A Lament of Moonlight Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  What Now?

  Sneak Peak of The Chosen of Anthros

  Catch Travis Online

  About Travis

  Copyright © March 2015 by Travis Simmons

  The Harbingers of Light Book Three:

  A Lament of Moonlight

  Published by: Wyrding Ways Press

  Edited by: Wyrding Ways Press

  Formatting by: Wyrding Ways Press

  Cover Design by: Najla Qamber Designs

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or in any means – by electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without prior written permission.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used factiously. Any resemblance to actual places, events, and people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Dolan felt the surface of the mirror slip over his face like a cool sheet of water. No matter how many times he stepped through the mirror, he would never tire of the way it eased his muscles and cleared the worry from his mind.

  He hadn’t traveled through the mirror in some time, because he was being hunted by Heimdall and the other gods for the alleged theft of the god slayer. But he’d made a promise to his daughters, and he intended on keeping that promise. By now they would have found their way to Agaranth, and he could do what he needed to do.

  He tried not to think of the way the shadow plague had taken his oldest daughter Abagail, and he tried not to think about how his youngest daughter, Leona would cope in a world without him. She was too young—and she acted younger—to be facing such hardships.

  Dolan didn’t have to try hard to keep his daughters from his mind because no sooner had he stepped through the mirror than a familiar sight greeted him.

  Heimdall was tall and lithe with blond hair that was frosted from his time out in the cold of the cosmos. His skin was milky, like alabaster, and touched by the same chill that colored his hair. The God of the Crossroads shimmered with frost from his bare feet to his head. Around his waist he wore a simple white wrap held up by a leather belt inscribed with runes burnt into the surface.

  On the belt hung the horn of winter.

  Dolan’s eyes lingered on the horn. It was the same one that Heimdall would use in the end times to signal the start of Ragnarok. Dolan shivered and closed his eyes. He didn’t like to think of the days when the frost giants and fire giants and demons from the underworld would converge on Eget Row.

  “Olik, we’ve been looking all over for you,” Heimdall said. His voice, while soft and welcoming, held a kind of terrible power that made Dolan shiver. “You took something that belongs to Hafaress.”

  “Have you had to use the horn yet?” Dolan said, trying to ignore the name he was given at his creation.

  Heimdall shook his head. He shifted his weight on his feet and the movement caused the opalescent cobbled road of Eget Row to shimmer in rainbow light. “You would know if I had used it. All the nine worlds would know.”

  “Then I didn’t take it in vein. It passed by here some time ago,” Dolan said.

  “The only thing that’s passed here were two girls and a boy, heading for Mattelyn Bauer’s hall,” Heimdall said. Understanding alighted in his blue eyes. “You concealed it well.” It was as near a compliment as one was likely to get from Heimdall.

  “So you are going to imprison me now?” Dolan asked.

  “On the contrary, I need your help.” Heimdall gestured wide with his hand and a stairway of radiant light sprung up before them. Together they started climbing the stairway to the Ever After. It had been too long since his feet had touched the landscape of his ancestral home. Dolan had put himself in exile some time past, knowing that he had to keep the God Slayer out of Eget Row for the safety of all the nine worlds.

  “Why did you take it?” Heimdall asked, as if reading his mind.

  “The Tree and the nine worlds would never be safe while the God Slayer stayed with Hafaress,” Dolan said. “Or rather, while it resided in Eget Row. The harbingers of darkness have been looking for ways to seize it, destroy the gods, and place themselves back in the Ever After. Hafaress was too curious for his own good. At some point, he was going to lose it.”

  Heimdall nodded, a smile of understanding ghosting across his face.

  As they climbed, the rainbow bridge beneath them faded into darkness, and above them the song of the Ever After wafted down to their ears. It was a song that made Dolan feel like he could fly.

  “And what is it you need my help with?” Dolan asked.

  “The All Father has been missing for some time,” Heimdall said as they crested the top of the stairs. The light billowed away from them in a luminous cloud to reveal a large kingdom of white stone. Minarets spiraled up into the pristine darkness above the Ever After. The parapets were empty, no indication that before thousands of feet would tread along their winding paths through the upper reaches of the great castle. Normally the Ever After was bustling with activity, songs, and praise rising high into the air. The desolation around the Ever After was haunting. Nothing moved except the light and the resonant sound the light created when it crested the stone walls. Heimdall gestured, and Dolan felt a buoyancy around him as they began floating to one of the highest peaks of the castle. “Hafaress went looking for him, and I haven’t seen him since. It was only today that I realized Vilda has also gone missing.”

  “All of the gods? They’re gone?” Dolan asked, his face wild with disbelief.

  Heimdall nodded.

  “What was Vilda’s reason for leaving?” Dolan asked.

  “I don’t think there was a reason for her leaving,” Heimdall shrugged. “Or if there was, it wasn’t any reason I was aware of.” Together they stepped through an arched window and into a spacious room. The walls were hung with white sheer fabric that reminded Dolan of mist, and all around the floor were cushions and pillows for lounging. On the wall hung a mirror similar to the black one Dolan kept in his home.

