DOFAB#3

Chapter Twenty- Part One

~ KINLEY ~

The sun sits high. Its rays beaming out behind a mountain made of bark. The brightness of the burning yellow star seeps through the dancing vines streaming from this strange mountain as tall as the skyscrapers in the UR. Shielding my face from the gleaming glare of leaves that's cellular structure appears to be made from thousands of precious gems, I find I'm standing at the base of a giant willow. The canopy of the willow's reach goes for miles, the peak of it lost in the clouds it touches.

For a second, I expect the hill this enormous willow and I share to come alive and reveal its Rien. Our father of Naveeden is often depicted as a stag with willows for antlers. One touches Zeura's kingdom. The other Haysha's. In the middle, the earth he's charged with keeping in balance. But the soft grass beneath me does not crack and the rumblings of the earth's crust breaking apart as Rien rises fails to happen.

Birds fly overhead, chirping as the breeze sways the blue-green and purplish-blue leaves of the enormous willow before me.

Am I wondering again?

Is this a part of the eerie's nest?

The winds pick up, strumming the vines as if they were inharmonic, clattering wind chimes. The lyrical melodies grow louder until each tune flows separately within me. Words my soul interprets, yet they hold no meaning to my ears. Backing away from the tree that's life force is infiltrating mine, I see them. Rows and rows of pinks, blues, violets, yellows, oranges, reds, and every color in-between. There are thousands of them. No, millions are all planted in a single garden beyond the hill the willow is rooted upon. My sisters, shieldmaidens and temple priestesses that have yet to blossom. But it's more than that. There are eevie working the fields, tending to the young buds and the ones ready to unfold next season.

Is this Naveeden?

Have I slipped into my afterlife?

My garden sisters continue to work, the wind saturated with the fawnettes they sing.

Strike. Strike. Plow the fields.

Turn the soil. Sow the seeds.

Their words fill me, the rest overtaken by the wind chime vines streaming from the swaying willow's branches. Standing at the base of a thriving willow and among so many garden sisters, the unfettered joy and peace washing over me turns into blistering ice. The kind I imagine lives in Tristan Darkos's veins. As I lift my hands, the reds of death cover me. The lush green grass beneath a pile of bones I stand upon as creatures I hope I never face screech and roar hidden somewhere in the blood and ash saturated fog of a battlefield. My garden sisters are no more, the planes having shifted me into a completely different realm than where the willow stood.

I duck, narrowly missed by a squawking, feathered beast made of shadows that breathes green fire as if it were made of the same magic of Rien's emerald flame. The same magic that existed within the green lake of fire within the snow-colored eerie's nest.

Emerald magic is said to be the breath of the universes. A potent mix of light and dark magic that is limitless if wielded by the right hands. In the wrong hands, it is as destructive as the eerie sent to end the worlds that fall.

Are these raven-feathered beasts pelting the armies locked in battle the eerie sent to destroy whatever world I've stumbled upon?

The pile of bones beneath me snap jarring me from the gruesome conflict. Before me, Tristan kneels, resting back on his calves, arms limp at his sides. Enough blood to fill rivers for decades drenches his sword, dripping down into the underworld. Haysha's kingdom so saturated with the lifeblood of sacrifice, it's rising up, piercing the veil that should keep this world and her afterlife separate.