Elizabeth Haydon: Destiny: Child of the Sky

How could I have known ? he mused. Total destruction of the Earth in blood and black fire had seemed absolute, as horrific as any fate could have been. It never occurred to him that taking the paths he had might doom it to an even greater devastation, one that survived death, that lingered into Eternity.

Please , he whispered silently. Open your eyes and see. Please .

Even as he watched, the Time-strand grew filmy, changing from the Past to the Present. Soon it would be the Future. Whatever came to pass, he could no longer intervene; the thread would never again be solid enough to manipulate.

Meridion settled back into the humming chair and closed his eyes, to wait.

Please ...

In winter the dry red earth that had given Yarim its name was akin to sand. Granular specks of it hung heavy in the air of the decaying province, sweeping it like a vengeful wind demon, stinging with cold.

That blood-red clay-sand glistened in the first light of morning, sprinkled with a thin coating of crystalline frost. The frost painted the dilapidated stone buildings and neglected streets, dressing them for a moment in a shining finery that Yarim’s capital had no doubt known long ago, an elegance that now existed only in memory, and for a few fleeting moments in the rosy haze of sunrise.

Achmed reined his horse to a stop at the crest of a rolling hill that led down into the crumbling city below him. He stared down into the valley as Rhapsody came to a halt beside him, musing. Looking down at Yarim from above gave him the opposite sensation to looking up at Canrif from the steppes at the edge of the Krevensfield Plain. While the Bolg were reclaiming the mountain, reaching skyward along with the peaks, Yarim sat broken, fetid, all but forgotten, at the bottom of this hill like dried mud left behind where a pond had been. Where once there had been greatness now there was not only decay, but diffidence, as if even the Earth were oblivious of the state of ruin that was Yarim. It seemed a pity.

Rhapsody dismounted first, walking to the edge of the hill’s crest. “Pretty in the light of first sun,” she said absently, staring off beyond the city’s walls. “Like the beauty of youth; it’s fleeting,” Achmed said, descending himself. “The mist will burn off momentarily, and the sparkle will be gone, leaving nothing but a vast carcass rotting in the sun. Then we’ll see her for the aged hag she really is.” He would be glad to see the glistening vapor go; mist such as this hung wet in the air, masking vibration. It might hide the signature of the ancient blood that surged in the veins of the F’dor’s spawn hidden somewhere amid all that standing rubble.

An inexplicable shiver ran through him, and he turned to Rhapsody. “Did you feel that?”

She shook her head. “Nothing unusual. What was it?” Achmed closed his eyes, waiting for the vibration to return. He felt nothing now but the calm, cold gusts of the wind. “A tingle on the surface of my skin,” he said after a moment, when he could not reclaim the sensation.

“Perhaps you’re feeling Manwyn,” Rhapsody suggested. “Sometimes when a dragon is examining something with its senses, there’s a chill of sorts; a presence. It’s almost like a—a hum; it tickles.”

Achmed shielded his eyes. “I had wondered what you could have possibly seen in Ashe,” he said sourly, gazing down into the morning shadows as they began to stretch west of the city. “Now I know. Manwyn knows we’re here, then.” He gritted his teeth; they had hoped to avoid the notice of the mad Seer, the unpredictable dragonchild who wielded her Seren father’s ancient power of vision and her dragon mother’s control over the elements.

Rhapsody shook her head. “Manwyn knew we were coming before we got here. If someone asked her a week, or a day, or even a moment ago, she could have told him so. But now that we’re here, it’s the Present. Manwyn can see only the Future. I think the moment has passed. We’re gone from her awareness.”

“Let’s hope you’re right.” Achmed glanced around, looking for a high rise of ground or other summit on which to stand. He spied a jutting outcropping of rock to the east. He set his pack on the ground, pulling forth a scrap of fabric that had once been soaked in the blood of the Rakshas, now dried to the same color as the earth in Yarim. “That’s the place. Wait here.”

Rhapsody nodded, and drew her cloak closer as she watched Achmed lope over to the small hilly rise. She had witnessed his Hunting ritual once before, and knew that he required absolute silence and stillness of movement to be able to discern a flickering heartbeat on the wind. She clucked softly to the horses, hoping to gentle them into a quiet contentment.

Achmed climbed to the top of the outcropping and stood with nothing but the wind surrounding him on all sides, staring down into the skeletal city. Somewhere amid its broken buildings a tainted soul was hiding, one of the nine children spawned of the ancient evil through a systematic campaign of rape and propagation. The blood in his own veins burned at the thought.

With a single, smooth motion he pulled away the veils that shielded his skin-web, the network of sensitive nerves and exposed veins that scored his neck and face, casting a final glance back at Rhapsody. She smiled but did not move otherwise. Achmed turned away.

He knew Rhapsody was aware that because of his Dhracian heritage he was predisposed to disposal, not rescue, of anything that contained the blood of F’dor. This undertaking, should it prove successful, would undoubtedly be the first time one of his race would hunt a creature spawned of the F’dor and not exterminate it immediately upon capture.

The natural detachment that the Dhracians felt when confronting the malignant filth had deserted him, leaving him shaking with hatred. It was all he could do to remain calm, to keep from allowing his racial proclivities to roar forth, launching him into a blood rage that would culminate in the efficient, traceless slaughter of this demon-child and all its misbegotten siblings. He swallowed and began to breathe shallowly, trying to keep focused on the greater outcome.

That ancient blood, which pulsed softly now in the distance like a trace of perfume across a crowded bazaar, could eventually help him find the F’dor itself.

Achmed closed his eyes and willed the landscape from his mind, emptying it of conscious thought, concentrating on the rhythm of his own pulse. As always, when this moment of the hunt came, he could almost smell the odor of candle wax in the monastery where he was raised, could hear his mentor speak again in his memory.

Child of Blood , Father Halphasion had intoned softly in his fricative voice. Brother to all men, akin to none . The Dhracian sage, dead more than a thousand years now.

The hunt required of him a tremendous sacrifice, both mental and spiritual. It was in the power of those words that he had been able to divert his kirai , the Seeking vibration inherent in all Dhracians, to hone onto the heartbeats of non-F’dor, his own unique gift. Brother to all men . He had been known only as the Brother most of his life, a deadly relative to his victims, whose Pulses had briefly shared a rhythm with his.

Let your identity die , the Grandmother had instructed him; the ancient guardian and mentor so recently gone. It was more than his identity, however. At the moment when he subdued his own vibration, even that part of him which might be called a soul disappeared without a trace, replaced by the distant, thudding rhythm of his target.

He once wondered casually what would happen if instead of emerging the victorious stalker, he were to die while following his kirai . The place to which his identity went while in the throes of the hunt was undoubtedly the Void, the great emptiness of space, the opposite of Life. He suspected, when he allowed himself to think about it, that should luck turn against him and his victim instead overpower and kill him, everything that had been part of his identity would dissipate instantly, shattering in that empty space into tiny particles that would burn out forever like firesparks, robbing him of any existence in the Afterlife.