Elizabeth Haydon - Rhapsody 2 - Prophecy,Child of Earth

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Book Information:

Genre: Fantasy

Author: Elizabeth Haydon

Name: Prophecy: Child of Earth

Series: Book 2 of Rhapsody Trilogy

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Prophecy: Child of Earth

Rhapsody (Part 2)

Elizabeth Haydon

THE PROPHECY OF THE THREE

The Three shall come, leaving early, arriving late,

The lifestages of all men:

Child of Blood, Child of Earth, Child of the Sky.

Each man, formed in blood and born in it,

Walks the Earth and sustained by it,

Reaching to the sky, and sheltered beneath it,

He ascends there only in his ending, becoming part of the stars.

Blood gives new beginning,

Earth gives sustenance,

The Sky gives dreams in life—eternity in death.

Thus shall the Three be, one to the other.

THE PROPHECY OF THE UNINVITED GUEST

Among the last to leave, among the first to come,

Seeking a new host, uninvited, in a new place.

The power gained being the first,

Was lost in being the last.

Hosts shall nurture it, unknowing,

Like the guest wreathed in smiles

While secretly poisoning the larder.

Jealously guarded of its own power,

Ne'er has, nor ever shall its host bear or sire children,

Yet ever it seeks to procreate.

THE PROPHECY OF THE SLEEPING CHILD

The Sleeping Child, the youngest born

Lives on in dreams, though

Death has come

To write her name within his tome

And no one yet has thought to mourn.

The middle child, who sleeping lies,

'Twixt watersky and shifting sands

Sits silent, holding patient hands

Until the day she can arise.

The eldest child rests deep within

The ever-silent vault of earth,

Unborn as yet, but with its birth

The end of Time Itself begins.

THE PROPHECY OF THE LAST GUARDIAN

Within a Circle of Four will stand a Circle of Three

Children of the Wind all, and yet none

The hunter, the sustainer, the healer,

Brought together by fear, held together by love,

To find that which hides from the Wind.

Hear, oh guardian, and look upon your destiny:

The one who hunts also will stand guard

The one who sustains also will abandon,

The one heals also will kill

To find that which hides from the Wind.

Listen, oh Last One, to the wind:

The wind of the past to beckon her home

The wind of the earth to carry her to safely

The wind of the stars to sing the mother's-song most known to her soul

To hide the Child from the Wind.

From the lips of the Sleeping

Child will come the words of ultimate wisdom:

Beware the Sleepwalker

For blood will be the means

To find that which hides from the Wind.

Meridion sat in the darkness, lost in thought. The instrument panel of the Time Editor was dark as well;

the great machine stood silent for the moment, the gleaming threads of diaphanous film hanging idle on

their spools, each reel carefully labeledPast orFuture . The Present, as ever, hung evanescent like silver

mist in the air under the Editor's lamp, twisting and changing moment by moment in the half-light.

Draped across his knees was an ancient piece of thread, a lore strand from the Past. It was a film

fragment of immeasurable importance, burnt and broken beyond repair on one end. Meridion picked it

up gingerly, then turned it over in his hands and sighed.

Time was a fragile thing, especially when manipulated mechanically. He had tried to be gentle with the

dry film, but it had cracked and ignited in the press of the Time Editor's gears, burning the image he had

needed to see. Now it was too late; the moment was gone forever, along with the information it held. The

identity of the demon he was seeking would remain hidden. There was no going back, at least not this

way.

Meridion rubbed his eyes and leaned back against the translucent aurelay, the gleaming field of energy

tied to his life essence that he had shaped for the moment into a chairlike seat, resting his head within its

hum. The prickling melody that surrounded him was invigorating, clearing his thoughts and helping him to

concentrate. It was his namesong, his life's own innate tune. A vibration unique in all the world, tied to his

true name.

