, then glanced back at Issa. ‘It led me to you after the storm, and I doubt you would have survived another hour had it not,’ Freydel said wistfully.
‘It is a he,’ Issa said absently, staring at the raven who was her companion. ‘I don’t really know why he came but he has been my protector of sorts, warning me when danger is near and guiding me to safety,’ she said. ‘But anyway, I have always had a connection to animals, though never to a raven.’ She suddenly felt overwhelmed as if everything was too much to take in, too much to understand. She did not want to think or reason what it might mean, and instead tried to let the words wash over her as Freydel pressed on.
‘This Queen of Ravens is an interesting character. I began to research her and one day, in spring of this year, my searching’s led me to a terrible place.’ His face turned pallid.
‘Quite by chance I stumbled upon an ancient Dark Dwarf ruin. I was scrying and had travelled far, too far, and though it looked nothing to the naked eye I could feel the twisted magic emanating from it, it reeked with Baelthrom’s unnatural power. So cursed was it I was forced to use the Orb of Death to protect me, for it was a foul place of Necromancers, deep within Venosia. I was a fool to venture so far into Maphraxie land, but so great was my need for understanding, I had to.
‘In I went, against my railing spirit, and descended down dank steps until the air became stale and the cold touched even my soul. It was dark beyond any night; a moving darkness that sought to feed off the life force within me,’ he shuddered.
‘Many doors barred the way; many magics would have stopped a physical body but I passed through in spirit form. Yet even then the last door was bound in such a way that it took me many hours to work through its unyielding mesh. Someone had taken great pains to hide this place away forever.
‘Before me stretched a long corridor and along each wall were many ancient stone tablets. Each tablet was inscribed in Dark Dwarven runes and there, to my disbelief, they mentioned the Queen of Ravens. “Look to the eastern skies, when the Dark Moon covers the moons of Doonis and Woe...” These are our moons, Doon and Woetala, as they were called in antiquity, “...from the ghosts will the chosen be drawn... the White Beast seeks her for he knows! He knows! ...Beware the Dragon, bringer of dawn... The raven comes, she comes for us...”
‘Confusing I know, my knowledge of Dark Dwarven runes is poor at best,’ he sighed and mopped the sweat from his brow with a sleeve.
‘Then they know this “Queen of Ravens” is coming? Knew millennia ago?’ she asked.
‘So it would seem,’ Freydel replied, taking a deep breath.
‘It’s all fairly heavy stuff isn’t it,’ she sighed wearily, ‘but why are you telling me? It has nothing to do with me. I came from... from far away... and know nothing of this Night Goddess,’ she frowned.
‘Most people fear the Night Goddess,’ Freydel explained, ‘for she has come to symbolise death and, as such, is a largely misunderstood aspect of the Great Goddess. It is she who leads the souls of the dead through the darkness to the eternal light of the Mother Goddess, Feygriene, so that we do not become lost in the darkness and trapped within time.
‘Zanufey’s face is always hidden until our death when she reveals herself to us. Only in our final moments shall we know the face of death, the face of Zanufey.’
Stillness settled around them as he spoke about the Night Goddess. There was no breeze and the buzzing insects were nowhere to be seen. A shadow passed over the sun and a voice whispered to her again, as if from another time and place and only she could hear it.
‘Maion'artheria.’
Issa looked straight through Freydel, her eyes seeing not him but the sacred mound and then the hooded figure in the desert, the great stone doorway behind her, huge monoliths striking up into the night. The figure was beckoning to her and then the image was gone and the sunlight returned. She looked up and frowned for there was not a cloud in the sky to cast such a shadow. Was it Zanufey who beckoned to her in her visions? She almost laughed aloud at the thought: why would she be so important as to have a Goddess call to her?
‘Some say her face is terrible, the most frightening thing to witness,’ Freydel continued, his voice came from far away, ‘but then who faces their own death without terror? Others say she is infinitely beautiful and exudes an eternal serenity. But none have truly seen her face and lived; perhaps it is so beautiful it destroys all. Despite the darkness and death that she has come to symbolise, she is perhaps the most important aspect of the Great Goddess, and ironically the most loving.’
A thought, a revelation of sorts, struck Issa and the white, bloated, form of Keteth came to her mind. ‘But there is one who has seen her and lived isn’t there, Freydel?’ she spoke quietly but her voice seemed loud in the stillness. Freydel’s eyes darted to hers. Issa did not know how she knew, only that it was the truth.
‘Oh yes, it is true,’ he whispered, ‘but only he has seen her face and
he alone. There are no others. It was when he stole the orb. Look what it did to him...’ he trailed off shaking his head, ‘no one knows why she let him live. Keteth brings upon himself his own punishment, his own misery, for he refuses to follow Zanufey, he refuses to go into the light...’ Freydel rubbed his arms as if he were cold.
‘Why do you think Keteth hunts you, Issa?’ he asked abruptly, but the tone of his voice told her he knew something.
‘I… I don’t know.’
‘I think you do,’ Freydel said, ‘of all those that live he alone knows her face. He knows the Child of the Raven can lead him to Zanufey; and he hungers for release but he is afraid. He is torn apart by madness for he loves and lusts for his prize but despises and fears it ferociously, and he will die before the Immortal Lord reaches the Child of the Raven.’
Everything became very still as Freydel spoke and it seemed his words were unlocking some knowledge deep within herself. Suddenly the air became thick as soup and she could barely breathe as she looked into the coal black eyes of the White Beast.
‘Issa?’ Freydel said, taking her by the shoulders, but she did not hear him. She was once again suspended in the dark, murky, ocean that stretched out far above and below her. He was there, coming to her from the depths.
‘Issa!’
Her attention snapped back to the present and she stared up into Freydel’s worried face, the magic of his trance breaker shimmered blue in the air between them.
‘I... I was lost... I,’ she swallowed and wiped the sweat from her brow, frowning in confusion.
‘Keteth can reach you with his mind, even here,’ he said releasing her gently, ‘you must learn to protect yourself. I can help you with that. Nowhere is safe. He does not move amongst the world like a normal being, you must be careful not to draw him to you. I fear he knows where you are already.’
She put a hand to her throat and tried to calm herself.
‘Come,’ he said, seeing the goose pimples on her arms, ‘let us go to my study where we can talk some more over spiced tea.’
