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

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.
    “Try to drink this, little ky’pen’dati,” a silver
voice from out of a dream said, and the smell of peppermint came to her from
the darkness. She felt a bowl