Blessings and Trials (Exiles and Sojourners Book 1)

  BLESSINGS AND TRIALS

  EXILES AND SOJOURNERS BOOK I

  BY THOMAS DAVIDSMEIER

  © 2018 Thomas Davidsmeier

  All rights reserved. No part of the content of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database retrieval system, or copied by any technology yet to be developed without the prior written permission of the author. You may not circulate this book in any format.

  Produced by Wisecraft Press, an Imprint of Superversive Press

  ISBN: 978-1-925645-94-1

  PRELUDE

  A song of the Sojourners:

  Abide with me, fast fails the evening wind,

  The darkness closes in, Lord, with me abide;

  When faithful servants fall and false ones flee,

  Help of the helpless, O abide with me!

  Swift to their end come our life’s precious day,

  Kosmos’ joys grow dim, its glories pass away;

  Lies and deceit from all around I hear,

  O Thou the ever true, abide with me!

  I need Thy presence every passing hour,

  What but Thy grace can foil the Prince’s power?

  Who like Thyself my guide and stay can be?

  Through storm and clear sky, O abide with me!

  Hold Thou Thy word before my closing eyes,

  Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies;

  Through my Door morning breaks, and vain shadows flee,

  In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me!

  CHAPTER 1 - SURVIVORS

  23rd of Sorun, 2nd Year, 31st Aion

  “And I saw the Prince and his rebellious host falling from the Heavens, like embers cast off of the great fire that was the wrath of God. So, the six hundred and sixty-six Exiles came into the world, each twisted to its own way.”

  – Songs of the Sons, Pendan’s Song

  A broad smile spread across the old man’s face. A young girl weaved her way toward him through a maze of parcels and people.

  “Grandfather!”

  “Ingrid! What are you doing here?” Vänlig Ullwitt caught her in a hug. “You aren’t leaving on this skyship now, are you?”

  He tried to hide the hope in his voice as he thought, She has only seen ten summers, Blessed or not. She should be evacuating too. But the plan would not have changed tonight. He sighed as he hugged her more tightly.

  A door creaked in the distance. The sound of a faraway commotion filtered down into the crowded underground room.

  “No, Grandfather.” Ingrid giggled. “We’re still leaving on next month’s dirigible.”

  Her innocent face became serious. “I just came to see you off and say goodbye again. And, I brought some honey cakes for the trip. Maybe you could save some for the little ones when you get there. That way they can remember their big sister while we’re apart.”

  Taking the little bundle from Ingrid, her grandfather reassured her, “Your little brothers and sister are going to be so happy to see you again whether you bribe them with sweets or not!”

  “Give them all hugs from me,” said Ingrid as she hugged him again. She buried her golden-haired head in Vänlig’s side. Inhaling deeply, Ingrid savored the smell of sage that always clung to her grandfather’s clothes.

  A shrill whistle rang out, louder than any shout.

  Blue eyes wide, Vänlig looked up and immediately extricated himself from Ingrid’s embrace. At the foot of the stairs stood a guard. Cuts crossed his face. His clothes and armor were covered with soot and ash.

  A mixture of fear, anger, and defiance filled the battered guard’s voice. “We are being attacked. More abominations! To arms! All who are able, to arms!” He did not wait for a response. The crowd was too shocked to give him one. He turned and sprang back up the stairs to the tower above.

  Dread rippled through the room. Vänlig stood in stunned silence. Are they the same monsters as last time? The Faithful fought them off easily enough, but two of them have left since then. The guard looked like it’s going badly. And he said abominations! Vänlig remembered some of the half-human things he had met in his younger days and shuddered.

  As the man opened the door to the tower above, people turned to each other. Before anyone uttered a word, shouts echoed down the stairs.

  “Back! Back, you wretched demonspawn!”

  The heavy door at the top of the stairs slammed shut.