The demon he was seeking had great power over names, too. Meridion had gone back into the Past

itself to find it, looking for a way to avert the path of devastation it had carefully constructed over Time,

but the demon had eluded him. F'dor were the masters of lies, the fathers of deception. They were

without corporeal form, binding themselves to innocent hosts and living through them or using them to do

their will, then moving on to another more powerful host when the opportunity presented itself. Even far

away, from his vantage point in the Future, there was no real way to see them.

For this reason Meridion had manipulated Time, had sliced and moved around pieces of the Past to

bring a Namer of great potential together with those that might help her in the task of finding and

destroying the demon. It had been his hope that these three would be able to accomplish this feat on their

side of Time before it was too late to prevent what the demon had wrought, the devastation that was now

consuming lands on both sides of the world. But the strategy had been a risky one. Just bringing lives

together did not guarantee how they would be put to use.

Already he had seen the unfortunate consequences of his actions. The Time Editor had run heatedly

with the unspooling of the time strands, fragments of film rending apart and swirling into the air above the

machine as the Past destroyed itself in favor of the new. The stench of the burning timefilm was rank and

bitter, searing Meridion's nostrils and his lungs, leaving him trembling at the thought of what damage he

might inadvertently be doing to the Future by meddling in the Past. But it was too late now.

Meridion waved his hand over the instrument panel of the Time Editor. The enormous machine roared

to life, the intricate lenses illuminated by its ferocious internal light source. A warm glow spilled onto the

tall panes of glass that formed the walls of the circular room and ascended to the clear ceiling above. The

glimmering stars that had been visible from every angle above and below him in the darkness a moment

before disappeared in the blaze of reflected brilliance. Meridion held the broken fragment of film up to

the light. The images were still there, but hard to make out. He could see the small, slender woman

because of her shining hair, golden and reflecting the sunrise, bound back with a black ribbon, standing

on the brink of morning in the vast panorama of the mountains where he had last sighted the two of them.

Meridion blew gently on the lore-strand to clear it of dust and smiled as the tiny woman in the frame

drew her cloak closer about herself. She stared off into the valley that stretched below her, prickled with

spring frost and the patchy light of dawn.

Her traveling companion was harder to find. Had Meridion not known he was there prior to

examining the film he never would have seen him, hidden in the shadows cast by the sun. It took him

several long moments to find the outline of the man's cloak, designed as it was to hide him from the eyes

of the world. A faint trace of mist rose from the cloak and blended with the rising dew burning off in the

sunlight.

As he suspected, the lore-strand had burnt at precisely the wrong moment, obliterating the Namer's

chance to catch a glimpse of the F'dor's ambassador before he or she reached Ylorc. Meridion had been

watching through her eyes, waiting for the moment when she first beheld the henchman, as the Seer had

advised. He could make out a thin dark line in the distance; that must have been the ambassadorial

caravan. She had already seen it. The opportunity had passed. And he had missed it.

He dimmed the lamp on the Time Editor again and sat back in the dark sphere of his room to think,

suspended within his glass globe amid the stars, surrounded by them. There must be another window,

another way to get back into her eyes.

Meridion glanced at the endless wall of glass next to him and down at the surface of the Earth miles

below. Black molten fire was crawling slowly across the darkened face of the world, withering the

continents in its path, burning without smoke in the lifeless atmosphere. At the rim of the horizon another

glow was beginning; soon the fire sources would meet and consume what little was left. It took all of

Meridion's strength to keep from succumbing to the urge to scream. In his darkest dreams he could never

have imagined this.

as

ln his darkest dreams. Meridion sat upright with the thought. The Nameras prescient, she could see

the Past and Future in her dreams, or sometimes •st by reading the vibrations that events had left behind,

hovering in the air or clinging to an object. Dreams gave off vibrational energy; if he could find a trace of

one of them, like the dust that hovered in afternoon light, he could follow it back to her, anchor himself

behind her eyes again, in the Past. Meridion eyed the spool which had held the brittle lore-strand he had

spliced together, hanging listlessly on the Editor's main pinion.

