Angharad of Llyr is heir to a matriarchy: a line of enchantress-queens that has ruled her island for centuries. Her destiny from birth: to rule as sole authority and ensure that her powerful bloodline endures for another generation. Devoted to her p...
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Prydain was over there, somewhere to the east. He knew that.
But Llyr's vast-by-comparison neighbor was so far as to be invisible, save for the faint bluish mass of Mona that rose to his right across the water. For all intents of imagination that endless shifting mass of ocean might go on forever, or to the very edge of the earth...an edge, just now, where sea met sky in an incandescent conjunction of water and fire.
Geraint stood spellbound, face fixed upon the horizon. He had seen many sunrises in all his wanderings. But never had he witnessed a sunrise birthed from the sea, and it filled him with such awe that he could not tear his gaze away.
Awakened, chilly and damp, as the sky had begun to grow pale at its edge, he had risen up stiffly and taken a few breaths to clear his mind, muddled from the exhaustion of the previous day and the discomfort of the night. But within a few minutes his thoughts had been silenced, quelled beneath a growing awareness of what his vantage point was revealing. Above him, the heavens were lightening into a vast overturned bowl of color: cobalt, turquoise, rose, and gold bleeding one into another, broken by banks of dark violet cloud. At their feet, the sea breathed like a slumbering dragon, a muted mirror of the sky, crossed by undulating black stripes and laced with pearly webbing.
He stared, heart pounding strangely. It kept changing, moment by moment, never the same from one heartbeat to the next; the light and the color and the drifting cloud, gathering into an anticipatory glow at its center. The first brilliant edge of the sun unfurled like a banner over the rim of the water, scattering ribbons of scintillating light in a beckoning path upon its surface. The fire swept higher, became a searing white-gold and crimson sphere, setting the edge of every cloud ablaze. He could no longer look directly at it: fire and water wed, such unfathomable beauty wrought from their union that his breath seemed to swell to something his body could not contain; he wanted to soar, like a gull, into the very heart of that all-consuming radiance.
A warm wind moved, ceaseless, from the midst of the sunrise through the coarse sea-grass surrounding his rough shelter, lifting his hair, whispering Angharad into his mind. His hands clenched painfully into the clumps of vegetation at his knees. He ached with wanting her next to him, to witness it with him, this swirl of elements that was the very core of her being; no wonder she held him in such thrall. Every shifting color and mood of the scene before him had its incarnation in her; to love her was to hold that magic of light and liquid in his arms and crave both the burning and the drowning it would bring. The crescent of raw flesh at his chest flamed painfully; he pressed the cold metal of the pendant against it and set his teeth, welcoming the sting. This, he thought, blinking at the flaming circle, his eyes watering, is why I am here.
With new resolve, Geraint rose to his feet again, taking in his surroundings. The grassy hollow among the sea cliffs that had provided his shelter had been the limit of his travels the previous evening. The journey around the island had been as smooth as Arianrhod had promised, and he had docked without incident before dark. But his attempts to delve inland, to find paths among the cliff faces, had proven frustrating. Every promising gap he followed eventually ended in impassible stone; then night had fallen, too early, somehow, and with it had come other things. Strange sounds, of whose first furtive echoes he had taken no notice, had gradually become loud enough to make him pause and look about in consternation, wondering if he'd really heard them. Eventually he had not needed to wonder; hair-raising howls and gibbering cries rang out, without warning or consistency of direction, every few minutes. Setting foot into one likely-looking cleft had resulted in a bloodcurdling shriek rising from behind a boulder at his very elbow, sending a shock of terror down his spine. He had sprung away instinctively, and nearly tumbled from a sheer drop at his other side.
