Hades Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

their culture and their religion about the great River Llan, which wound its languid and peaceful way across the island to its mouth on the eastern coast. As the forests were the home of the stag god Og, so the Llan and its tributaries, its lakes and springs, were the home of the mother goddess Mag, under whose benefices the Llangarlians grew their crops, bred their livestock and raised the strong-limbed children that graced their hearts and homes. Llangarlia basked in the union between Og and Mag, and in the marriage of forest and water.
    To the south of the Llan lay the fields and villages of the Llangarlians, but on the northern bank of the river spread a series of mystic hills and mounds that the Llangarlians called the Veiled Hills after the mist that often enclosed them. These hills and mounds were the sacred heart of Llangarlia, resting as they did between the dark forest that spread to their north and west and the river to their south.
    Here, amid the Veiled Hills, the ordinary people of Llangarlia walked only during holy festivals when their footsteps were directed and protected by the MagaLlan, the living representative of Mag, and the Gormagog, the living representative of Og. Between them, the MagaLlan and the Gormagog guided the spiritual lives of the Llangarlians and the physical health of the land, personifying as they did the holy marriage between Mag, the waters, and Og, the forests.
    For the past fifteen hundred years, ever since the Llangarlians had replaced those strange, forgottenpeople who had built the Stone Dances, this union had been one of great soundness. The Llangarlians had lived in health and peace, the men reaping the wealth of field and river while the women bred children of exquisite beauty and wellbeing, the most elderly and respected Mothers among the women of the land presiding over the Houses, or families, of Llangarlia.
    Now, however, a blight had fallen over the land. It had begun one dreadful night twenty-six years previously when the Gormagog, Aerne, had lain with his own thirteen-year-old daughter, Blangan. In itself this was not particularly unusual, for many Mothers asked the Gormagog to lie with their daughters and get children of exceptional beauty and power on them, but on this occasion the sexual act turned into a cataclysmic disaster. The instant the Gormagog spilt his seed into Blangan he felt his Og power torn apart. Half of it he managed to retain, half vanished into the son he had planted within Blangan’s womb. Divided, the Og power had become virtually useless. There was no point in even trying to abort the child; the damage was done.
    It was a disaster not only for the Gormagog, as also for his son, but also for the god, Og. As the Gormagog was crippled, so also was Og. With every year that passed Og weakened yet further, and as he weakened, so his union with Mag, which kept the land healthy and productive, also waned.
    There was nothing that could be done about it. No means existed to reunify the Og power now divided between Aerne and his son, Loth. If Loth had been a girl, it was conceivable that Aerne could then have lain with his daughter (and granddaughter, as she would have been) when she came of age, and the son thus produced could have reunited the Og power into one body…but the Gormagog had planted a son into Blangan, a son, a useless son…
    For all of Mag’s power, and the power of the MagaLlan, the land itself began to wither and die. Cattle and sheep birthed thin, deformed offspring. Crops tended more to failure than to bounty, and winters extended well past their allotted span so that miserable sleet and destructive frosts afflicted the land even at the height of summer.
    The daughters of Llangarlia, who traditionally had enjoyed healthy pregnancies and easy labours, now began to miscarry and, worse, die during childbirth. Even if both mother and child survived the perils of childbed, the infants often perished in the first few months of life, and their