Asharielle and the Hidden Realm, page 1
Asharielle and the Hidden Realm
Violet Eden
Copyright © 2023 by Violet Eden
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or may any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the owner, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law or the Australian Copyright Act.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, incidents and dialogues and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales are entirely coincidental.
Cover designed www.hannah-sternjakob-design.com
For John.
Contents
1. Prelude
2. Chapter 1
3. Chapter 2
4. Chapter 3
5. Chapter 4
6. Chapter 5
7. Chapter 6
8. Chapter 7
9. Chapter 8
10. Chapter 9
11. Chapter 10
12. Chapter 11
13. Chapter 12
14. Chapter 13
15. Chapter 14
16. Chapter 15
17. Chapter 16
18. Chapter 17
19. Chapter 18
20. Chapter 19
21. Chapter 20
22. Chapter 21
23. Chapter 22
24. Chapter 23
25. Chapter 24
26. Chapter 25
27. Chapter 26
28. Chapter 27
29. Chapter 28
30. Chapter 29
31. Chapter 30
32. Chapter 31
33. Chapter 32
34. Chapter 33
35. Chapter 34
36. Chapter 35
37. Chapter 36
38. Chapter 37
39. Chapter 38
Prelude
Awaken the Dragon
Finally, the call had come.
He, Dragon, had been summoned by the tiny man, but after so long in this alternate dimension, he was confused. No…he was dispersed! It was an odd thought. He searched his mind, trying to understand what this might mean but everything felt strange—like he was everywhere and nowhere all at once. Time had dissolved his consciousness.
It was not his fault. It was not hers either.
This place had been built in a hurry and she had not had time to check for problems.
It did not surprise him that his first coherent thought was of her. Eyes like the midday sky rose in his mind, sharp and clear as if eons had not passed since he had last gazed into them or let his own wander over the curves of her bronzed skin.
I remember…
She had asked him to wait here, in this hastily constructed dimension, cut off from the world he loved until the summoning. He had agreed, for how could he not? He would do anything for her.
And so, he had stood before the portal in spirit form only, nervous at not only leaving his body suspended until such time as he could reclaim it, but also because he had no idea what awaited him on the other side.
Nothing could have prepared him for this side of the portal! He had imagined a world like earth; a familiar place where he would pass the time flying over mountains and fields and oceans and lakes while he waited for the time of summoning. He could not have been more wrong.
This dimension was faulty.
She could have warned him about the void but perhaps she did not know herself. His new reality was nothing more than a bubble in space. It wasn’t dark as such; it was simply empty. And it certainly wasn’t timeless.
But that wasn’t his only problem. With no flesh to mould his spirit, his form dissolved. Startled by this, he kept trying to meld his soul back into his dragon-like shape, but though his will was strong, the moment he lost concentration he would return to what he was…a cluster of conscious light at the centre of the void.
After a while, he gave up, focusing instead upon the Earth plane and the events transpiring there, for he was invested in the plight of his lady and her people, but soon, he wished that this dimension had cut him off from the world like she had promised. He could only watch in horror as Life Stealer destroyed the Earth in his quest for hue. Knowing he could do nothing to help, he shut off the connection.
Trapped in the void, he waited…
His mind drifted to memories of better times, many of them spent with her. Yet, as time passed, they too began to feel more like stories he had made up than actual experiences. His thoughts turned inward, and he began to philosophise about the nature of his existence. One question held him captive: For how long could he hold on to his identity when there was nothing to sustain the continuity of his being? It was something he contemplated often—until the silence between his own thoughts grew too distant and his consciousness began to unwind.
Atom by atom, his soul drifted out into the void until he was everywhere and nowhere all at once. He had become nothing more than the flickers of light caused by the particles of his soul crashing into each other. Each flared in brief recognition before they spun back into the emptiness.
Now, those atoms were hurtling back toward the light that clustered at the centre of the void, reforging his soul, and bringing strength to his thoughts. But there was little time to revel in the experience, for the summoning drew him out of the void and back into the real world.
His rebirth came as a shock. One minute he was everywhere…and then he was trapped, not in the vastness of his own magnificent body, but in the fragile shell of the tiny hue-man. He roared in dismay at his predicament. Though he had agreed to this, he had not known it would feel so confining: it was like trying to force the sun beneath the earth’s crust.
He flexed his consciousness, cracking the man’s mind like an eggshell. He pushed further, expanding into the spaces between his thoughts. At first, he thought the little man might explode from the pressure, but the blood connection between them had activated, just like she had thought it would.
