The gods and demons of the ancient world were never myths but twisted from a very real past...and they are still living among us. When Kaja Landauer is violently killed she finds herself immersed in the world of the Avati, a race of ancient and inde...
With his clean hand, he pulled the door of a supply closet open and stopped short up in surprise. Wooden steps leading down into a dark basement. He climbed down the first two steps and shut the door behind him. He fumbled for a lock but didn't find one. Cursing softly to himself, he listened, holding his breath as he watched the crack of light under the door.
He stepped down a couple for steps backward. His feet slipped, and he fell, face-first into the stairs. Leif grunted, skin peeling away from his cheek and forehead, as he slid from step to step. He jerked and dropped over the edge of the staircase into the unknown darkness. He landed shoulders first onto hard-packed dirt. The impact forced out what little air he had left in his lungs.
The floor creaked slightly directly above him as he waited, watching the darkness. The door opened, and someone stepped halfway down into the basement. The intruder hovered silently, listening, then turned back to the main floor.
Leif counted more seconds until he slowly lost consciousness.
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The lonely sound of crickets singing outside the bedroom drifted in through my window. A full moon was hovering above the sea, making all the shadows in the room quiver with soft edges. When I was in college, I spent a summer living and working in a remote village. The only water source was a hand-pump well, and the people there had never lived with electricity. The nearest telephone was a single payphone, a five-mile hike down a dirt road. That one telephone was supplied with power through a single generator... when it was working. It was the only generator for more than fifty miles.
It rained almost every day. Dark billowing clouds obscured the sky most evenings but were swept away by morning, only to be replaced within a few hours as evening returned. There were astonishing storms of massive thunder and lightning like I had never seen before. Thunder shook the trees, and lightning lit up the sky like cannon fire. It was how I imagined terrifying battlefields during World War I. But in that remote village, the world was silent. No animal or insect made a sound, giving the center stage to the wind and the thunder as it gnashed its teeth and clawed at the land. Instead of being terrified, I was awestruck. It was exhilarating.
My surprise, the first night of a new moon, was startling. For those living in the modern world flush with electricity, experiencing the darkness of a new moon is not something we can imagine. It can only be experienced. It was darkness; a complete, engulfing darkness. An inexhaustible black had swallowed the world. Nothing could be seen, not even our own bodies, our own limbs, our own hands fluttering inches from our eyes. Nothing can prepare someone accustomed to the constant, ever-present sources of light in cities for such complete darkness.
I was equally surprised to discover how much light there was during a full moon. The full moon brought as much light as the new moon brought the dark. Everything was washed in a pale blue that softened the landscape. Deep shadows lay underneath, as further evidence of how bright it really was. Shadows can only exist with light.
