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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Geraint, though master of words, for once, found them insufficient.
He tried to make sense of the sight before his eyes, but there were no names for the shapes and colors in it, no frame of reference for directions and perspectives that broke every natural law, and his overwhelmed senses reeled in bewilderment at what they could not define.
Angharad had spoken words that meant something, to her if not to him; she had stood upon the stone slab of her ancestor's barrow and been swallowed up in light. The light grew and engulfed the world around them, until they stood in the center of a circle of glowing mist, though whether it was under their feet or in front of them or directly overhead or all these directions at once, he could not tell; they seemed caught up in a place with no above or below, a place in which the very word "where" was meaningless.
There was a deafening noise in his ears as though he were held beneath a plunging waterfall, or in the trough between mighty waves of sea, and he looked about him and saw that the edges of the circle were water, rushing water, rising up on all sides, swirling around them in a spiral, a tunnel, stretching before them, a beckoning pathway that drew them with a strange and indefinable longing. He hung back in uncertainty. Angharad turned to him, face shining, and held out her hand. In the blazing light her hair and garments looked blinding white; they tossed and floated as though no force held anything down, but left all suspended, in air or water.
He was almost afraid to take her hand; she seemed so far away, so high above and beyond human that he thought she would dissolve if he touched her, melt away into the shining mist surrounding them. But he reached for her, taking a step...or at least, he moved forward; he could not say how. Instantly he stood upon solid ground, blinking, looking around himself in wonder at a landscape strange and alien, yet faintly reminiscent of something familiar.
The sky was the rich turquoise sheen of early morning, still speckled with stars, hung with a moon as bright and round as a giant pearl. Its milky light shone upon stone buildings, their delicate tracery and straight columns glowing white against the lavender shadows, obscured, in places, by climbing vines of the same silver-white flowers that had burst from the ground at Angharad's feet. The land sloped away from the structures in gentle hills, gleaming in the moonlight, broken by dark stands of trees, until a silvery expanse of sand separated it from the dark, shifting mass of sea, visible in the distance. From horizon to horizon it all lay silent, with the hushed air of an ancient place left empty, or perhaps asleep, awaiting the break of day with held breath.
Angharad stood next to him, and clutched his hand as they stared about them; she looked at him, speechless with amazement, then turned to look back and cried out in surprise. He followed her gaze, saw that the circle of light still blazed behind them, expanded, massive, enough to swallow the world — or perhaps this was a trick of the eye, as it seemed, no matter what its size, to block out everything else the moment he looked. From within it, figures were emerging, people one and two at a time, and then entire groups, families and clusters stumbling forward, blinking in confusion.
