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  Anais Eternal

  Paige Graffunder

  Copyright © 2021 Paige Graffunder

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN-13: 9798590628100

  Cover design by: Paige Graffunder

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Cassidy, may your world be ever full of empathy, magic, and the strength to love fearlessly.

  And for Karen, for loving me into the person you always knew I could be.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Before

  Nomad

  Curses

  Madness and Magic

  Oak and Willow

  Built Not Born

  Invisible

  Oracle

  Communion

  Sisters

  Learning and Enlightenment

  The Clearing

  The Glade

  Shelter from the Storm

  Stasis

  Doubt and Discovery

  The Illusion of Safety

  The Rapid Tattoo of a Panicked Heart

  Every Second Counts

  Rabble Rouser

  Unleash and Upload

  The Patience of Prisoners

  Boom

  Liberation

  Revolution Now

  A Fire Like a Rage

  Devil in the Details

  The Next Steps

  Breaking In to Break Out

  The Monster

  Anais Eternal

  Veni, Vidi, Vici

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgement

  About The Author

  "I glimpsed a bat with butterfly wings. Oh, what marvelous things."

  -Eisley

  "No, it's not a phase, it's the way that she combs my hair. Never wake, never wake from this coma."

  -Dance gavin Dance

  "When I die, let me do so beside you. When we die, let us go at the same time."

  -La Dispute

  Before

  I have memories from my life before the Devastation. Nothing concrete or chronological, but I do have them. Memories of music, soft orange light, tinkling crystal glasses filled with the wine my people were famous for tipped elegantly against the full lips of waiting mouths. I remember high cheekbones and long elegant hair always worn loose to allow it to flow with the dances. I remember elongated pointed ears, festooned with gold and silver. I remember dresses and waistcoats, slippers and flashes of magic. My sister said that I am remembering parties. I don't really know what that is, but I like to replay the memories anyway, to see my people before the Devastation. Before we had to hide our features behind masks of plainness. To see what our homes looked like when we had them. We don't have them now. We used to rule this world, but that was a long time ago. Now we are few, we are hidden, we are a secret that we struggle to keep. Our magic cannot be used lightly because they can detect it if we use too much. Our features make us too obvious, so we must mask them. Our language is forbidden for fear that we will give ourselves away. Our ways are lost to those too young to remember.

  We lose so many of our younglings; born with magic they no longer speak the same language as. So, it burns through them instead, emptying who they are, and when it grows too large for them to contain, it leaks. Then they sense it, and we have no choice but to abandon our children to save ourselves. Our younglings, rare to begin with, come less and less, as our people are afraid of this inevitability. I speak our language. Though I was very young when the Devastation struck, my sister taught me. Passing the knowledge in quiet, in secret, wrapped in darkness too absolute to be natural. I speak the language of the magic that lives in me. I talk to it, but only in my head, in my heart. It seems to be enough for the magic, to have this private conversation. It does not lash out. We comfort each other when the days grow desperate. There are more desperate days than not now.

  When I was a youngling, not even yet 100 years old, I asked my sister to tell me what the world was like before. She told me that it used to be us, and another race— non-magical people called Humans. These Humans lived here too. They built great cities they thought we could not enter, but of course we could. We spread lies about ourselves to make them think we were make-believe, and then we built our cities inside of theirs, in the up high, and the deep down, walking among them as though we were them. We led a life behind the scenes, orchestrating the machinations of our mother planet to suit our needs. But then some decided this was not enough, they wanted more. Began to wonder if this was all there was, and set their eyes up to the sky, and away from our mother planet. They sent the Humans out first, to see what it was like, and then they went themselves. Launching beacons into deep space, leaving signatures of the Humans on top, with our messages and magic beneath, and for so long there was nothing.

  Our immortal lives make us patient, but everything has its limits. Some waited anyway, even while the rest of us forgot they had done anything in the first place.

  And then one day, when I was barely more than a baby, 25 years old or so, they came. They had found the beacons, heard the Human messages, and deciphered our messages beneath them, seen our magic, listened to our stories. I can't blame the ones who brought this upon us. They thought that we would find kinship in the stars, and so they told of our secrets. But what found us was not our kin; it was our desolation. First, they came for the Humans, hiding in their ships, while they filtered a pestilence into the air, killing men and beasts, but not us. Our magic protects us from such things. We witnessed this pestilence and were forced into action. We used our collective magic and protected the things that our mother planet needs to survive. Bees, and birds, and beasts of the deep and the forest. It's hard to call this a mistake; if we had not done it, we would have died with our planet. But there were consequences to our actions. In our efforts to preserve life, they were able to find us. They built machines to track our magic if it was used in great amounts. They used our desperate attempts to save our planet to hunt us. To dig out the deep down, and climb to the up high, and there they gave us what we wanted. At least at first.

