The Time Weaver

Prologue

Imagine a place empty of souls.

Imagine it lush and green and fertile, a land dripping with moss and dew, streams flowing like glass across peat and smooth dark rocks. Wild roses weep petals into the streams, sending them down and down hills into lakes that glitter sapphire and gold beneath the sun.

Pebbles of copper and silver live in the silt at the bottom of the lakes. Occasionally long speckled trout flick by, the fans of their tails stirring the mud into storms; fish do well in this place. They never hear the sad, persistent songs of the silver, the ardent copper, and there is no one above the water left to hunt them. The fish thrive.

Beyond the water the land is not yet so easy with itself. The scent of the creatures who used to dwell here still saturates the air. The decaying homes, the fallow fields, the deep tangled woods. The abandoned manor house on the knoll, still shining with windows, surrounded by grass and aspen and willows: everything smells of them, and all the little animals who would normally flourish in this green silence remain missing. It will take many years before any of them dare to reclaim the land.

Birds will appear first. Then rodents. Then badgers. Hedgehogs, red squirrels, moles, foxes, rabbits. And deer too. Along with the rabbits, deer will come last.

But they’re not here yet, not even the smallest of larks. For now, all that may be heard is the water rippling over the rocks, and a scattering of insects hiding beneath ferns or under the bark of the trees in the forest, chirping and breathing.

This place was named Darkfrith, for the woods and the water. The beings who dwelled here—who built the cottages and the mansion and the mines and mills—were called the drakon .

They were dragons, of course.

There are none left now. But once—oh, yes, once upon a time, they ruled this empty place.

Beasts of brutal beauty and cunning, they had learned to blend with the Homo sapiens of the more ordinary world, to mask themselves as them, to conceal their true resplendence. Centuries past they had been driven from their homeland in the Carpathian Mountains, but in their flight these particular dragons had discovered the woods and lakes—heard the silver calling to them from the buried veins deep inside the earth—and decided to settle here. In England.

For a while, they managed it very well.

Darkfrith is a secret ripe corner at the northern edge of the country; remote, timbered and undulating, it offered nothing remarkable to tempt tourists or even common travelers. Occasionally a few would venture in anyway.

None of them lingered long.

By day they would discover a scene of idyllic perfection: lustrous-cheeked girls and strong, comely lads. Neatly tilled fields, Roman-straight orchards spangled with apples and pears, peaches and plums. Emerald hills that hugged the heavens, that invited the clouds down low for foggy kisses. A flock of black-faced sheep. That manor house, seat of an ancient noble family, gleaming with wealth. Silver mines. A bustling village. Everyone smiling and happy.

However, should he look more closely, the Traveler might notice how the smiles of the villagers never quite warmed their eyes. How there was but that lone drove of sheep, not nearly as many as the meadows could support. And how those sheep bolted from their keepers over and over again, even though they were herded only by children.

What the weary Traveler might perceive more quickly was the fact that Darkfrith had no inn. Not one. And the people of the shire—nearly all of them blond and pale and handsome—somehow never had a single room to spare, not even a bed of hay in one of the barns.

He might take coffee in the tavern, or ale, should he prefer it. He might admire the clean cobblestone lanes and elegant limestone architecture, the aroma of spiced tarts or souffle au chocolat from the bakery, the books displayed in the bowfront window of the circulating library. But as the day would fade and dusk slowly darken into blue, the Traveler would begin to feel an uneasy sort of itching settle between his shoulder blades. A restlessness. The urge to press on.

For all their smiles, the villagers would make certain of that.

Because by night, Darkfrith became a very different place. By night, the smiling fair people were gone, and any Travelers left on the shire roads would have done well to duck their heads and move faster.

The skies writhed at night. The stars trembled, the moon shrank. The beasts took flight then, commanding the dominion of heaven: great, glimmering bands of dragons, curling and coiling and streaking through the dark. From over five leagues away, farmers would shiver and cross themselves for no reason; their wives would pull the shutters a little tighter against the unnatural moaning of wind carved by wings rising beyond the hills.

Everyone local knew not to venture to Darkfrith at night, even if they did not know why.

For sixteen generations the drakon thrived in this little pocket of the world.

By the time the seventeenth took their first toddling steps, it was done.

Here is the story of how they perished. Or perhaps it’s the story of how they did not.

You’ll see.