Prophecy: Child of Earth
Prophecy: Child of Earth
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Overview
In Rhapsody a fellowship was forged—three companions who, through great adversity, became a force to be reckoned with: Rhapsody, a singer of great talent and even greater beauty; Achmed, an assassin with unearthly talents; and Grunthor, a giant sergeant-major whose jolly disposition stands at odds with his deadly skill at weapons. Having fled the F'dor—an ancient, powerful evil—the three emerged on the other side of the world only to discover 14 centuries had passed. Their homeland had been destroyed, their people scattered across several continents, and everyone they ever knew had long since passed away…except perhaps the F'dor.
Prophecy continues this powerful epic. Driven by a prophetic vision, Rhapsody races to rescue the religious leader of her new homeland while Achmed and Grunthor seek evidence of the F'dor. These three may be their world's only hope, the heroes spoken of in the Prophecy of the Three, but their time is running short. They must find their elusive enemy before his darkness consumes them all.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781511317153 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Brilliance Audio |
| Publication date: | 11/03/2015 |
| Series: | Symphony of Ages Series , #2 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Product dimensions: | 5.30(w) x 6.60(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Elizabeth Haydon is an accomplished herbalist, harpist, and madrigal singer. She also enjoys anthropology and folklore. She lives on the East Coast, where she is working on the next books in her epic Symphony of Ages series for adults and her Lost Journals of Ven Polypheme middle-grade series for young readers.
Read an Excerpt
Meridion
Meridion sat in the darkness, lost in thought. The instrument panel of the Time Editor was dark as well; the great machine stood silent for the moment, the gleaming threads of diaphanous film hanging idle on their spools, each reel carefully labeled Past or Furute. The Present, as ever, hung evanescent like silver mist in the air under the Editor's lamp, twisting and changing moment by moment in the half-light.
Draped across his knees was an ancient piece of thread, a lore strand from the Past. It was a film fragment of immeasurable importance, burnst and broken beyond repair on one end. Meridion picked it up gingerly, then turned it over in his hands and sighed.
Time was a fragile thing, especially when manipulated mechanially. He had tried to be gentle with the dry film, but it had cracked and ignited in the press of the Time Editor's gears, burning the image he had needed to see. Now it was too late; the moment was gone forever, along with the information it held. The identity of the demon he was seeking would remain hidden. There was no going back, at least not this way.
Meridion rubbed his eyes and leaned back against the translucent aurelay, the gleaming field of energy tied to his life essence that he had shaped for the moment into a chairlike seat, resting his head within its hum. The prickling melody that surrounded him was invigorating, clearing his thoughts and helping him to concentrate. It was his namesong, his life's own innate tune. A vibration unique in all the world, tied to his true name.
The demon he was seeking had great power over names, too. Meridion had gone back into the Past itself to find it, looking for a wayto avert the path of devastation it had carefully constructed over Time, but the demon had eluded him. F'dor were the masters of lies, the fathers of deception. They were without corporeal form, binding themselves to innocent hosts and living throuh them or using them to do their will, then moving on to another more powerful host when the opportunity presented itself. Even far away, from his vantage point in the Future, there was no real way to see them.
For this reason Meridion had manipulated Time, had sliced and moved around pieces of the Past to bring a Namer of great potential together with those that might help her in the task of finding and destroying the demon. It had been his hope that these three would be able to accomplish this feat on their side of Time before it was too late to prevent what the demon had wrought, the devastation that was now consuming lands on both sides of the world. But the strategy had been a risky one. Just bringing lives together did not guarantee how they would be put to use.
Already he had seen the unfortunate consequences of his actions. The Time Editor had run heatedly with the unspooling of the time strands, fragments of film rending apart and swirling into the air above the machine as the Past destroyed itself in favor of the new. The stench of the burning timefilm was rank and bitter, searing Meridion's nostrils and his lungs, leaving him trembling at the thought of what damage he might inadvertently be doing to the Future by meddling in the Past. But it was too late now.
Meridion waved his hand over the instrument panel of the Time Editor. The enormous machine roared to life, the intricate lenses illuminated by its ferocious internal light source. A warm glow spilled onto the tall panes of glass that formed the walls of the circular room and ascended to the clear ceiling above. The glimmering stars that had been visible from every angle above and below him in the darkness a moment before disappeared in the blaze of reflected brilliance. Meridion held the broken fragment of film up to the light.
The images were still there, but hard to make out. He could see the small, slender woman because of her shining hair, golden and reflecting the sunrise, bound back with a black ribbon, standing on the brink of morning in the vast panorama of the mountains where he had last sighted the two of them. Meridion blew gently on the lore-strand to clear it of dust and smiled as the tiny woman in the frame drew her cloak closer about herself. She stared off into the valley that stretched below her, prickled with spring frost and the patchy light of dawn.
