A Step into Darkscape (The Legacy Novels Book 2) Page 2
She took a few steps toward the animal.
He took a couple of steps back.
Ami took a few more steps, and the dog countered again.
“Oh, we’re playing a game are we?” Ami looked around again, but she was alone. “I know a little thing that might get you moving.” Lowering herself slowly to the ground she got on all fours and threw her arms out in front of her, the universal gesture of play. But it didn’t work. Instead the patchwork pup turned tail and trotted off toward the wood. It stopped at the edge of a pathway that cut through the trees, barely seen except for a small green sign. Public Footpath.
Curious, Ami followed, first starting on all fours and then rising slowly to her feet. The dog looked back.
Is he wanting me to follow?
Dangerous.
She felt for the pencil she’d slipped into her pocket, gripping it.
The dog waited patiently until she’d caught up, the path before them a narrow dirt track that cut between the trees.
Memories of the Mortrus Lands filled her with an exhilarating fear, the deep, dark and mystical forest where both her natural and hidden powers had been put to the test, her very claim to her individuality challenged—but here at least, they were only trees, only woods.
The dog moved on, his small head swinging back constantly to check on her.
“It’s okay,” she said, “I’m coming, Pepper.” She didn’t know his name, but it seemed to fit, and he seemed happy with it, trotting a little faster.
A feeling of unease grew inside her though as they continued on, close knit trees becoming less dense, shadowed spaces becoming larger. It was a familiar feeling, all mixed up inside. She thought of her brother Adam’s tainted voice touching her name as if a fractured crystal, precious but sharp…
Dangerous.
But Adam was gone.
Sunlight broke behind branches and became a white fire behind shadow. It shifted and moved across the path, touching her booted feet with flickering fingers. Flowers bloomed here and there, and all the beauty she’d seen, heard and smelt intensified.
Butterflies swooped low, high, circled and darted; insects hovered and then disappeared above and below; all the while the small dog trotted on.
Ami’s senses sharpened as he came to a dead stop in the middle of the track, as still and immovable as a stone.
She almost tripped over him.
Perhaps she’d been lured into the woods as a ruse so that an army of Jack Russells could pounce on her, attacking from each side of the track? Amusing, but unlikely. Suppressing the thought, she gripped the pencil and stepped past the small dog.
Immediately on her left, the woodland thinned to reveal a broken wooden shack. Desolate and clearly abandoned, it sat bleached and battered in the embrace of the many limbs that held it.
The dog growled and Ami followed his stare to the empty doorway that rose above a rickety porch, lifting and breathing with the breeze. There was a whisper in her mind that sharpened its tongue, and quite suddenly she knew that whatever this place was, it’d known power.
“What is it, boy, what do you sense?” But he wasn’t talking. Ami bent down to him again, but he growled at her touch and urinated where he stood.
“This is too weird,” she whispered, withdrawing the pencil and looking around. Alone. “I’m going in, Pep, you coming?” The dog stood immobile. The pencil shimmered a violet-jade and lengthened in her hand. The hilt and blade took shape, marbled and licked in green flame.
She brought it up to her face, looking at her reflection in the polished surface, the symbol for infinity clearly etched into the hilt.
The breeze lifted her hair and Ami listened for a time to the creaking of the branches, to the old wood of the shack lifting in their grasp. It sounded like voices, though light and far away.
Dangerous. Again.
Her palms filled with a fire that seeped beneath her skin as quickly as it’d arrived. It felt good.
Stepping forward into the long grass, Ami placed one foot upon the step and stared into the dark doorway.
Her second step creaked, the old wood beneath bending a little too far for comfort. She looked down to it, and from the corner of her eye caught the figure of a man on the porch, his arm raised—but when she looked up there was no one. The dog whimpered, yet had joined her, reluctantly recruited, and followed her as she climbed the remaining steps onto the porch.
A chill swept her body as if a winter wind beneath her clothes. It caressed her neck as she raised the sword higher, looking to her left where she’d seen the man. Nothing.
