Journey to Aviad Read online

Journey to Aviad

  Copyright 2015 Allison D. Reid

  Published by Allison D. Reid

  ISBN: 1-4563-2965-0

  ISBN-13: 9781456329655

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, the please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 – The Coin

  Chapter 2 – A Chance Encounter

  Chapter 3 – Vision of Darkness

  Chapter 4 – The Storm Breaks

  Chapter 5 – Vivid Dreams and Tree Sailing

  Chapter 6 – A Robe for Gareth, and Alazoth's Hounds

  Chapter 7 – The Scattering of the Circle

  Chapter 8 – In the Arms of the Enemy

  Chapter 9 – The Traitor's Wife

  Chapter 10 – Escape From Tyroc

  Chapter 11 – Respite Along the East Road

  Chapter 12 – Emergence at Deep Lake

  Chapter 13 – Living Fire

  Chapter 14 – The Inn at Greywalle

  Chapter 15 – The Offering

  Chapter 16 – Endings and Beginnings

  Afterword

  Connect with the Author

  Excerpt from Ancient Voices: Into the Depths

  Other Works by the Author

  Dedication

  In memory of my beloved grandmother, Agatha Irene Gibson (1929-2010), who always encouraged both my imagination and my own personal journey to Aviad (although I came to know Him by another name in this world).

  Prologue

  The veil of night has not yet lifted. Even so, I find myself climbing the familiar stone steps that spiral up to my office. I have trod them so many times before that I do not need the light of my lantern to navigate their steep incline. This ancient staircase, cut by masons long dead, has been worn smooth by the feet of generations of my ancestors. No place in the world do I feel the pressing weight of time more strongly than here, where there is no other distraction for my mind, and no other task for my body but to climb, with the voices of all those who came before me echoing in the sound of my footfalls. Reaching the top of the staircase, I push open the heavy wooden door and light a lantern. While I may not need it to navigate the stair, my aging eyes will need light for the task I begin on this day—a task that I have left for far too long. With the world sleeping in the quiet before dawn, I smooth out a fresh piece of parchment and lift my pen in thought...

  I have always been amazed by the way time unfolds itself; slow and subtle as the petals of the morning glory open to the first rays of sun. At first, you will see naught but a tightly closed bud, but allow yourself to be distracted by a passing breeze for only a moment, and you miss the flower’s brilliant heralding of the new dawn. I implore you, whoever you may be, to look around you. Open your eyes to every detail of the present as it lives, as it breathes. Do not be distracted by a fleeting wind and miss the coming of the dawn, for the events of today very soon become tomorrow’s folklore.

  No doubt someday many will wonder if these lands that sustain us, the cities we inhabit, the shrines at which we worship, our language, our literature … our very lives … ever truly existed, just as we continually struggle to unearth the traces of our own history from the rubble of our past. Our collective memory diminishes with each passing generation, leaving us with only tomes and trinkets to remind us of who we once were, and to show us who we are yet destined to become. Our descendants will look through our libraries, the remnants of our dead, and our rubbish alike, trying to discover if the tales they’ve heard of us are truth, or merely the imaginative ravings of some drunken bard of days long gone. And most likely they will find part truth, part fiction, mesh it together and call it “history.” Our existence will be neatly summed up into a list of significant dates, and squabbles over land, and rulers whose power was as over-inflated as their egos. That is not history. It fills the minds of the intellectuals, no doubt, and allows them to feel rather smug in their knowledge, but such things do not feed the soul, they do not represent the truth as it was breathed and bled by those who lived its everyday reality. The beauty of the flower cannot exist without its roots, its stem, the rain, the soil, the sun, and any number of other things we do not see, though they are rarely given the same adoration as the colorful bloom.

  Of course, I suppose the more frightening thought is that no one will wonder at all—that we will be here and gone in an instant, with none left to remember our families, sing songs of our exploits, or learn from our triumphs and failures. Perhaps that is why I find myself here in the silence before the sunrise, driven to commit all that I know to parchment, so that the truth is not buried with me, forever lost to the coming ages. No doubt the men of this age would shift uncomfortably in their seats and try to deny my writings as false, if they knew that a young girl of our own time grew up to hold the fate of the world in her hands. They have no idea how close they came to suffering the utter destruction of everything they hold dear.

  But there is no point to telling a story’s end before its beginning, and even the greatest heroes known to legend have made their entrance into the world as children. While it is true that we make our own choices as we grow, before we have even drawn our first breath Aviad the Creator has called to us each by name, and continues to call to us on our journey through this life. So often it falls to those who truly listen for His voice to rise and fight for us all. So it is with young Elowyn, who came into the world of base birth and unknown lineage, like a single seed planted in the garden whose tender shoots sprouted unnoticed in a world unwary of its fate. This is where my tale truly begins.

  May the Ancients look kindly upon one man’s humble retelling of her life, as it has been made known to me over the course of many years. For though Elowyn’s physical form must inevitably someday perish, I write this tome in the hope that the essence of her life, and the knowledge of her mark upon this world, will not.

  The Coin

  A lone man slipped cautiously through the quiet of the forest just before dawn. The sky was draped with a thick gray mantle of clouds, covering any waning moonlight that might have guided him along the treacherous path before him. The man lowered his face as he raised his hood against a sudden, heavy burst of rain. Only the most urgent of tasks could have brought him to the very edge of the Deep Woods at this early hour. But he was a man of honor, and he had made a solemn vow that would not be broken. His nerves and muscles were stretched taut as he made his way slowly forward. He prayed for an end to the rain, so that the sight of the sun’s first gentle rays might break through the clouds and ease his troubled mind. The rain diminished, but the darkness persisted.

  A twig snapped somewhere in the underbrush behind him. The man lowered his hood and instinctively turned to peer back down the path. Cursing the darkness under his breath, he listened intently for a moment. Unable to see, and hearing nothing more, he continued on, walking at a faster pace than before. Another twig snapped, from somewhere to the right this time. He withdrew an arrow from his quiver and held it ready in his hand. His senses were all on edge now as he broke into a run, only to hear more sounds of movement from somewhere ahead of him. He was being surrounded, by what he could only guess. He veered to the left, off the footpath, running erratically in the direction of a small stream he had crossed earlier. Any hope to shake his pursuers was futile; the noose they had drawn around him had already tightened. The
man was quickly surrounded by a pack of wild beasts, larger than wolves, with red glowing eyes and fiery breath. Leading them was an enormously tall figure with an antlered helm who carried a staff taller than himself.

  The man raised his bow and released as many arrows as he could into their midst, unsure if such beasts could even be harmed by them. He screamed as they set upon him, their teeth and claws tearing through his leather armor and into his flesh. But there was more at stake than his life. That was the difficult message he had received in prayer the night before. Perhaps his demise was fated, yet there still might be hope if he could only get to the stream. In spite of the agonizing pain, he rammed his way through the beasts, pulling a small cloth-wrapped object from beneath his shirt. The rain stopped and the clouds thinned. His prayer had been answered after all. The sun had not yet risen, but the moon still shone bright enough to reflect off the surface of the stream. He could see it now, bubbling and flashing not much farther ahead of him.

  The man dashed toward the stream with the last of his strength. He dropped his bow, and frantically unwrapped the object. He flung it into the rushing water just as the beasts brought him to the ground with such force that his helm flew off. For a brief instant the moonlight caught the object’s silvery surface, flashing so brightly that he was blinded by it. His last moment of awareness was filled with hope as the creatures around him shrieked in painful fear of its brilliance.