Prophecy

  “Prophecy proves that Elizabeth Haydon is a superstar and not a one-hit-wonder. The story line is intelligent, filled with action, but does not neglect the characters. Haydon’s world is so real the audience will feel that we too have been transported in time and space to a wondrous vision that makes it easy for readers to rhapsodize that the author is becoming one of the top wizards of the genre.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Three cheers for Elizabeth Haydon! One great book (Rhapsody) might be a fluke. But its sequel, Prophecy, keeps right on developing great characters in a believable fantasy world without sacrificing the momentum of a terrific story. Fans of epic fantasy will find Haydon a worthy successor to Tolkien, ranking with Robin Hood and Guy Gavriel Kay. Just don’t start reading too late in the day—once you’ve begun you won’t want to stop.”

  —Amazon.com, Best Book/Editor’s Pick for 2000

  “The second book of Haydon’s epic high-fantasy trilogy is as strong and compelling as its predecessor, Rhapsody. The action is exhilarating; and sometimes broad, sometimes wry humor leavens the story’s horror. As in high fantasy at its best, the sense of foreboding is palpable, the world building is convincing and consistent, the evildoers are truly wicked, and the battles are ferocious.”

  —Booklist

  “The characters are appealing and Haydon’s world intriguing…the novel has enough magic, good fights and thrilling love scenes to make it a keeper.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Praise for Rhapsody

  One of the Best Novels of 1999:

  Best Fiction of 1999, Borders.com

  (Top ten Fiction Titles of 1999)

  Best Book/Editor’s Pick: Amazon.com

  (Top 10 SF/Fantasy titles of 1999)

  The Readers’ Choice List: SF Site

  (The 10 SF/Fantasy titles of 1999)

  A Best Book of the Year in SF/Fantasy:

  BarnesandNoble.com

  “One of the finest high-fantasy debuts in years.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A stunningly-told tale by a new fantasy author who is sure to go far.”

  —Anne McCaffrey

  “An epic saga worthy of Eddings, Goodkind and Jordan.”

  —Romantic Times (4½ stars out of 5)

  “A powerful novel…. This author will surely go far.”

  —Piers Anthony

  “An epic beginning to a major fantasy series, and readers will quickly pick up on the echoes of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth and David Eddings Belgariad series.”

  —Toronto National Post & Mail

  “Rhapsody is movingly-written, epic fantasy. I read this book with a growing sense of pleasure, impressed not only with the author’s deft plotting but also with her use of language. Haydon is a writer.”

  —Morgan Llywelyn

  “With Rhapsody, Elizabeth Haydon makes a magnificent fantasy debut. I can hardly wait for the next book in the trilogy!”

  —Mary Jo Putney

  “In Rhapsody, Elizabeth Haydon gives us strong, compelling characters in a world both mysterious and familiar.”

  —J. Gregory Keyes

  “Rhapsody is a very moving book…quite intriguing.”

  —San José Mercury News

  “In a genre choking with predictable worlds and characters, Haydon blows in on the fresh air of new insights and talents. She makes the old fantasy new again. A very auspicious beginning!”

  —Jennifer Roberson

  Author’s Note:

  The author’s royalties from this book are being donated to the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. For more information about the Foundation, visit their Web site at: www.pedAIDS.org

  To the peacemakers and the negotiators

  The nightmare chasers and the kissers of knee scrapes

  Those who build up the civilization of the world one child at a time

  The legacy creators, the history writers

  Those who honor the Past by shaping the Future

  To those for whom being a parent is a calling

  Particularly the ones I know most intimately

  With profound love

  THE PROPHECY OF THE THREE

  The Three shall come, 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 PROPHECY OF THE UNINVITED GUEST

  Among the last to leave, among the first to come,

  Seeking a new host, uninvited in a new place.

  The power gained being the first,

  Was lost in being the last.

  Hosts shall nurture it, unknowing,

  Like the guest wreathed in smiles

  While secretly poisoning the larder.

  Jealously guarded of its own power,

  Ne’er has, nor ever shall its host bear or sire children,

  Yet, ever it seeks to procreate.

  THE PROPHECY OF THE SLEEPING CHILD

  The Sleeping Child, the youngest born

  Lives on in dreams, though Death has come

  To write her name within his tome

  And no one yet has thought to mourn.

  The middle child, who sleeping lies,

  ’Twixt watersky and shifting sands

  Sits silent, holding patient hands

  Until the day she can arise.

  The eldest child rests deep within

  The ever-silent vault of earth,

  Unborn as yet, but with its birth

  The end of Time Itself begins.

  THE PROPHECY OF THE LAST GUARDIAN

  Within a Circle of Four will stand a Circle of Three

  Children of the Wind all, and yet none

  The hunter, the sustainer, the healer,

  Brought together by fear, held together by love,

  To find that which hides from the Wind.

  Hear, oh guardian, and look upon your destiny:

  The one who hunts also will stand guard

  The one who sustains also will abandon,

  The one who heals also will kill

  To find that which hides from the Wind.

  Listen, oh Last One, to the wind:

  The wind of the past to beckon her home

  The wind of the earth to carry her to safety

  The wind of the stars to sing the mother’s-song most known to her soul

  To hide the Child from the Wind.

  From the lips of the Sleeping Child will come the words of ultimate wisdom:

  Beware the Sleepwalker

  For blood will be the means

  To find that which hides from the Wind.

  Contents

  Intermezzo

  Meridion

  Second Movement

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23


  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Preview

  Author Bio

  Acknowledgments

  Intermezzo

  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 Future. The Present, as ever, hung evanescent like a 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, burnt 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 mechanically. 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 aureole, 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 way to 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 through 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. 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 und
er 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.