Elysia Read Online Free PDF

be — that home was here. Now, for the first time, he consciously desired to remember it. Knowing his instincts, how true they ran, that was a very bad omen indeed. And so, until journey's end, he deliberately absorbed all he could of Elysia, letting it soak into him like water into a sponge.
    Elysia was not a planet; if it had been, then it would be the most tremendous colossus among worlds. But there was no real horizon that Crow had ever seen, no visible curvature of rim, only a gradual fading into distance. Oh, there were mountains with towering peaks, and many of them snow-clad; but even from the tops of these Elysia Could be seen to go on endlessly into distant mists, a land vast as it was improbable and beautiful.
    Beautiful, too, its structures, its cities. But such cities! Fretted silver spires and clusters of columns rose every' where, fantastic habitations of Elysia's peoples; but never vying with each other and always with fields and rivers and plains between. Even in the most abstract of cities there were parks and woodlands and rivers and lakes like bright ribbons and mirrors dropped carelessly on the landscape, yet always complementing it perfectly. And away beyond lines of low, domed hills misty with distance, yet more cities; their rising terraces of globes and minarets sparkling afar, where dizzy aerial roadways spread unsupported spans city to city like the gossamer threads of strange communal cobwebs.
    Sky-islands, too (like Serannian in the land of Earth's dreams, or Tiania's castle and the gardens around it), apparently floating free but in fact anchored by the same gravitic devices which powered Elysia and kept her positioned here in this otherwise empty parallel dimension; and all of these aerial residences dotted here and there, near and far, seemingly at random and at various heights; but perfectly situated and structured to suit their dwellers, who might in form be diverse as their many forms of gravity-defying architecture. And yet the sky so vast that it was not, could not be, cluttered.
    Flying machines soared or hovered in these skies where-ever the eye might look (or would in normal times), and through tufted drifting clouds green and golden dragons, the lithards, pulsed majestically on wings of ivory and leather. Nor were the lithards and flying craft sole users of their aerial element: a few of Elysia's races were naturally gifted with flight, and there were even some who might simply will it! Then there were the users of flying cloaks, like Crow's; and finally, today especially, there were the time-clocks .
    But Elysia was not all city and sky and mountain; she had mighty forests, too, endless valley plains, fields of gorgeous green and yellow, and oceans more beautiful even than the jewel oceans of Earth. The Frozen. Sea was one such: patterned like a snowflake one hundred miles across, its outer rim was cracked into glittering spokes of ice, while at the core a nudeus of icebergs had crashed together in ages past to form a mighty frozen monolith. Titus Crow flew across the Frozen Sea even now, and beyond it -
    - There in the Icelands, whose temperature ideally suited certain of Elysia's inhabitants — there dwelled Kthanid in his palace at the heart of a glacier. Kthanid, spokesman of the Elder Gods themselves.
    `Elder Gods.' They were not gods, and Kthanid himself would be the first to admit it, but so many races down all the ages of time and on a thousand different worlds had seen them as gods that the name had stuck. No, not gods but scientists, whose science had made them godlike. Beneficent Beings of Eld, they were, but not all of them had been benign.
    [NOTE to this ebook: the paper original from which this ebook was derived was owned by a rare and accomplished Adept and Ipsissimus. He had turned down this page in the book, for use in future reference to this part of the book, of special relevance to him regarding the CCD.]
    Crow was across the Frozen Sea now and began to feel the