Chapter 1
The first thing I remembered was the cold. It leached into my bones with a fierce bite that had not bothered me since I’d last eaten real food, not the blood of humans or animals. Clawed at my joints with ravenous fingers and pried beneath my eyelids as it made my insides crack in brittle pain. The only point of warmth in me was the heat that pierced me through the center of my back and clear all the way to my chest. The place where the silver arrow had pierced me.
It was an agonizing effort to breathe and several times, I heard an urgent voice compelling me to keep breathing when all I wanted was to sink into the dark coldness.
My eyes refused to open and not even when a blast of warm moist air smacked me in the face did I open them. We, the thing that carried me. I dropped with a sickening lurch that I felt all the way to my belly. I heard strange voices buzzing over my head speaking in a language I had never heard before but using words that were somehow familiar. I could feel it when the fur-covered being slid me off its shoulder to lay me on a padded board of some kind and we went flying down the long hallway brilliantly lit by expansive lights. I could sense other beings around me as their hands were busy stripping off my things, rolling and hurting me worse than I thought was possible.
I fought them. In my mind I could see my hands beating them as I roared out my anger and yet I knew I was making no more than a feeble moan as I twitched my fingers. I heard a door open with a whoosh and a giant light hung over my face burning through my eyelids. I felt rather than saw something descend from the ceiling to cover my face. Two breaths of the strangely dry air and my senses left me in a swirl of violet and gray.
*****
Slowly, I came up out of the darkness. Fearfully, for I wasn’t sure if I was dead or in the hands of enemies. I couldn’t remember the last thing that had happened to me, all I could think of was being chased across the glacier on a sylph. Slowly, the memories came back. Arriving home to find that my father’s hired hand had taken over the place in my absence and put flowers on my parents’ graves. Eating with him and being able to stomach the food only to find that the Wizard and my grandfather had beaten me there and laid a trap. Being captured by the wizard only to escape from their magic and fleeing out onto the glacier. The hot pain as a silver arrow hit me in the back. I moaned and voices told me to hush. The race across the ice with my enemies in pursuit and finally, collapsing on the ice with the sylph guarding me with its body as it died.
I opened my eyes. Focused slowly on my surroundings as I explored first my body and then the room. I was numb. I couldn’t feel my hands or feet. I couldn’t feel any part of my body. I wasn’t even sure if I was lying down or propped up on a plank somewhere.
I coughed and besides a shortness to my breath, couldn’t even feel my chest rise. I panicked and struggled to move, to get up, and run yet all I succeeded in doing was to roll my eyes and work my mouth into a scream. A pitiful one that came out more a gasp than a yell.
“Help!” I called faintly and tears dripped down my cheeks at the utter horror in the certainty that I was paralyzed. Some time passed with my emotions raw and in absolute terror. I knew my heart was pounding because the pulse in my neck and temples told me so even when I couldn’t feel it in my chest. Eventually, I became accustomed to the fear of not moving and wallowed in despair. I couldn’t do anything except move my eyes, mouth and to a certain extent, my head.
So, I did. I turned my head all the way to the left and saw the wall. White walls made of stone with a smooth worked surface yet I knew it was granite by its consistency and color. Andanite granite, the hardest rock known to the Old and New lands. A monster stone to work and yet it was here, smoothed to the polish of Imperial marble.
On the wall were pictures. Not paintings or drawings but images so real they seemed as if the objects were actually mounted inside the frames. Pictures of plants, trees and animals that I had never seen before. The frames were not made of wood but some other shiny thin material with glass plates over the images.
I turned my head to the right and saw another wall but this one made my mouth gape in astonishment for it was only half a wall. The rest was a wall-length window that looked out on a busy work area where people in strange uniforms bustled back and forth. Except for the four that I saw seated at a huge horseshoe-shaped desk. Most of them were women. Tall women with ice blue eyes, light hair and skin the color of old ivory. One looked up and stared at me. I saw her mouth moving and presently, a man wandered over to the desk, leaned on top of it and turned around to stare at me.
I heard a hissing noise and before I could open my mouth, I was falling asleep. I tried to fight it but I had no better luck with that than trying to move.