The Age of Light (The Ava'Lonan Herstories Book 1) (22 page)

Begone from Av’s
own sight

Begone before
Av’s stare

“Unfoul the
inner lain

Of Av’s own
house and grace

Untouch the
knowing mind

As rain before
Av’s face.”

:Daughter.:

“Yes Mother, I know. Someone knows. Someone is
toying with us. If that attack had come during our Rite-casting…”

She left the rest unsaid. It would have been
disastrous, perhaps fatal to one of her
Rit’ati’u
. The Rite
would have been undone. Her family, her mother and her daughter, could have
been injured.

And the culprit had managed to get away.

Audola no longer felt tears. All she felt now was
rage.

shivering, the darkness turned and
turned...

Jeliya
shivered, the dark that surrounded her deep with the embrace of cold. She
huddled, cub-like, in on herself, staring with eyes of stone into the
nothingness.

“Where
am I?” she whispered out into that ungiving void, the cold a living thing
that bit with teeth of glass and burned with flames of ice. It sucked at
her
av’rita
, her
life-force, trying to drain her dry of the bright aura of light that did not
stay so bright in the crystalline cold.

The
gila cat gleamed in the dark, paced closer, a white shadow in the shadeless
place.

“You
are in the earth, kitling, in Loro, deep in the soil of your world,” it sang,
smiling a terrible, cruel smile.

“But
why is it so cold?” she rubbed her freezing palms together, chafed numb arms,
the filmy wrap that she wore only mocking her with its impotent protection.
“The earth should not be so frigid, not with all the av’rita.”

“Ah,
but there is no av’rita in this part of the earth,” the gila cat replied,
sitting and blinking small orbs of Av at her. “At least, not very much, not any
more.”

“N
- not any m - more?” The cold became a physical thing weighing upon her and she
hunkered down, hugging her knees, the air around her seeming solid and aflame
with cold. “But w - what happened? W - where did all the av - v’rita go?”

The
gila cat laughed. “Long ago, this earth was full of av’rita, and one with
itself, and av’rita and lor’rita and the di’rita and the chi’rita danced in
harmony. Then came the Yo’teng, the division of the world.” It licked its
whiskers, blinked, grinned. “The earth and the earth spirit Loro cried out in
despair; the waters and the water spirit Dio cried out in anguish. And the life,
the light, the light spirit Ava and the air spirit Chia fled. All was haled
from this soil and rock, the wholeness of the earth divided. The earth has its
own ‘rita as does the air and the water and the flame, but the earth’s ‘rita
has little warmth. The creatures that lived within and upon this part of the
earth too, cried out in despair. But they have grown strange and cold of blood
and little remember the warmth and the light.”

Jeliya
felt nothing in her fingers or her ears, her nose or her toes. It was as if
those extremities did not exist, having been replaced with dead, unfeeling
stones. She felt her life force, her av’rita, retreating from the greedy, cold
fingers of the earth into the inner most core of her being. The heat withdrew
with the spirit, leaving her limbs wooden, petrified with cold. The words of
the gila cat crackled in the brittle emptiness, falling laughingly and mocking
on dumb ears. Lor’den. The cold-dark sickness.

“But
the earth is poised, do you feel it?”

She
did feel it. She could not move nor answer and no part of her seemed to work as
every cold thing turned to the preservation of the tiny kernel of warmth her
essence had become. But still she could perceive the heavy anticipation of the
earth, the sense of a thing coiled and waiting, a crystal shard balanced upon a
knife’s edge. All that she was, her awareness, her consciousness, reduced to a
small knot of warmth inside the huge frozen vessel of her body, quaked and knew
fear as the oppressive cold crushed her with its ominous foreboding. The cold
invaded her body slowly, patiently, as patiently as it awaited this coming
unknown event. The Loro’dan.

“It
waits, the earth is poised,” laughed the gila cat, wagging its hindquarters and
glaring at her with eyes of green flame. “It waits for the inevitable, the
bringing together of what was so long ago torn asunder, that which you have
striven to keep sundered, Jeliya of the land of light. The end for you is near;
then will this earth again joined with itself and whole and full of light and
warmth!”

It’s
coming, the earth sang as it reached icy fingers for her. It’s coming!
Dal’yo’teng is near its end!

The
cold laughed. The gila cat laughed. But Jeliya, could she move, would have
quaked with terror, as the terrible cold laughter surrounded her, drowning
her...

Jeliya’s body pushed her out of sleep. She was
deeply chilled with lor’den, the cold-dark. Her head throbbed, ached with cold.

“Hello?” she called weakly, shuddering
uncontrollably. The strains of cold-dark echoed through her. It was bad.

Hoof steps answered her almost immediately.

“Yes? Is something wrong?” his deep silver voice
asked.

“Y-yes,” she curled in on herself, the outermost
extremities beginning to lose feeling. His hand touched her forehead - it
burned.

“You don’t have a fever,” he said, but his voice was
questioning. “In fact, you feel like your temperature has gone down a little
too
much.”

“I’m in
lor’den
,” she said
through chattering teeth. Her speech was clipped, for fear of biting her
tongue.

“I don’t understand. What is this ‘cold-dark?’ ”

Jeliya turned her head to him, stunned. She
regretted it, losing valuable heat in the process. How could he not know of the
lor’den
?

“I have been out of the light of
Av
for too long,” she said, shaping the words carefully. “I need to get into the
light.” Further explanation would have to wait.

“Why did I not detect this before?” he wondered,
sounding angry with himself.

Jeliya forced herself to think and answer; he seemed
reluctant to act without information. “M-maybe fever masked it-t.”

