The Beginning

Stirring from dream, Helena already glimpsed through sleep-thick lids and the frostglass window’s rime the many creams and ices on the courtyard feasting slab, supple blooming cakes gleaming jewel-like in the dawn, shining up through plated lead and iron bar into her turret chamber, full bright colored sugar lip treats to kiss the grey stone garret awake.

She jumped upright with no care for sleep or the ache left in any little limbs — today began the festival!!

Soon there would be the ringing of the morning bells and the procession of the Higher Townsmen with anthems, from High Queen to Beggar, and then the many games and plays and feasts, and by the day’s end even Helena and the other Serving, the working folk, would join the festivities, clanking mugs of mulled plum and pumpkin wine and glorying the ancestral runes, spinning the ancient dances, their palms held even to the Queen’s own palm as they whirled, together, one.

This was the month for which Helena wept and prayed through the sameness of her days, serving with duty as her Elder Woman taught her, but never without a longing for the year of her Twelfth Birth, when she would leave this serving life to learn to read the Great Books with the other girls of Harka.

This morning she floated down the stairs, wound, round and votive, slipping into the light atmosphere of day, an atom, a whisper. She wore her only clothes.

“WHAT SHOULD I DO!” she child-warbled the question, bouncing across the moss toward the Elder. So many days it was blight to help, to serve, but today it was a lolly, a frozen pop dream of becoming, a butterfly garden!!

The Elder laughed at the shining little face.

“Take the vestments Maid! They’re for wash and not to dawdle! But—” The Elder drew Helena near with one creaky arm, her breath thick of ale and seed. She was a kind woman. “Take this here to sweet your journey, yes? Treats aren’t just for Queen today!” and she plopped a thick moony gum of new fruit candies into Helena’s hand, glopping and bursting, friendly and wonderful.

“The Queen’s own sweets!”

Helena wrapped both child-arms around her neck, thanking her, and kissed her briny ear. The Elder watched her skip away, gobbling the sweets, happy, weighted by the garment bag but no less innocent, and she felt young again.

What joy Helena saw!!! Half to the river, stopping not as the Elder had warned but oh were the dances already so broad – detailed and lush, so lovely!! Hoisted skirts spinning like floating flowers and sterling tone of Singer, harp rang the courtyard, trail, forest, to life! Helena wound and ran, hoisting the laundry bag lightly today, stopping to receive a plum-dripped bun here, an emerald ribbon there – the townsfolk giving as they received – generous in their joy. The Youngers gripping new prizes, the Elders passing mapled wines, the Middles skipping with beaus and bows and books and bundles, all color and blushed cheek and held hands and giggles, the whole town seeming light as new day.

This was Harka, the way she would always remember it.

But just as Helena’s first footfall found Riverpath, the trees rustled a new way – a hiss, the curious whisper of something new to the branches. What there? Helena inspected the ivied roots and slowly, slowly upturned her gaze– rose and rose until she glimpsed – what was this? EYES. Many, many eyes, all together in – one creature? A hundred orbs all on the breast of one mammoth wing-ed creature. A BEAST WITH CHEST OF EYES in the branches!

Her jaw went slack.

Before she could call out, the flurry of wings and white hot chaos erupted– Helena herself, standing at Riverpath’s mouth, half-in, half-out of Harka and childhood, saw the very moment at which life changed forever.

For from the beast came a deafening cry and the whoosh of wicked wings as it alighted! Its cosmic squall a splitting, reverberating boom, high- and low-pitched at once, it wrought and clung to every atom, to ear and ground and castle. The creature took the sky and came to rest, shaking the earth, between Helena and Harka.

She saw villagers kneel to clutch their ears, cry aloud and shield themselves, as terror ripped across the fields of celebration, all rent. And then the fearful becoming as each caught sight of the beast in their own time.

Fearsome leviathan, with sky-sized dragon head and thrashing maw, the color of swamp but iridescent, the beast seemed to terror-glow! The neck—able to retract and then shoot endlessly forward! And the chest below of a hundred liquid orbs – staring, wild, searching. The chest-pupils went wide, blood-shot, hungry, dripping. They chose a target and out shot a limitless ten-ton spine — forthright, stinging, swift.

As Helena watched in shock the beast spewed a thick venom at a Soldier. He ran, ran, slowed. The beast did not follow, retracting. Turned its multiplied foetid gaze to the prey, haunches relaxed and crouched. It set to…..watch.

The soldier writhed this way and that. He cried out, seemed to search the air for answers and clutch his belly, marred by venom– and then.

And then from his belly grew another of these creatures.

From Soldier’s own torso sprung forth a second beast—neck rising instantly, fully-formed, and stretched skyward, its face to his face!

That which grew from him now stared at him.

Within an instant, a full monster erupted from the man’s form, his body settling atop the creature’s back like a horseman. His self went dark. He, no longer Harkan Soldier but part of the creature, seemed now to ride the beast!! He had become that which grew from him, and now the fiend sought its next prey.

