Fatale

Prologue

Prologue

The way a world works is rarely anything more sophisticated than a brightly arrayed flood of societies, baring different flags, learning to either work together or how to fight and destroy one another. They plunder the cultures of those around them and try to develop their individual identity in relation to their neighbours. No one notices, you see, no one really wants to.

Yet amongst all those brought up in the primordial maelstrom of antediluvian alacrity there are those who did not tread unassumingly down a straight fairytale track, those who did not follow the path laid out for them on stones so ancient they crumbled into the earth and become dust. Those were the ones who fought, realising the contract they signed with every precise movement, every flash of steel, every grunt of effort. They glanced upwards and bared their sharp white teeth, looking out over to the rising sun.

It was a long, long time ago in a far away land but they defined the dirty world we live in now, they lived to protect it, were shunned and spat upon. Back then the beauty of their ideals were not recognised. No one wanted to see that those heroes and heroines were fighting the darker neighbour, the hidden enemy which your ancestors could not see and could not feel.

Things, I daresay, are different now.

In the cold, iridescent light of a land steeped in the archaic and the modern, things are stirring. The wind is beginning to murmur its tales on the thermals and zephyrs. It waits in invisible coils in the branches of trees, gathering strength for a time when it can sing its truths in a fountain of Boreas. And as the wind whispers and grows, so too does that land move and groaning stretch out its long rested limbs, searching for the sign which says the hills can once again come alive. The mouths of caverns let forth moaning yawns and the sea snickers within and around them. The sea is already awake. The sea never slept.

I woke myself and felt the fell of dark. In a dawn dirty light, the grey shadows hang like bitter, stagnant cloud over the world. Space is an orifice that is damp and cold and silent except for the drum of fingers across the galaxies.

I recall days when sunlight used to fill me up and spurt from his hands as bright, contagious energy. I remember when laying in the dappled shadows I saw beauty in the luscious greens that flickered bright and dark in the alcove of trees. I remember leaping from one image to the next and revelling in the uniqueness held there… And I remember mourning the way man forgoes this beautiful world in the lieu of industriousness and technology. I remember when one word was not enough to describe the magnanimous grandeur of Life in this wearisome world. I recall the crepuscular haze of bosky rivers and the inscape of it all. The delight I took in the delicate balance of feather and wind as a fragile beast, known for its hunter's skill, danced on thermals and which I exonerated… But as time slides past the memories become more obscure and more obscure still, less easy to hold on too... Until time itself seems more containable... Each moment was an eternity that was still too short to diagnose. Each blurred line between his chevalier and a bird too distinguished.

And now the welkin with warison wails whenever any of us reach out and listen for the word of the man us dreamers follow. The acuity of his mind; the swirling, twirling, churning wakefulness of his body, clambers upwards, out through his heart and his own corporeal self is risen. Nightmares twist about me, demons whispering and pressing for me to submit to the crush of his own desires and lose control and free myself and fall…

The sea sooths me, the wind embraces me with her warm spectral fingers which she whispers will soon turn cold.

I see sick. I see gall. I see heartburn... I see the suffering of others and their failures and crystallized agonies that I have escaped and ignored and endeavoured to omit from his sleep in the vain honour of his station. But the bitterness I taste now on his tongue, sticking to the upper palate of his bloodmillion cavern with thickening ooze, is only a melancholy memorial to the misery that I mistook for romance. His body is wearisome of the world and the spirit is being broken by it. I am losing hisself in it. I am one of the lost which linger beyond that door and who recognise not the formidable imperium of The Old World.

We are rising again. Gathering our strengths. We are searching for the newborns. Those who are destined to join us. There is even a prophecy. But no pawns are we of fate. I walk, his new limbs wrapped up in new fashions, along the cement pavements which are polkadotted with white and black stains. It is an ugly world. I look up. The stars still transcend us. But we can try to capture a little of that again and place it in the heart of this world once more. Or so we hope. And so man prays….

But before I begin there are some facts and some fictions we have to straighten out. Let us polish the stone, shall we say, before we write on it.

There is no such thing as a Dragon.

People talked about them but they were wrong. So wrong, in fact that people had stopped believing in even the truth behind the myth. The leathery skinned monsters that scaled the skies on skeletal bat wings and sat in the darkest, deepest caves have become the cliché of the giant lizard or dinosaur as so many like to call them now.

We know the truth. Because once upon a time the mythological 'dragon' wasn't such a histh. In fact it was almost true. I can tell, my dear reader, that something that your narrator has said has peeked your interest. Shall I tell you the story? Ah well… look closely and you'll understand in due time.

Life begins and ends at the same point, on the brink of something intangible, with a small spark and a wave of darkness. No one remembers it but it's still there every time a life is begun and it is only recognised at the point where that ember is washed away into the miasma of Where-Ever. But no one really knows where it comes from and people have questions from the beginning of their existence until the end, irresolvable myths.

For Lesedi Wilde it was shoulder blades.

Lesedi's father had killed himself when she was thirteen, shooting himself in front of his daughter after apologising for what he was about to do repeatedly until the girl had tried to ask why.

She lived at the top of a hill with his aunt and uncle in Ireland on the outskirts of Dublin in a small one-up-one-down red brick extension to a manor house which had been converted into a school for those suffering from conditions such as autism or Downes syndrome.

