A Blackbird In Darkness (Book 2) Read Online Free PDF

everything. Now, the revelation. Medrian is unhappy on H’tebhmella; even we, here, cannot really touch or ease her misery. Have I deluded her, as well as myself? Must the Serpent triumph?
    Now the Lady of H’tebhmella knew: she had no power to reassure or even console Medrian. She could not even say, don’t be discouraged , because Medrian already was. Despair was all that kept her going.
    The Lady could look into human souls as into crystal, and she shared deeply in their suffering, devoted all her strength to alleviating it. Yet human beings had an insubstantial quality that she could not quite touch, any more than a rock can grasp the sea that washes against it. She knew she could never cross that essential barrier, for she was H’tebhmellian, immortal. And now, faced with this Alaakian woman, whose soul was as intangible as a shadow, the Lady felt the void more acutely than ever. All her compassion, strength and wisdom failed her. She felt wordless, powerless. Diminished. I cannot heal her. M’gulfn has won.
    When the Lady spoke at last, there was a quality of inner exhaustion in her voice that Medrian had never heard before.
    ‘I accept that you feel like this, but I wish you would tell me your story, so I can understand more clearly what has brought you to this depth of hopelessness.’
    Medrian hesitated, and the Lady felt sure she would refuse. But at last she said, ‘Very well. I will tell you, my Lady, because you’re the only one to whom I’ll ever be able to speak freely. Not that relating my story can change anything, but it might restore my strength of purpose.’
    Emotionless, the words falling from her lips like cold, white pebbles, Medrian began to describe her life: a nightmare such as even the Lady could not have envisaged.

Chapter Two. Medrian of Alaak
    Medrian dreamed.
    She dreamed that she was lying in snow under a black dome of night, and the light of stars was burning around her – stars that quivered with mocking pain, like the fragments of a shattered crystal.
    She dreamed that her body was long and loathsome, a thick grey cord of knotted muscles covered in a colourless, flaky membrane like the discarded skin of a snake. She felt so heavy, as heavy as pitchblende, and at her sides leathery wings twitched feebly, impotent of flight. Yet within the core of her body a latent energy vibrated, radiating along every muscle rope, as slumberous and fierce and deadly as the power at the Earth’s heart.
    The snow felt lukewarm and ice crystals grated against her skin membrane; the feeling was both irritating and deeply familiar. She rocked the weighty body from side to side, groaning faintly as she failed to lift her lead-heavy head. Unfamiliar, nightmarish sounds rent her lobeless ears. Someone was singing, though she had never heard a voice before, nor any sound except the fall of snow and the creaking of ice, and the moaning of the wind in the stars.
    Medrian dreamed she was the Serpent.
    Or rather, it dreamed and she was forced to share it, seeing through its eyes and experiencing its feelings and thoughts. Its thoughts were wordless images, vivid and explicit and nightmarish, redolent of age-old, unforgotten terror. For the Serpent suffered its recurring phantasm of eons ago, when it had been the only living being on Earth, and the Guardians had come to rend it of its power. And Medrian was entrapped in the nightmare, no longer knowing that she existed as herself. She was the Serpent, and to her the dream was real.
    She lay upon the roof of the world, safe and inviolable in her domain of sighing, snow-filled gales. Of her origins she remembered nothing; she had always been there, past and future a grey tunnel of eternity. She – the Serpent M’gulfn – was in perpetual symbiosis with the Earth, her kingdom and home.
    Until this moment.
    Grey figures stood before her, their shapes both vague and chillingly real through her three Serpent’s eyes. They stood upright; each had a torso and a