  A maelstrom of motion and voices erupted around the room. Vänlig dropped to a knee as quickly as his old body would let him. He grasped his granddaughter by the shoulders, “Ingrid, run down to the village. Raise the alarm. If you see Haliel and Dargar, send them here.”

  “But…” Tears brimmed in Ingrid’s eyes. “Can’t I stay here with…” A dark look from Vänlig stopped the question on her trembling lips. She looked away, blinking her tears back. “My friends are in the library. I need to go warn them.”

  “Do it on your way then, but you must be quick.”

  A woman near the stairway screamed. A man beside her slapped wildly at her shoulders and back. A glimpse of something on the woman’s cloak sent a revolting memory through Vänlig’s mind. He got up, the rush of danger beating old age, and dashed over to help.

  Wrapping the tail of his cloak around his hand, Vänlig reached out. He caught a spider-like creature the size of a man’s fist and pulled it off of the woman’s back. “I got it, Olga, I got it. You’re all right!”

  A man beside Olga did his best to help calm her. Meanwhile, Vänlig stared down at the unnatural eight-legged thing in his hand. The creature squirming in his hand resembled a large spider, except for two features. At the end of each of its eight legs was a tiny human hand, and it had a tiny woman’s face with eight glittering black eyes.

  Vänlig drew his knife and dispatched the creature. He dropped the body on the floor and viciously stomped it for good measure.

  “Spideresses!” shouted Vänlig. “Daughters of Arachne! This one was small. They all have poisonous bites! We have to keep them out. Everyone who can, help me move the baggage to block the stairway. We’ll need to seal it.”

  To their credit, none of the crowd in the underground meeting hall panicked. Most of them began pushing, pulling, and piling everything they could in front of the stairway. Others fell to their knees and began praying.

  Vänlig caught sight of a pale-faced Ingrid in the middle of the swirling crowd. He dropped a satchel on the growing pile and went to her. Fighting back the urge to chasten her, he managed, “Ingrid, you’ve got to go. Right now.”

  The young girl was staring right past him into the distance. She whispered something. With all of the noise, he had to lean in close to hear.

  “Am I ever going to see you again, Grandfather?” Two large, round tears rolled down over Ingrid’s round cheeks.

  “Of course you are, Ingrid. If not here, then at the foot of our Savior’s throne.” With his age-spotted hand, Vänlig tenderly brushed Ingrid’s tears away. “And remember, He’ll wipe all our tears away for good when we see Him there. But, I don’t want to see you there any time soon. So move!”

  Finally, the little girl tore herself away. She made a beeline for a doorway out of the meeting hall. Vänlig watched her to make sure she made it out, then turned back toward the growing barricade.

  Two men were pushing a large crate. Vänlig leaned down and helped. The whole process would have gone much faster if they were not all so old. As it was, they were doing as well as could be expected.

  One of the men who had pushed the crate with Vänlig grabbed his arm as they turned to get more baggage. “
Brother Ullwitt, how do you know about these spider abominations?”

  “Before I became a Sojourner, my family sold sheep to the temple of Arachne in our city. They used our sheep as food for the Daughters. They always asked us if we could get them thralls instead.” Vänlig shivered for a fraction of a second at the memory.

  “Well, when you became a Sojourner I guess they had to find a new supplier.” The other man chuckled, as they both bent down and started heaving a chest.

  “Not actually. When I became a Sojourner, the rest of my family disowned me. For all I know, they’re still selling sheep to the Spideresses. Actually, knowing my brothers, they have taken them up on the requests for thralls by now.” Vänlig growled as they pushed the chest into place.

  “Well, I for one, thank you for your restraint. I used to be a thrall. Rather glad I never got eaten by a ‘spideress’, as you call them,” answered the man.

  They grabbed smaller bags and tossed them into the gaps.

  “Never say never, Brother Bjornson. Especially with what’s on the other side of this pile of luggage.”

