Servants and Followers (The Legends of Arria, Volume 2)
Read Servants and Followers (The Legends of Arria, Volume 2) Online
Authors: Courtney Bowen
Tags: #romance, #women, #fantasy, #family, #friend, #prophecy, #saga, #angst, #teenage, #knight, #villain, #quest, #village, #holy grail, #servant, #talking animal, #follower
The Legends of Arria:
Volume 2
Smashwords Edition
This book is a work of fiction. Names,
characters,
events, and places either are the products of the
author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously.
SERVANTS AND FOLLOWERS
Copyright © 2014 by Courtney Bowen
Cover
image:
Woman on the
stairs
by Caspar David
Friedrich
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
used or reproduced without written permission
from the author, except in cases of brief
quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First edition: 2014
Who would take a look inside and see
What they might find. Many thanks.
Table of Contents
Part One: Coe Anji
Part Two: Coe Aela
Part Three: Coe Wina
Chapter 14: Together Until the
End
Chapter 15: Fire on the
Mountain
Part One: Coe
Anji
Chapter 1: Day and Night
What do we lose when someone leaves us?
Do we lose a piece of ourselves, gone forever?
Do we lose our sense of place, our focus on
others?
Or do we lose nothing but the person’s presence?
--
Loss,
Mirandor
In a
quiet room,
which once had
been full of laughter, Habala sat down upon the empty bed and
opened up a book entitled
Legends of Arria
,
from which she read:
Night and Day Origin Myth:
Day and Night first
appeared as two birds: white and black, dark and bright, though
there was nothing to tell them apart. They were the same to each
other when there was no light in the world
,
no sun, and no moon to
reflect the sun in darkness. There was not even darkness either,
just mist, when darkness could not exist without the sun and light
to detract it. Day and Night could not see each other in the mist,
nor could they see the ocean and the sky that surrounded them, as
the
se were the
only places that existed in the world when the
land had not risen yet
.
B
ut they could feel, and Day and
Night flew through the sky side-by-side when they could sense one
another, and knew that the other one existed. They loved each other
for that reason.
They dived down into the ocean,
side-by-side with each other, to fish out what little remnants they
could find to eat. One day, Day or Night went down first to catch
whatever was beneath them. For whatever reason, the other did not
wait for its partner, did not realize that its partner had not
followed it forward, and so remained in the sky and continued
flying. By that point, they were lost to each other.
They could not sense
where the other had gone, for though their senses might have been
accurate enough to catch traces of each other, they kept on flying
as rapidly or as slowly as they had before they lost each other.
They flew constantly, and could not stop and rest now to search for
each other from afar
,
and to think about what to do
next
,
because there was nowhere to stop and rest without land, nor
any light to guide them.
Day and Night fell and rose in search
of one another, went left or right, went backwards or forwards, and
never met. Sometimes they missed each other by a few inches or a
few seconds, going past one another in opposite directions as,
whenever they did sense where the other one had been before, they
went straight there and did not pause to wait for the other one to
catch up with them eventually. Day went down to look for Night, and
Night came up to look for Day, both at the same time.
The distance grew between them as their
constant flight meant they had to keep going in whatever direction
they took, and the opposite direction was eventually the one they
took. Soon, they were at opposite ends of the world, the furthest
they could ever be from one another.
Finally, they turned toward one
another, they sensed each other across the vast distance of sky,
and sped toward one another at the point where the water met the
clouds on the horizon. Eager to be reunited after their long
separation, they did not slow down, and Day and Night collided in
mid-air. The impact of their mating shook the sky, and the sun and
the moon spiraled forth from their collision. The stars and
raindrops pattered down like semen from their embrace, and an egg
was dropped from one of them that would become the seed of the
world.
Light came into the world from the sun,
shining through the grayness of the mist, which was dissipating for
the first time. The ocean and the sky were shown, with all of the
colors now visible as the sun started to set, and then the sun rose
for the first time with darkness in between. The magnificence of
the sunset and the sunrise were in honor of Day and Night.
Day and Night saw
each other for the first time as light came into the world, and
marveled at each other and the differences in between, for Day was
white and black with
different shades of
color
in between
,
and Night was dark and bright with
different shades of
light
in between
.
