The Lost Prince: Part V – The Protector of Ashenmore (Pt. 1)
Make sure to read Chapter IV of The Lost Prince before reading The Protector of Ashenmore, so you don’t spoil the story for yourself!
The Lost Prince, Part Five:
The Protector of Ashenmore
For what could have been an eternity, I did not know where I was. All I can remember are the faintest of apparitions, the occasional glimmer of substance before the darkness bestowed upon me by the Sky Women, once again, conquered my vision. Truth be told, even the small details that I can remember made little sense to me, starved, bewildered, and utterly ensnared by terror as I was. The fluttering of my tortured eyes was greeted with a series of looming and terrible images, each one more absurd than the last…
Vast walls of purple and black stone, encircling a seething mound of blackened, hump-backed buildings, punctuated by thin slivers of grey light. I was inside ‘The Spiral’ and, indeed, it was hollow. Men and women darted in and out of my field of vision. Men with skin adorned with black shells. Women whose limbs were translucent, like water, and whose features seemed to slide across their endlessly shifting faces so that their mouths occupied the space where their eyes had once settled, and their lips curved into thin, curious frowns from the bizarre angle of their high, sharp cheekbones.
Most of the inhabitants of ‘The Spiral’ had either the same dark and tattooed skin of Una, or the smooth, black shells of the hulking, spindly men, but there were many other shades to be glimpsed. The pale skins of the Thaltians and Lariptians, the smooth brown shades of the Ilyians and the people of Ashenmore. ‘The Spiral’ was a cacophony of the endless races and species of The Southern Islands – and Uorn itself. All of this I observed before the darkness swallowed me up…
Only to be greeted by further darkness and shifting walls. We were on a ship. I was in a small, circular room, covered in a thick veil of sweat. A woman wrapped in long silver robes was watching me. Her head was as smooth as a stone. It was one of the Sky Women. Her dark eyes glared at me, cutting across the shadows like two black stars, brimming with contempt. I couldn’t see Una or Lazrilus. Another woman entered the room, balancing a tiny sphere of fire in the palm of her hand. The two women exchanged several heated and indiscernible words to one another, with the bald woman occasionally glaring in my direction. The Fire Woman shook her head…
Endless trees. I was in a floating box, Una and Lazrilus were fast asleep, their heads resting against one another, the two sleepers propping each other up. A giant man with sharp ears and a river of dark hair was sitting to my left. His dark skin was covered in jagged tattoos. I leaned – or to be more exact, fell forward and glanced out of the small oval window that the brute was partially obscuring with his immense forearms. The box was ringed by a sort of pale-white platform, upon which squatted one of the bald Sky Women. This Sky Woman’s arms were extended into the distance, her fingers twitching, and, with every twitch, the box was further elevated by the gentle hands of the wind. We were flying! The Sky Women were actually carrying us through the vibrant sapphire sky of a land with whose landscape I was entirely unfamiliar. The impossibility of this form of travel struck me like a physical blow. The whole room spun before my frail eyes and I drifted, once more, into oblivion…
