Chimera Prologue

You'd better hope and pray that you wake one day back in your own world.

Chatoya Irkil dreamed of blood, and ice, and endless blue sky.

Around and around she spun on the balls of her feet, burning from the sheets of flawless ice she stood on, the air still and hung with droplets of mist. Surrounding her, the glorious bowl of the sky, arching out forever, and forever, bright with promise, bright with cold.

“I will destroy you,” a voice whispered in her ears. Darkness twined around the soft, deep velvet of it, like a diamond coated in poison. “I will leave you to rot in darkness, to long for friends and love that will never come. You will beg and you will plead...”

The sky snapped out and she was left in a world as black as the cloak of her hair, to shudder and to shiver and to pray to gods that did not exist.

Silence slammed in on her like a warhammer.

Silence and dark. And soon, she could no longer stave it off. Her voice was nothing in the immensity of this, she was nothing but a bodiless creature, floating in dark and cold. She was buried here, forgotten here, lost here.

Ghosts of words rang harsh in her ears.

“And no one will ever hear.”

~*~

He moved like the shadow of a panther. Hands searching for tiny juts of rock that he could lever his fingers into, bare feet clinging to the barely-there gulfs that ran up and down the length of the rock.

Find a grip, and then trust to gravity and skill to slither higher up the sheer, perpendicular wall of rock he was climbing. Alone. Without a harness.

In the middle of the night.

Blue Malefici pulled himself up onto a narrow ledge, perhaps six inches wide, and around a hundred feet above the ground. An easy climb, and a good viewpoint. He could see most of the road that wound by the forest from here, down to the shivering mass of the lake.

The figure appeared from the dark miasma of the woods, little more than an ant to him. But Blue flicked his mind out, like someone else might crook a finger, and an owl dropped silently, swooping over the girl.

So this was her, was it?

She wasn't pretty. She wasn't even unique. She was utterly ordinary; the face you saw in a crowd every day, the wrong number you dialled, the girl behind the counter.

That was why she was so dangerous.

He pulled at the clouds that hung overhead like bulky vultures, throwing a little power at them. As she walked beneath, a harsh rain began to pound down, raising circles of dust on the old tarmac.

He borrowed the eyes of the owl again, perched on a branch overhanging the road.

The girl came into view, and Blue snapped his fingers.

Lightning struck.

She shielded eyes that were a dusty, almost sandy brown half-closing. Average height, not too short and not too tall, with hair that was a colourless flat brown with just a touch of sun-streaked bleaching. A watch on one wrist, one pair of earrings - plain studs - no weapons, no perfume, no readable expression.

She walked in beauty like the night, he thought and half-smiled.

For like the night, she was something that could creep up on you with scarce a warning and swamp you in its hidden power. He let her walk on by, amused, and looking forward to the challenge she would present.

He waved the storm away, and apart from one last thought before he left, let the matter fly his mind.

So that was who they had sent to kill him.

'Cause when you sleep at night, they don't hear your cries back in your own world.