Equinox (Book One of the Firebird Chronicles) WATTY AWARD HIDDEN GEM WINNER 2015

Chapter One (Part Two): Reia

A/N: Media is how I envisage Reia to look!

I ran until I thought I could run no longer, and then I ran some more.

The marketplace had caused me to lose my cloak; desperately shoving people out of the way and trying to squeeze in between gaps had resulted in me yanking it from my shoulders in effort to get away faster. I regretted it now as the sun began to set, and I was still pounding across the fields, scarcely even aware of what direction I was running. All the while, I could hear the hounds following in the distance.

As I tired, they began to catch up, snapping their jaws viciously. I cried out as I stumbled, the earth catching my feet and pulling me down. My body was moving and scrambling away before I could even tell it to, my heart pumping so hard that I could hear it in my ears, droning out the dogs with its drumming rhythm.

Eventually, I came before a wall and a gate, and I vaulted it so fast that I had to continue running once I hit the ground. Only when a few minutes had passed, and the yapping of the hunt had faded, did I realise I had left the dogs behind at the gate, and I could relax.

My knees buckled, and I fell to the ground, sobbing. I stayed on the ground for what felt like a long time. My body had cooled, my heart rate had plummeted and my muscles began to scream. Exhaustion was creeping over me, so I forced myself to stand.

It was only then did I realise where I was— and gasped.

The harbour! I was in the harbour!

The land met with an expanse of water glittering in the setting sun. The evening light threw flickering shadows of jetties and moored boats bobbing with the gentle swashing of the waves. But the real reason I hated the harbour at this time of year was the gigantic mass of rock and earth that floated over the water, like an overweight cruise liner waiting to dock.

The floating island had been built hundreds of years ago, long before the cities beneath it began to flourish in a haze of smog and science. Nobody really knew anything about it, which caused no end of stories and legends of gossip between the townsfolk, who had all grown up alongside the strange phenomenon and had learned to accept it.

Being a person that liked facts, I believed that we only knew two truths about the island, and they were visible from observation.

Fact number one? The time of year it appeared.

Always, as if in orbit, the island would descend lower towards Earth as the height of summer and the solstice approached. Where it rested now, a few houses above the harbour, was just about where it would reach maximally, for the summer solstice— and my birthday— was only a few days away. Within a month, though, it would disappear back into the sky, to vanish again for the year.

The second fact was what it looked like.

On the underbelly, a huge bronze mechanism whirred and cranked, releasing plumes of steam from pistons, and rotating fans at an incredible rate.

From this belly rose the body of the island, made from what appeared to be rock and high walls of stone, but amazingly, decorated with vines and flowers. Just towering above the walls, the top few turrets of a castle could be made out; glistening glass towers that surely overlooked a great city.

Perhaps I lied; there was one more fact that I alone knew about the island, and it was that I was absolutely terrified of it.

When I was a child, parents would tell their children that the island was there to take naughty children away. As it whirred in its approach, the towns' toddlers would suddenly become a lot better behaved. Having grown up in an orphanage, it was not down to parents telling me that it would steal naughty children, but my sister, fervently denying it.