Helena gasped and the dragon turned instantly to her. Sniffing this way and that, its many eyes at her eyes, its breath at her breath. Helena jumped back, yelped in silence, skirting away from another dragon’s claws just inches from her toes.

Neither creature….seemed to see the girl. All thousand eyes and none saw.

“MAID!”

As if from a dream she heard the call amidst chaos everywhere, terror everywhere. It was The Rag-man– he of the myrrh and rune, he the Beloved, he the wisest. He so gloried– the Highest-held, the Queen’s Teacher, Healer, Shaman– he now, too, by beast laid low. Having feared to ever before, Helena met his gaze.

“Get back LITTLE ONE— but the slightest drip of maw blights the body!”

The Rag-man rolled on the dirt clay of the courtyard. His blind eye of ice lolled toward her, the other fixed on the eight-legged behemoth emerging from his belly.

“Have you been touched, Maid?”

“No sir! They—they seem not to— to see me. They seem not to see me!”

Rag-man’s mouth went wide and he began to pray, to chant, and touched his free palm to his breast in ritual movement, seeming to bless something there.

“Rag-man we must kill them!”

“No! No Maid. These beasts die not by hand of man—not Higher, not Lower, nor Soldier nor Squaw.” His speech halted, hurried. He was dying but needed her to know things.

“They come to havoc man and retreat at the whimsy of their maker.”

His arms and legs wrapped about the creature even as he spoke, hugging it to him like a lover. He screamed into its face to her, its eyes studying his. He talked to her and it.

“They have come by the Ethos, the Sky, they have come from the Unnamed! They pave the way, harming what they can and exposing what cannot be harmed, they are the highwaymen, stallions on whose backs will be spirited their master – to find One he seeks!”

Helena screamed as creatures alighted all around her.

“He looks for One he cannot see.”

The Rag-man had hold around the creature’s neck with both hands now, its blood-red venom dripping about his knuckles and down his wrists like a wrung beet. He turned to her. “Maid, attend!” And she habitually struck Soldier’s pose.

With one hand he unmuddled a goatskin pouch at his chest beneath what was left of his garment. He ripped the pouch, its frayed and ancient crumbs falling like odd rain, and birthed from within it a curious black volume, bound in oxhide, tear- and wine- and time-stained. Even on first sight, it seemed to vibrate cryptic and luscious, glowing with purpose, weight.

He raised the strange book aloft and sent it flying toward Helena. She shrieked but caught it effortlessly. She looked back to him, desperate.

“But I— I’m not of the Twelfth year!! I can’t—READ!”

“Ope the book Maid!”

Hurriedly she slipped the ancient sheaves apart, the pages seeming to hum, her heart with their rhythm.

“READ IT!”

And tucked inside was an envelope made of insect wing, with text of liquid gold. Helena, awed, screamed aloud the passage:

“We’re here in other world and time. We are many and we await you. Your destination is with us, your journey long. You’ll need this note of our currency, called twenty thousand dollars. You'll know when. Every single thing you’ll need, in every time, is either in these pages or within you. Creator speed and keep you.”

And with that the book slapped shut and Helena screamed, awed.

The Rag-man’s voice had dropped to a terrifying pitch. “This book is for One the beast seeks. You must help the One to the destination!”

“I will do as told, Highest!! But who--- who do I help? Who is the One? WHO DO THEY LOOK FOR??!!?”

The Rag-man stretched skyward.

“Highest—if it is you the beasts cannot see…” He struggled, resisted –fearless. And he turned his face and spirit full around, gleaming like a pyre.

“Then they look for YOU.”

And he wrestled for one splendid moment to kneel to her, so he could mark this new time, this new era to come before he was gone from it.

“Take this book—and---“

His mouth went wide as stars, thick and full as cosmos and shattering the moon as he screamed:

“RUN.”

And with that Helena spun and jumped the beast behind her, knees lifted to her waist as she ran, gaze to sky so as not to view the devastation. She ran! Upward she turned to see only the celestial window, boots pounding earth. She looked not ahead, swift as a comet hurtling faster and faster away from her home.

She clutched the book to her but it seemed to want to stick there, found, as if impressioned. It was not hard to hold, this new thing – it was at home.

At her thumping feet, and 3 yard from them, and 12 yard from that, and 100 field before her, and 60,000 behind, was only evil below and above and around. For as far as comprehension beheld was the pall of some lesson and only she moving through to learn it. Had Helena been high, high above to view this world from great height, she would have seen her small self winding through a sea of affliction, the evil having ravaged not just Harka, but everywhere.

But she couldn’t know this now.

She ran and ran, hurtling over and over and under creature and kinsmen and mound and ground and grave and tangles and knots of monster and human, flesh and prayer, of scream and sob and roar and soul, looking only forward.

She traveled long like this and, bone-weary, slept for days.

And then —

Stirring from dream, Helena found herself propped against a tangle of mossed vine, curiously renewed. There – hovering in front of her like a vision! — was the book. There the secrets. There the sacred. What next.

She, who had lost all, placed it, reverent, into her lap,

oped the binding and

began to

read.