Their soul-merge caused a blending of forms, and for a moment, they were one being. Ryder’s thoughts were now open to him, and he felt the man’s desperation as if it were his own, as well as his anger toward the enemy that stood gloating in the centre of the forest clearing.
It was Life Stealer!
Rage ignited his soul and filled his lungs with liquid heat. He welcomed the inferno that rose in his throat. Ignoring the voice in his mind that begged him to wait, he opened his maw. Fire shot toward the being he despised more than anything…but The Destroyer was quick on his feet. He escaped through a portal and only the ugly creatures burned.
Disappointment filled him, but through their link, he felt Ryder’s exultation at the decimation of their foe and his joy that he would be able to save the girl.
What girl?
His anger had distracted him. Dragon looked at the young woman who stood in the clearing, and his heart skipped a beat.
It’s her…
She was standing amongst the flames, laughing as the hued firelight danced against her skin. He tried to call to her, but his consciousness was too powerful. The soul-merge had already altered Ryder’s DNA, and Dragon knew that if he didn’t leave, the little man would die. Admiration filled him, for he had not expected that such a tiny being would be able to hold the entirety of his essence for as long as he had. Before he could speak to Ryder or the girl, the link between them snapped, and forces beyond his control pulled him out of the hue-man’s body.
His soul was drawn back along an invisible tether to his physical body which still lay undisturbed beneath his mountain home. He did not return to his flesh, nor did he break the hued barrier which preserved his immortal state.
He held back, appreciative of the opportunity to gaze upon himself the way an outsider would. Though his form was massive, he was perfectly streamlined. The warm gold, orange and yellow tones of his body were mesmerising as they shimmered in the light emitted by the hued dome. She had told him several times that he was magnificent to behold, and now that he could see for himself, he had to agree with her. Yearning filled him as he stared at his wings; he had forgotten the feel of the wind beneath them long before he had entered the faulty dimension, but he could not remember when that was.
He did not remember his origin story.
He only knew he was the first.
He had been here long before her arrival, but his memories from the dawn of time remained fuzzy. Perhaps the time spent in an alternate dimension had affected his memory, or perhaps he was so old that he could no longer traverse the pathways that would allow him to remember his birth.
What he did recall was a feeling of intense loneliness and later, raging anger. It triggered washed out images of an endless cycle of light and heat, followed by bitter darkness and burning cold. He remembered that sometimes, he would call out to the bright lights that sparkled in the darkness above, but the only answer he received was the aching silence that comes from being alone.
Then she had come.
He had called out and she had answered.
One touch.
That was all it had taken. Something had…flowed…from her into him. It was a shade of light that he had never seen before, and it filled the emptiness in his soul.
It was soothing.
Calming. Gentle. Peaceful.
He remembered watching her place those tiny hand
Time passed and they had become inseparable.
She was an exceptional being. She discovered that she could create living things and, caught up in her zest for life, he watched as her experiments began to evolve. Dragon thought they looked strange and unusual, and he would laugh when she presented him with her ideas for new creatures.
Soon, the surface teemed with life of all shapes and sizes, but they were all like her— tiny. Some of them moved about through the air or swam in the large bodies of water. Some stuck out of the ground. Some lived beneath it and others moved over it.
Eventually, the surface grew too crowded. He began to dread every footstep, so he stayed put, but even when he stretched, he would squash the living things around him, causing them to lose their glow. Though he tried to be careful, watching their light go out made him sad.
Together, they made a haven for him to roam freely in—a giant mound of rock and dirt that rose high above the ground and contained a huge cavern beneath, which he could move about in without hurting the tiny ones. She had covered the mound in little green sticks so that it would not look too different from the world she had created. She even let her creatures roam upon its surface.
Safe within his home, he watched her from afar as she continued to develop many different species. Life on the planet flourished, but with his retreat from the surface, something changed within her.
Though she loved creating, he often felt something was missing from her life. She appeared lonely, just like he once had. It was then that he discovered that he too had special talents. His energy was different from hers, but it was powerful just the same. For her, he learned to change his shape. He reduced his size so that he could spend time with her, modelling his figure to resemble hers. The smile on her face when he first visited her as a tiny creature was worth it. It had been a strange sensation, yet the joy of holding her hand far outweighed the physical pain of morphing his body into such an unusual shape.
But it was unsustainable. The smaller body was confining, and he could not hold its form for long. He would always have to return to his lair where he could resume his normal form.
His last visit brought him only sadness and sorrow. Packed into his tiny form, he had left his cave to find that strange dwellings had sprung up around her home, and she was talking and laughing with creatures that looked almost like her. Unable to take another step, he had watched from a distance, then retreated to his cave, overcome with grief that she had found others to make her happy. From that point on, he refused to shape-change. Though he missed her, his pride stopped him from returning to the surface to be by her side. She did not need him.