  But this mirror had been smashed, and all around it on the white flagstone walls the shadows that were kept inside the glass splayed out like reaching tendrils of night.

  “So, she just vanished without reason?” Dolan asked, stepping nearer the mirror. He expected to see through the wall to the white light that existed everywhere in the Ever After. Instead, he saw was a long tunnel of darkness. It wasn’t anything Dolan was expecting, and the darkness within the Ever After chilled him to the bone. He stepped away from the shattered mirror, an unexplainable uneasiness gripping his stomach.

  “You’ve never trusted her since the rest of her brood turned bad,” Heimdall said to Dolan.

  “With good reason. They aren’t just bad, but the three of them: Hilda, Gorjugan, and Anthros will see the nine worlds destroyed.”

  “Some might say the same of you, Olik, birth golem of Hafaress.”

  Dolan stopped short. Was that all he was? Afterbirth wyrded to life so the Light of the Waking Eye, Hafaress, could have a playmate. That’s all most people saw Hilda, Gorjugan and Anthros as. After all, they were wyrded from Vilda’s afterbirth as playmates for the goddess.

  “You stole the God Slayer away
, secreted it in O all this time, and now it is loose in the world. It had been safe here in the Ever After. One might say you’re the true reason the darklings are invading the nine worlds.” Heimdall crossed his frost-kissed arms over his chest. “You could very well be the reason for Ragnarok. Trying to avert it, you may have made it inevitable.”

  “Then that person would be wrong.”

  “All of the gods have now left the Ever After,” Heimdall said, staring through the hole in the wall. Shadows clung to the edges of the ruined bricks like soot from a raging fire.

  “Where have they gone?” Dolan wondered to himself.

  Several hours earlier:

  Why couldn’t Celeste see that opening the scepters was necessary? Daniken wouldn’t, no Daniken couldn’t, understand her sister’s position on the matter. She couldn’t see how, standing before Abagail as she levitated in place, spewing currents of darkness around the clearing of their once sacred home that Celeste would think this was okay, that this shouldn’t be stopped.

  The nine worlds are in danger, and she’s content to let it stay that way! But did Celeste really feel that way? Did Celeste really feel that they shouldn’t open the scepters, or was she trying so hard to fit in with the light elves the sun scepter chose her to be part of, that she wouldn’t entertain any other possibility?

  Daniken had eased herself around her sister, feigning like she was going to help them. She knew that Celeste would never do what needed to be done, even if she wanted to. So Daniken played along, waiting for the right time, waiting to take the burden of killing the harbinger from her sister, and in turn opening the sun scepter that Celeste controlled.

  Daniken drummed her fingers against the moon scepter, letting the light of the stave issue forth to contain the darkness threatening Singer’s Trail, just as the light elves were doing with their sun scepters. She watched Celeste out of the corner of her eye, waiting for her sister’s guard to drop. Celeste didn’t waste time with concern as to why Daniken was really helping them, she just pushed more of the sun’s radiance out of her scepter and into the fray.

  And then it happened. Daniken had her opening. Once and for all she would give Celeste what she really wanted, what she needed. She grabbed her sister’s sun scepter and flung it through the harbinger threat. The shadows coalesced and several people screamed at once.

  Daniken turned around, but that had been the wrong move. The one person she expected to help her, the one person she thought would see what needed to be done in this group was waiting there for her.

  Leona swung with all of her might, the tip of the short sword slashing an angry mouth across Daniken’s throat. She stumbled to the side she lost the grip on her moon scepter, and tripped into the warding of Singer’s Trail.

  Daniken fell into the darkness, carried on waves of malcontent and pulled further into the forest. The shadows consumed her. They slipped into each opening they could find, fingers of hatred seeking her soul.

  There was pain. Fiery hot pain blistering up her body, consuming her mind. But there was also healing of a kind.

  The shadows fled from her vision, and Daniken lay there, blinded by a bloom of silver light. At first she thought it was from her scepter, but then a voice came out of the silver light.

  “My Father refuses to do what needs to be done, just as your sister refuses. Together we can push back the darkling tide.” And then the voice and the light entered her. It was like a song filled her being. A true vibration of the moon. A lament of moonlight that Daniken felt she’d always known, always felt soar within her body even when she didn’t control the moon scepter.

  But it wasn’t just the light and the voice that filled her.

  In the coldness of the Fey Forest, Daniken felt the chill of winter fill her soul too. Her neck healed even as her body stiffened with the onset of ice that seemingly filled every crevice of Agaranth. She became one with the darkness and one with the cold. She felt her blood congeal and solidify. Her head stung, and then burned.

  She writhed on the ground, tearing at the pain in her head.

  And then her skin started to split. From the holes created on either side of her head, great horns of frozen wood sprouted forth, their branches reaching high.

  Her dark hair turned silver.

  Her eyes webbed with frost.

  Her skin turned blue like the winter’s sky.

  And then Daniken Lindorph fell still.

