The Age of Light (The Ava'Lonan Herstories Book 1) (2 page)

The unnamed being raised his head sharply toward the
bait, reached up large, fine, pale hands to pluck one of the fruit she had painstakingly
set for the purpose of luring him. He raised the
gulu
to his nose and sniffed carefully. His face became blissful, dreamy, and he
inhaled deeply, enthralled by the scent on the fruit. He sighed heavily, as if
smelling something intoxicating.

Jeliya’s eyes grew wide, riveted on the creature. It
was working! She had been rather doubtful that it would, but there he was,
standing in the middle of her rited circle, plucking the fruit she had painted
with her own scent. She stared as he nuzzled and licked the skin of the gului,
quivering with delight and reaching for more. A strange jolt passed through
her; it was her own juices she had used to bait the gului, and to watch him
taste the fruit was as if he tasted her, nuzzled her skin with such fervor. She
shivered inwardly.

In her fascination she forgot to utter the cantrip
that would spring the trap. She also inadvertently leaned forward to get a
better view, somehow as drawn to him as he was to the fruit. The branches
beneath her creaked, swayed dangerously; then, just as she was becoming aware
of her imminent exposure, the branch broke with an explosive sound that crashed
across the mid-afterzen tranquility. She flailed in the air, wildly, for one
instant, and then she was falling. The world became a crazy kaleidoscope of
streaking color and weightlessness, broken once as something caught her ankle,
wrenching it, and then the ground slammed into her with a bed of knives.

Groggily she raised her head, saw the creature whip
around with lightning quickness, center in on her, and wheel away, vanishing
between the trees into the undergrowth.

“Wait,” she whispered through blood that welled from
a bitten lip. Then the bright sky and the dark earth tumbled together in a
confused whirlpool of pain and swirling color, and then darkness closed in with
deafening silence.

the
darkness turned...

They
pursued. With the heads of ken’nu-wolves they pursued. On wings of eve they
pursued, creatures with the heads of ken’nu-wolves and the feet of horses,
sickly yellow hooves gleaming in the dark. She ran for her life, for her soul.
Their eyes glowed as they pursued and they laughed with the voices of women.

She
ran toward the light, the safe, lovely light. Their hot, putrid breath scored
her back, spurred her heels as she ran through the murky sand, and she leaped
into the circle of light...

the
light turned...

It
was cold and green, that light, dim and lifeless, not like the warm, golden
brilliance of Av... And at its center danced a creature, like a man blended
with the attributes of a yora, covered from head to heels with the quills of
porcupines. He looked at her with dead eyes, eyes that were a total, dull
white, eyes that held cold malice and hate. He gyrated in the light, his head
hardly seeming to move as he twisted and leaped to a wild, raucous beat. His
dance held her enthralled and his eyes burned through her. In his eyes she read
her fate. She turned through liquid light to flee the man-thing and his
terrible dance - just as he turned and whipped his head and arms back,
releasing arm-length, razor sharp, poison-filled quills. They thudded into her
back, her legs, her arms. She fell. Sickly yellow laughter rang all around her
as she fell...

the
darkness turned to light...

She
was falling. Something caught at her ankle, twisting it, and she cried out, but
she continued to fall. The laughter echoed through the darkness into which she
fell. She landed on her back, driving the quills into her, through her...

darkness
turned from light...

“Well,
you’re not dead,” a deep silver voice said and cold hands, hands like ice
touched her. She tried to scream but could not, tried to see but did not. “At
least not yet, anyway,” the voice continued.

The
hands of ice turned her paralyzed body over, pulled one of the flaming quills
out. Again she tried to scream - again her body betrayed her, not even
permitting her that release.

“Don’t
raise such a fuss,” the silver voice said into the dark as the hands pulled out
another quill. “These needles are only a quarter of a digit long. You were
lucky. I’ve seen some grow as long as two digits.” The voice paused, then
added, “Of course, you could have chosen a less poisonous variety of stinging
nettle to fall in; boro’thrista would not have been my first choice.”

She
tried to tell the voice that they were quills, not needles, and that they had
been thrown at her by a man/yora beast, but the voice did not seem to hear. The
hands pulled a quill out of her heart. She heard herself scream this time, and
then the darkness became a solid thing that closed in around her, silencing the
voice and numbing the hands of ice...

…and
the darkness turned...

She
floated in a boiling sea, and it scalded her when she moved, scorched her eyes
when she tried to open them. The sea was red with her blood. She was sinking,
drowning, drowning in bitter red, sinking in boiling blood. She thrashed about,
coughing, the bitter water filling her mouth, her lungs. The seaweed tried to tangle
her and pull her down. She fought the stinging strands, clawing to get away,
blind with redness. She was drowning...

The
ice hands touched her, and she struck out at them, thinking that they would
pull her further into the boiling sea. But the hands held her, dragged her out
of the sea and the silver voice tasted of peppermint and sage. The deadly sea
came out of her lungs, her stomach, and the hands of ice touched her
everywhere, leaving behind their coldness, soothing her fevered, burned skin.
She reached out blindly and felt the arms that were attached to the hands. The
hands let go, leaving her to the boiling sea that tried to suck her back into
itself. She clutched after the hands, huddled against the body, cried as the
sea surrounded her, creeping over her head, devouring her feet. She cried out
that it burned, and she pleaded to the hands to save her. The hands picked her
up and ran with her, away from the searing sea of fire and blood. It pursued,
sometimes covering her completely with its licking waves of flame, but the
hands did not stop, did not drop her or permit her to be swept away.