He seized the ancient reel and spun out the film, carefully drawing the edge where it had broken

cleanly back under the Time Editor's lens. He adjusted the eyepiece and looked. The film in frame was

dark, and at first it was hard to make out anything within the image. Then after a few moments his eyes

adjusted, and he caught a flash of gold as the Namer sighed in the darkness of her chamber and rolled

over in her sleep. Meridion smiled.

He had found the record of the night before she and Ashe had left on their journey. Meridion had no

doubt she had been in the throes of dreaming then.

After a moment's consideration he selected two silver instruments, a gathering tool with a hair-thin

point and a tiny sieve basket soldered onto a long slender handle. The mesh of the thumbnail-sized

basket was fine enough to hold even the slightest particle of dust. With the greatest of care Meridion

blew on the frame of film, and watched under the lens for a reaction. He saw nothing. He blew again, and

this time a tiny white spark rose from the strand, too small to be seen without magnification even by his

extraordinarily sensitive eyes.

Skillfully Meridion caught the speck with the gathering tool and transferred it to the basket. Then,

watching intently, he waited until the lamp of the Time Editor illuminated the whisper-thin thread that

connected it to the film. He turned his head and exhaled. He had caught a dream-thread.

Working carefully he drew it out more until it was long enough to position under the most powerful

lens. He never averted his eyes as he gestured to one of the cabinets floating in the air above the Editor.

The doors opened, and a tiny bottle of oily liquid skittered to the front of the shelf, then leapt into the air,

wafting gently down until it came to rest on the gleaming prismatic disc hovering in the air beside the him.

Keeping his eyes fixed on the thread lest he lose sight of it, Meridion uncorked the bottle with one hand

and carefully removed the dropper. Then he held it over the thread and squeezed.

The glass below the lens swirled in a pink-yellow haze, then cleared. Meridion reached over and

turned the viewing screen onto the wall. It would take a moment for him to get his bearings, but it was

always that way when one was watching from inside someone else's dreams.

c,'Vhapsody did not sleep well the night before she handed herself over to a man she barely knew, a

man whose face she had never seen. Having been girted with prescience, the ability to see visions of the

Future and the Past, she was accustomed to restless nights and terrifying dreams, but this was different

somehow.

She was awake for much of the long, torturous night, fighting nagging doubts that were very likely the

warnings, not of some special foresight, but of ordinary common sense. By morning she was completely

unsure as to the wisdom of her decision to go overland with him, beyond the stalwart protection of her

strange, formidable friends.

The firecoals in the small, poorly ventilated grate burned silently while she tossed and muttered,

neither awake nor really asleep. The mute flames cast bright sheets of pulsing light on the walls and ceiling

of her tiny windowless bedchamber deep within the mountain. Upon becoming king of the Firbolg in

Ylorc, Achmed had named his seat of power the Cauldron, but tonight the place more closely

approximated the Underworld.

Achmed had made no secret of his disapproval at her leaving the mountain with Ashe. From the

moment they had met on the streets of Bethe Corbair the two men had exuded a mutual mistrust that was

impossible not to notice; the tension in the air made her scalp hum with negative static. But trust was not

Achmed's common state. Aside from herself and Grunthor, his giant sergeant-major and long-time friend,

as far as she knew he had extended it to no one.

Ashe seemed pleasant enough, and harmless. He had been willing to visit Rhapsody and her

companions in Ylorc, their forbidding, mountainous home. He had not appeared uncomfortable with the

fact that Ylorc was the lair of the Firbolg, primitive, sometimes brutish people that most humans feared as

monsters.

Ashe had exhibited no such prejudices. He had dined agreeably at the same table with the glowering

Bolg chieftains, taking no notice of their crude table manners and ignoring their propensity to spit bone

fragments onto the floor. And he had taken up arms willingly in defense of the Firbolg realm against an

attack by the Hill-Eye, the last holdout clan to swear fealty to Achmed, whose reign as Warlord was still

new and sorting itself out. If he was amused or displeased in any way by Rhapsody's obnoxious

companion's ascent to monstrous royalty, Ashe did not show it.

