Stormchild: Emeline and the Forest Mage

0 Stormchild

Erdil, 30 Years Ago

The South of the Dreur Woods crawled with men drunk on bloodlust. The snow, trampled and muddy, clung to thousands of feet. They scuffled, jumped, pushed. Spell-bound and screaming, lusty and raucous, each human entranced by the Shadow Weaver danced and reached towards her. The throng pressed in, arms and limbs swinging, eyes too wide, mouths gaping with screams of worship and pleas of desire.

An acrid stench of blood and sweat filled what little space remained between their bodies. The chill of winter frost nipped at their skin, but they paid it no heed, their breaths pluming in the crisp air, forgotten. Thus, the living stretched to the Shadow Weaver and ignored the mass of walking corpses stammering to the north of the altar.

Between stark trees, the unclean dead swarmed and massed. They filled the North of the Dreur Woods. Pale-limbed staggering bodies bumped shoulders, lips silent as death, dead and rotting, staunch with post-mortem rigour. Stiff and animated in jerked spouts of movement, the unclean stammered and waited for the commands of the only voice they would ever heed again. Hers.

Blood poured in rivers from an altar of solid grey stone at the heart of the Dreur Woods, the snow stained red. Blood marked the trees where dead hands smeared. Blood soaked the feet of enchanted men and women who trampled the weak in their earnest straining toward the Shadow Weaver.

At the head of the altar, she stood garbed in a tattered black dress, hair whipping in winter winds. The rush of blood flowing from the altar and the dying screams of sacrifices pierced the air. A pale man knelt at her feet with hair the colour of sand, begging and stammering, fists clutched as if in prayer to the Fathers. The ground beneath him was slick with blood, making it hard for him to kneel without slipping.

She sneered at him. A young girl squirmed in her grasp, defiant, her hair -- like the kneeling man's -- a pale yellow. With her one fist in the girl's hair, the Shadow Weaver lifted the girl's head, exposed her gullet to the roaring crowd, and slit through it. The girl's body convulsed and collapsed. Her blood joined the river and her soulless eyes opened. Taking her dead sister's hand, she stammered into the mass of black-eyed corpses.

The throng of lifeless bodies welcomed her, swallowed her, and the crowd of star-struck onlookers roared its approval. Men and women vied to be next, argued, strained desperate hands to the Shadow Weaver's feet. The Shadow Weaver's laughter rang through the murky woods, and she grabbed the kneeling man by the nape of his burnous.

'Did you think this was the end, Rishtai?' she whispered into his pained face.

The pale man's muscles bunched, strained against her grip. But in his eyes there was love and loss. The ache of betrayal and the hopelessness that comes when a child dies. His tears had long dried up, but sobs wrenched his struggling body. 

'Please,' he begged.

The Shadow Weaver's dark eyes swirled. Pleasure tipped up the corners of her mouth. She kissed him long and deep. Black inked over his blue eyes and his pleas turned to awe-filled cries of worship. Blood smeared, he grabbed the dagger from the Shadow Weaver's hands. 

At random, he grasped the outstretched hand of a man and pulled him onto the altar. The man threw his fist triumphantly into the air and screamed. But his scream bubbled to a stop when the Rishtai slit his throat, to the crowd's raging approval. He smiled at the Shadow Weaver, and she laughed and laughed.

Behind the Shadow Weaver, three bodies lay strewn in the red snow. Three who seemed lifeless at first, but if one looked closer the truth became clear. Nobody looked closer. Not now, not yet.

The first was a man whose long blonde hair sprawled about his chiselled face, unmoving but for his grey eyes. With an earnest gleam to those eyes, he watched the Shadow Weaver. Watched and longed. Beside him lay a woman without colour. White as snow, black as night, the colour of rainbows or the sun or the shadows. Her closed eyes did not move.

She held the man's hand with her legs splayed, like one who had fallen from a great height. The third man lay with his eyes pinched shut. A brown hood covered his face, and he held both hands to his chest like a man in a coffin.

No breath moved their chests, no blood pinked their cheeks. In a forest filled with the dead and dying, these three stood out against the crimson snow. Yet not a one batted an eye or puffed a breath. A silent, eerie reminder that more lay buried in the events that had passed this eve.

A cloud of darkness hovered over the woods. The Shadow Weaver shouted a command, and the cloud spread out of the Dreur Woods towards Aysgarth. Finger-like tendrils reached out, searched, and overcame the farmlands methodically. Like toxic vapour with the mind of a man, it swallowed farmsteads and fields, horses, and cows, carefully searching for human hearts to turn.

A tendril of the black cloud dug into a farmer's brain as he sat on his porch sipping a cup of hot drink. The metal cup clattered onto the wooden porch, rolled down the steps. The man's boots clunked down after it, but he did not pick it up. His loping strides sped until he was running faster than any man that age could into the dark cloud and towards the Dreur Woods, his eyes as black as night.

The door of his home opened, and his daughter called to him, her pigtails fluttering in the wind. Her calls turned to shouts of fear when she realized what was happening. She left the door, ran in the other way, through the house and out the back door, terror in her eyes. But it was no use. The black cloud swallowed her too, and her lusting eyes turned to the Dreur Woods, too, bare feet speeding her to demise.

At last, there was someone who saw, who noticed the three splayed behind the Shadow Weaver and the red field of blood. Above the earth called Erdil and beyond the land of dreams called Träumenil, higher than the realm of the immortals called Götteril, and beyond the end of the reach of the stars, the Great Fathers stood in council.

A massacre stained the North of Öldeim, and the Fathers who had created all argued, as they almost never did, about the fate of the world. The Father of Creation, robed as the others in splendorous white, insisted that Erdil be blotted out so they might start over and create a race more malleable than the insolent humans. The vines marking the side of his face bulged with his anger.

The Father of Time would not hear of it. His large moustache bounced as he argued that time should be kept pure, that the guilty be punished and the innocent be given a new life. The Great Father did not speak at first. His eyes were far away on the Dreur Woods, and tears wet his cheeks.

Every created thing held its breath. Even the trees paused in their ever-long dance and the stones ceased their whispers. The river of blood paused in its flow. A hooded man's grey eyes closed for a second. Two dead sisters' hearts beat for a moment. Then the Great Father spoke:

'Let us make a Stormchild.'

Author's Notes

Readers, for a while I've been telling you there's a second draft of this manuscript in the works, and today I thought I'd tantalise you with the new prologue-ish intro to the book. What do y'all think of that?! I must say, this is so much fun for me to write! I promise, when the second draft is legible enough, I'll put it up here for your further comments and all that.

© Joy Cronjé 2023