  As if on cue, three fist-sized spideresses and another even larger one popped through the last hole in the barricade. A man near the barricade shouted a warning, and another man slammed a trunk into the hole, stoppering it. The invaders swarmed and bit both men.

  Chaos erupted. People swung bags, whipped cloaks, and stabbed at the creatures with whatever they had available. One feisty grey-haired woman chased a spideress around with a pair of knitting needles until Vänlig smashed it flat with a frying pan.

  The knitting-needle woman laughed, “And I thought I was good with a frying pan.”

  “Where’s the big one?” shouted Vänlig, counting three slain creatures.

  “Over here!” croaked a woman. She was slumped against a wall, by the doorway Ingrid had left through. The woman cradled her arm to her chest, and everyone could see two wounds from spider fangs on her forearm.

  Ingrid flew down the dark hallway to the library despite her heavy heart. If she hadn’t known the way so well, she would have smacked into the closed door. She managed to skid to a stop and fling open the library door all at once. She darted into the room and slammed the door closed behind her.

  Litharus, a boy two years older, looked up at her with brown, thoughtful eyes. Gwyndolyn, two years younger than Ingrid, did not look up from her book. The life cycle of honey bees was too engrossing for her to brook any interruption.

  “Litharus, Gwyndolyn, thank goodness you’re still here,” gasped Ingrid.

  Litharus dipped one eyebrow on his brown face quizzically. He set down his copper plate. “Where were we going to go? I’ve got a good half-hour of geography work left. My mom said I’m supposed to have this whole map done by tomorrow.” He ran his hand back over his close-cropped, frizzy hair. It was a conscious imitation of his father whom Litharus tried to emulate in almost every way.

  The boy’s mundane response brought Ingrid up short. Words escaped her for a moment. She could barely understand that this was really happening. She just wanted her family all safe and back together.

  Litharus continued, “And, you know how Gwinny gets when she’s reading. She’s fallen into the world of bees and shows no sign of climbing back out anytime soon.”

  With her slim finger, the younger girl was tracing the hand-drawn illustration of a hive in cross section. Gwyndolyn was determined to learn everything there was to know about God’s creation. “I’m not far enough into bees to miss you calling me that name.” She pushed a curly silver lock over her ear as she turned the page. “I am Gwyndolyn, if you please. ‘Gwinny’ is far too babyish for a girl of my years.” The eight-year-old didn’t lift her green eyes from the five-times-life-sized bee illustration she was now examining.

  “Come on, we’ve got to go now,” urged Ingrid dumbly.

  Despite their differences, the children shared an important bond. They were all Blesseds, each born with the potential to control one of the five elements. Litharus was a Stonewright, as his dark hair and skin suggested. Gwyndolyn’s silver hair and coppery complexion matched her Aetherial Blessing. And, Ingrid’s blue eyes and blond hair marked her as a member of the race of Waterwrights. They had manifested their Blessings at similar times and had since been inseparable as they had trained and learned together.

  Their friendship did not help Litharus or Gwyndolyn understand Ingrid any better. The older boy looked at her quizzically and laughed. “My mom said to finish my work first, so as tempting as it is to go and play, I’ve got to finish first.” Litharus proudly always went ‘by the book,’ just like his centurion father.

  “No, you don’t understand! There are monsters coming! We’re being attacked again. We’ve got to get to the village as fast as we can. Come on!” She ran down the narrow stairway and grabbed onto Litharus’s cloak, tugging him out of his seat toward the stairs.

  Pulled to his feet, Litharus cried, “Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”

  “Why didn’t she say what?” asked Gwyndolyn, her face still buried in the book.

  “Come on, Gwinny,” Litharus snapped, trying to take charge like his father would have done, “We’ve got to go. Leave the book; it’s half the size of you, and it would slow you down too much.”

  The tiny eight-year-old looked up at her friend with a stormy frown. Gwyndolyn wanted to be an adult already. “I can carry it just fine.”

  “No, you can’t. Now get up and move,” commanded Litharus imitating his Father’s centurion bark.