Eyes forward, she ventured on.
Inside, the shadows swallowed her and there was a musty smell like a neglected tree house, a place children played long ago, but not in a long, long while. The rooms to her left and right weren’t fit for people, big or small; an animal, much like a squirrel, scurried across the floorboards and jumped to climb the branch of a protruding tree, disappearing.
The whole place creaked, almost swayed, anchored precariously as if in danger at any moment of launching into the sky. Dorothy’s house, she thought. Follow the yellow brick road. An eerie chill solidified in her mind, and she knew beyond doubt then, that she wasn’t alone…
Pepper had gone quiet, and turning to look for him she saw the man again, as before, definite and there. He was old, very old, dark skinned with white hair just covering his scalp; perched on a chair that hadn’t been there, he was bent over a small table on the porch. His arm was outstretched, his fingers clutching a small, golden chess piece.
Ami shook her head, but the man remained. He’d stopped in mid-move, his head cocked as if listening for something. Listening for her.
He knew she was there, too.
Dangerous.
Ami raised her sword, pivoting slowly on the spot to face the door once more—but then he was gone. Simply wasn’t there, as if he’d never been.
A growl of uncertainty came from the pup and he ran from the house and back out into the sunlight. Wary but curious, Ami turned back into the shack, feeling Dangerous. Dangerous, yes, her Shadow Princess left deep within the Mortrus Lands. Forever there, forever with her.
Her sword burst into coloured light, chasing the shadows.
Ahead of her was a staircase, stunted and broken, and from the light of her blade she could see the fallen balusters, coloured a pale blue, preserved in the gloom. But there was something else, something reflecting within the rotted dust that would otherwise have been lost to darkness.
Checking the rooms to her left and right, Ami moved down toward it, keeping the blade raised, tilted toward the object. It was buried side on, and as her fingers stroked downward, brushing the debris aside, it revealed a shape she’d seen only moments ago. The gold glinted, looking gothic and sinister, flickering purple and green and gold.
Pepper barked, but Ami ignored him, her eyes fixed upon the chess piece, a rook, the tiny battlements of the castle clear.
She touched it and the world suddenly spun out of control.
Tornado, she thought. Auntie Em?
But it wasn’t a tornado, and in that fraction of a second she lost all sense of time and place—and then hit the floor, her sword falling from her hand.
Pepper barked furiously behind her, the noise thumping through her head.
“Pepper,” she managed, “be quiet will you?”
The dog relented, resorting to an unsettled growl instead.
Ami pulled herself up and grabbed the sword, pointing it down at the piece; it hadn’t moved, but it had moved her.
“What are you?” she whispered, studying it without touching it. She felt the presence again, the sense of another on the decrepit porch behind her, but she ignored it, pointing the sharp tip of her sword at the golden rook. They touched.
A flash of white light spun her, spun the shack, spun the world, landing her back on the floor in a daze.
“Shit,” she murmured, stunned and sluggish. “What is that?”
&n
bsp; She wasted no more time in getting to her feet, but instead held her sword tightly in one hand and snatched the rook up in the other.
The white light struck again behind her eyes, and the world spun as the cool metal dug into her palm, her blade bursting into green and white flame. She felt sick, but was determined to hold on until the change fluttered to a steady roar, then a hum, a thrum that danced to the rhythm of the world around it; but which world? she wondered.
She opened her eyes to walls that were no longer wooden but stone, cold and grey with masoned steps rising up to the second floor, complete and solid. Her sword was still within her grasp as was the totem, and though it all looked almost the same, she was definitely somewhere else.
Through the narrow doorway Ami saw a slice of the outside world, where great rounded stones littered a grassy plot that was filled with flowers of reds and blues and purples and yellows, some winding up the trunk of a nearby tree, others shooting wild, drooping and hanging over a cliff edge. The sea. I can smell it, hear it. Beyond and to the ends of the earth was the blue-grey ocean, bringing to mind memories of lazy days at the beach, adventures at the coast, of fun and happiness… Someone was coming.
