summers, for now the low-trees – which almost certainly loved mother almost as much as do we who serve and protect her – continued to drive the man-things away.
And so it was that the warrior servants swarmed up the narrow pathway with victory almost certainly within their reach.
But then a man-thing that was not a breeder as most of the man-things are, unleashed something that no one has ever seen before. We, the servants of beloved mother, have encountered the fires of the man-things before, but the man-thing who was not a breeder sent a huge wave of fire that was not yellow down the pathway. The fire was blue instead, and it consumed warrior servants uncounted as it rushed on down the narrow path and even beyond.
That in itself was horrid beyond anything we had yet encountered, but then the man-thing which was not a breeder called forth yet another blue fire at the foot of our narrow path. And that blue fire rose higher than the pile of flat rocks the man-things had built, and it showed no indication that it would ever stop burning.
And yet once again, our beloved mother screamed in agony, and we who serve her also screamed.
So great was mother’s fury that she listened to a suggestion of one of the seekers – a suggestion she would not even have considered had she been more calm. The seeker declared that since there was only one part of this land that was not blocked, the man-things would certainly know that mother’s warrior servants would attack them from that direction, and their numbers would be enormous. ‘You will need many, many warrior servants to overcome the man-things, beloved Vlagh,’ she said. ‘Can you possibly spawn out more this time than you did when we attacked the other directions?’
‘Many, many more,’ dear mother replied. ‘I will bury the man-things in freshly hatched spawn. I will have the land of the sunrise, and my children will feed on the remains of all the man-things that contaminate this entire land that is – and always will be – mine.’
We did not wish to remind beloved mother that a spawn of that size would severely reduce any future spawns to the point that there would hardly be enough new care-givers to see to her needs, and seasons uncountable would pass before she could spawn more. We tried as best we could to bring this to her attention, but she paid little heed and commanded us to carry her straight-way to the spawning chamber. And, since it is required, we did as she commanded.
Should disaster come again, however, the children of future spawns will be so limited that as the seasons plod on by, the nest of our beloved mother will have few – if any – care-givers to see to her needs, and in time, it may be that she will dwell here alone.
It was well past midnight, and Zelana was standing alone on the balcony of what big brother Dahlaine called his ‘War Chamber.’ It seemed to Zelana that those fancy names had always been one of Dahlaine’s failings. For some reason he seemed to feel a need to give almost everything some kind of stupendous title. If he’d spend as much time solving a problem as he usually spent coming up with a name for it, things might go a bit smoother for him.
Right now, however, Zelana was trying to swallow some very peculiar events. It seemed that they had a mysterious helper who could pull miracles out of her hat – or sleeve – without any kind of warning at all.
Down in baby brother Veltan’s Domain, Longbow had been plagued with a series of very peculiar dreams which were being rammed into his mind by an entity he always called ‘our unknown friend,’ despite the fact that he’d told Zelana and the others that he recognized the voice – but he couldn’t quite attach a name to the speaker. Zelana knew that Longbow’s mind was too sharp to start getting fuzzy about something that important, so it was quite obvious that ‘unknown friend’ had been tampering with him in ways Zelana could not even begin to comprehend.
There was one thing that was abundantly clear, however. Not only could ‘unknown friend’ erase memories, she could also break – or just ignore – some very important rules. Zelana and her family were not permitted to kill things. ‘Unknown friend,’ however, had manipulated the members of the Trogite Church with her ‘sea of gold’ and lured them into a confrontation with the Creatures of the Wasteland. Then, when the two enemy forces were locked in what would almost certainly have turned out to be a war of mutual extinction, ‘unknown friend’ had obliterated them all with an enormous wall of water that she’d pulled up from about six miles down below the face of the earth.
It seemed that their friend had powers that Zelana could not even imagine, although she was almost positive that their friend was using the Dreamers to assist her.
The more Zelana thought about it, the more certain she became that Eleria’s flood and Yaltar’s twin volcanos had also originated in the mind and imagination of ‘unknown friend.’
The involvement of the Dreamers had been confirmed when the children’s shared vision had mentioned ‘a fire unlike any fire we have ever seen,’ which had produced the blue inferno that had obliterated what had almost certainly been an entire hatch of the Vlagh.
That, of course, brought Aracia’s idiotic attempt to conceal Lillabeth’s Dream right out into the open. Aracia had always been obsessed with her own divinity, but now – probably because of the overdone adoration of those assorted indolents who had identified themselves as her clergy – Aracia’s mind had begun to slip, and she seemed to be convinced that she was now the most important creature in the entire universe. Her absurd attempt to conceal Lillabeth’s Dream had been a clear indication that sister Aracia’s mind was starting to come apart.
The more that Zelana thought about it, though, the more she remembered that Aracia had always been more than a little unwilling to go to sleep and relinquish her Domain to Enalla. It seemed that deep down, Zelana’s sister hated Enalla. The length of their sleep-cycle made change inevitable. Zelana ruefully recalled the time in the distant past when she’d awakened to find her Domain covered with ice that must have been at least two miles deep. It had taken Dahlaine weeks to explain that to Zelana’s satisfaction. He’d assured her that the inevitable thaw had already begun, but it had been almost five centuries before the ice was gone, and Zelana’s Domain didn’t look at all the way it had when she’d drifted off to sleep. Perhaps even more disturbing had been the fact that the creatures she’d come to know in her previous cycle were all gone, and strange new animals had arrived to replace them. Dahlaine had used the term ‘extinction,’ and that had chilled Zelana all the way down to her bones. She’d had almost no contact with Aracia during that particular cycle, but she was almost positive that her sister had somehow twisted things around in her mind so that she could blame Enalla for those eons of ice and the disappearance of almost all of the creatures that had been present in her Domain when she’d gone to sleep.
Something like that was the sort of thing Aracia would do.
Zelana was growing more and more weary now, and she’d be more than willing to hand the responsibilities of the Domain of the West to Balacenia – the adult version of Eleria – but she was almost positive that Aracia wouldn’t see things that way at all, and her priesthood was probably in a state of near-panic by now. Whether they liked it or not, Aracia would go to sleep very soon, and
