D'Spayr: A Knight in the Withered Land

D'Spayr: A Knight in the Withered Land, 2

Only she had survived. Tuolenne remembered that the scent of old lightning had lingered in the air after the slaughter.

Tuolenne went a little crazy after that and had spent three months screaming herself awake every night.

And she always fought the urge to scream herself crazy whenever she smelled that coppery electrical scent...)

"Derivan! Sir Knight! Something is coming...!", she screamed. "Something is coming!"

* * *

Amazing. It was a continual source of amazement to her.

Her head still ached...

Her soul had once again been hijacked back to that place, that awful dreary realm of misery, discontent, simmering rage and lost dreams. Well, at least that was how she looked at it, how she reasoned it, dreading inside the secret knowledge that, whether she liked it or not, she was inescapably bound to the tortured fate of this Reality where she'd been born.

The pain of continual rebirth was really quite exquisite, marvelous even, and this was, despite its unending stillness and deep grayness, a place of marvels.

The headache had heralded the beginning of the transition from Here to There. Yet even after her arrival, her transplacement, the ring of pulsing agony that wrapped her skull in an electric buzz remained.

Rebirth. The after-effects of her rebirth were still with her.

She hated the fact that it thrilled her, each and every time. She worked so hard to purge herself of that twisted animal, that thing that licked its lips in anticipation of the pain, that her parents had created so very long ago, had thoughts she'd buried it under a mountain of new impressions, sensations and memories. But it would not die.

Neither would she.

Mere hours ago she'd sat comfortably in her wheelchair, in her library with its grand latticed windows overlooking the interior of her vast greenhouse garden, a tall woman, her dead legs draped with an expensive handmade afghan throw and a warm cup of tea sitting in porcelain on a reading table at her side. Aged and infirm, yet still possessing reserves of physical strength and mental faculties that raced at a speed that made light look sluggish, she had been enjoying her late afternoon, reading and listening to classical music from her stereo system. And then the light that streamed past the greenhouse roof and through the library windows deepened to resemble candlelight passing through a shade of thinned blood and the headache began.

The Summons. Impossible. The only beings capable of such an extrasensory call across Time and Space, her parents, were dead, slain by her own hands. Yet there it was, undeniable... The Summons.

The Laws of Attraction took over at that point, the corollary of Retracting Co-Linearity ruled, Like called to Like, the Whole demanded the return of its Splinter, gravitational and temporal cohesion roared angrily, Being and Affinity inverted and she was pulled back into the grasp of the Withered Land.

She was shunted from one dimensional Reality to another. It was a miracle, a dark marvel.

Nygeia, Princess of the Withered Land and daughter to the late unlamented Pahrayah, was forcibly returned home. She allowed a single black tear to fall from her brimming eyes and trail a charcoal streak down her face.

Her amazement did not deter her from deciding she'd kill whosoever had summoned her back.

She hated this place.

She rose from the gritty soil where she'd been kneeling as she'd allowed the after-effects of the transplacement to pass, standing tall on strong and shapely legs, the legs of a trained athlete, lithe and long-muscled, and she was dressed in her traditional leather tunic under a billowing hooded cloak. The years had dropped away from her face and form, leaving her young and vital, desirable in a demanding aggressive way, and she held her banded walking stick in her slim fist. Her piercing hazel eyes, cold and calculating, surveyed the scene around her.