The
hands, with the sound of hooves striking the earth, took her to the shores of
another sea, a sea of ice, and plunged in with her. The voice of peppermint again
touched her lips, spread over her tongue, sought to clear away the boiling in
her throat, her lungs, her belly.

Jeliya
held fast to the hands, begged them not to let the sea of red take her.

“Don’t
worry,” whispered the voice of silver over the roar of the sea, “I won’t let
you go...”

the
light turned to darkness...

The
Beloved stepped from the cold dark, a pool of light in the endless eternity of
nothing.

She
cringed, afraid, the darkness so void of substance that it seemed to tear at
her being with its nothingness. But then that Other moved closer, calling to
her in a voice of golden vastness; a voice so sweet that it made her forget all
else. She looked up into the face of the Beloved and smiled at His welcome...

And
He smiled back...

The
hands of warm ice touched her from far away and the silver voice from seas of
gray and claret called to her also, despairing that she should go further, that
she should go to the arms of the Beloved. She glanced back, uneasy, then looked
to the placid expression of the Beloved who stood motionless now, neither
beckoning nor urging away, neither challenging the voice nor moving forward to
claim her nor turning away back to the cold darkness. The silver voice called
again from the empty darkness behind her, closer, louder this time, fueled by
desperation. Jeliya took another step forward, to the golden glow. Then she
shuddered as a force from behind took hold of her, made her look back, kept her
from advancing to the alluring light ahead. She quivered with strange conflict,
turned; and then an explosion of heady silver, radiant pleasure seared through
her with sweet fire, the touch of brilliance piercing her with a thousand
needles of ecstasy. And from out of the heart of the blossoming expansion of
silver light stepped a figure of glowing darkness, a darkness hard and real and
full of life, totally unlike the ungiving cold that had gripped her before. The
dark arms enfolded her in a loving embrace, the silver light blinding her to
all else, the touch burning away all thought or feeling save orgasmic
connection. Union. Oneness.

The
dark presence sighed her name, drew her back, the silver radiance around her
cutting off almost everything else from view, even, when she looked back, the
sadly smiling face of the Beloved...

light
turned to the flow of darkness...

The
trushi birds pecked at her eyes with red-hot beaks. She shrieked and clawed at
her face, trying to catch them or drive them away but the devilish birds eluded
her hands and kept stabbing her eyes. She cried out in anguish and threw her
head from side to side, but the birds always found her eyes, pecking, clawing,
pecking...

The
hands of ice held her wrists, leaving her to the mercy of the demonic birds.
She screamed and fought, but the hands held her; then a cool cloth covered her
face and chased the trushi away. Her eyes burned still, but the dampness in the
cloth seeped under her lids, soothed her, and took the burning itch away.

The
hands refreshed the cloth and the voice of peppermint water touched her lips. She
drank deeply of it. The hands stroked her face, kept refreshing the cloth until
she slept...

and
the darkness turned...

The
gila cat sat back, blinking feline eyes at her as she pounded corn in a stone
bowl and mixed in sand.

“Have
you found the cause?” it asked, licking its whiskers absently.

She
shook her head and kept pounding the corn into meal and mixing in sand.

“How
do you think to find the cause?” it asked.

She
shrugged, added more sand. She took up the golden half globe in her lap and
added it to the bowl, began to pound it.

“I
wouldn’t do that,” the gila cat said, then sighed. “But I suppose you have no
choice, do you? It must break sometime.”

She
tried to stop but the pestle kept pounding and grinding, and she watched with
terror as the amber hemisphere began to crack. Then someone took a piece of
rotting seaweed dripping red and began to choke her...

light
turned...

The
crown rested heavy on her head and the purple and gold mantle weighted down her
shoulders. She faced the Great Laine filled with bones and wreckage, and dark
shadows moved in the dim corners of the great room, shadows that slowly
advanced on her, pushing the darkness before them so that she could not see
their numbers. At her feet lay a shattered half globe, luminescent as amber,
and in her lap, a thing that played with a shard of the fractured hemisphere,
crumbling it to dust. Voices whispered accusingly at her.

“You
failed,” one said maliciously in her ear. She turned her head to find the
speaker.

“We’re
all dead now,” another baited. She opened her mouth to protest but another
choked off her words.

“Our
land is dust and ashes. Hail High Queen of ashes!”

“I
tried!” she cried out to the shades of her people. “I found it!” she held up
the thing on her lap. “See, I found the cause!”

“But
not in time,” a cryptic voice said, sardonic. “You still failed. You failed and
we paid for your failure.”

“No!”
she moaned in despair, falling to her knees, not seeing the darkness creeping
up behind her. “No! I will find it in time to save you!”

“What’s
dead is dead,” a voice like her mother’s sneered. “You cannot undo the past,
little princess. You cannot change the future.”

“The
future is not set in stone!” she denied, but the voices still jeered,
distracting her, and then the darkness with its hidden host closed over her
with midnight jaws...

darkness....

turned...

Jeliya woke up in absolute darkness, coughing and choking,
her lungs closing up. Her head throbbed with each spasm. She moaned, and began coughing
again, breath rasping, her body trying to clear the blocked air passages of the
fluid constricting them. She felt hot and weak and her head hurt savagely, as
if every nerve ending had been pounded to a pulp. She groaned again, labored to
breathe, was gripped by another fit of coughing.

Something clattered around, sounding like the
hoofsteps of a kati’yori. She tried to sit up, fought for a single breath,
could not get enough air. When she began coughing once more the hooved creature
came into the place where she was and cool hands touched her. She started, but
continued to cough, tasted blood. A strong arm raised her up.