Chapter 1: The Enigma
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Cy walked all throughout the day, enjoying the trip back to the only place where he felt he really belonged. An unfamiliar path that angled off from the main trail puzzled Cy. He knew these woods better than anyone, and he couldn’t remember ever having seen this particular path before. Driven by curiosity, Cy started along the path which led him upward to a large clearing that sat at the crest of a hill. The clearing was maybe a three hundred paces long and about half as wide. It was almost completely enclosed by tall, leafless planta trees whose bare branches were raised like bony fingers pointing to the sky. A shallow stream meandered across the clearing, and a cold wind stirred dry, brown planta leaves, sent them skittering across the rocky ground. A backdrop of distant mountain peaks showed craggy silhouettes against an amber moon rising behind them.
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At the center of the clearing was a large, flat-topped rock, and Cy made for it with the thought of setting up a camp for the night. Leaving his small pack on the ground by the rock, Cy walked to the nearest edge of the clearing to look for deadwood in the fringe of surrounding trees. Upon returning to his camp he lit a fire in the lee of the rock, and once the fire was lit he sat against the rock and listened contentedly to the gentle murmur of water running over the stones on the stream bank. Moonlight tinged the clouds a deep yellow, and an intermittent wind whispered through the bare branches of the planta trees. Small birds flitted up high in the trees and chittered softly.
Cy was lulled by the flickering flames, and the warmth of the fire had made him drowsy. From the edge of sleep he slowly became aware of a deep, humming, throbbing noise that hovered at the border of perception. The sound was barely audible and had an almost tactile quality to it, a vibration like the hum of a tuning fork held close to the ear. The vibrations filled the small clearing, and gradually the strange sound increased in volume. Cy shivered as the eerie noise began to silence and then drown out the natural sounds of the surrounding night. In his field of vision solid objects sometimes seemed to waver and grow opaque and then snap back to normal. Unnerved by the strange sights and the peculiar sound, midnight came and went, but sleep would not come to him.
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Suddenly the eerie sound reached a shattering intensity, and incandescent lances of light flashed from the darkness at the end of the clearing. Cy stood up and took a couple of hesitant steps toward the source until one of the darting beams of light found his eyes, and he was blinded for a moment. He stopped and stood there dazzled. After a while his vision cleared, and Cy noticed two figures close to the spot where he had seen the flashing lights. A shimmering, spectral glow radiated from the scene where one figure lay on the ground while another one, cloaked in some sort of hooded robe, stood above the first. The harsh glare made it impossible to make out any more detail. Cy stood mesmerized for what seemed to him only minutes, but hours passed, and the sun had risen, and its warmth had caused swirls of vapor to rise from the surface of the stream. He closed his eyes and rubbed them with clenched fists. The clearing was empty except for the figure lying on the ground at the edge of the trees. Cy cursed himself for a fool and started to walk toward the figure he saw still lying on the ground.
“I don’t like this situation one little bit,” thought Cy, but he knew he had no choice but to go on.
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As he neared the place where he had seen the two figures the night before Cy noticed a faint ring of scorch marks on the ground, and a burnt smell like hot tar still seemed to linger in the air. The signs unsettled him because of similar events that had happened a long time ago, and now ghosts of his past seemed to rear up in front of him. Cy glanced around the clearing as his unease continued to grow.
The figure lying on the ground was facing away from Cy as he reached the spot. Cy slowly circled around to get a look at the figure on the ground and was astonished at what he saw. On the ground lay a young woman. She was small and fair-skinned with blond hair that fell around her shoulders in a cascade of shining gold.
“She's so beautiful....” Cy spoke out loud. Talking to himself was a sometimes embarrassing habit he had developed in the long years he had spent alone in the forest.
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The cloaked figure he had seen the previous night was gone. Cy slowly knelt down beside the young woman, mesmerized by the shiny material of the quilted blanket on which she lay. He caught himself reaching out a hand to touch the material, his curiosity overcoming his caution. He had seen something very similar once, but that had been many, many years before.
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A solemn quiet pervaded the little clearing. No trace remained of the strange sound that had disturbed him the night before. He heard only the gentle rustle of wind-blown leaves, the trickle of water in the stream bed and the slow, steady rhythm of the young woman's breathing. Her eyelids fluttered as Cy watched her, and when she turned onto her back in her restless sleep, he realized with a shock that the young woman was pregnant.
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As he knelt there beside her, an image formed in Cy’s sight, and it filled him with revulsion and something near panic. A sudden, agitated movement by the sleeping woman brought him back to himself. He knew, instinctively, that she was experiencing that same monstrous vision. From the way she covered her eyes with a shivering arm, Cy knew she was seeing it, and that she could not shut out the unsettling vision.
With a sudden, violent motion, the young woman arched her back, and her body became taut and rigid. A scream formed on her lips, but no sound come out. For a moment Cy could see a curled, fetal form and a red-tinged splash of darkness that enveloped it. Then, as quickly as it came, the vision faded, and the young woman began to moan softly. Looking up, Cy grimaced at the sight of dark clouds that had drifted in to block the sun in the eastern sky. A sudden sharp sound startled him as small birds fled from the clearing. The sound echoed off the ring of trees around the clearing before it faded into silence again.
