The Age of Light (The Ava'Lonan Herstories Book 1) Read Free

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