Rath's Children-Prologue

Legends can be born from the most mundane of occurrences.  A cherry tree is felled, a simple truth uttered, and a man is known forever as an honest man.  A woman renowned for her beauty is stolen away, spawning a bloody war.  It matters not if the stories are true; these are legends for those who know the character of the world that they live in and strive to learn from those who lived before.

The people of that world do not attempt to see into the living haze that lies beyond such stories.  Even those that do cannot hold firmly to it.  It is like catching the air; when you close your hand, it sweeps across your knuckles.  It is a futile maneuver.  If, instead, you were to hold your hands flat against the wind, it would come to you willingly.  Though it would not linger, it would have been, for a fleeting moment, a .

That is where Earth and Polithia so greatly differ.  Legends are not made to teach lessons here.  They are created to die, and to linger.  Each breath is filled with their spirits; each raindrop is salty with their tears.  Their legends are forced into being just as children.  And that is what they were: Rath’s most precious children.

You do not know their story.  It was not meant to be heard by those in this world where a god can rise and fall within a century; so fickle.  In a world where you can only believe what you see, there can be no true understanding; only Chaos.

Rath’s children, nine precious souls born over and over to protect his beautiful world of Polithia, gathered here not half a year ago.  The world was crumbling; the lovely towers of Nine Points broken to detritus on the ground.  They stood at the edge of the world and called to Rath.  When he did not answer, the blood of Diamond called to him.  His Arms, glorious with death, came for her wish.

That is where it started.  And that is where it ended.

This is the first spring that she has not walked through the gardens.  The flowers, even the life-giving dragon blossom, bloomed dark.  They go well with the gray skies and the frigid winds.  This place, once vivacious with sights, sounds and colors, has been shrouded with mourning.  The people know why the sky is silent; they have seen it before.  But this time, when they hold their hands to the wind, it blows away from them.  Her whispers cannot be heard; the rains have not come for months.  The spirit of Diamond has vanished from this plane as though it had never existed.

No one understands Rath’s motivation.  His dearest creation, His precious Diamond, has been erased.  Perhaps He doesn’t understand exactly what He has done.  He has drained everything of her virtue.  We are barren without it.

What must we do now?  Can you tell us, Rath?  What is expected of us now?

 

*    *    *

 

Jeremy hesitated.  The tip of his pen lingered over the impassioned scrawl.  The words danced in the flickering candlelight.  His gaze roamed the loops and dips of the letters, taking their full impact into consideration.

Jeremy Aile, son of a swords smith and a kitchen maid, was neither a scholarly man nor a religious man.  He was comfortably secular: secure in his faith and smart enough to realize that he would not be smote as a result of an errant thought.  But the author within him made him second-guess the line.  One could not be impartial when one was obviously so furious with one’s creator.  He sighed and set to scratching out the sentence.  He brushed one long, clean line across it and moved on.

He hesitated.  It was not enough.  The adjustment was too narrow; he could still clearly read every word.  He chuckled at his own quirk and he pressed another thin line across.  His smile faded.

Another stroke of the pen edged into an innocent paragraph.

Another.

Another!

He gripped the pen in his fist and moved the nib hard and fast against the page.  The words were black, but not black enough.  Ebony lines streaked haphazardly across the page.  He took no heed of the destruction until the paper gave way at last with a mighty RRRRRRIIIIIPPP!

He shifted away from the desk slowly.  The pen dropped from his unresisting fingers.  He surveyed the damage, both to the desk that he had built from the wood of the first tree he felled and to the manuscript he had been crafting for years.  He drew in a long, shaky breath, ripped the page from the spine, crushed it into a ball, and flung the offending excerpt into the brimming wastebasket at his side.  Several that had met a similar fate leapt and crashed to the floor, a rustling cascade of mediocrity.

His thoughts were not his own of late.  Strictly speaking, they were formed in his mind, and written by his hands, but they were foreign to him.  Words that once held meaning had become odd shapes that he scrawled clumsily, countering nonsense with a reasonable outlook that, ultimately, only enhanced the nonsense.  Texts of history are not meant to beseech the involvement of poignantly absent higher powers.  They are meant to be written as though men beget in a mad world are unaffected by their origins.

