Canellian Eye, page 1
Canellian Eye:Prophecy
Copyright 2019 by Caroline Noe
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters and events, other than those in the public domain, are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is purely coincidental.
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CONTENTS
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
CONTENTS
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
PROPHECY
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROPHECY
When my people inhabit fear and death, when Darkness descends upon the sanctuary of Light, I will move once more. In the travail of your soul, salvation will come to the Chosen. You shall journey to a New World and there remove from my sight the evil of its inhabitants. It shall be called Canellia of Jehul. I choose from among you one who bears my mark and carries my power. The One shall be called the Eye of Jehul, for I AM JEHUL.
The Eye is mine, set apart to my service and to no other. The One shall bear no offspring, for Canellia is your child and, in suffering, you shall bring her forth to a fertile and beautiful land.
The Prophecy of Erulia
13,752 Before Current Age
Translated from Ancient Pictorial
PROLOGUE
Is every Eden destined to fall?
Long ago, when the stars were young and everything was possible, there was a grand jewel of creation. The sapphire radiance of the planet Canellia reflected the brilliance of two suns as it passed between them on its, seemingly, endless orbit of bliss. Perpetual light waxed and waned from season to season, but never left its blessed inhabitants in darkness.
With most of its surface covered by water, Canellia teemed with aquatic life. Creatures of all shapes and sizes thrived in the sultry climate, racing through vast depths of ocean or basking in bays of vividly coloured flora, swaying in the surging current.
Canellia’s sentient beings lived on islands; people as varied and full of life as the sparkling waters surrounding them and as green as the plants intertwined with every dwelling. On the largest of the tiny oases stood a city, its undulating sculpted architecture soaring above and plummeting deep beneath the waves. On Canellia, function and aesthetics existed in perfect harmony as technology and transportation achieved a living art form.
The city swarmed with as much life as the sea, yet the people lived at a slower pace than their aquatic friends, savouring the beauty of the day and relative coolness of the lesser day as they went about the joy of living. Work, play, rest; these words bore no meaning for a people alive in wholeness. At the border of land and sea, they moved in water with the same natural grace and bodily flexibility as on land. Dancing, singing, love making - the sea caressed as readily as the rays of two suns.
Verdant green skin of all shades reacted to endless light by giving back energy to the atmosphere which, in turn, fed the waters in a symbiotic dance of harmony and unity. Children were born with the deepest and most radiant hue, giving off the strongest energy in their play. By the end of their lifespan, the colour had paled to a gentle pastel, with wisdom replacing vitality as their gift to the community.
Death held no terror; it was perceived as returning to the loving embrace from which they were birthed, having lived, grown and expanded. A celebration of music, art and feasting accompanied each passing, the traveller crossing the divide surrounded by multiple generations and the memories of those who had gone before.
Living in the deepest sense of community, there was no need for hierarchy or gender divide and no concept of jealousy or prejudice. Each individual discovered their own voice in the living orchestra and was allowed to flourish there. For millennia, countless pairs of jade eyes had surveyed paradise and seen that it was good.
Only one voice had ever pierced the peace of Canellia.
Erulia found her voice even before developing her ability to swim. Almost from the first, she had sung forth a stream of unintelligible words, until it gradually began to coalesce into something none had ever experienced before: prophecy. In a society rooted in the present, the future had never been predicted and was barely considered. Erulia’s prophecy hung in the air, heavily laden with a warning that none could understand. Having no idea how to deal with the anomaly, the Canellians strived to include their wayward child in the only way they knew how: Erulia’s prophecy was carved into a magnificent stone artwork, given respect and a place, before fading into legend.
And then it came to pass...
Imperceptibly, at first, one of Canellia’s twin suns began to diminish. On a planet bathed in sunshine, rays penetrated a little less of the watery vastness and life cast a weaker shadow. Whilst millennia rolled onward, the planet grew colder until, to the surprise of her bemused population, a new phenomenon appeared at the poles: ice.
As with all life undergoing a slow erosion of heritage, the people simply adapted to the arrival of night and deepening seasons. There came a day - even the ancestors could not recall exactly when - the ailing sun no longer shone and the ice thickened.
By the time the second sun began to fail, all Canellian people had migrated to the warmth of the equator and raised a generation of scientists to deliver a prophecy of their own: the coming of a deadly ice age.
As aquatic life slowed and decayed under the onslaught of glaciation, Canellians hurried to stay alive within the one remaining city, its former beauty buried beneath the need for warmth and almost perpetual darkness.
With storms of terrifying power lashing the city, the elderly, weak and sick perished in the arms of hopeless loved ones. The birth rate plummeted, as though nature was assaulting them from inside and out. As plant life disappeared, every animal became carnivorous or died.