Life for her was simple. It was about coping. It was about living. It was about asking questions and seeking answers. She wasn't happy, but when she thought about the people her aunt worked with everyday she understood that her unhappiness wasn't really all that important because she had everything compared to some of those children. Sometimes she tried to pray for something else to make her happy but always stopped half way. What was the point in praying to something that never listened? Day came waving aside the damp shadows of the night and then day went, succumbing to the cool respite of dusk… Life was life. It was liveable.

It was the night the snow came that things changed. Snow lay on the ground and fell in chiffon curtains that blew in the dawn-dirty glamour. Her dark hair was splayed out in the snow as she watched the sun creep over the horizon, trees bowing and bending and letting the cold shiver through their skeletal branches. She smiled slightly and felt the blanket upon him getting heavy with fallen snow… She loved snow. The way it made the whole world seem new and perfect because it disguised its dirty flaws… It made it easier to forget…

"S'cuse me?" A voice sounded from above her, somewhere to her left. She tipped her head, dark blue eyes towards the voice and they widened slightly at the unexpected visitor.

A tall man with red, auburn hair that hung over the darkest eyes she had ever seen stood in the snow, carrying a small leather case stood over her with a quizzical look over his face. She noticed the case was emblazoned with a small silver circle… it looked familiar.

"Are you alright, kid?" The man asked this time, crouching down with a concerned look in his eyes.

For a second she didn't reply, simply looking at the stranger, then she sat up, her long ebony hair falling to her mid back in damp tangles and he smiled, "I'm ok. Thank you."

The man looked at her a moment. He wasn't old. But he didn't seem young despite the youthfulness of his appearance. Slowly he sat down, a little behind her but Lesedi was able to twist herself easily enough to watch the stranger without discomfort, "You're sure."

"Yessir." She thought the man's eyes were asking her to tell the truth and she thought about it a little harder, "Quite sure."

"You're not cold?"

"No sir. Not really."

The man frowned, a small wrinkle forming between his eyes. Everything about him was so smooth, so refined and graceful, even the way he frowned. Then again she had to wonder why he was here in the woods behind the school yard. She asked tentatively, not wanting to be intrusive.

"I'm looking for something." The man smiled, "How old are you?"

"Nearly seventeen." She didn't know why she didn't feel more scared of the guy asking these questions when he had no real right to be where he was nor anything to guarantee his trustworthiness… "What are you looking for?"

"Something special." Their eyes locked, "Do you hurt at all?"

"N… Well my shoulder's ache a little from where I was lying on the ground but…" Why the hell was she saying all this? It wasn't good to talk to strangers. Especially those who asked questions, "Do you?" And where did that come from?

"Yes." The man looked very old for such a young guy, the way his eyes looked back into his spoke of a life that Lesedi couldn't begin to understand, "And I know why you do too."

Standing upright again, the stranger stretched languidly, "The ache isn't from being out here kid."

Lesedi just averted her eyes.

"You've never hurt because you've leant on something hard, never bruised, never strained to keep up with others. Have you?"

"No sir. But my aunt says my body is much faster at healing itself than others because of some cell condition. And she thinks my brain is stressed out a lot which means I produce adrenaline…" Lesedi was uneasy and wanted to dispel any illusion this stranger was under. She babbled.

"Do you think she's right?"

That question stung. She'd always doubted his aunt. Always.

*

He didn't know her name yet and he didn't know if this was the person he believed she was, but he had been… almost enchanted in the snowy light of the valley, there had been a magic contained within incognizant plants and silver, spidery walls… such magic that Leon had not been able to ignore it. The magnetic allure had struck him most and it had resonated not just in the warm, green eyes but also in the words of the young girl themselves. The words had noticed him. Something had tingled, an energy responding like-with-like. And the girl was giving him the chance to be himself. He wanted to know more… Leon was in awe of a child, of the girl… He stood next to him in the snow, settled into a posture which showed ease and friendliness and watched as the girl slowly returned her gaze to the falling flakes of a far away storm. Yet, in the fading of the day, everything seemed very much clearer, brighter, surreal than it should in November.

Now, I must interrupt and tell you a little about Leon. He is what can be mistaken for a beautiful man. As he watched Lesedi many things were quite transparent, though of course, the girl wouldn't recognise them. For one, Leon's shadow never touched the snow. He had lost it when he had acknowledged his destiny in the eyes of the Ever. Secondly, his eyes were flecked with gold and the pupils were elliptical with a small burning circle in the centre. Lastly, and most interestingly, across his right cheek was a marking, only a few shades paler than his skin, an ancient rune naturally marked on his human flesh.

But Leon hadn't counted on Lesedi's unnaturally perceptive nature and as he stood there the gril was considering everything to himself very slowly. She counted the snowflakes as they fell and wondered about this stranger. This girl who would come to be of so much worth…

"What happened to your face?" She murmured after a while.

Leon frowned, "You can see it?"

"No offence but it's not exactly hidden…" Lesedi smiled at the strange man, "It's pretty cool though."

"Pretty… cool…" astonished, Leon laughed, "Yeah I guess it is. What's your name?"

"Oh I'm sorry, how rude of me, I'm Lesedi."

And that was when it began. That's when the story began and it also marked the time when all the universe roared into life, the first winds of Winter bringing in something which was much, much more permanent than the transient beauty of soft white snow.