Yet hundreds of pages had been crushed by hands that continued to relay the unrelenting inquiry.  He traced where the pen had split the wax and blackened the wood of his desk.  It had been one of his greatest boyhood treasures, and a point of pride for him for decades.  Yet he had ruined it in his furtive attempt to hide his most shameful of thoughts: That the sacrifice had been for naught.

It was not the truth.  He knew, on a rational level, that the outcome would have been tragic otherwise.  Yet the voice of doubt persisted.  What had once been a niggling sense of guilt had grown to a dull roar.  He could no longer shake free of it.  It had been several long months since he had nearly completed his manuscript.  All that was left was the ending.

     The faint scent of jasmine wafted near.  He knew then that she was there.  The door had not made a sound.  The loose floorboard two paces within had not creaked.  She knew better than any how to move undetected through the consuming silence.  “How long have you been standing there?” he asked, reaching out to straighten the papers piled high before him.

She stepped from the shadows.  Her long, slender arms, clad from shoulder to wrist in black, were folded about a bulging leather-bound book.  Drawing up close behind him, she untangled one limb, dipped, and picked up his fallen pen.  “Around the time you started ruining things.”

“You should be asleep.”

“I should be a lot of things.”

He lifted his eyes to gaze upon her at last.  She was as beautiful as she had been in any life.  Her porcelain skin cast an ethereal glow against the darkness; her almond eyes held a millennia’s worth of unshed tears.  Legends had boasted of her power over the moods of the moons; Opal always sparkled brightest in the full moon night.  But the moons were concealed now, and the cracks were beginning to show.  A worry line here, a frown line there, they were miniscule distortions in an otherwise flawless façade.  Nevertheless, there they were.  Studying her face, he tried hard to remember the last time he had heard her laugh aloud.

She lowered the object in her arms, interrupting his thoughts.  “Here.  I thought you might be able to use this.”

Nodding, he accepted the offering.  It was heavier than he had expected.  He drew it into his lap and opened it slowly, careful not to jostle the loose papers sticking out and about every which way.  Upon closer inspection, Jeremy realized it wasn’t an album at all.  Small papers, large papers, every size and color were jammed into it, each page filled with neat, feminine handwriting.  He glanced at the inside cover.  Sucking in a breath, he traced the letters there.  “Is this…?”

“It’s about as up close and personal as any of us are going to get.”

The temptation was great, but Jeremy’s sense of diplomacy was greater.  He hoisted the journal upward.  “I can’t take this.”

“They want you to have it.”

The tone in her voice left no room for arguments.  Normally, Jeremy would have found a way to decline such a worthy gift.  But, with the state the royal family was in, Jeremy was ill prepared to fight their wishes with propriety.  He placed the journal on the floor, searching for the right words and finding none to be adequate.  “You’re pale,” he said at last.  “Have you been eating?”

“Not much has appealed to me lately, but I am.”

“And sleeping?”

She smiled.  There was no heart behind the gesture.  As with every other aspect of the new Polithia, it was a show of something distantly remembered, and poignantly absent.  “I’ll sleep when the winds are warm again.”

“You can’t keep doing this.”

She sighed, bringing a hand to her head.  “I don’t want to argue again tonight.”

“Then start taking care of yourself.”

“What about you?  You’ve been working on that for weeks without stopping.  You’re going to exhaust yourself.”

“I don’t care about that!” he erupted.

The woman blinked, unused to such a display.  Jeremy sighed and took a moment to gather his frayed composure.  “For ten years,” he said, in a voice that thrummed with self-loathing, “I was not able to do anything for you.  I couldn’t raise a hand against people who wanted to hurt you; I couldn’t take the pain away when you were suffering.  This is the only thing that I am able to do.  Grant me one instance in which my strengths can be of use to you.”