Facing annihilation within a generation, Canellia poured what was left of her resources into a last, desperate bid for survival. She remembered the Prophecy and prayed to her God to reveal the Eye.
Then, when life was at its most desperate, Jehul answered.
* * *
The heart-searing cries were so loud and visceral that they penetrated the mighty thickness of crumbling walls and floated into the howling wind beyond. A new born child struggled into life, but the wailing didn’t originate in that tiny body. Meto steeled himself against the harsh action to come; he knew what that sound signified.
Snow sprayed into the swirling air stream as he heaved on the door’s solid weight and entered the dwelling. Once inside, he peeled back his hood to reveal a face whose sage skin had weathered more than his twenty eight years would suggest. These latter times had been long and the living harsh, making endurance a lottery of hardness.
The owner of those cries had long since given up the fight to survive and succumbed to despair. Cort was six years younger than Meto, but clung to the blood-stained dead body of his wife like a living corpse, howls punctuated by the hacking cough of the dying.
Knowing, from bitter experience, that there was nothing to be done to save either the dead or dying, Meto scanned the tiny dwelling for the child. The emerald face of the new born baby peeped out from between its parents, smothered by their bodies and emitting no sound. The hollow eyed family stood back, pressed against the walls, making no move to comfort the grieving. Despair engulfed most of Canellia, despite Meto’s best efforts to provide an escape from oblivion.
“Cort, enough,” Meto snapped. “Silence!”
He dragged the whimpering Cort off his wife’s corpse, hauling him away from his child. Family glared, grieved by the harsh act, but did nothing to intervene. Meto placed his fingers against the female’s throat, checking for a pulse, but her open eyes told him she was already gone. Cort crawled into a far corner and curled into a foetal ball.
“Did you send for the healer? Has anyone checked the child?” Meto demanded, scanning the faces of the watchers. They all avoided his gaze.
Without the dead weight of his parents smothering him, the naked child was revealed as male. His tiny legs kicked out with force, showing him to be surprisingly robust and healthy, despite his continued silence.
“Let him die,” Cort moaned. “It’s a mercy.”
Meto sighed; he had heard this morbid pronouncement from ruined parents more times than he cared to recall. They feared dooming their children to a life of frozen hell.
“We’re building the ship for...” he began.
Cort cut him off. “Not enough time. We’re dead. All of us.”
“Jehul.”
The use of their God’s sacred name, coupled with Meto’s shocked expression, penetrated Cort’s delirium.
“What? What is it?”
He scrambled to his feet and peered down at his son.
On the right side of the child’s cheek, just below his eye, was a singular birthmark: three intersecting lines in the form of a Y. It was a design recognisable to every Canellian; they witnessed it every day of their lives, carved into stone. The birthmark was almost identical to the pictorial ancient symbols of the language of Erulia.
The mark was that of the Eye.
CHAPTER ONE
The colossal stone of Erulia once stood in the centre of towering architecture. The city shrank around it as the ice age bit deep, but the Canellians made a conscious decision to keep it at the centre of their dwindling lives as a reminder of who and what they once were.
The crumbling stone was a vestige of its former glory. Ice had forced its jagged fingers into every tiny crevice, shattering the surface and scattering its message to the wind. The beauty of ancient pictorial markings was fading into history alongside its doomed culture. Few could read the eroded carving with any degree of certainty. The Canellian staring at the mark of Jehul’s Eye was one of those few.
Layers of woven fur concealed his face, combatting the bitter cold, but every Canellian knew who he was, and not simply because of his unusual height. He stood silent and still, unmoved by the howling gale that lashed his frame with snow and ice. This was the last time he would gaze at the carving and he was burning the sight into memory. A gloved hand touched the eroded mark as though it was braille to the snow blind, but numbed fingertips felt nothing. He raised his head, staring up at the sky and for a brief, blessed moment the grey cloud cover broke, allowing a glimpse of the dying sun. All too soon, he was plunged back into gloom.
Snapping into action, he turned his back on the stone, burying the past in drifting snow. Leaning at an acute angle and engaging brute strength against the hammer force of the wind, he battled through invisible city streets, smothered by white out. Instinct kept him moving in the direction of the Construction Bay.
It seemed that the foul conditions worsened with every passing day as Canellia rattled its death throes. He had seen paintings of a city of light, before the sea of ice reached them, but the soft curves of that time were long gone, hidden beneath jagged edges of grey buildings battling to survive the elements. An iceberg towered above beleaguered survivors, its leading edge hanging over their last remaining haven like the angel of death. In its wake stretched the crushed remnants of the past. As a last rebellion against their fate, the Canellians had taken to chipping away at their nemesis, creating tiny ice sculptures of their own faces in the slowly creeping menace.