A whimper came from the young woman as she tossed about restlessly. She opened her eyes, but Cy could sense no awareness in them. She didn’t seem to notice him as she stared vacantly into the pale morning sky. Her jaw was clenched tightly, and her arms were now held stiffly by her sides while her hands were knotted into small fists, white-knuckled and shaking slightly.
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Cy felt a terrible turmoil in the young woman's unconscious movements, and he knew he had to watch over her until he could figure out what he should do. It was the only way he knew, so he carried the young woman back to his camp at the clearing's center. Then he turned around and sat with his back against the big rock and waited.
Memories welled up in Cy’s mind as he sat there, and he was overwhelmed at how much the young girl lying there reminded his beloved C'elaine. Caught up in a haze of nostalgia, Cy thought about how, once before, the course his life had been changed. He sensed with an unshakable certainty that, with the appearance of this young woman, his life would never again be the same.
His vision seemed to blur and haze again for a moment, as though once again he had been dazzled by a blaze of light, and for a brief moment Cy glimpsed a faint image of darkness and star-strewn space, of nebulous, glowing dust clouds and the silhouette of a figure whose image filled him with a terrible sense of foreboding such as he had never known.
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He shook his head to clear it, and leaned back against the rock to try to think, to try to find some meaning in what was happening. There was a terrible knowledge within Cy, knowledge about himself and the world he lived in, knowledge that he carried, unwillingly, inside himself. “Maybe it’s best not to dwell on that just now,” he mused.
The morning was still cool, so Cy stoked the coals of the previous night's fire back into flame and added the last bits of firewood he had collected the night before. The young woman slept on, quieter now, while Cy sat and thought to himself, "Who is she? Where does she come from? How did she end up out here in the middle of nowhere?"
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Unanswered questions piled up like a drift of blank, white snow. Speaking aloud again, Cy asked himself, "What do I do now?"
As the fire burned low Cy realized he would have to get more wood soon, but he didn't want to leave the young woman alone. Mulling his dilemma, Cy waited there beside the young woman as he looked around the clearing and pondered. He didn't notice when, a minute or two later, the young woman opened her eyes and lay there watching Cy as he stared off into the distance and squatted by the fire, thoughtfully poking and prodding at it with a long stick.
In a low, quavering voice the young woman spoke as she sat up, "Where am I?
Cy stood quickly and turned around to look at her, and he was struck by how young she looked. To him she looked barely more than a child, but an incredible vitality seemed to shine through her now wide-open green eyes. In that moment Cy felt some deep connection forged between them. It was, at the same time, both incredibly warming and deeply disturbing; and it brought on another wave of long-buried memories. The impression of her youth was even more emphasized the sound of her voice.
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"We are in the lands of Marntz, about a day's walk from the city itself," Cy said after a slight hesitation, and asked, "How did you come to be here?"
A puzzled look crossed her face as she started to stand up, and she paused for a long while before answering.
"I'm not really sure," she said. "I remember waking up to a strange, pulsing light shining through my window, and the light kept getting brighter and brighter, and then, and then…."
Her voiced trailed off, and she looked away. Still not looking at him she said, "What has happened to me?"
Unsure of what to say, Cy just stood there mutely. All he could think of to reply to her heart-rending question was, "I don’t know.”
Sheepishly he stood there, looking at her slumped shoulders. “My name is Cy. What's yours?" Cy offered, trying to fill the silence that had fallen between them.
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She turned and, with a wan smile, said, "Pleased to meet your Cy, I'm..., I'm...." She hesitated again before saying, "Oh, I don't know...."
Tears rolled down her cheeks as she looked away then back at Cy and said again, “What has happened to me?" Then she pleaded, "Please, help me! I'm so confused!”
She knelt back down, and her shoulders trembled again with sobs she couldn’t suppress, and tears she could no longer hold back fell onto the rocky ground. Her head was still down as Cy knelt in front of her and put a hand on her shoulder to comfort her. With his other hand Cy turned her face up to look at him, and then gently brushed away her tears. Looking into her eyes he said softly, but with a fierce determination, "I'll do whatever I can."
Something about his quiet manner made her feel comfortable with Cy, but she marveled at her willingness to trust a man she had just met. By all appearances he was just an old man. It was, she decided, the openness of his face and the way he smiled at her so easily. A tentative smile crossed her face as well, and she said, "Well, Cy, what do we do now?"
Cy felt again the strength of the bond that had formed between them in that first moment their eyes met. He sat down beside her and said simply, "The first thing I need to do is to get some more firewood. Will you be alright by yourself for just a little while?"
Looking into his eyes, she smiled at him and said, "As long as you're not gone too long."
Standing up, Cy smiled back at her. "I won't go far, I promise, and I’ll be back real fast" he said, then turned and started walking toward the closest part of the ring of trees that surrounded the clearing. Looking back over his shoulder Cy spoke again, "First things first, though."
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Once outside the ring of trees, Cy collected firewood. As he gathered dry branches for the fire, Cy thought about what he had seen the night before, and he thought about what might lay ahead. The young woman and her sudden appearance were enigmas, and he was uneasy because of all the unanswered questions in his mind. Overhead, the flocks of small birds were beginning to drift back toward the trees around the small clearing. Life seemed to be returning to normal in the woodlands, but Cy felt, once again, that nothing in his life would ever be the same.
The sun shone brightly, but the sky above the distant mountains still held a threat of storm, so he hurried to complete his task and return to where the young woman waited.