Her fingers itched.  She wanted to reach out and swipe the unfinished manuscript from his desk.  She wanted to cast the flickering candle to the ground and watch every page burn.  Every movement they had made was recorded for the sake of history, preserved to be gasped at and pitied and to be learned from.  In her heart of hearts, she knew that there was logic to the process.  But, looking at Jeremy’s drawn features, she couldn’t banish the long pull of powerlessness, and the ache of loss.  She had fought so hard for so many years to be impervious to the whims of her emotions, and for what; to look back upon it and drown in regrets?  It would be better to forget it all and let the memories die with those who had suffered through them.

But the passion, the fire had had so often driven her every movement in the past, smoldered as instantaneously as it arose.  She sank against the doorframe, leaning her head back to rest it on the solid oak.  “What do you want me to say?”

That was her way.  Opal was bred with a tongue like a barbed whip.  Where she could not weep, she could lash out; no amount of gentle upbringing or loving care would alter that.  Jeremy was well aware of her personality, and was often able to take her tactless words and carelessness in stride.  But he had no energy to deal with such nuances, cold and exhausted as he was.  “Nothing,” he said, his voice devoid of inflection.  “There’s nothing to say.”

The woman felt the first embers of shame heat her cheeks.  She reached out, fingers stretched imploringly across the silent chasm of the icy chamber.  “Jeremy . . .”

Unaware of her advancing, he was sharp and concise with his dismissal.  “Sorry, but can you leave?  I have work to do.”

Feeling resentment at being rebuffed, she parted her lips to speak, but thought better of it.  For many years, she had been able to inwardly quell the rage of her spirit.  For her sake, she had strived to be a person of discipline and compassion.  Because, though she never sought or expected to be like her, she desired her loyalty and companionship, and so she strived to earn it.  Too late she had realized that there would be no keeping her.  Though she repressed the inherent fury, her love could not save her.  Perhaps because of that, because of the guilt she bore, the destructive characteristics of Opal had returned.  It burned slow, and it destroyed in like pace.  If she were to speak now, with her thoughts aflurry and face burning, the rest of her carefully established world could disappear.  She knew more than anyone where her weaknesses lay.  Nodding, she turned away and placed a hand on the door.

Jeremy gripped the edge of his desk.  “Alicia.”

She paused and stared, transfixed, at the carved handle.

“At least try tonight.”

And, just as stealthily as she had arrived, she was gone.  The smell of her shampoo lingered in the frigid room for only a moment.  Jeremy unleashed a sigh of contemptuous frustration.  Banging the desk loudly against the wall, he pushed to his feet and started for the door.  The journal, bursting at the seams, toppled from its precarious position at the edge of the desk and crashed to the floor, spilling a fair amount of its contents across the slick stones.  He stared at the mess.  He very seriously debated dropping the watchful candle to the scattered pages.  There was nothing that could be won back; the tortuous loss could never be alleviated by his reflections.  He was just as worthless now as he had ever been.

The weight of his conscious bore him to his knees.  He pressed his hands to the detritus.  He could not succumb to his grief; would not.  Trembling from suppressed melancholy and lack of sleep, he shifted the slightly jostled pages into place.

A slip of paper caught his eye.

Gingerly, reverently, he pulled it free from the jumble.  It was a rough pencil sketch.  Time and fingertips smudges had worn away most of the details, but he could still make out a female figure.  Her eyes had been colored in with a blue highlighter.  She regarded Jeremy with her bright, imploring stare.  At length, Jeremy turned the page over.  The handwritten description of the drawing chilled him.  He set the drawing aside, face down, and took in the fragments of recollections that surrounded him.

For the first time in a very long time, there was, faintly, a resurgence of purpose.

 

*    *    *

 

The wind blows colder every day; the trees scream for mercy from the starvation that whittles their once mighty arms to fragile, fruitless twigs.

It hurts, to push the ones you love away.  It hurts, to see them suffer.  The hurt goes on, over and over, an endless cycle spanning generations.  Only hope can heal.  But the well of hope ran dry long before we were quenched of it.  What must your people do, Rath, to be imbibed of it again?