Her traveling companion was harder to find. Had Meridion not known he was there prior to examining the film he never would have seen him, hidden in the shadows cast by the sun. It took him several long moments to find the outline of the man's cloak, designed as it was to hide him from the eyes of the world. A faint trace of mist rose from the cloak and blended with the rising dew burning off in the sunlight.
As he suspected, the lore-strand had burnt at precisely the wrong moment, obliterating the Namer's chance to catch a glimpse of the F'dor's ambassador before he or she reached Ylorc. Meridion had been watching through her eyes, waiting for the moment when she first beheld the henchman, as the Seer had advised. He could make out a thin dark line in the distance; that must have been the ambassadorial caravan. She had already seen it. The opportunity had passed. And he had missed it.
He dimmed the lamp on the Time Editor again and sat back in the dark sphere of his room to think, suspended within his glass globe amid the stars, surrounded by them. There must be another window, another way to get back into her eyes.
Meridion glanced at the endless wall of glass next to him and down at the surface of the Earth miles below. Black molten fire was crawling slowly across the darkened face of the world, withering the continents in its path, burning without smoke in the lifeless atmosphere. At the rim of the horizon another glow was beginning; soon the fire sources would meet and consume what little was left. It took all of Meridion's strength to keep from succumbing to the urge to scream. In his darkest dreams he could never have imagined this.
In his darkest dreams. Meridion sat upright with the thought. The Namer was prescient, she could see the Past and Future in her dreams, or sometimes just by reading the vibrations that events had left behind, hovering in the air or clinging to an object. Dreams gave off vibrational energy; if he could find a trace of one of them, like the dust that hovered in afternoon light, he could follow it back to her, anchor himself behind her eyes again, in the Past. Meridion eyed the spool which had held the brittle lore-strand he had spliced together, hanging listlessly on the Editor's main pinion.
He seized the ancient reel and spun out the film, carefully drawing the edge where it had broken cleanly back under the Time Editor's lens. He adjusted the eyepiece and looked. The film in frame was dark, and at first it was hard to make out anything within the image. Then after a few moments his eyes adjusted, and he caught a flash of gold as the Namer sighed in the darkness of her chamber and rolled over in her sleep. Meridion smiled.
He had found the record of the night before she and Ashe had left on their journey. Meridion had no doubt she had been in the throes of dreaming then.
After a moment's consideration he selected two silver instruments, a gathering tool with a hair-thin point and a tiny sieve basket soldered onto a long slender handle. The mesh of the thumbnail-sized basket was fine enough to hold even the slightest particle of dust. With the greatest of care Meridion blew on the frame of film, and watched under the lens for a reaction. He saw nothing. He blew again, and this time a tiny white spark rose from the strand, too small to be seen without magnification even by his extraordinarily sensitive eyes.
Skillfully Meridion caught the speck with the gathering tool and transferred it to the basket. Then, watching intently, he waited until the lamp of the Time Editor illuminated the whisper-thin thread that connected it to the film. He turned his head and exhaled. He had caught a dream-thread.
Working carefully he drew it out more until it was long enough to position under the most powerful lens. He never averted his eyes as he gestured to one of the cabinets floating in the air above the Editor. The doors opened, and a tiny bottle of oily liquid skittered to the front of the shelf, then leapt into the air, wafting gently down until it came to rest on the gleaming prismatic disc hovering in the air beside him. Keeping his eyes fixed on the thread lest he lose sight of it, Meridion uncorked the bottle with one hand and carefully removed the dropper. Then he held it over the thread and squeezed.
The glass below the lens swirled in a pink-yellow haze, then cleared. Meridion reached over and turned the viewing screen onto the wall. It would take a moment for him to get his bearings, but it was always that way when one was watching from inside someone else's dreams.
Copyright © 2000 by Elizabeth Haydon
Interviews
Back in 1999, B&N.com SF & Fantasy editor Andrew LeCount had the pleasure of speaking with author Elizabeth Haydon. Topics discussed included the launch of her ambitious new fantasy epic, Rhapsody, her strict attention to detail, her favorite character to write, and the wild New Orleans night that sparked her writing career. Enjoy our interview.
B&N.com: Tell us about your debut fantasy novel, Rhapsody. Set up the story line for those who have yet to discover it.
Elizabeth Haydon: Three mismatched companions come together unintentionally and end up escaping the devastation of their homeland in a fiery cataclysm. Rhapsody is the story of their journey across time, away from the doomed Island of Serendair to a place that may be even more dangerous; the riddle entwined in the history of the new land; and the mystery of the evil that may have survived with them.