His hand lay like a heated weight upon her arm. Her
muscles began to lock and cramp, and her back spasmed. Her stomach tied itself
in a knot and her throat began to tickle with the cold.

“I - I
don’t know how to treat this,” his voice said, filled with despair. He sounded
helpless.

“N-need
Av-v-
l-light,” she
tried to say, but lost the rest of the words in coughing.

“No good, it’s eve time. Av won’t be up for another
ten
san’chrons
.”

Jeliya felt the chilling despair that colored his
voice. Her performance of the Rite earlier that turn had not been enough to
stave off the cold shock. She needed the light of
Av
,
but in lieu of that, she needed heat. And lots of it.

“M-mus-s-st k-k-k-keep-p w-war-rm-m,” she choked out
with a dead and leadened tongue.

His hooves immediately clattered away. He returned
an ice-age later with something that instantly made the temperature of the room
rise, and his deep silver voice murmured rites as he worked. Again he left and
returned, and again. The lain was stifling, but the warmth was slow to
penetrate through the cold fog that surrounded her. At last his weight settled
on the pallet and he fed her hot broth and lemon-grass tea. Then he lay down
beside her and gathered her to his chest, desi and all, and wrapped a second,
thicker desi around the both of them. She pressed against him, revulsion and
apprehension forgotten, his body hot and sweet. She sighed, her body slowly
heating up, pushing back the biting cold and she went back to sleep in the warm
embrace of his arms.

He held her close, as he had done several times
before. He prepared himself to endure a night of uncomfortable heat, for he had
brought in two braziers full of sweet oil that he used during severe storms and
hurricanes that frequented the rainy seasons and in his subterranean storerooms
at other times. But Jeliya pulled heat from him as fast as his body could
produce it.

He soon became tired from pushing his metabolism up
so high. His eyes grew heavy, though he struggled to stay awake and keep an eye
on his charge. But he, too, eventually fell deeply asleep.

the
light turned to him...

He woke to find himself chilly and yearning for
light, with a hot body against him. Jeliya had worked her way out of the first
desi to press the full length of her body against him. Embarrassingly his body
had responded, as it had the last time he had bathed her. Feeling himself
turning red with shame, still he did not get up right away.
Av
still swam upon the rim of the world casting, only pale rose veils across the
sky. For a time he lay there and enjoyed the feel of her body against his, her
skin silky smooth, and her
guinned
hair
fragrant from the oils he had applied the turn before. When he tightened his
embrace, she murmured and snuggled closer, wedging her head comfortably under
his chin. He sighed. And for a moment he wished himself fully a man...

Stop such silly thoughts,
he
chided himself
.
You haven’t thought such nonsense since Jenikia...

He sat up, pushed away, as if by distancing himself
from her he could distance himself from his desire, his memories. She shivered
and reached after him. He took hold of himself, shivered his skin as though to
slough off the remembrance of the feel of her. It did not work.

He bundled her in the abandoned
desi
and sidled backwards off the bed, pushing with his forelegs. He placed his hind
hooves on the floor, and reared off
the bed altogether, the surface rebounding slightly as their combined weight
left it. He carried her in his arms, not trusting that she could stay on his
back. He took his short spear-hook as he hurried out of his home.

She
needs the light. The closest place is Este and Sor’n of here. In lu’mar
territory.

His hide gave an involuntary shiver as he traveled
deep into the forest with her, coming eventually to the stream to which he had
run with her when her fever had soared to dangerous levels. This place was the
nearest break in the forest canopy, where direct light could be seen. But the
lu’mari
had been dormant then, in the last shreds of eve. They were stocky, deadly
creatures with thick, muscular bodies and powerful legs, heads like canines
that might wrestle cattle, and slick, razor-sharp scales from nose to the
spear-like tail. And they were Goddess-cursed smart, and vicious. They were
most active at
Av’d
awn, coming out of a long eve of
torpor.

He stood upon the bank facing
Av
,
his every sense alert for the distinctive musk of the
lu’mari
.
He was at a loss.

“We are in the light of
Av
,
Jeliya,” he said, squinting. “Now what do I do?”

She did not answer. He looked down at her, tried to
rouse her. She murmured and stirred, but she would not fully awaken. He sighed
wearily and shifted her weight, considered settling to the ground, then decided
against it. Tired. What was he to do? He knew nothing of this ailment. True,
every now and then he craved to see the morn star and stay in its light for a
while, but this cold-dark illness he had never heard of.

Could it possibly have anything to do with the rite
that Jenikia and I shared?
he wondered, then glanced around, nervously. They
were in the open and without any real protection, for he was drained of energy.
He set only the most basic of wards, but they would not discourage anything
that was determined to get to them. If those that hunted her should come upon
them, or the
lu’mari
catch their scent...

As he thought it, he heard a faint, high hunting
call, and his hackles rose. Were they being hunted? Whatever Jeliya needed to
do, she needed to do it fast!

She moved, drawing his attention. Her face was
turned to the light and her arm outstretched. She was smiling. And glowing.

He nearly dropped her. Only his fast reflexes saved
her from a spill onto the stream bank. She seemed oblivious, her lips moving.
Preoccupied with hanging on to her, he did not notice right away that she did
not speak the words aloud, and yet he heard them as if she murmured in his ear.

“In you there is Light,” she whispered rapturously.
Her fingers moved in some complex yet discernible rhythm against the taut skin
of the wind. “In you there is Peace.” Light around her fingertips seemed to
coalesce into a gentle golden rain that showered both of them. He jerked back,
startled, and then, and only then, noticed that he was glowing too. Dull bursts
of alarm rang through him. This was all too familiar, from that forgotten age.
Should he put her down...?