Shall I tell the tale?  It began with a vision. . . .

 

*    *    *

 

Crystal Richardson was one of few people who took great stock in her dreams.  It may have been for good reason; often, scenes that played in her mind at night were reenacted in some form when she woke.  Her elder brother teased her mercilessly when they were children the time she claimed that an elephant would walk down their neighborhood street.  Only when a small calf broke away from a traveling circus caravan and tromped through their front yard did he concede that the world was crazy with coincidence.

So, it was not uncommon for her to keep a log of her dreams, just in case her nightmares decided to take fruition.  Curled where fingers had countlessly turned the pages, the book was thick with writings and sketches.  From the dull doldrums of everyday life to the bizarre fury of unforeseen natural disasters, her every sleeping vision took form there.  Fortunately, her true dreams, ones rife with fantasy and dark secrets, effervesced in the morning light.

     There was, however, one entry that was of particular interest to her.  More out of curiosity than fear, Crystal logged it away in its own separate notebook.  For ten years, she had glimpses of an identical dream.  Each time, there was an occurrence that either matched or filled in the omissions of the previous entry.  But, no matter how many times she attempted to piece it all together, none of it made sense.  The most common vein was the time when she awoke.  Three o’clock in the morning; without fail.  She convinced herself that, mentally, she was in a rut.  So the years passed, and it gradually became a part of her: her constant companion.

     One fall evening, she sank into the warm, welcome oblivion of the unknown.  How could she have known, curled beneath the feather down of her comforter, that the final chapter of the story was lurking behind the tapestry of her subconscious?  How could she know that the hands that fell against the spilled silken threads of her hair would remember exactly what had been forgotten?

 

*    *    *

 

     It was pitch black, a darkness that sought and swallowed any light.  The only sound was a low hum, an eerie, disembodied lullaby.  As time passed, the lonely sound swelled, as though joined by more impalpable onlookers.

     “Please. . .”

The voice, a harmonious whisper of male and female voices, flared as a faint blue flame flickered and died.  A flash caught an apparition, a hint of salvation before it was once more cloaked by darkness.

     “Please. . .”

     Flames coursed upward, a corkscrew spiral, enveloping a figure suddenly illuminated against the velvety black.  Pale and lithe, she stood as though suspended in water.  Her golden hair, tinged with blue from the fire, floated tenderly from her face, revealing the stunning electric blue of her unwavering stare.  She treaded forward.  Her glowing white gown rippled against the wind.  “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered.

     The chorus of voices intensified.  The intensity of the woman’s gaze softened.  She appeared solemn, melancholy.  When she spoke again, her sweet voice was no longer gently imploring.  It was urgent, and tremulous, as though unshed tears grasped her throat.  “You must remember.  Rath cries for a new generation.  The blood that courses through you, the living vessel of a Royal, it is the only thing that can stop It.”

     The girl fell silent.  She raised her arm reverently.  “Try to remember.”

Her eyes narrowed.  Flesh broke.  Blood welled from her ivory wrist.  It gathered at the site of the wound, forming an engorged mound of fluid.  Slowly, she turned her arm.  Time hitched; silence engulfed the endless nothingness.  The blood succumbed at last to a force of gravity that ignored all else.  As it plummeted, the girl’s words echoed in the stillness: “You must fight.”

The blood had just touched the ground, if there was ground at all to judge by, when it began to bubble.  The bubbling gave way to a loud hiss.  The fury of voices began again.  They grew louder and louder, until at last the darkness could tolerate no more.  A wall of light erupted from the spill, encasing the hapless figure with its scalding purity.  She raised her arms to cover her face from the mighty glare.

Doubt should not have existed then.  The blood, pure and of Rath’s child, should have purified the darkness.  Despite the discomfort and brilliance of its wonder, the dream should have ended there.  It always had.

But, tonight, the nightmare would not end.

The light did not remain.  It faded, bit by bit, until the heat left the girl’s straining limbs, leaving her trembling.  The blackness was not absolute any longer.  Though her companion flame had died, the girl was visible, ashen and powerless.