Rhapsody is a Singer, a woman who has been forced to serve some time in the streets as a prostitute and now is studying the ancient musical arts of her mother's people, the Lirin science of Naming. While attempting to escape the henchmen of an obsessed former client, she falls in with two shady characters, a gigantic Firbolg mercenary named Grunthor, who is a Sergeant-Major by trade, and a mysterious assassin known only as The Brother. Both men are on the run from an ancient demon who is in possession of The Brother's true name, planning to flee the Island.
In the course of their tangled meeting, Rhapsody uses her newly learned power to rename the Brother "Achmed the Snake". This action snaps the metaphysical collar of servitude the demon has used to keep the assassin in his thrall, setting "Achmed" free. The two men decide to take Rhapsody with them, since they don't know whether her actions have saved the assassin or compromised him even further.
The companions travel to a primeval wood, a holy forest where the Great Tree, Sagia, grows. Legend says that this enormous oak grows in one of the five places where time itself began, and its roots wind through the Earth, tying it to all things that grow. It is through the root of this tree that the three companions escape, and find themselves on the other side of time, 14 centuries in the future, in a place colonized by the descendants of the people who fled their homeland before it was destroyed. As they traverse this new and strangely violent continent, they begin to suspect that they are not the only inhabitants of Serendair who have survived -- that the evil they escaped on one side of the world may be here, in the new world, hiding in wait for its time to come forth.
B&N.com: Explain your use of music in Rhapsody.
EH: In the mythos of this story, the five elements that formed the world -- fire, water, air, earth, and ether (the matter that makes up the stars) -- still resonate power left over from the time of creation. That power gives off vibrations. Certain individuals, because of physiology or training, can manipulate those vibrations and derive power from them. I suppose some might call this magic, but it has a scientific basis.
Achmed is an example of physiology making use of those vibrations. He is half-Dhracian, a race that has a skin-web of exposed veins and nerve endings that make Dhracians sensitive to the currents of the air and the various signatures of vibration around them. Achmed's particular gift allows him to track the heartbeats of humanoid prey; he can sense the unique rhythm of an individual's heart, match his own pulse to it, and follow it without error. In a way, this is a use of music.
Rhapsody is a more traditional example of musicianship. At one point, she explains to Achmed and Grunthor that different kinds of music are the maps through the vibrations that make up all the world, and that if you have the right map, it will take you to wherever you want to go. Those of her race and profession have long studied musical lore and are the depository of a vast treasure of songs of history. In addition, she has attained the highest level of this profession; she's a Namer, someone so attuned to the music of a given thing's name that she can alter the reality around it through musical manipulation. Namers are foresworn to the truth, because if they interject any false notes into a given "song," it dilutes its power.
There is music all through the Rhapsody trilogy -- grisly (and humorous) marching cadences sung by the Firbolg, songs of healing and Naming, war chants and lullabies -- it is ever-present in the description of the world around them, the wind in the forest trees, the song of the Earth as they crawl within it. My clearest memory of C. S. Lewis and Tolkien was hearing music the whole time I was reading, like a soundtrack. I hope that comes across somewhat in Rhapsody as well.
B&N.com: How much research went into your novel? According to your web site (www.elizabethhaydon.com), many of the marvelous weapons in Rhapsody were influenced by actual arms. Give us a few examples.
EH: An embarrassing amount of research went into this book; I'm an editor by profession, and we tend to be anal-retentive when it comes to accuracy. It would be nice to be able to relax a little and just let the creativity flow, but alas, I fear it will be an uphill battle against my nature as long as I'm writing. In addition to the research, I coaxed quite a few experts in various fields to review the manuscript for accuracy, to make sure the herbalism, music theory, archaeology, anthropology of the various racial societies, weaponry, and military tactics were all correct. The languages are linguistically accurate. Everything else I just kind of made up.
Some weapons examples: The knives that the Bolg manufacture are based on a triple-bladed throwing knife of the Bwaka people of central Africa, which rotates in flight and can pierce at almost any attitude at which it impacts. Achmed's cwellan (which is the Old English word for "kill") is based on a form of Mongolian crossbow, which hurled projectiles at a side angle by force of recoil. Grunthor is a weapons enthusiast and a walking arsenal; I had to make certain that the tech level of the weapons in his stash were appropriate to the approximate technology period of Rhapsody and to the natural resources of the places he had traveled.
B&N.com: Talk a bit about the prophecy in which you refer to the "lifestages of all men" -- Blood, Earth, and Sky.
