• PROLOGUE

    ”As the world takes slow and solemn steps toward hell
    We never stop to think of what we built
    and why it fell.”
    Terria Fonté, famed Ametrisan poet, 6058

    The world is dying.

    She has been dying since she was born--nothing lasts forever, even time itself is not immortal. She had thrived, though weighed down by evil and sin, and not until people spread across the world that the first fatal blow was delivered. The first of the Great Healers was brought forward, the beginning of a new age. The world recovered, and since, other blows were diverted, and she was content.

    But a new and persistent evil emerged; one that even the First Great Healer overlooked, and all since; an evil so powerful and malignant that it had the power to overthrow the heavens themselves. It was not as a dark cloud spreading over the sky...it was not tangible, not obvious...no one saw it coming. And for a time, it appeared, in lesser forms, was fought, and was believed to be eradicated—but it was only pushed back, delayed, while it slowly but surely crept into the hearts of all like a deathly plague, feeding on their fear, hatred, envy.

    Evil never changes; this evil had been there since time began. But it took on new forms, tainted the innocent, ‘gained power...struck that fatal blow again and again...and then, it committed the worst sin of all.

    There will come a day when we forget the past. There will come a day when stories lose their sharpness, detail, clarity, and are criticized as mere legends...there will come a day when books are used for entertainment alone, and then only for classroom textbooks, and then, as fuel for the ravaging fires sweeping the world...there will come a day when all love, faith, hope, compassion, mercy is lost forever, when no stories of it remain, when the idea is lost. And that is when the world will die.

    But that day is not today.

    This is the story of that great evil, long after the First Great Healer struck it down, the turmoil and strife it caused, its motives, its moves, its consequences...and the untainted innocents that banished it back from the abyss once and for all.


    CHAPTER ONE: LOST SOUL


    Red eyes; always the red eyes. It seemed to her as if the visions she saw were reflected on them; as if the eyes saw, as if the eyes projected them onto themselves so she could see too, and feel the horror that it relished and mocked.

    She witnessed thousands of flashes of memory, one after the other, some sliding past, some etching themselves forever in her mind; visions of the past, present, and future. She saw scenes from her childhood: her young self looking down upon sand-colored tents, rows and rows of them surrounding the little desert oasis, her people, her family. She remembered how quickly she had run through the maze, where teenage apprentices watched as the adults performed dazzling feats of magic, or worked with delicate metals, or ground wheat for the family’s bread. She had raced other children through that place, played with them, fifty of them at once; there were hundreds of the proud, red-eyed people here, the race of sorcerers who had dedicated themselves to the magical arts millennia ago…but all of them were family, brothers and sisters and uncles and grandmothers.

    A vision flashed before her of her true family, two parents and five children aside from herself; her father had snatched her as the raid had begun, protected her with his crude, heavy sword, been cut to pieces by the strangers, the white-skinned soldiers from the strange new country; her mother snatched the baby and ran, and two of her brothers were slaughtered as they tried to protect their sisters. But she never saw what happened to the rest, for she had run away, eyes burning with cowardly tears and the smoke of the plains, the soldier’s homeland, as the flames burned the grass and the bodies of the dead. And soldiers had trapped her, and she’d fought them with her pathetic little dagger, and they’d hurt her until she fell...they’d thought she was dead, and had moved on…the tent around her collapsed from the heat of the flames, smothering her as the fire passed. But she had not died; she wished she had.

    She did not acknowledge any more of the past, letting it pass her by, but every image was just as painful; she saw rivers flowing red with blood, dismantled and desecrated corpses of wide-eyed people, men, women, and children…she saw a burning sky, a city in flames…she saw a world of slavery and wicked magic, violence and cruelty, a world where unwanted things—garbage, slaves, children—were tossed aside and left to rot.

    Men, women, and children of every race were slaughtered, tortured, corrupted by the eyes, by unstoppable evil; carrion crows picked at moldering bodies; armies of soldiers filled with hatred, greed, and petty desire burned down a woman’s home and caught her as she came out, cradling an infant in her arms; they took it from her and crushed it underfoot, beat her until she begged for death, and executed her, simply for the crime of feeling compassion for her child. In the new world, any kind feelings, any scrap of goodness was hated, feared, rooted out and destroyed with brutal cruelty, burning the cities, the dead, and the pure of heart and staining the skies with smoke, until all that was left was darkness.

