The Godlost Land Read Free

west lay Vardania, the name being a corruption of the westerner's word varidan, which simply meant land. Still, the names suited the lands and most especially the people of the five kingdoms.
     
    They were a simple people, unadorned and artless according to those of the more civilized lands across the oceans. There were a few traders who sometimes made the journey. And every so often more migrants. These were the lands built by a bunch of farmers, miners, hunters and a few exiled nobles over thousands of years. People who had wandered far from their homes for various reasons and eventually settled in this new one.
     
    But wherever they had come from and for whatever reason they had left, they had always brought a part of their old homelands with them. It could be seen in their languages and their customs, their history and their ways of life, and of course in their faiths. And while most of those things had merged and blended over the millennia and become very different to what they had begun as, they had still never been forgotten.
     
    As a child he had read stories of the ancient faraway lands and dreamed of one day travelling to some of them. Of seeing the great ice castles of the frozen seas, walking the endless cobbled roads of the Land of Lights, and climbing the million steps to the Spire of the World, a mountain so tall that it towered above the clouds themselves and was home to half a dozen cities. He'd even dreamed of walking up the foothills of Mount Olympus in the fabled Hellenic Isles.
     
    But those lands were thousands of leagues away – across great oceans – and he'd known he never would. He would be destined to live out his days in the five kingdoms. Actually he'd imagined he would spend all his days in the city of Lion's Crest in the Kingdom of the Lion. The fact that he now lived some three hundred leagues away in the Rainbow Mountains meant that he had actually travelled further than he had ever thought he would. The sad thing was that having moved away, all he wanted to do now was go home. But he never could. Not until the Goddess left. He had no home any more. Only a succession of refuges. He wasn't even sure that his home still existed. The battle for Lion's Crest had been a terrible one.
     
    Realising that the hour was getting late, Harl got up to leave. Even though the minotaur was not yet burnt to ash and someone could perhaps come along and see its burning remains, it was time to go. The afternoon sun was starting to dip a little lower in the sky, and he still had a ways to travel before he was home and safe once again. So he grabbed his dropped pack, checked that the pile of ore he'd chipped out of the nearby mine was still intact, and set off down the track.
     
    At least he could still go back to his house. He didn't need to start running once again. This creature had probably not come hunting him he decided. And even if it had come for him it had not come to his home. It had most likely just been out on patrol, looking for anyone who wasn't a follower. How the priests gave them that ability he didn't know, but the beasts were able to discern those who refused to bend their knee to the Goddess from those who didn't. Either way it surely had no idea where he lived. Still, he would keep watch through the night. Just in case. And he would celebrate another victory. Another kill. Another battle he'd survived.
     

Tonight he decided he would dine well. But not perhaps on the salted beef he'd just traded from old man Seran. Suddenly he just didn't have the stomach for it.

Chapter Two
     
     
    Terellion the Bright strode the great halls of his castle with a troubled look on his face. He wasn't in the mood to pay his usual attention to the beautiful marble tiles of the floors, or the elegant arched windows that towered above his head. He scarcely noticed the art works hanging from the stone walls, and didn't look up as he normally did to wonder at the huge lattice work of great oak beams that