The Queen's Viper by Lesley Donaldson

Author:Lesley Donaldson [Donaldson, Lesley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy
Publisher: Aquhorthies Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

19: Dugan Mound

Maidstone, Kent.

June 4, 2012: afternoon.

Viper and Clare stepped under the horizontal lintel of the Sisters’ unearthed trilithon. Viper placed her forearm against the glowing glyphs on the massive upright stone. Red sparks spewed from the glyphs on the stone nearest the runic scars on her arm. Warm air blew at them from the portal, drying their clothes. Viper clasped the girl’s elbow when Clare retreated a step backwards. Smoke emitting from the ancient glyphs engulfed them. The immortal urged the human through the trilithon into the mist on the other side of the portal.

On Viper’s second step, vertigo spun the world that should be still. The Daoine Tor kept a firm hold on the girl. The babble of thousands of voices swirled around them, dense as the fog itself. An uncomfortable pressure in Viper’s ears progressively dulled the chaotic sound until both the sensation of deafness and disorientation became almost unbearable.

Viper took her third step forwards. The world around them cleared and her senses resumed as before. Transit through the portal felt like a short moment, but hours had passed. The sun hung low in the twilight sky. They had arrived on a crest of the chalky North Downs near the River Medway, some five miles north of Maidstone. The untended hill overlooked a small village where electric lights and stucco row houses replaced the vast, Kentish fields of Viper’s memory.

Viper’s heart skipped a beat when she saw unexpected bleakness where she expected to arrive. Long before the Sisters retreated beneath Maidstone, they had created this place to channel the aeir of the land and animals. The pristine double-ringed megalithic stone circle had been decimated. Her hands turned cold, and she unconsciously set Clare down. Clare took a moment longer to recover, sitting on the ground with her head in her hands. The portal sank back into the dirt behind them without a trace.

Only one of the original four outer trilithons remained. Its top lintel stone lay on the ground, where it had fallen long ago. Pockets of cup-shaped indentations, made by centuries of rainwater, scarred the exposed moss-covered side. Where they still existed, submerged remnants of the other upright sarsen boulders stuck out like boils on the ground. Seven narrow obelisks of black onyx and white quartz once stood between the trilithons, markers for the solstices and equinoxes of both Earth’s seasons and of V’Braed magic. They had vanished.

The more Viper took in, the more she found herself struggling to believe her eyes. She picked her way to the centre past cigarette butts, crushed beer cans, and scattered firework shells. Coarse grasses within the site refused to be trodden flat by local sightseers and delinquents. The inner ring of stones should have been comprised of four wide, rectangular, bluestone boulders around a solitary fire opal pillar, like the one in the Sisters’ hovel. Only one upright bluestone remained. Where once there was marginal space to shuffle between the inner circle of stones, the centre now lay splayed open and vulnerable.

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