    And the red eyes, vivid blood-red and burning with cruel, insane fire—so unlike the creamy auburn of her people—watched it all, and she knew they were the cause, they were the effect; they were the eyes of hell.

    The queen jerked herself awake.

    For several minutes she lay in bed with her eyes wide open, her heart racing from the dream as the memories painted themselves endlessly across her eyes. She thought to scream but couldn’t find her voice; distant images and red eyes flashed in her mind every time she blinked, and in the empty air when she didn’t.

    Eventually, she remembered her wits, assuring herself that it was just a nightmare, it was not real; and her mind remembered too, and she slowly started to calm down. Images stopped floating around her eyes as her heart calmed and her breaths were steady once again. She sat up, pushing back her hair as she looked around. The room was obviously royal, every piece of furniture intricately carved and covered in soft, fine cloth. Her bed was stuffed with feathers, grass, and heather; her blankets were white silk, the topmost finely woven wool covered in detailed designs. The floor was carpeted, the walls were covered in silk, and the fireplace was big enough to roast a full-grown man inside; it was huge and beautiful, the bedroom of generations of monarchs before her.

    She looked at the fireplace, which had faded to glowing embers in the night, and realized that she was cold. She shivered as she slipped out of bed and into her boots—even the queen wore boots in this place—and, on second thought, reached beneath her pillow and grasped her dagger. It was gaudy, certainly—pure silver, with a jeweled hilt—but sharp, and she always belted it on her thigh before she left her room every morning. It never hurt to be paranoid.

    She crossed to the fire, her mind whirling over her newest dream. They changed every time; they came every fortnight or so, different and yet the same. Different horrors, different tragedies, different memories of her past and foresights of the present—but always the same message. The thing with the red eyes knew about her, it knew every detail of her broken past, and it knew so much more about the present of this world; and it knew of a future, a future of darkness and hatred, a future it would cause.

    Frustrated, she threw a log into the flames with unnecessary force—why was she getting these dreams? How could she stop this from happening?

    Her head started to throb, and she groaned; yet another headache. Her mind lost focus in the pain until her entire body was one cold, agonizing throb. She leaned against the wall, pressing her sweating forehead against the forgiving silk, clutching at it to keep from swaying and shivering uncontrollably. Her stomach churned, and she felt suddenly stifled, choking; she stumbled to the window and made to jerk it open.

    But something stopped her: a pair of bright crimson eyes shone before her, wide and mad and frightening, staring right at her from outside the window.

    She forgot to breathe, and the world spun; she swayed dizzily, gripping the windowsill with her pale fingers, her eyes locked with the burning bloodred orbs before her. Blackness swirled about her vision until only the eyes remained, narrowed, glaring, mocking her….

    And then she blinked, and the pain and despair was gone.

    She looked out the window and saw no eyes this time; instead, she saw the world beyond. Sometime in her little episode the moon had traveled further westward, and was now visible; it illuminated the turrets and towers of the rest of the castle, the walls protecting it, and a small strip of the city beyond. And then there were plains, endless rolling plains of waist-high grass that stretched to the edge of the inky sky. The same plains where her family had camped for the last time, twenty years ago; the same plains where they had all died….

    She remembered her dream and was filled with a hateful, spiteful longing—that world was not evil, not if it was her world, not if she could inflict the same pain and suffering she had gone through on the people who had killed her family…. Oh, how she wished she had that sweet power!

    She recalled snatches of the dream, little glimpses of happenings from other places, and told herself not to forget those—the red eyes would help her, give her visions of the present so she could bring about the future. She could do it—and she would.

    The fire flared, reflecting on the window pane, and the moon appeared to be burning, the smiling face on its surface now a grimace of pain. She laughed, feeling hot, heady power rush through her veins.

    The red eyes were watching too, and at the time, the queen had had no idea that they were her own.


    FIN.