The Dark Accords

Prologue: The Sacrifice

"For she had discovered that as well as the evil web there was another. This too bound spirits together, but not in a tangle. It was a patterned web and one could see the silver pattern when the sun shone upon it. It seemed much frailer than the dark tangle, that had a hideous strength, but it might not be so always, not in the final reckoning."

-Elizabeth Goudge, The Child from the Sea

"Hell is empty and all the devils are here." - William Shakespeare

Prologue: The Sacrifice

Afralon, Lorridine

1902

The river streamed by like a thick, black snake against the evening twilight. Everything was silent, like the still ocean that lay beyond the realm of Lorridine. Above the glittering water, the mortal world went on as it always did. They didn't seem to care about the young woman who was wandering thousands of feet below them, a woman who was just as human as they were, but had escaped the dissatisfaction of her mundane life. There were no worried faces streaming tears or searches being made to find her again. Maybe they had once known her, years before, but now she was nothing to them. She had been forgotten, a dusty flower bud blowing in the wind, like all people were eventually forgotten. But that was the way it was.

Mortals, it seemed, didn't care to notice what did not directly affect them. It was in their nature to be selfish. While the humans put their roast beef into pots for the next day and tucked their crying children into bed, telling them stories of creatures that did not exist, below the smog of steaming earth, a whole other world flourished with perfection. This was the world of Lorridine.

The people there didn't need souls, for there was no one they were judged by. They didn't have to fear, for they were all equal in their own right. It was due to their very existence that the humans could stay as innocent and foolish as they were. They couldn't have known that in every minute of their lives, during every busy morning, every late night walk on the street, every dangerous and stupid event they ever chose to be a part of, they were being watched by the Gifted Ones, the most elite of all the Sorts, the varying races of people, in the world of Lorridine.

Since the Last War, though, things had changed. Not only had their greatest enemy been defeated and silenced, but the Gifted Ones had disappeared. Now no one knew what the humans were up to.

But it didn't matter to Valerie what they were up to. She had her own ambitions, and when she had left the human world and came to Lorridine, she knew she had left all that had come with it, including humanity. The moon was glowing in its full extremity high in the sky above her, looking like a luminous gray eye of God watching over the events of the night. Valerie had been pondering by its dark beauty when the storm rolled in, gray and thunderous, above the grassy banks of the mansion. She'd left her steed in the meadow to roam, and therefore was left to her own feet to find her way back to the tall white gates of the Washington Mansion. But she couldn't leave quite yet. She knew her husband would not return for another hour, and she planned on taking benefit of it. There was still a certain business to attend to.