Child of nature in a land of strife
Child of nature filled with life
Raise your voice to a brand new day
Grandfather Sun light your way
Taste the wind, feel the breeze
With Grandmother Moon take your ease
The Arch of Sky, gentle and blue
Joins up with Earth to watch over you
Child of nature in a land of strife
Child of nature filled with life
The power of Thunder in your voice
With rippling Water may you rejoice
The steadiness of Rocks give you your ground
Whispering Four Winds fill you with sound.
Medicine Bear and mighty Hawk
Beside Eagle and Otter may you safely walk.
Child of nature in a land of strife
Child of nature filled with life
(CABell, 5/1/95, with deference and appreciation to the Osage Amerind belief system)
(Comprised of an Introduction, Awakening, Acclimating, Healing, and Remembering)
The following story is the beginning of a larger work. It started with a basic concept: that of a woman with amnesia. At that point, all I knew was that she would have Amerindian features. Everything else was a large blank ... as were her memories. As the days went on, she developed a personality all her own, and snippets of ideas about her past fell into place. Her name was actually one of the last things to fall into place.
At the end of this tale, Anne Nightwolf, as she likes to call herself, is faced with her memories and her past, and vows to take action based on what she has learned. That story is a cooperative work that is currently having the finishing touches put upon it before release. The start of that story, The Outcasting, is linked below. The end of it will be posted when ... erm, um ... when my co-writer can unbury long enough to give me the last pieces of his part of the story ... :D
The gods were drumming wildly in her head. That was her first thought as she struggled towards full consciousness. Her pounding headache beat an insistent counterpoint to the powerful rumbling crashes around her. Streaks of brilliant light seared her eyeballs through her closed lids. True awareness took longer.
Not drumming. Thunder. Rain. A storm. But where was she? During the flashes of lightning, she could make out the fact that she was in a cave. But what cave? Where?
Dimly, she remembered awakening in the hold of what seemed to be a spacefaring vessel, and men waving odd-looking weapons at her, screaming that she was a stowaway. Panicked flight followed, a helter-skelter nightmare dreamscape of unfamiliar places and faces as she ran. She had headed for the hills, literally, and taken shelter in this cave just before the storm started.
Why was she here? She searched her memories and came up with ... nothing. Sitting upright in panicked terror, she almost fell over from the waves of dizziness and pain that hit her. Idly her brain cataloged hunger and exhaustion as the causes, but how had she gotten that way? Who was she? The wind, howling in mockery, was her only answer.
Doggedly, she tried again, mentally backtracking. The storm, the flight from the ship, waking up in the cargo hold, ... nothing. Blankness, and a sharp pain in her skull.
Trembling copper-skinned fingers reached up to massage her aching skull, brushing back long strands of black hair that had escaped her thick braid. Her troubled moan echoed oddly in the cave, almost swallowed by the sounds of the storm. "Who am I???"
The storm didn't seem inclined to help her, and her mind was oddly devoid of any answers.
The following days brought no answers, but many more questions.
She had painstakingly retraced the steps from her panicked flight: through the area she found was called Arden, onto the disconcerting transporter, and back onto Red Star Station, and from there to the docking bays with it's wide array of spacecraft.
Nobody recognized her and nothing looked familiar.
The only thing that kept her from total hysteria were her newfound friends who helped her find a needed balance and stability. Mixx, who got her a room in the Red Star Hotel and a credit chip, and promised to find her a job to repay him once she was settled. Lyric, who gave her a sympathetic ear and a crystal that eased her many headaches. Pal, who gave her the name Anne.
Most of the food, clothing and technology was unfamiliar. However, it wasn't totally incomprehensible. Perhaps she had at least heard of most of the technology before, but had not been a party to it?
Magic was more familiar, as was, it seemed, shapeshifting. She didn't learn until her second day in the area that she could shift into the form of a black wolf. She had been in an inn when someone started randomly attacking people. Startled, the next thing she knew, she was on all fours, a snarling, snapping black wolf. She never did figure out who was more startled, herself or the man who had started the mess.