The faint glow of the Construction Bay flickered through a curtain of snow; a wavering beacon to a weary traveller. The outline of an ice statue materialised, standing alone in the gloom. As he approached, the statue turned to watch him pass. Hundreds of Canellians appeared and disappeared through swirling flakes, all making their way to the same bay. Passing through their midst, the taller traveller received a gesture of respect from each huddled figure: the placing of a gloved fist against the primary heart. He responded with a nod, but their eyes never met his.
A macabre groan echoed through perpetual night, as though a great beast was struggling to rise. The iceberg moved forward a fraction, unleashing a resounding crack. The ground beneath their feet trembled in fear, sifting and levelling snow dunes. He gestured for the people to hurry, but they needed no encouragement.
Reaching the sanctuary of the Construction Bay, he levered himself through the metal doors. The shrieking wind softened to a howl, dulled by the thickness of stone walls. Tall as he was, the breadth could encompass his entire height, yet even they would not withstand the coming blast wave.
He pulled back his hood and ran a gloved hand over ice encrusted hair, its shoulder length loosely braided at the base of his neck, not for decoration, but to keep it from his eyes. Even within the shielded outer bay, his steamy breath still hung in the bitter cold. They no longer had the resources to heat buildings where the children weren’t present. No-one complained. Being stalked by the inevitable, the people had grown quiet as the day of salvation, or abandonment, approached.
The traveller unwound layers of makeshift wrapping from his nose, mouth and forehead, revealing a strong, chiselled face, its emerald skin as yet unscarred by trauma. It did, however, bear a mark; a quite singular mark; a mark he had carried with pride for all of his seventeen years. Soon after a birth that took the life of his mother, his father had also succumbed to the climate, leaving Meto to name him Quaylan: the ancient Canellian word for Eye.
He was a handsome young man, even given the much older gaze. His bone structure and strong muscular frame received admiring glances which he acknowledged, but never acted upon. There would be no point. The Prophecy was his guide, telling him that Canellia, alone, was his child. It was a sacrifice that had cost him little, thus far. He had been raised without the slightest doubt that he was Jehul’s prophesied Eye and no-one had ever questioned it. The people were only too blessed to welcome their saviour, particularly once his frame had grown so comfortingly impressive.
In the outer workshops, frenetic activity greeted the arrival of the Leader. There was no time left to waste as the launch would go ahead in the ‘morning’. Harried engineers squeezed around a long queue of glittering young Canellians, none over thirty years of age, each clad in an identical loose fitting grey bodysuit whose material sparkled in the dim light. Most were engaged in the process of painful goodbyes to older friends and relations. The farewells were dignified and, considering the circumstances, muted. Tears were being carefully concealed.
Ever since the birth of Quaylan, Meto raised a chosen generation that would follow their prophesied saviour into space, escaping the death of Canellia in a gigantic vessel whose construction consumed all of their remaining resources. They were brought up in the knowledge that they would leave the older generation to die and were, therefore, taught not to engage too deeply; the Chosen were their family. Such clinical logic comes at an emotional price and doesn’t always work. The practicality was far more complex than such a cold ideal.
A portion of the mighty spaceship filled the far end of the workshop, a design, identical to Quaylan’s birthmark, laser etched into the metal. Goodbyes complete, each of the Chosen slowly shuffled up a ramp and through the open entrance, forming a queue that solemnly snaked its way through winding corridors.
The queue silently undulated out of Quaylan’s route to the ramp, leaving him a clear view of one of the more emotional goodbyes. Quaylan had very few friends, in the true sense of that word, his status of Prophet preventing him confiding his opinions and feelings to many. A weathered young man with hard muscle, tidy haircut and mint skin was one of the few.
At the age of twenty five, Milachay had attained an unusual level of wisdom and dependability, even for a Canellian. Much like his Leader, he tended to silent contemplation, rendering his few words all the more significant. The systems analyst was usually to be found lingering at Quaylan’s right elbow; a calm, constant watchdog. That reliability rendered this scene all the more distressing.
Milachay was buried in the embrace of his weeping mother, her hands clutching his head against her shoulder. His brother and sister, both older than the cut off age, had delivered their muted goodbyes at home, begging their mother not to accompany him to the ship. Promise broken, the widow told herself that it would be acceptable to follow her youngest son, so long as she maintained her dignity. Every vow failed in the face of reality. When she hummed a lullaby directly into his ear, Milachay’s celebrated fortitude cracked and his eyes swam with tears.