Something beyond her shifted.  A tendril of darkness pulled from its surroundings.  It waved upward, seeking.  Then it stilled, fixed upon the sole interloper.  The girl stiffened.  Her eyes widened.  Then they were upon her.  Tendrils of blackness tore from a thousand directions, catching her about the waist, about the arms and legs, binding her fast.  One snaked about her throat and dragged her to her knees.  She gasped for air, tearing at the viscous arms and struggling with shaking limbs to pull herself upright.

“Never forget, dear one,” she managed.  “We may not always be with you.  But the ties that bind us shall never be severed.”

Her hair was coated then, a cloak of midnight.  Her knees had all but vanished into the world beneath.  With great difficulty, she cupped her hands together.  A pearl of light whirled in the concentrated air between her palms, casting a silvery glow against her imprisonment.  Fingers of darkness caressed her face.  Her eyes shimmered, casting their last spark of hope into the tiny void.  “It takes so little to conquer the darkness.  I know that you will find a way.”

No . . .

A veil concealed her nose and mouth.  She closed her tragic, beautiful eyes and made a small gesture; a sweep of her fingers across the miniscule globe of light.  Midnight screamed victoriously.

“No!”

Crystal lurched forward, arm outstretched.  Only, it wasn’t Crystal.  Not in the way she saw herself in the waking world.  She drew back, stricken.  Her hair fell, a white, silken sheet about her kneeling, robe-clad body.

When the light, full and warm and promising, faded, the girl was not present in the aftermath.  Only the sinister black presence remained.  It pulsed and wove through the empty air, tasting.  It was not satiated.  A hundred centuries worth of untarnished souls would not be enough.  Nothing would ever be enough.

The atmosphere was icily cold.  Crystal shivered.  Despite her predicament, it was not fear that she felt.  Facing down the consuming blackness, the tremor in her heart was one of quiet, repressed fury.  Her every muscle seized with ferocity.  “Why?” she breathed, struggling to cope with the rage that threatened to overtake her.

She was met with silence.  The dark hovered teasingly, awaiting her inevitable struggle.

“These childish games, this needless destruction of unwanted things...”  Her violet eyes glittered.  She shook her head.  “I don’t understand any of it!”

A discordant note of alarm shattered the miasma’s assured demeanor.  Crystal felt a prick of heat on her breast.  Drawing in a surprised breath, she pressed a hand to the pain.  Her fingers explored the fiery area of smooth flesh.  The heat intensified.  She cringed and let loose a cry, pressing harder, willing the pain gone with her touch.

A solid mass rolled beneath her fingers.  Horrified, she watched her flesh break and birth an iron-hot, glowing shard of crystal.  Her skin puckered and drew together where it had been torn, leaving a pale, star-shaped scar.  She took the shard between her fingers and observed it.  A frenzy of colors danced in the internal glow.  “The light...”

Her heart constricted.  Somewhere between passionate love and boiling hate, there was an undeniable bond to the small, indescribable thing that had caused her so much anguish.  She pressed it close to her scar, letting it burn.  “I can’t let you destroy it.”

The darkness reared mightily.  Crystal gripped the shard, turning her full attention to the situation at hand.  The voices rose as the darkness drew higher and higher, looming over Crystal.  She was so small in comparison.  One cascading blow would sweep her into nonexistence.  It would be too easy.

It did not take into full account the influence of the shard in her hand.  It certainly did not factor in a second shower of blood.  Droplets flew far and copiously, peppering the dark.  Holes appeared in the thickest of it, tearing it asunder bit by bit.  The screams rose and trailed away as slowly, steadily it was devastated.

Crystal gasped and keeled over.  Her hands had been too shaky; she had cut too deeply.  She bunched a fist over the pouring wound, applying pressure, knowing that it would not matter.  She did not want to die.  Her vision blurred.  The evaporating darkness danced and doubled before her.  She shook her head and fought to keep focused.  It was a losing battle.