Ami pulled herself to her feet as faint voices floated over the crash of waves from somewhere nearby. She couldn’t be found here, but the rooms that lay open to each side of the hall were empty and held no place to hide.
“…waking him, I’m sure. But why?”
“It is not ours to question why. You know this.”
Ami looked to the golden chess piece in her palm, and then back to the doorway where shadows now approached and overlapped, footsteps grinding dry mud and gravel. She turned and touched the rook instinctively down upon the first stone step, and in a sickening spin and a white flash of power, the walls around her morphed back into wood, the air becoming dry and hot, scented with green and growth. She fell to the ground, her empty stomach wanting to heave.
The dog barked out a warning and Ami jumped up, pivoting up on to her toes, stopping short of the blade trained on her heart.
Chapter Two
The sun had risen over the eastern hills, a sight that Hero had seen many times before, from the city walls, from turrets and towers, and now from the high up windows of Legacy’s castle keep, the ancestral home of the Lord of Legacy that was now—temporarily—under his stewardship.
He brooded on the sight, thinking of all that his city had suffered over the years without a ruler, and how despite these woes, he’d seen true strength in his people as they rebuilt their homes and lives in the wake of disaster; each and every person held Princess Ami as a guiding light in their hearts.
But Ami had returned to her own layer, leaving the survivors of Adam’s wrath ultimately on their own, and although it’d been agreed upon and accepted, Hero regretted letting her go so easily.
And now this.
A fear passed once more like a shiver through the land, plucking the skin of the weary, the war-torn, the ones who’d once fought each nightly riot and claimed to know death by sight, by smell. This tremor had travelled far across the mountains and through the Commune Valley, where traders and traffickers had brought warnings from the East. Then others had whispered of the stirrings up river, the strange happenings at the mouth of the Mortrus Lands, the mystical forest revealed as the origins of power.
What the disturbance was, was unclear. Some spoke of a fog that hung from the dense and blackened trees; others whispered of dark beasts, red eyes, and hidden rasping breaths. The ground was said to shake, to crack.
Hero meditated on these things long and hard, for rumour could damage, yet deliberate inaction could destroy. It was time for the Guard to find out the truth.
He turned his back on the view and eyed his lieutenants, Raven and Florence. They had fought beside him now in peace and war, each proving themselves capable and vital. They would be Legacy’s envoys.
“We hold this land together on the promise that Ami will return as princess when she is needed, on the hope that with her we will always be strong. In her absence, we must find out all we can to keep us safe. Any disturbance from the Mortrus Lands is of concern, and so I ask that you, Florence, ride to the spring of the river and report back what you find. Your power and swift gallop shall come into its own should you need to flee quickly.”
“Of course, Hero, I shall leave immediately.” The girl gave a half bow and left the room.
“Raven, I have a special task for you.” He stepped forward and placed his hand on his shoulder. “Set a fire and seek conference with the Shadow Princess. I believe the stranger-girl will answer our call should we need her. Perhaps she will know of these things. If Ami is needed, she will be able to call to her.”
“But Hero, it would be better if you—”
“I’d like you to do it in my stead, Raven.”
“Okay, anything.” Raven nodded, turned and headed out of the room in Florence’s wake.
It was of personal shame that Hero himself shunned this task, for who better to visit the Shadow Princess of Ami than he? Yet it felt necessary. With Lady Grace gone, the lands were his responsibility in Ami’s absence; it would do no good to endanger his people should he be distracted… but that of course was a truth wrapped in a lie, for the real reason was that his heart ached for Ami, but no matter how long he’d waited, and no matter her last words to him, she’d not returned. He was bruised, pure and simple.
“Oh, Ami,” he breathed, and turned back to the window to watch the morning come.