  We welcomed them. They were not so different from us. Our skin was smooth and in soft tones, pale to deep umber. They were covered in shimmering scales of many colors but walked on two legs like us. They shared our elongated ears, and our long hair, but their faces were reptilian. Nearly lipless mouths, and eyes that blinked two ways. Their pupils vertical like a feline, their fingers tipped with curved wicked claws. Their knees were inverted, and they wore no clothing. Their scales shimmered, opalescent in sunlight, but as we were to learn later, they could become almost invisible with very little effort. In those early days they offered us friendship, telling us stories of their world, of how they too felt lonely, so they sought out civilizations like their own. They taught us their language, and we taught them ours, showing them our magic, and our hidden places. And for a few years things were peaceful. Our people believed they had found a complementary species, a species with whom they could commiserate. Friends. I wish they had known how very wrong they were. It's too late to tell them now, they have returned to our mother planet, to be recycled, those that we had enough of left to bury. Life is different now. Life is difficult. No more scholars, no more parties, no more wine, only survival.

  My name is Anais, and I survived. My sister Tatiana survived. No one els
e from our pod still breathes. I never was made to bend and bow. I was made to fight, and I intend to.

  Nomad

  It's dark and I am alone. I look around but find nothing except a mostly empty room. My magic whispers to me, and I answer it, letting it curl around my fingers. I don't know it intimately yet. It isn't my friend. Now it is a playmate, a pet, and sometimes that pet bites. Unable to fully control it yet, the magic winds too tightly around my small fingers, compressing, and painful. I cry out, and there is the sound of light footfalls and a wedge of light as my door is pushed open. Within moments my magic is dispelled, and I am wrapped in warmth. Held close in arms, my face pressed to a chest that always smells faintly of cinnamon, apple orchards, and brown sugar. My aching fingers are enveloped in a hand much larger than my own, but still small and elegant, long fingers curling around mine. As my hand is lifted and pressed to lips, the sting starts seeping out of them. Something lilting and soothing is whispered in my native tongue. A lullaby just on the edge of hearing, and I feel my eyes closing again, drifting back into sleep.

  ◆◆◆

  "Get up now! We have to move." My sister whispered sharply, as hands shook my shoulders to wake me. No gentleness in her as she ruthlessly ripped me from my dreams. Reality jolted into focus and snapped my eyes open. There was a commotion outside of the small hollow beneath a fallen oak that Tatiana and I had slept under last night. I shook myself to get rid of the vestiges of the dream I could barely remember. Tatiana was already wearing her glamoured Human mask and she shook me roughly again.

  "Now, Anais, get up!" she hissed urgently. I groaned and sat up, shifting out of my bedroll, I began to roll it up, my movements mechanical and automatic. I had slept in my clothes last night, too tired from the day to change. This turned out to be a good thing, if I had taken the time to change, we might not have made it out. Tatiana poked her Human-looking head out of the entrance furtively, the strain of her mood made her lithe body rigid and unforgiving. The lines of her face— even softened by her Human glamour— still appeared to be sharp.

  I finished packing up my things, and strapped my bed roll to my pack, yanking on the strings to ensure it was secure. I pulled the bag onto my shoulders, as I ground my palm into my sleep weary eyes. I took a step toward her, but her hand, an elegant golden spider poking out from her threadbare sleeve, stopped my progress as she put it to my shoulder. She turned her eyes to me, her jaw clenched, expression flat, but fraying with stress around the edges.

  "Glamour first, you dingbat," she whispered, and I mentally kicked myself. Whispering inside my head to my magic, I pulled a tiny thread forth from the tangled mass of my power, coaxing it into place, gently. I had to take this moment to allow my glamour to trickle into place, otherwise, it might be detected. It became clear to me there were Himlani near, that's the only reason Tatiana ever looked as stressed as she did now.

  Once I was satisfied that my glamour was in place, my Fae features softened into Human plainness. I touched Tatiana's arm, and she glanced down, nodded, and released her hold. "We have to be quiet and quick," she whispered. I nodded. "When I say go," she continued, "you keep low, and go right, I will go left, we will meet up at the creek where you found Ayesha." She glanced down at me again. "Wait for me no longer than an hour. If I am not there, keep going, you know what to do." I reached out and touched her arm right before she started to move.

  "Don't be late." I raised my eyebrow and cocked a half-smile at her. She rolled her eyes but smiled back. I stepped up beside her and she took my hand, squeezing it in her own for just a moment before she dropped it and whispered "Go!"