The shard clattered to the ground.  She slumped beside it, eyes half-open, unable to lift so much as a hand.  Her blood pooled beneath her, warm and strikingly red against the harsh white surroundings.  The tormented cries of the darkness had faded into nothing.  Only the wind remained.  It surged over her paralyzed form, urged her to rise.  But she had no strength.  The sharpness of blood was on her lips; only death could wash away the taste.

Suddenly, her fingers moved.  Or, rather, the shard lifted her limp hand, shedding drops of lingering blood and sending ripples gently through the puddle.  It hovered an inch from the ground, thrumming.  Crystal watched it weakly, too intent on staying alive to look away.  The shard turned on end, holding Crystal fast to it.  It began to spin.  Blinding slivers of light pulsed across Crystal’s eyes.  Her vision became cloudy.  Her heartbeat sputtered: Fast, hard, resounding, andante.  Above the miasma, a voice:

Can you feel it?

Without warning, the light of the shard flashed, blinding.  Her skin sizzled where it touched.  Screaming, she struggled to tear away from it.  It persisted, piercing her singed fingertips.  Her veins caught flame, under siege of a thousand particles of crystal.  The pain would not end, even when she shot up in bed, still screaming, clawing at the place it had been borne from.

She gulped in four great breaths.  Her trembling hands slowed their hysteria.  High on the wall, a series of clocks documenting London, Tokyo, and Honolulu time zones ticked in perfect sync; the pounding in her head steadied in time.  Lowering her hands to the coolness of the sheets, she drank in the reality of her surroundings.

Unreasonably, she had not expected to return to the room she so dearly loved.  Appreciation flooded her.  She was surprised to feel tears pricking her eyes.  How ridiculous to be relieved to awake from a dream, no matter how frightening!  Rubbing the weariness from them firmly, she turned her attention to the small black alarm clock on her nightstand.  3:00 AM.

She grabbed the half-full glass of water next to the clock and downed it.  The cool liquid was heaven to her parched throat.  Sighing, she set it down with a click and pulled her comforter from the floor.  She always had the most frightening nightmares when she was chilled, she reasoned as she settled beneath the downy warmth.  Her hand found the warm hardness of the key charm she wore about her neck.  Always subconsciously, she found solace in the feel of the pea-sized diamond against her thumb.  Rubbing as she laid back down, she remembered that she had indulged in a second piece of her mother’s Dutch apple pie only an hour before bed.

Why always the same time?

Excuse after excuse could not hold up to that single question.  Crystal rolled onto her side and hugged the pillow to her head.  Something was triggering the dream.  For the first time she allowed herself to think it, allowed herself to feel a trickle of fear.  It had to end.  For her sanity, she had to be free of the tragic visions.  But how?

The second she sought answers, she knew: Alicia.  She recalled a conversation they had had months before.  Alicia had mournfully confided in her about her grandfather’s method of wandering her dreams in an effort to diffuse her violent tendencies, and mischievously admitted to reciprocating during his meditations.  It was not a sure course; Crystal hesitated to ask more than a blessing on a test, if that.  But the possibility contented her.

Tension melted from her limbs.  She settled against the downy softness of her pillow and sighed.  The ticks of the disjointed clocks lulled her.  Soon, she was breathing soft and deep, adrift in a sea of lighthearted fancy.

The room was still.  Then, slowly, a light flickered and whirled in the center of the key charm’s diamond, still cradled in Crystal’s limp hand.  It swelled and pulsed, filling the room with brilliance.

In the pitch black of evening outside, the light was a beacon.

Only one saw the signal.

A cloaked figure watched from high above.  She balanced, unwavering, on the edge of a tall building, never turning away from the light.  She raised a hand, bringing up a computer the size and shape of a compact.  On the screen, a white spot flickered quickly against a backdrop of grey.  Three others flashed, slower than the first, but present still.  The figure snapped the compact shut.  Though shadows masked her features, her pink lips were visible.  She smiled.

“At last.”

She swept the hood of the cloak back.  Shorn locks danced in the wind, robin’s egg blue in the moonlight.  Her violet eyes narrowed.  “I have finally found you.”