But there was little, in fact, that Ashe did show. His face was always carefully covered by the hood of

his cloak, a strange garment that seemed to wrap him in mist, making him even harder to discern than he

already was.

Rhapsody rolled over bed and let out a painful sigh. She accepted his right oncealment, understood

that the great Cymrian War had left many of its •• rvivors disfigured and maimed, but still could not

escape the nagging ught that he might be hiding more than a hideous scar. Men with hidden f res had

plagued many different areas of her life.

Rhapsody opened her emerald eyes in the darkness of her cavelike chamber. In response, the coals

on the fire glowed more intensely for a moment. The remnants of charred wood, reducing in the heat to

white-hot cinders, sent forth wisps of smoke that rose above the coalbed and up the chimney that had

been hewn into her chamber centuries before, when Ylorc was still Canrif, the old Cvmrian seat of

power. She drew a deep breath and watched as more smoke billowed up, forming a thin cloud above

the ashes.

She shuddered; the smoke had seeped into her memory, bringing back an unwelcome picture. It was

not one of the lingering images from her old life on streets of Serendair, her island homeland, gone now

beneath the waves of the sea on the other side of the world. Those days of abuse and prostitution that

had haunted her for so long rarely plagued her sleep anymore.

Now she dreamt mostly of the terrors of this new land. Almost every night brought the hideous

memories of the House of Remembrance, an ancient library in this new world, and of a curtain of fire that

formed a hazy tunnel. At the end of the column of smoke a man had stood, a man in a gray

mantled-cloak, much like the one Ashe wore. A man whom the documents they had found identified only

as the Rakshas. A man who had stolen children, sacrificing them for their blood. A man whose face she

had also not seen. The coincidence was unnerving.

The coals were doing little to dispel the dampness of the room, she thought hazily. Her skin was

clammy, causing the blankets to cling to her and scratch. Beads of sweat tangled the hairs at the back of

her neck in the chain of the locket she never took off, pulling painfully as she writhed again, struggling to

break free of the clutching bedding.

Just as her stomach was beginning to twist in cold worry, a pragmatic thought descended. Achmed

was arguably her best friend in this land, the surly other side of her cheerful coin, and he tended to walk

the world veiled from sight as well.

It never ceased to amaze her, after all this time, how she could be so close to this

assassin-turned-king, a man who seemed to make it a life's goal to annoy anyone with whom he came in

contact. The fact that he had dragged her through the Earth itself, against her will, away from Serendair

before the Island was consumed in volcanic fire, saving her life in the process, had not inspired gratitude

in her. Although she had ceased to resent her kidnapping over time, a tiny corner of her heart would

never forgive him for it. She had learned to love him and Grunthor in spite of it.

And she had learned to love the Firbolg as well, largely through the eyes of these two friends, whose

blood was half-Bolg. Despite their primitive nature and warlike tendencies, Rhapsody had come to

appreciate many aspects of this cave-dwelling culture that she found surprisingly sophisticated, and far

more admirable than some of the behavior she had seen exhibited by their human counterparts in the

provinces of Roland. They followed leaders out of respect and fear, not arbitrary or dubious family

heritage; they spent what meager healing resources they had on bringing forth infants and protecting

mothers and their young, a moral tenet Rhapsody shared. The refined social structure Achmed and

Grunthor had introduced was just beginning to take root when the need for her journey had become

clear.

Rhapsody writhed onto her back, seeking refuge from her dreams and a more comfortable position,

but neither was to be had. She succumbed to the rapid whirring of thoughts through her brain again.

Finding the claw had changed everything. From deep within the vaults of Ylorc they had unearthed the

talon of a dragon, fitted with a handle for use as a dagger. The claw had rested undisturbed for centuries,

even as the Bolg took over the mountains, making the abandoned Cymrian realm their own. Now it was

in the air, and the dragon to whom it belonged would feel it, would taste its vibrations on the wind.