  When she came to once more, she knew what she needed to do. Celeste traveled with the God Slayer, and she needed that more than anything to beat back the harbingers of darkness. There was a presence in the forest. Two in fact. Perversions of nature spirits that she could bend to her will.

  They were charged with the same thing she desired. While their wills might not always be aligned, this time they were.

  It took little effort to send out the call to the elle folk, and in moments they answered.

  A black cloud formed in the air before Daniken, and out of it dropped a broken harp, followed by a gorgeous woman, and a withered old man. They were no taller than Daniken’s knees. While the woman was dressed in leaves, the old man was dressed in skins, leather it was said was fashioned from the hide of men.

  The woman grimaced, baring teeth like broken glass.

  The memory of Daniken within the new form knew that this one was the harpist, and her harp had been broken.

  Daniken slipped her cold fingers around the instrument, and as she handed it to the harpist, the harp mended itself. In a series of strums and musical notes, the harp returned to what it had once been.

  “We have work,” Daniken said to them. “I know where the God Slayer is.”

  “But you’re dead,” Abagail said. This has to be a dream. Daniken is dead. She tried to remember what had happened. She remembered the shadow plague taking control of her. As if brought on by the memory of the plague polluting her body, Abagail felt the wound in her stomach yawn wide. Her flesh grew warm with a new wash of blood. Daniken stabbed me and then— “I know you’re dead, I watched Leona kill you.”

  Daniken stepped forward, her silvery skin darker now, almost blue with frost. She looked different than what Abagail remembered. Now she had twisted antlers of wood sprouting from her head. The antlers dripped with ice. She wore a gown of winter now, that’s all Abagail could think of it as. A dress made of snow and ice and everything cold and bad with the world. Her eyes were no longer the clear silver they had been before, but instead were webbed with frost, glazed with death.

  “That was then,” Daniken said. Her voice was hollow, cold. “This is now.”

  “There’s a power in you,” Abagail said. She could feel the power radiating from the dark elf. It was power like Abagail felt mirrored within herself. “Are you a darkling?”

  “No,” Daniken said.

  “Infected with the shadow plague?”

  “Wrong again.” A slight smile marred the wintery beauty of her face. Cracks appeared in the frost across the corners of her mouth.

  Within the dream they were surrounded by darkness, but Abagail knew somewhere around them existed a forest rife with darklings.

  “What are you?” Abagail asked.

  “A memory,” Daniken said. “The maiden of the forest?” she shrugged.

  “Why are you here?” Abagail asked.

  “To wake you up. You are different from the rest,” Daniken said.

  “The rest of what?” Abagail asked, her breath hitching in her throat as the elf’s frozen feet brought her closer leaving trails of frost in her wake.

  “The harbingers,” Daniken said.

  Wake up harbinger, a voice called to her. She felt lips pressed to her own. Not the lips of Daniken, but one much warmer. When she opened her eyes, she was surrounded by a verdant green forest. Birds chirped in the boughs of trees above her, and the sun dazzled her eyes.

  She blinked in the brightness. Before her stood a fair woman. It was she who kissed her. A warrior maiden with wings.


  “Ballicrie!” Abagail cried, stumbling away from the woman and wiping her mouth. “But you kissed me!” she accused.

  The angel nodded.

  “But you’re of the host of death!”

  Again, the ballicrie nodded.

  “And now I’m going to die?” Abagail asked. She held up her arm, only then realizing she was naked. She knew the plague had spread the night before, it had taken her over. Claimed her as its own. She remembered the cloud of darkness that had swirled around her, out of her, taking the forest by storm.

  “Everyone dies,” the ballicrie shrugged. “And so shall you.”

  And then she was standing on the edge of a giant well, the voice of the ballicrie still in her mind. And so shall you.

  A sharp pain bit through Abagail’s back, twisted through her stomach and ripped through the flesh of her belly. She stared in shock as the blood coated root began wrapping around her waist, holding her tight. The giant green root lifted her off the well, her blood spilling into the wyrded water beneath her.

  Abagail was swallowed by the wyrd, consumed by the tree.

  In her mind she saw two birds. Ravens. They circled above her, calling to her. She was laying down now, her back to the cold ground. She stared up through a canopy of stars and she saw them. She knew that these ravens were different than most, but she couldn’t be sure how she knew they were.

  Help is coming, she heard them speak into her mind. The harbingers know you are here.

  They weren’t birds at all. Abagail knew that much.

  The thought startled her awake.

  The ground was still cold beneath her. Twisted roots and lumps of stones bit into her back, making her stiff and achy. She groaned and started to sit up.

  “She’s awake!” Leona yelled over her shoulder.

  Rorick and Celeste gathered around her, nearly choking out Leona, but her sister stayed her ground, wedging herself between the other two so she could see her sister.

  “Thank the All Father you’re alright,” Rorick said, crushing Abagail to his chest. Over his shoulder she could see two other elves, one male and one female. The male was talking, but the female seemed more interested in the ground between her feet.