THE BITTERBYNDE TRILOGY

Book One: The Ill-Made Mute

(c) Cecilia Dart-Thornton.

FOUNDING.
Speechless, castaway and wry, a spellbound oddity am I.
My feet are planted in the clay, my gaze is locked upon the sky.
(From the Talith song “Yearning for Flight”.)

The rain was without beginning and without end. It pattered on incessantly, a drumming of impatient fingers.
The creature knew only the sound of the rain and the rasp of its own breathing.  It had no concept of its own identity, no memory of how it had come to this place. Inchoate purpose drove it upward, in darkness. Over levels of harsh stone it crawled, and through dripping claws of vegetation.  Sometimes it slept momentarily, or perhaps lost consciousness. 
The rain lapsed. 
Time wore away.

With stiffening limbs the nameless entity moved on. Reaching level ground it now reared up on its hind legs and walked.  Thought-fragments whirled like dead leaves inside its skull.
The ground emptied from beneath its feet. It hurtled downwards, to be brought up sharply on a spear-point of agony. A band around its forelimb had snagged on a projection. The scrawny thing dangled on the cliff face, slowly swinging like bait on a hook.
Then slowly, with great effort, it lifted its other arm.  Bird-boned fingers found the band's catch and released it.  The band sprang open and the creature fell. 
Had it landed on the rocks it would have been killed - a kinder fate - but it finished instead, face down in a green thicket of Hedera paradoxis.  Stealthily, the juices of the poisonous leaves ate into its face while it lay there for hours, insensate.  When it awoke it was too weak to scream - it used its last energies to crawl from the toxic bushes and lie frozen in the morning sunlight, with its now-ghastly face turned up to the sky.

*****

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