But still, no memories. Nobody with any past knowledge of a slender, copper-skinned woman in her early 20's, with long black hair, brown eyes, and an almost regal bearing.
She and Mixx became closer during the following days. He was kind, tender and attentive, and she was lost, alone, and in need of comfort. He even said he loved her. She didn't love him, but cared for him quite a bit. It was enough, for the moment.
Then her latent magics were triggered during a romantic interlude with Mixx, and, though she did not know it, she had just guaranteed that once her memory returned, she would never be fully accepted in her homeland again.
How to cope with the loss of memory?
What to do if the past's a great mystery?
In your darkest hour, whatever the cost
Hold onto trust when all hope seems lost
Rely on new friends
Memories come rushing from my past
Each one more haunting than the last
My thoughts, which I can finally call my own
My dreams, when I am lying all alone
I'm thankful for friends
~~~~~
She had been sitting in front of the viewport at Red Star Station, staring out at the stars, musing. "Which one is mine? Will the Wakontah grant that I ever find it again? Or remember it once I find it?" Copper skinned fingers balled into fists of silent frustration.
Words from another language had been slipping into her speech patterns for days: Wakontah, the Great Spirit or Great Mystery; the mialuschka, the lost souls, the little people who revel in causing trouble; Kahameopah, Mooncrow. These little tidbits only caused silent tears of frustration. Tantalizing tidbits that hinted, but did not deliver, full remembrance.
A mute paladin, by the name of Eric approached her, communicating with gestures in a lopsided conversation. She was despondent enough to swallow her pride and accept the offered help.
His magic opened the way. Pain, loss, grief, sorrow, white-hot rage. Emotions that went rampaging through her slender frame as the veils of memory were drawn aside. Memories of death, corruption, betrayal, loss, leaving her weak and shaken -- cowering in her wolf-form in a corner, a low keening whine coming from her throat.
Forgetfulness had been a blessing, but with her memories came a sense of duty, and responsibility, to right the wrongs she had witnessed ... for the sake of her land, and its people. For herself, she had little hope. It was already too late.
If harnessing the latent magic that had been triggered by accident didn't kill her, she had to go home to stop a madman from destroying a kingdom. Either way, she would most likely end up dead.
After watching her father be killed by Ap-Jori, her half brother, then fighting off his advances and fleeing, the thought of death didn't scare her much anymore. The thought of that same half-brother in control of the kingdom, however, did. Her people, her land, deserved better than that.
Ap-Jori must be stopped, and she, Carana Honxiogathe, crown princess of the kingdom Hunka, was probably one of the few who could do so ... if she managed to control her forbidden magic.
Every woman in Hunkah had *latent* magic they could not touch. Magic belonged to the males. A woman's latent mage-ability increased as she grew older, and was considered part of her dowry, to be taken from her by her husband on their wedding night. This was tradition, and they were a very tradition-bound people. Regardless of what she had learned in her time away from Hunka, and her personal feelings about those traditions, she respected her people's right to hold onto their beliefs.
Those few women whose magics were activated in a non-traditional manner generally had their magics ripped from them in a very painful manner by the nearest powerful mage. Those who fled were generally destroyed by the wild magics within them. Only four women in the past decade had survived long enough to make the magics their own, and they had disappeared, either under their own power as outcasts, or by someone else's design.
Crown princess or not, they would most likely not suffer her and her magics to reside in the kingdom. However, with her half-brother, Ap-Jori having acquired the throne by murder, and her younger brother, Lebandren, in hiding, she hoped they would tolerate her long enough to let her help. They were her people. Hunka was her land, her heritage. She hoped they would consider her the lesser of two evils. She had to at least try.
Resolutely she made arrangements with a pilot to take her to Hunkah, using monies Lyric loaned her. She only hoped she lived long enough to repay the many favors she had received.
**All text on this page copyright 1995, 1996, 1998 by Christine A. Bell. Image copyright 1995 by Matthew Link. Reproduction prohibited without the express permission of the author.**
The Outcasting (the next segment in Anne's story)
Curious about the author? Visit my home page.