She moved to her large east-facing windows and opened them. A restless breeze blew into the room and ruffled her hair as she looked out at a gigantic full moon. A witch’s moon. It would appear to decrease in size as it moved away from the horizon, but for now it hung impossibly huge over the ivory-tipped black ocean, its color rich champagne. The brightest jewel in the night sky, it hung as though from the pendant of a goddess’s necklace, the spray of stars surrounding it the filigree within which the jewel had been set.
Ever since she had claimed the island, she had sketched the positions of the night stars throughout the seasons. It was an idle, useless hobby. She had never been able to determine if the stars were actually the same ones as seen from Earth. Their positions were too different in relation to each other. There would never be any satellite telescope to capture and compare deep-space imagery with that of Earth’s.
Perhaps they were different stars altogether. Carling tended to think not, but ultimately it didn’t matter. Here, the stars were nothing more than a mystery and ornamentation. No weight of historical belief hung on their configuration. There were no myths attached to any constellations. There was nowhere to navigate to by their positions. No matter where one sailed, one always came back to the island. This little bubble of dimensional reality was nothing more than a seed pearl strung beside the goddess’s pendant moon.
This had been a good place to retreat to when the rest of the world grew to be too much, a good place to find at least a measure of solitude and quiet whenever she could find time to attend to her research and studies.
She supposed it had been as much a home as anywhere else had been, and it had been far better than most. She had made peace with the shy winged creatures that lived at the top of the redwoods. She set wards around the forest and refused to let anyone hunt them. In return, presents were sometimes left on her window ledge, a black iridescent feather, a perfect sea-shell, or a gold-veined rock, or sometimes a handful of tart red berries on a leaf, and once, there had been a string of strangely carved wooden beads.
The place had not changed, but what peace she had managed to find here had fled, and she missed it. She missed it badly.
All that it had taken to wreck it was the presence of one insouciant Wyr, a strange and ancient creature who, at his heart, was a compassionate man.
She caught movement out of the corner of her eye and her attention shifted.
Rune strode out in the champagne and ivory night. As she watched, he turned toward the cliff and started to run. With each powerful thrust of his long legs, he kicked to an astonishing speed, his vigorous wide-shouldered body moving faster and faster as he approached land’s end. Then he sprang like the great cat he was, landed in a crouch on top of the stone wall at the edge of the cliff, and leaped into the air, his arms spread wide, his athletic body thrown into a perfect diver’s pose.
As he soared into the air, he changed. Enormous wings flared into existence. Moonlight glimmered on his broad-muscled back as his body turned feline. Colossal paws tipped the columns of his four legs. The strong length of his neck and head became the pure sharp arc of an eagle’s, with a wicked, razor-hooked beak that had to be as long as her forearm and a great fierce raptor’s gaze. In the full light of the desert day, he had shone hot with color, copper and gold. In the light of the witch’s moon, his colors were darker and sharper, bronze tipped with the palest silvery edge.
Humans were not meant to bear the weight of immortality. Each Vampyre had to find her own way of coping with great age or eventually go mad. In the end, the best way to survive the endless onslaught of event as it turned into memory was to compartmentalize. Carling had countless closed doors in the corridors in her mind, doors that were shut against all the grinding relentlessness of the past. Those closed doors had, inevitably, become barriers to other things as well.
As Rune took flight, all the many thousands of doors in all the corridors in her mind opened and opened and opened, until she stood in solitude, utterly naked, and felt as she had as a child.
Rune was one of the oldest mysteries of the earth. His existence predated language itself. She watched him soar against the starry backdrop of the champagne moon, and just as the long-ago child Khepri had, she felt her soul leave her body all over again.
When ten minutes became longer than a half hour, she stopped waiting and became busy with other things.
The books screamed as she burned them. The screeching sound they made clawed at the inside of her skull.
She was braced for it. She had made Rhoswen swear to not leave the main house. That had been a fierce argument she hadn’t seen coming, and really, she had grown too tired of how everything had become such a struggle. That was going to have to change.
Then she had spelled a circle of protection in her cottage with salt around the fireplace. She stuffed her ears with wax softened with myrrh and smudged with sweetgrass and white sage, and she wore leather gloves that were also spelled so that no magic, dark or light, could cling to them.