Wings of Light: Prophecy of Ages - Prologue

PROLOGUE

IT BEGINS with a BREEZE

Emptiness. Nothingness. A vast space with no beginning or end, as bright as pitch and as dark as the burning sun.  A chasm stretching as far as a human eye can see though taking up as little space as can fit in your hand.  An abyss full of blinding light and smothering black between the worlds of Gods, men and beasts where no time and all time begins and ends.  Silence exists like a howling roar as deafening as a screaming mute, talking of nothing and speaking no sound; as solid as air and thick like water and as impenetrable as stone.  The Void stands lifeless.

Something moves in the dark, cold empty light.  A watcher. 

It is here within this pit, this rapturous hole that the whispers begin.  Churning like a summer’s breeze and as cold as the mountains’ snow.  A hush of voices softly screaming a warning.  A warning of something that has stirred within the nothing, made into something that is still only emptiness.  A breeze stirs from the Void, piecing the thin veil between worlds and shifting time.  The wind blows and plunges through the thick nothing into the night of a sleeping world.  Down across sweeping meadows, stirring not a single blade of grass, high into the night air touching the wings of seabirds without them feeling, and over the crystal ocean, disturbing none of the sails of a mighty armada as it passes them by.  It blows across rolling waves, touching the spray from a shore-bound vessel, lifting back into the night sky to stare in wonder at a bright star shining in the east.  Across flat green plains and fields of dancing flowers, it moves, searching.  A village emerges from behind a hill, a small settlement of river-stone walls and thatched roofs, snuggled in the hills like eggs in a nest.  The breeze sweeps low, grazing the grass covered hilltop as it spirals down into a small, high-walled garden.

Mainiry Sykt peers into the lens of her microscope, an ingenious invention she had picked up from Chamblid on a visit there with her employers, and gasps.  On the glass slide is a drop of Elvin blood.  Clean Elvin blood.  She grabs at a pile of hastily scribbled notes and rushes over to the chalk boards lining the side of her house.  She rubs part of an equation away with her cuffs, taking little care for her finely cut silk dress which she had not removed after the late King’s birthday anniversary.  Glancing at the hand-scrawled parchments, she fills in the blanks.  She steps back from the chalkboard and surveys her findings.  “Yes, it seems to fit,” she mutters to herself as she begins to recheck the work.

An illness had swept across the Elvin nation so swiftly and with many of the sick dying within days of the first symptoms presenting themselves that a team of healers had been called to the Royal House of Karalgil.  The first to fall ill were farmers and traders, spreading from the countryside into the towns and cities.  On the first day it seemed no more than an epidemic of the common cold, only affecting the Elvin race.  On the second day hundreds had died, and by the third this had risen into the thousands.  Tests had shown that it was a poison of the blood which within the turning of three moons burned the internal organs of the victim as if it were acid.

Mainiry had been head of the team, leading them with her vast knowledge of science and technology.  They were all dead now, having succumbed to the sickness.  She was the only human on the team, and that fact alone had just saved the remaining Elvin nations.

She steadies herself on the workbench and lets out a shuddering breath, smiling as she does so.  She had feared that this cure would not be found in time. “I better begin making more.”

The door to the cottage creaks open and a cold draft flutters the papers on her desk.  She rubs her arms as the brisk wind sweeps across her.  For a brief moment she imagines hearing a woman’s voice float to her in the breeze.  She hurries to the door to close it, but as she does something out in the dark garden catches her eye.  She strains her eyes to see better and gasps when she realizes what she is looking at.