Rhapsody believed she would come for it eventually. Having heard the tales of the mighty Elynsynos, and

seen the fierce and horrific statues of the beast in the Cymrian museum and in village squares across

Roland, she had no doubt that the dragon's wrath would be virulent. Images of that wrath had led the

parade of nightmares on this last night in Ylorc, causing her to wake for the first of many times, trembling.

It was to spare the Bolg from the devastating consequences of that wrath that she had decided to find

the wyrm first and return the dagger, though both Achmed and Grunthor had objected strenuously.

Rhapsody had stood firm in her decision to go, her determination fueled by the thought of her adopted

Bolg grandchildren withering to ashes beneath the dragon's breath. It was another of the dreams that

haunted her, though sometimes the victims changed. Her dreams did not discriminate.

She feared for Jo, the teenaged street child she had found in the House of Remembrance and adopted

as her sister. She also feared for Lord Stephen, the pleasant young duke of Navarne, and his children,

whom she also had taken into her heart. Each of these loved ones took turns in her nightmares roasting

alive before her eyes. This night the honor had belonged to Lord Stephen.

It was within his castle that she had first seen a statue of Elynsynos. He had already suffered the loss

of his wife, his best friend, Gwydion of Manosse, and countless people within his duchy to whatever evil

was plaguing this land, causing inexplicable outbreaks of violence. The loss of Rhapsody's world and her

family had almost killed her; the Bolg and her friends, this was her family now. To leave that family open

to attack would be almost as bad as losing it the first time, in some ways worse. Ashe said he knew how

to find the dragon. It was well worth risking herself and her safety to save them. She just couldn't be sure,

in this land of deception, that she was not endangering them even more by going with him.

Rhapsody twisted onto her side, entangling herself in the rough woolen blankets again. Nothing made

sense anymore. It was impossible to tell whom what to trust, including her own senses. She could only

pray that the dreams f the coming destruction were warnings, not like the foregone premonitions that had

told her of the death of Serendair, but either way, it would be impossible to tell until it was too late.

As she drifted off to troubled sleep it seemed to her that the smoke from the fire had thickened and

formed a ribbon in the air, a translucent thread that wound around her dreams and settled behind her

eyes.

cAchmed the Snake, king of the Firbolg, was having nightmares as well, and it irritated him. Sleeping

terrors were Rhapsody's personal curse; generally he was immune to them, having lived out more than his

share of torments in the waking world, the old world, a life that he was well glad to be rid of.

The inert stone walls of the Cauldron, his seat of power within the mountain, normally provided him

with dark and restful sleep, dreamless and undisturbed by the vibrations of the air to which he was

especially sensitive. His Dhracian physiology, the burdensome gift granted to him by his mother's race,

was both a blessing and a curse. It gave him the ability to read the signals of the world that were

indiscernible to the eyes and minds of the rest of the populace, but the toll was great; it left him with little

peace, having to daily endure the assault of the myriad invisible signatures that others defined as Life.

He was therefore unintentionally appreciative to find this fortress hewn deeply into the mountainous

realm of darkness that was Ylorc. The smoothly polished basalt walls held in the quiet, stagnant air of his

royal bedchamber, keeping the noise and tumult of the world at bay. As a result his nights were generally

free from disturbance, tranquil and comforting in their silence.

But not this night.

In a flurry of growled curses Achmed spun over in his bed and rose to stand, angry. It was all he

could do to keep from striding down the corridor to Rhapsody's room and dragging her out of her own

sleep, demanding to know what was wrong with her, why she was so oblivious to the danger in what she

was about to undertake. There would be little point in doing that, however; Achmed already knew the

answer to that question.

Rhapsody was oblivious to almost everything. For a woman whose brain was keen and mind vibrant

with an intelligence he could feel in his skin, she was capable of disregarding even the most obvious facts

if she didn't want to believe them.