However, Day and
Night had been cracked with this union. For though they were joined
end to end, with the sun setting or rising in between them, they
were separated by the barrier of the sun
and the differences between them
. They could not coincide anymore without an eclipse of the
sun, or some other strange phenomenon in the sky.
So they parted as much as they were
able, with the sun shining bright and the darkness in between, yet
they longed to join together again, as they had before the sun,
without anything in between them. So they continued, Day and Night
meeting each other with each sunrise and sunset, Day mimicking
Night, and Night mimicking Day as much as they were able to, but it
was never the same as it had been before light came into the
world.
Habala sighed
to herself
before she closed
the
Legends of Arria
book that had belonged to Basha
and stored it back
on
the
shelf beside the bed that he
and Oaka had shared for so many years, ever since she and her
husband had first started tucking them in at
night
. Basha would not want
to have this book misplaced. S
he
hoped
that
Basha
and Oaka might come back
here, to sleep in this bed and read from this book
again
. She shook her head. It had been
several days since they had left, but still she could not shake off
the feeling that they might come walking in through the front door
of the inn, laughing at the prank they had just pulled, how they
had just spent several days camping out in the woods a few miles
outside of town, with Sir Nickleby watching out for them, instead
of
lost out there in the world, with Sir
Nickleby as their only guide.
She trusted the
knight just as much as her husband did, when he was a good man who
had watched out for her sons while training them, but he was just
getting so old. Would he always be there to watch out for them?
Would he always be able to protect them? Would he trust them too
much, thinking that her sons were able to fend for themselves
without him? She knew that he was a good man, but she did not trust
him enough with her sons’ lives, especially when they were going
to
…
she didn’t even want to think about it.
The Wastelands were such a desolate, dangerous
place, occupied by Doomba and all of his creatures, and no human
had ever returned from that place alive, as far as she knew
of.
She stormed out of her sons’ bedroom,
wiping away her tears as she shut the door tight behind her, to
seal in the memories and seal off the passage of time, the
desecration of such memories. She went down the hallway to the back
door, out into the stable yard and into the shed that she claimed
as her own, where she fixed and made clocks of all types, just like
her father had done in the farmhouse that they had once lived in
together.
She picked up one of her clocks and
stared at it, fixated not upon its features, which she had
recognized immediately and had memorized already by heart for
having created them, but upon her memories instead. She remembered
those happy times of childhood, the tricks of the trade that she
had learned sitting upon her father’s lap, the goats that they had
raised in the barnyard, until the darkness had descended upon them
and they had been forced to leave the farm behind, moving away from
the forest to Coe Baba. Her troubles in life had begun then.
Ever since she had
married Geda, and they had started to raise Basha and Oaka
together, she had retreated to the shed every once and awhile, just
for a few short hours to tinker and mend and create her clocks,
away from her sons and her husband
. A
few short hours of peace and
privacy for herself,
it
was
nothing much
, to remember her past before she was
wed
. Geda had rolled his eyes at his
wife’s hobby, and the noise it caused when all of the clocks struck
at once, but he had left her alone during those hours, knowing it
gave her some comfort, and he watched over his sons while she was
away.
She had thanked him
for that peace and privacy, but she wished now that he had not been
so generous.
Geda had taught his sons to
avoid their mother’s workshop as well when they had started
tottering about and knocking things over as babes, and they had
continued to avoid the workshop even as they grew up and older.
They understood it was their mother’s refuge, and that they might
get into trouble if they disturbed her there without good reason.
Habala had been thankful for the most part that her solitude had
continued unabated, although now she wished that she had taught
them, perhaps Basha or Oaka if not both, what she had learned from
her father all those years ago when she had been so
young.
Clock making and
repair had been her mainstay for all of these years, useful and
practical when she could afford to spend the time upon her hobby
and earn a small wage from it, thanks to the efforts and
considerations of her father and husband
. I
f only she had extended
the courtesy and kindness of her knowledge to her sons. If only she
had been more open, more generous of her time and of herself,
shared what she had so enjoyed for all these
years
,
but no, she had retreated, blocked herself off from her
husband and her sons, and had avoided them in the shelter of this
shed, away from everything but the ticking, tocking, chiming,
chirping and ringing of her clocks.