Glimmer in the Maelstrom: Shadow Through Time 3 by Louise Cusack Page A

royalty, but his thoughts were obviously fixed on her recovery — selfishly at this point, because he wanted to be reunited with his king, to have distractions from the horror of remembering his son’s death. Her rest was simply a means to an end. In time, however, Glimmer hoped he would care for her without the need for ulterior motives.
    In the privacy of her own mind she dreamt of more than a Champion’s concern from Kert. Her dreams were of love; wild as a waterfall, reckless as the wind and as enduring as time itself.
    Lying still on the rock floor, she thought about that, about the poetry of her impetuous dreams, and the impossibility of them ever coming true. Time was not enduring. The linear time she existed in was about to end and she wanted to make the most of it.
    If she remained on the fast-moving world of Haddash she could live ten years with Kert while a bare twenty weeks passed on Ennae. During that time the Maelstrom would spread the elements of the Four Worlds across each other: water from Magoria, air from Atheyre, earth from Ennae and fire from Haddash. These elements would mix with each other creating catastrophic climatic conditions.
    Eventually, the four elemental worlds would be torn apart, and in that moment she must be standing on Ennae with the talisman, ready to focus her power to control the Maelstrom, drawing those elements to herself. Her body would form the gravitational centre of a new world, the One World, where the survivors of the Maelstrom might find a home, and where time would exist outside linear constraints.
    This was the ending humanity had been evolving towards, the task for which she had been born. Not to live, but to die.
    Those on Ennae thought her already dead, killed along with Lenid and Kert in the Volcastle mouth. But the despair of those counting on The Catalyst to save them did not touch Glimmer. Only Kert stirred her emotions. So although her best probability of joining the Four Worlds lay in an immediate return to Ennae to protect the anchors, she planned to stay on Haddash, with her love.
    The part of her mind still functioning logically also concerned itself with the threat that lay sleeping in the core of Haddash — the Fire God’s child. Either the egg must be found and destroyed, or the new serpent, when it hatched, must be made to serve her purpose. If it did not, the future would become terrible beyond mortal imagining. Glimmer knew she must not let that happen. Only, just now her powers were weak and her mind was muddied with desire and attraction.
    There would be time to attend to the Serpent God’s child … later.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    P agan of the House of Guardians stood patiently at the foot of the pale stone dais in the Volcastle’s circular great hall. Above him, surrounded by flickering candlelight, his beloved Lae of Be’uccdha performed her rites of office. Behind Pagan, on the solid timber pews that lined the hall, the remnants of Ennae’s nobility clustered in groups like bunches of oceanberries. All were silent, listening to the instruction of a seventeen-year-old girl who had newly inherited the title of The Dark.
    Grief had stiffened the soft lines of Lae’s narrow face, and her skin, a rich Be’uccdha black, appeared paler. The swirling tattoo of her calling was stark over the right side of her face, and the straight black hair Pagan longed to touch did not dance on her shoulders. Instead it had been scraped into a tight coil at her nape, accentuating the fragile lines of cheek and chin. Yet her voice was strong as it carried across the large room, offering comfort to those who had come to listen.
    ‘This is a time of uncertainty,’ she said, and there were murmurs of assent throughout the crowd. The peppery scent of luhz-kernel soap permeated the chamber and Pagan took heart from that. Many must have bathed with their last portions of the Verdan Forest specialty, and with rations low because of the long siege on their castle, this showed