Initially he had assumed that this was a factor of the cataclysmic transformation they had each

undergone, a metamorphosis that occurred when they walked through the inferno that burned at the

center of the Earth during their escape from Serendair. Upon exiting the conflagration Rhapsody was

vastly different; she had emerged from the fire physically perfect, her natural beauty enhanced to

supernatural proportions. He had been fascinated, not only by

the potential power that was inherent in her now, but by her utter inability to recognize the change.

The open-mouthed gawking that she experienced in the street whenever she put the hood of her cloak

down had done nothing to convince her of the magnificence of her visage; rather, it made her feel like a

freak.

Achmed gave the bedsheet that had remained wrapped around his foot a savage kick. Over time, as

he had gotten to know Rhapsody better, he realized that her self-deceptive tendencies had long preceded

their walk through the fire. It was actually her way of protecting the last shred of her innocence, her fierce

desire to believe in good where none existed, to trust when there was no reason to do so.

Her life on the street had clearly been one from which innocent belief could not hide easily. She had

had commerce with one of his master's servants, Michael, the Wind of Death, and had doubtless been

introduced to the harshest of realities by him. Nevertheless, she was always looking for the happy ending,

trying to recreate the family she had lost in volcanic fire a thousand years before by adopting every waif

and foundling she came across. Up until now this tendency had only served to set her up for heartache,

which didn't bother him a bit. Her latest undertaking, however, threatened to compromise more than her

life, and that aspect of it disturbed him deeply.

Somewhere out in the vastness of the lands to the west was a human host harboring a demon, he was

sure of it; he had seen the work of F'dor before. He had, in fact, been the unwilling servant of one. A

twisted race, evil and ancient, born of dark fire, he had hoped that the demise of their Island homeland

would have taken the last of the F'dor with it. Had he been there during the Seren War that raged after

they left he would have seen to it as his final act of assassination, the trade he had plied in those days.

But he had escaped the Island early. The war had come and gone, Serendair had disappeared

beneath the waves a millennia before he emerged from the Root, half a world away, on the other side of

Time. And those that had lived through the conflict, had seen the cataclysm coming and had possessed

the wisdom to leave before it did, had undoubtedly brought the evil with them to this new place.

It had all the pathos of the World's Cruelest Joke. He had broken the unbreakable chain of the

demon, fled from something from which flight was impossible, had made a successful escape from that

which could not be escaped only to find it here again, waiting out there somewhere for him, indiscernibly

bound to one of the millions of inhabitants of this new land, biding its time. For the moment they were

safe from it, it seemed; the evil had not broached the mountains yet, as far as he could tell. But now this

brainless harlot was leaving the protection of his realm. If she survived, she would undoubtedly come

back as its thrall without even knowing it.

In earlier days, this would actually have been, in a warped way, a good thing. The possibility that the

F'dor had bound itself to her would have alleviated need for him to go in search of it. Upon Rhapsody's

return to the Teeth,

Firbolg mountains, Grunthor would have killed her in front of him while performed the Thrall ritual. It

was another racial gift he possessed as half nhracian, the strange death dance he had seen but never

performed that would event the demon from escaping as the host died, destroying it eternally along

•^ its human body, in this case Rhapsody's. If she had not, in fact, been ossessed, her needless death

would have caused neither of them a second thought.

But that was no longer the case. Grunthor loved Rhapsody fiercely, defended her with ever fiber of

his monstrous being. At seven and a half feet, and the same width as a dray horse, that was a lot of

ferociously determined protection.

Even he himself had come to acknowledge that she was useful to have around. In addition to her

compelling beauty, which frightened the Firbolg or at least made them hold her in awe, there was

Rhapsody's music, one of the most useful tools they had in their arsenal aimed at bringing about the

conquest of the mountain and the advancement of the Firbolg civilization.

Rhapsody was Liringlas, a Skysinger, proficient in the science of Naming. There were pleasing

Elizabeth Haydon - Rhapsody 2 - Prophecy, Child of Earth

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