Unaware of his moody state, she began to visit him instead. Excited, she told him about her new creatures. She had gotten the idea from him and decided to make a race of beings that looked like her. She called them hue-men because they glowed with the same light that she did. She told him that this glow was a colour called blue. Many things had begun to emit this colour because of her influence: the water, the sky… Then she had told him that he, Dragon, was the colour of the setting sun—orange, yellow and gold.
At first, she visited him frequently, which soothed his bruised soul. Laughing at his stubbornness, she would sit herself down upon his nose and talk to him about everything that she had been up to. She spoke to him animatedly about her latest projects and how her world was growing. But mostly she spoke about her new hue-mans. She was always excited about them: their intelligence, their capacity for good and their ability to care for each other. She had taught them to help her tend the world she had created. She wanted to share that joy with him and tried to coax him out of his lair to meet them, but he always refused. Things were working well, and he saw no reason to change that.
When the Red Man came from the vastness of space, her visits grew sporadic. Curious and missing her presence, he discovered yet another talent for far-sight, and began to view her interactions from the comfort of his lair. Every time he saw them together his chest would ache. She found the Red Man exciting and challenging. So close had they grown that she had even told him her true name, the one with which she had arrived on the planet. That had hurt him because only he had known up until now. The Red Man found her captivating and lived in awe at the connection she had with the lives she had created.
Unable to stop himself, he continued to watch. She seemed happy, but he did not like the Red Man. He began to track his movements…and what he saw began to worry him. The Red Man was spiteful, devious, and cruel. He seemed envious of the power she held over creation.
The Red Man wanted that connection for himself and when he couldn’t replicate it, he began to steal it from the living. For a while, chaos ruled, for no matter how much the Red Man stole the blue hue from the living, he was unable to generate the same connection between himself and the living beings of the planet, which made the man increasingly vengeful.
Concerned, Dragon changed his form and snuck in to visit her while the Red Man was away. Surprised to see him, she fell into his arms the second he entered her abode. For Dragon, it felt like coming home. They had conversed throughout the night, and he expressed his fears over the planetary interloper. Leaving her the next morning had wrenched his soul, but he did not want the Red Man to know of his existence. He had hoped that his knowledge of the man’s movements might save some of the creatures being experimented upon…but it was too late.
When the Red Man made his bid for power, she had become so intricately bound to the energies that sustained the planet that the mass genocide of her subjects made her ill. Dragon watched it all from his cavern, unsure how to intervene. All over the planet, the hue was dying. So was she. He knew that if she were to die, he too would die. All life would fail. He was not surprised when she turned up at his dwelling with a little hue-man in tow.
Her idea was outrageous, but he had agreed anyway, and it had worked. The summoning was over and now he was back. Gathering his thoughts, Dragon turned away from his body and let himself sink below the earth’s crust. He drifted with the magma flow, and though he could not feel it, the heat warmed his soul and welcomed him home.
It was a strange feeling. This planet was his home and yet so much had changed since his lady last walked upon its surface. What he saw with his far-sight filled him with sadness. Though life had survived—had even flourished—this world looked vastly different from the one she had created. It was made of hard, ugly lines, full of angles and edges that grew in clusters all over the planet like a bad skin infection. Within these, lived millions of the tiny people but their lights were out—not one of them glowed with hue.
They sensed it too, that something was missing from their lives. It was why they were tearing the planet apart. Each was searching for what they knew was there, hidden from view, but could never find. Huge holes were cut into the ground, mined for resources that became toxins that fouled the air. Giant metal things made noises all over the planet; some of them even flew. Vast patches of land were parched; others were poisoned and unable to support life.
The tiny humans also wore stones on their bodies and attributed special significance to these rocks and crystals: some had special healing powers, while some portrayed wealth or ownership. They were driven by the need to possess bigger or better materialistic items than their neighbours. It was a pitiful sight, for he knew what they were looking for, and he was saddened that such a connection lay out of their reach.
He scanned the surface, searching for Life Stealer, but could not locate his presence, though his influence upon this new version of the earth was everywhere.
Focusing, Dragon channelled his thoughts back to the body of the man he had just inhabited and found him still in the forest with the girl.
All was not lost. It warmed him to see that there were a few beings who still held the spark of hue within them.
She had said it would happen.
The tiny hue-man had finally summoned him and now he, Dragon, was awake and aware. It was only a matter of time before the events—predicted long ago—would finally unfold.