  Meekly, Gwyndolyn set the book down, leaving it open to her page. She got up and followed her older friends to the steps, still a little confused.

  Descendants of Borea, Soru, and Pendan, they represented three of the five sons of Enoch. Ingrid was from Skysend, a northern skyship port, and Litharus was from the Kaladarian Empire to the south. Gwyndolyn’s family had moved between big skyport cities all over the continents. But none of their various experiences prepared them for what happened next. All three stopped at the foot of the steps when they heard the scratching at the library door.

  The only doorway into the room was high on one wall, with a landing in front of it. Stairs descended down to the lower floor where the children had gathered next to a heavy oak table.

  “What is that?” whispered Litharus, as the scratching continued.

  Ingrid whispered back through clenched teeth, “Some of the attackers are abominations of Arachne.”

  Gwyndolyn was all the way back from the world of bees now and not so sure she was an adult after all. Her eyes filled with fear. “That’s the only way out of here...”

  The scratching became increasingly insistent. It moved back and forth across the bottom of the door. The scratching paused for a moment, and Ingrid hoped that it was gone. Then the sound started again and climbed up and down the door. The scratching paused again, but before Ingrid could get her hopes up, a horrible retching sound came from beyond the door.

  A sizzling followed that sounded like eggs frying in butter. Then, the doorknob simply fell off of the door with a loud clang. The door slowly opened a few inches. First one, then another, then another tiny white hand slipped through the crack.

  “Little one, little one, let me come in!” came a high-pitched, singsong voice. With a clattering fit of laughter at its own joke, the spideress pushed open the door. “The big, bad spideress is here!”

  The monster’s body was only two feet long from mouth parts to spinnerets, but its arching legs made it look larger. Surveying the library, it chirped, “I see your footsteps, little one, little, tender, juicy, delicious one, but I don’t see you. The daughters of Arachne can see much more with our eyes than you can. Do not worry. I will find you soon, and then I will wrap you up as a present to my mother. She will be so very pleased. We don’t get the tender, juicy ones often. Oh, what is this?” The spideress’s voice screeched high at the end.

  The spideress scuttled down the stairs with a disturbingly inhuma
n gait. The face that looked like a woman never changed as it approached the table where the children had been sitting moments before. The spideress’s eyebrows did not move, her lips were still, and none of her eight eyes even blinked. Still, a voice came out of the being. “I see you were holding this copper plate. Aha! And this book! Wait, oh these chairs still glow with warmth. There have been little ones sitting here just a few moments ago. I believe I shall be wrapping... three presents!”

  The voice jumped up another octave to the edge of human hearing, “One for me! One for me!” The spideress was prancing and capering about atop the table on its human-handed eight legs as it spoke. “There will be enough to have one for me! One for me!”

  The spideress froze in mid-prance when the library door suddenly slammed open with a thunderous crash. If it had eyelids, its eyes would have widened in surprise.

  “Is one of these what you wanted?” Vänlig shouted.

  He reared back and whipped a cast iron skillet down on the spideress from the landing.

  The edge of the pan came down perfectly in the middle of the spideress’s face, four eyes on one side, four eyes on the other. The sound was disgusting, as was the smell. The pan cleaved the abomination into two messy halves. Splashes of yellow ichor ruined the bee book’s five-times-life-sized illustration. Spatters of something from inside the monster landed on Litharus’s copper map and turned it green. The pan bounced off the oak table and clattered to the stone floor, leaving only a soft hissing of some spidery fluid dissolving the metal.

  Vänlig looked around the seemingly empty library in horror. “Ingrid? Are you in here?”

  “We’re over here, Grandpa!” came a cry from inside a large scroll box. An avalanche of scrolls came tumbling down from in front of the children. Litharus stepped out first, his knife still drawn, prepared to protect them. Ingrid hopped down carefully to avoid stepping on any of the scrolls. “I was praying for God to save us, and He did!”