*
Raven stepped out of the stairwell onto the roof of the keep, his thoughts on Hero. For the life of him he couldn’t understand why he avoided Ami, or even the shadow of her. There’d been affection there by the end, from both sides, but now he found that Hero mentioned Ami less and less, and his captain’s mood had certainly darkened—not least due to the rumours of trouble to come that had unsettled them all.
Reaching out to Ami was the right thing to do. Raven could only hope that her double was substitute enough.
Pushing his thoughts aside, he strode to the edge of the castle walls, the battlements of grey rock and flint rough beneath his palms, and looked out over the landscape of the world. It was a breath-taking view, and he was now the highest point in all the lands. His eyes passed over each of them, far away yet easily definable. Planrus, the rolling green hills of the horizon, leading to the unicorn valley of Solancra; the mountains of Edorus; the sea beyond the southern Madorus Lands, and finally to the north, the Mortrus Lands.
Somewhere in the last was the Shadow Princess, the dark version of Ami, ripped from her within the deathly woods, forever to reside there, young and powerful, and seemingly all knowing. An oracle of sorts, the Shadow Princess knew everything Ami had ever known, had ever done, and everything she would soon do—her past, present and future. To reach her, he would kindle the fire that Hero would not.
He gathered the wood together—old crates, discarded pallets, all left to weather and rot—and built a pyre, a beacon he hoped she’d see from her lost realm in that magical place.
Tinderbox in hand, he set the wood alight.
It took only a few moments for the pile to blaze, and Raven sunk to his knees in front of it, closing his eyes, feeling the immense heat that threatened the hair upon his chin.
“Shadow Ami, from deep within the Mortrus Lands, I call to you,” Raven whispered. He waited, hearing the wood crackle and burn behind closed lids. He welcomed the calm, lapsing into a gentle meditation that each Guard learned, keeping them rational, clear of head and pure of heart. He pictured the blue sky above him, the clouds sailing past too fast, the flames before him heating stone and twisting high in rings of infinite orange and red. Soon the world began to change and the flames flew high and wide, scorching him and pushing him backward. Burnt embers shot into darkness while above him shadowed trees swayed uneasy in their sentry duty. The fire spat and sputtered as it lowered, sealing him within a tight, warm circle of light.
The girl sat beyond the flames, her dark hair full and dripping with pearls of violet, her eyes jewels of malevolent green; and then settling, the colours waned to their natural tones, each flecked with fire.
“Greetings, Raven of the Guard. It has been too long already.” There was a tune to her voice, a song behind her words, so soft. He wanted to join the melody.
“This is the place that you’d meet Hero?”
“It is. It is an in-between place, neither truly here nor there, but a creation to bond the two. I know why you have come, for I feel a change in the land, a shift in the power.”
“Do you know what it is, what is happening?”
“I do not, though I see much. I see Ami and what she has discovered. You should go to her. She needs your help.”
“I shall report back to Hero at once—”
“Not Hero’s help, but yours, Raven of the Guard.”
A sudden wind tugged at his robes, and the flames reached for him, bending and coiling.
“Go to her now. Trust in her judgement, her curiosity and instinct. With Ami, you will find the cause.” Raven dodged the curling flame but was soon caught and lashed by another that wrapped an arm of golden white around his wrist. It burned, yet gave no true pain, and began slowly pulling him into the fire.
His screams were silent and without breath, his fall an endless tunnel of hell’s tongues that licked and flayed, eventually cooling and leaving him shivering and weak in the dark.
The smell of earth, wood and moss flushed the smoke and char from his nose, for now there was no longer a fire, nor a mountain peak wind, but instead a peace that Raven had only ever found in the Planrus Lands with the orchards and streams and rolling sweet meadows.
His hand grasped for his sword.
Trees, to the left, to the right, behind and in front, a wood so green and the sun so low, giving deep dying tones to a strange and unknown place.
His face was smattered with cold, wet earth, and wiping at it idly he moved forward, squinting to see.