So after so many hours of arguing with myself, pushedfarther past exhaustion than I have ever been, I began writing this manuscripton the nightstand in my bedchamber.
On these few sheets of parchment, penned throughoutthe night, I have put my story. Now, as I finish, I prepare myself to climbthat ladder. I will smash the rose window, and destroy every last shard. If Iam right, and the evil is over, I will return here to this manuscript and throwthese pages into the fire so that none shall ever learn of these horribleevents. But if I am wrong, you are reading this now. If that is the caseperhaps you-whoever you are-will know what can be done to right my wrongs.
I am ready.
THE FIRST MOONWELL
Douglas Niles
The goddess existed deep within the cocoon of bedrock,an eternal being, formed of stone and silt and fire, her body blanketed by thedepths of a vast and trackless sea. In the way of immortals, she had littleawareness of the steady progression of ages, the measured pulse of time. Onlygradually, over the course of countless eons, did she become aware that aroundand above her the ocean came to host an abundance of life. She knew thepresence of this vitality in all the forms that thrived and grew; from thebeginning she understood that life, even in its simplest and most transientforms, was good.
Deep waters washed her body, and the volcanic firesof her blood swelled, seeking release. She was a living thing, and thus shegrew. Her being expanded, rising slowly from the depths of the ocean, overmillennia spilling along trench and seabed, pressing deliberately, forcefully upward.Over the course of ages, her skin, the floor of the sea, pushed through therealm of black and indigo and blue, toward shimmering reaches of aquamarine anda warmth that was very different from the hot pulse of lava that measured herown steady heartbeat.
Life in many forms quickened around her, first in themanner of simple things, later in larger and more elaborate shapes. Animationteemed in the waters that cloaked and cooled her form. Gashes opened continuallyin the rocky flesh of her body, and her blood of molten rock touched the chillwaters in spuming explosions of steam.
Amid those hissing eruptions, she sensed great formscircling, swimming near, breathing the chill, dark sea. Beings of fin andtentacle, of scale and gill, gathered to the warmth of the earthmother'swounds-wounds that caused no pain, but instead gave her the means to expand, tostrive ever higher through the brightening waters of the sea.
And, finally, in the life that gathered to her bosom,she sensed great creatures of heartbeat and warm blood. Those mighty denizensswam like fish, but were cloaked in slick skin rather than scales, and rosethrough the sea to drink of the air that filled the void above. Mothers nursedtheir young, much like the goddess nourished her children and her thriving sea.Most importantly, in those latter arrivals the goddess sensed the awakenings ofmind, of thought and intelligence.
Unaware of millennia passing, feeling the coolness ofthe sea against the rising pressure of her rock-bound body, the physical formof the goddess continued to expand. At last, a portion of her being rose abovethe storm-tossed ocean to feel a new kind of warmth, a radiance that descendedfrom the sky. Periodically this heat was masked beneath a blanket of chillypowder, but the frosty layer yielded itself in a regular pattern to morewarmth, to soothing waters that bathed the flesh of the goddess, and more ofthe golden rays shedding steadily downward from the sky.
The flesh of the goddess cooled, weathered by exposure to sky. New anddifferent forms of life took root upon her; beings that dwelled in the sea ofair turned faces upward to the clouds. Many did not walk or swim, but fixedthemselves to the ground, extended lofty boughs upward, creating verdantbowers across the breadth of the land. The growth of those tall and mightytrees, like all forms of life, was pleasing to the goddess. She sensed thefruition and waning of the forests that layered her skin, knew the cooling andwarming of seasons with greater acuity than ever before.
It was this awareness that, at last, gave to theearth-mother a true sense of passing time. She knew seasons, and in the courseof changing climes she learned the pattern of a year. She came to measure timeas a man might count his own breaths or heartbeats, though to the goddess eachheartbeat was a season, each breath the cycle of the annum. As the years passedby the tens and hundreds and thousands, she grew more vibrant, stronger, andmore aware.
The hot blood of earlier eons cooled further; the eruptionsfrom the sea ultimately were capped by solid stone. That firm bedrock, where itjutted above the waves, was layered everywhere in forest, meadow, glade, andmoor. Seas and lakes intermixed with the land, keeping the goddess alwayscool, both fresh waters and brine nurturing the growing populations of livingcreatures.
Still the goddess maintained communion with the beingsof warm blood dwelling in the depths, who swam to the surface and returned,sharing their mind-images of a vast dome of sky, of the sweet kiss of a seabreeze, and the billowing majesty of lofty clouds. Her favorite of those seacreatures was one who had been nourished at her breast from time immemorial,feeding upon the kelp and plankton that gathered to her warm emissions,slumbering for decades at a time in her embrace. She came to know him as theLeviathan, the first of her children.
He was a mighty whale, greater than any other fish ormammal that swam in those seas. His soul was gentle, his mind observant, keen,and patient-as only one who has lived for centuries can know patience. Great lungsfilled his powerful chest, and he knew life with a rhythm that the goddesscould understand. Sometimes he took a breath of air and settled into thedepths, remaining there for a passage of several heartbeats by the reckoning ofthe goddess-a time of years in the more frenetic pace of the other warm-bloodedcreatures.
In long, silent communication with the goddess who washis mother, the Leviathan lay in a deep trench on the bottom of the sea,sensing the lingering warmth of her fiery blood as it pulsed and ebbed belowthe bedrock of the ocean floor. During those times, the great whale passedimages he had beheld above the waves, pictures of growing verdancy among theearthmother's many islands, of the teeming array of creatures swarming not onlysea and land, but even flocking in the skies.
And he shared, too, his memories of clouds. Those morethan anything else stoked the fires of the earthmother's imagination, broughtwonder to her heart, and caused curiosity to germinate in her being.
As she communed with the Leviathan, sharing hismemories of the things he had beheld, she began to sense a thing about herself: The goddess, unlike so many of the creatures that dwelled upon her flesh, wasutterly blind. She lacked any window, any sense through which she could viewthe world of life flourishing upon her physical form.
The only visual pictures that she knew came from thememory of the great whale, and those were pale and vaporous imitations of thereal thing. The goddess wanted to see for herself the sky of cloud and rain andsun, to know the animals that teemed among her forests and glades, the treesthat sank their roots so deeply into her flesh.
From the Leviathan, the goddess earthmother hadlearned about eyes, the orbs of magic that allowed the animals of the world toobserve the wonders around them. She learned about them, and desired them…and devised a plan to create an eye for herself.
The Leviathan would aid her. The great whale drankfrom an undersea fountain, absorbing the power and the magic of the earthmotherinto himself. With easy strokes of his powerful flukes, he drove toward thesurface, swimming through brightening shades of water until again his broadback rolled above the waves, felt the kiss of sunlight and breeze.
Swimming strongly, the Leviathan swam to a deep bay,stroking between rocky necks of land into ever narrower waters, toward thewestern shore of one of the earthmother's cherished isles. Mountains rose tothe north, a stretch of craggy highlands crested with snow as the spring warmthcrept only slowly upward from the shore. To the south was a swath of greenforest, woodlands extending far from the rocky shoreline, blanketing this greatextent of the island.