EH: Aw, come on -- that would be telling! Well, OK, just a little bit. The prophecy you refer to was uttered at the end of a terrible war, which had divided the Cymrians against each other and the continent against itself. They were looking for a reason to have hope, and they asked the Seer of the Future, who was mad and spoke in riddles, if so great a rift could be mended. This was her answer:
The Three shall come,One of the repeating themes in the trilogy examines truth and deception, and how close they can sometimes be. While the Seers can only speak the truth, they don't always reveal everything they know, and sometimes what they say is technically true, but deceiving. Prophecies can have more than one meaning, and they don't always mean what they seem. Achmed ignores them for this reason.
leaving early,
arriving late,
The lifestages of all men:
Child of Blood,
Child of Earth,
Child of the Sky.Each man,
formed in blood and born in it,
Walks the Earth and sustained by it,
Reaching to the sky,
and sheltered beneath it,
He ascends there only in his ending,
becoming part of the stars.Blood gives new beginning,
Earth gives sustenance,
the Sky gives dreams in life --
eternity in death.Thus shall the Three be,
one to the other.
The line in the prophecy that is in the past tense -- formed in blood and born in it -- is in general a reference to birth, the first lifestage of man. The line in the present tense -- walks the Earth and sustained by it -- alludes to the second and primary lifestage, the actual lifespan. The line in future tense -- reaching to the sky, and sheltered beneath it, he ascends there only in his ending, becoming part of the stars -- refers to death and afterlife. Each of these examples also refers to one of the Three, those whose coming was foretold as one way that the rift might be healed. It is possible that Achmed could be the Child of Blood, given that he is an assassin; Grunthor is tied to the Earth; and Rhapsody is Liringlas, a Skysinger, the race known as children of the sky. But of course, I can't promise anything, because, after all, one should never trust prophecies completely, because they don't necessarily mean what they seem.
B&N.com: Do you have a favorite character to write? I must say, Grunthor is my favorite to read.
EH: He's my favorite to write as well. What's fun about Grunthor is that he's such a contradiction -- ferocious and gentle, a brutal adversary, a no-nonsense Sergeant Major to his troops, but sweet to Rhapsody and later to Jo, the teenage street urchin she adopts. For a Firbolg crossbred with an even more monstrous race, he embodies a good deal of personal wisdom and uncommon grace. He likes to sing grisly marching songs. Plus he's funny. He is the fulcrum between Achmed and Rhapsody, who are opposite sides of the same coin. While they both undergo tremendous transition, Grunthor remains consistent. And he reminds me a great deal of my editor, Jim Minz.
B&N.com: What drove you to write fantasy fiction in the first place?
EH: Clinical insanity. Actually, it was a favor to an editorial friend. I had read C. S. Lewis as a young child, Tolkien as an older one, and some fantasy in college, but had lost touch with the field after that. I work in educational publishing. In 1994, I met up with an editorial friend and mentor in New Orleans at the American Library Association conference, and he asked me to write him a fantasy that might cross over to other genres and contain some of the mutual interests we shared, like medieval music, history, anthropology, and herbalism. I was uncertain about it (we had been drinking something called Dixie Blackened Voodoo, and initially, I thought he was drunk when he suggested it) because I had never written a novel before, but when it became clear he really wanted me to do it, I gave it a shot. I created a universe's history and then fell in love with the story. Writing in this genre has awakened a long-dormant creative side of me that I never realized I missed so much.
B&N.com: Is it true there is a movie in the works?
EH: Yes, it was optioned for film even before it was offered to publishers as a book. The screenplay is almost done.
B&N.com: Rhapsody is a massive fantasy novel -- in size and in scope. How many volumes do you see your series spanning? When can we expect Volume No. 2?
EH: Volume Two of the trilogy, Prophecy: Child of Earth,, is due out in July 2000. It's complete and in the process of minor revisions right now, so I don't expect any significant delays unless I get a hernia carrying it to the post office.
Part of the development of the Rhapsody trilogy was the mapping out of the world's history from its formation to its destruction. I wrote it with a time line; if the beginning of the world is zero on the time line, and the farthest event I could envision is ten, Rhapsody takes place approximately at six. I know what came before this era, and what will follow it.
Because this story is a history, it has many epochs to it, eras of time which are distinct stories. The trilogy that began with Rhapsody will offer a definitive conclusion to this story at the end of the third volume. I'm an impatient reader myself, and I need some points of conclusion in a story, so I can't see myself writing a completely open-ended series with the same characters going through a series of new adventures each time. That being said, there are eras both before and after this trilogy that I would love to explore. The surviving characters from this trilogy do have future stories. Also extremely interesting to me is the exploration of the stories that precede the trilogy -- the events that are history to the people in Rhapsody. All of this depends, of course, on the readers.
B&N.com: Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions, Elizabeth. Tons of luck with Rhapsody.
EH: Thank you. I appreciate your time and the opportunity.