  We pushed our way up and out of the hollow, crouched low and bolted in our respective directions. It was seconds before the zapping sounds of the Himlani's Rounders could be heard. I spared a look back at our camp, in time to see the rest of our group scattering in panic. Himlani were firing their Rounders from the trees, arcs of light leaping from the weapons twisting through the trees to find their prey. One of the beams of light struck a man who had been traveling with us for a few weeks, a metal device clinging to him where the light had met his body. Instantly he was rendered helpless, paralyzed. His limbs forced tight against his body; a perfect picture of horror painted across his face. I turned away, bile stinging the back of my throat. I shoved the guilt away and returned my focus to escape. My magic whispered to me, but I shushed it. I couldn't use it here. I couldn't speak to it right now, not even inside my head, or I would be just as trapped as that man. Serrif, his name was Serrif. I scolded myself mentally to not minimize his life, his experience, and to feel his loss. I was powerless to stop this attack, but I could mourn the losses, and in that way honor those who would not see the end of this day.

  I kept low as I worked my way from tree to tree, arms tucked in close to my sides, making myself as small of a target as possible. I darted first north then east, working my way in a zigzag, my long coat both protecting me from the autumn chill and dragging behind me to cover the tracks I left through the forest floor. I felt eyes upon me suddenly. The hair on the back of my neck lifted as my blood went cold under the observation of someone unseen. I froze, hidden behind the trunk of a tree, slowing my breathing to remain silent. I listened, closing my eyes to focus my superior Fae hearing. I heard no footsteps, no movement, arming of weapons, not the clicking tones of the Himlani language. The wind crept through the woods, shuffling the carpet of leaves, bugs went about their business, and distantly a bird called, another answered.

  A sudden rush of wings startled me from my reverie. My eyes snapped open and taloned feet gripped my shoulder. I nearly screamed. My first thought was that it was the clawed fingers of a Himlani Hunter, but as my head turned, I saw instead sleek black feathers and a peering, penetrating, black eye. I relaxed and stroked Ayesha's feathers. The raven leaned her head into my hair, and I smiled, despite my still furiously pounding heart.

  I had found Ayesha two years before. She had been a wounded youngling pushed from the nest too soon. Her wing broken, and squawking her fear and pain, trapped in the shallows of the creek. Each panicked moment of her ineffective flapping drawing her closer to exhaustion and inevitable death. She would either be heard and eaten by a predator or become too exhausted to hold her head above water and drown instead. I had lifted her out of the water, earning myself a stern bite from her already powerful beak, and tucked her into my jacket. Tatiana had scolded me profusely, but I hadn't been able to leave her, wounded and powerless to save herself. I understood her at that moment and every moment since. Through her recovery and now through her flourishing, we continued to understand each other, in the ways that only the motherless and wounded ever could.

  Even after she had recovered, she had stayed close. Tatiana had told me that in the days when we ruled, many of our kind had animal familiars. That it came from our magic, allowing us to empathize with beasts, but that it became rarer and rarer. She said that by the time the Devastation occurred, it was considered a rare gift. Our kind had forgotten the ways of talking to the beasts of the mother planet and instead focused on the things we could build, not the things we could nurture.

  I sent a tiny thread of my magic through to Ayesha, explaining the danger and what had happened. While Ayesha contained no magic of her own, the bond formed by my magic allowed for rudimentary two-way communication. While I was not blessed with wings as some of our kind were, Ayesha could be my wings for me, warning me of danger. I had even taught her to squawk warnings in patterns so my sister could be warned of threats if I was not close. Ayesha nuzzled into my hair for a moment more before she leapt off my shoulder and took flight. She would fly ahead and meet us at our designated spot, scouting for any sign of trap or danger. I watched her go until she broke the tree cover and I lost sight of her. Tatiana had been most displeased with another mouth to feed at first, but now even she held a begrudging affection and respect for Ayesha. She had become my closest friend and an excellent ally in our exile.

  I worked my wa
y through the woods, passing the place we were to meet and then doubling back and taking several different conflicting paths. My efforts compounding to throw off the Hunters, ensuring that I would not be followed and that no one would find me and Tatiana. This was our life now. Hiding, glamouring, always on the move. There had been a small population of Humans who had survived the pestilence brought by the Himlani and subsequent round ups. It was disguised as these groups that we hid. Sometimes mingling with the Humans, and sometimes in groups composed entirely of our own.

  This group had been a mix of both, but the man who had been captured, Serrif, had been one of ours. I shuddered at what I knew would happen to him. While the Himlani hunted both us and Humans, they did so for very different reasons. The Humans, they discovered, had a wealth of fresh young genetics, compatible with their own DNA. The Himlani were old, and their genetic pool was all but expended.

  As Humans possess no magic, and are easily deceived, the Himlani had long since discovered that it was easier to grow them in their farms. Even so, hunting the ones left provided ever-useful variants to the Himlani. Allowing them to introduce new immunities and adaptations to their colonies. They harvested our former cohabitants like chattel, controlling all aspects of Human lives. The empathy inherent in my magic made me suffer for the fragile mortal Humans. A life led as genetic food for indifferent, reptilian, masters, clicking their language that Humans could never hope to reproduce with their limited vocal abilities. Kept placid by cold indifferent methods, that was no life at all, only a hollow approximation of existing. In my dreams, I liberated their colonies. In my dreams, I took our planet back.