Extract from the King's Shadow

This is an extract from the King's Shadow, Book One of the Soul Keys. This novel hasn't been edited, so expect the odd mistake.

The faeries go hunting and stop to make camp one night and something strange comes over them while they dance.

Salir seated himself outside his tent, in its shade, not as far toward the center of the gathering as the other faeries were, but he knew the others could still see him. An Elemental brought him wine and some food and he settled back against a pile of cushions to eat and relax, trying not to look at Divor'an and the elf girl who sat opposite him. He was not in the mood to watch his brother and consort flirting and kissing and touching another.

The air was thick with the smell of smoke and yellow grass. Its sweet scent filled Salir's senses, mingling with the scent and taste of alcohol to speed up his intoxication. The air felt alive, electric. Salir felt it flowing through him, through every cell in his body. Everything felt alive. The air felt nervous and tense, like it was before a storm, and thick with anticipation, and Salir needed to drink the wine, to loose himself in the peace of being drunk as he had never needed to before. It was such a weird feeling. One he had never felt before, as though something was moving inside of him, stirring, awakening. He hadn't felt like this before, and he needed to drink, needed to loose himself, distance himself from everything.

In front of him, things were changing. The faeries that had been drinking and smoking were no longer doing so. They were dancing. All the faeries on the hunt were dancing. They whirled around the fire, but the dance had changed. No longer was it the elegant whirl of silks and velvets and long limbs moving through practised and planned steps, it was now a passionate whirl. Spontaneous and violent. Wild. Hair flew free from its tight bonds, makeup smudged on pale skin, layers of clothing were ripped free. The music was manic, a wild, spontaneous mix of music, loud and eerie, and the faeries danced to it like puppets, jerking mechanically on their strings, or like dolls, as though they had no bones inside of them, so fluid and liquid they were. No one was oblivious to the dance around the fire, no faerie lay making love to various partners, no faeries smoked their ivory pipes, no faeries drank themselves unconscious. Everyone danced. Everyone except Salir and Divor'an.

Divor'an sat across the fire from Salir, his head close to that of the pretty elf he had ridden alongside, totally oblivious to the whirling dance of his fellows, of the dance that had returned them to their true element. He was oblivious, but the elf was not. She watched it all with wide eyes, her bare, slender feet, tapping on the ground to the same rhythm the dancers had sunken into, her body moving where she sat. She seemed only vaguely aware of Divor'an. Her mind was elsewhere.

Now the faeries were magic. Now they were something more than the lusting, selfish creatures that they were normally. Now they were true magic, true spirits of earth and air, fire and water, and they did not even know it. These were true faeries, the faeries that Salir saw in his dreams sometimes, the faeries that were free and unrestrained from their own game of politics and their own selfish needs and desires. These were the faeries that were the anthropomorphic extension of nature. The alien dance was hypnotic and natural, and yet, at the same time there was something very wrong about it. Something that didn't feel right. Never had a dance degraded into such a chaotic swirl of wild magic and it was starting to take over Salir's mind and his soul. He wanted to leave, he wanted to escape and retreat to the safety of his tent, as he could see that Divor'an was about to do, yet he couldn't. He could only remain where he was, his eyes glued to the whirling dance that went on before him. The sound of their drumming feet and the intense beat of the music passed right through every nerve and vein in his body, through his very soul and mind.

Divor'an walked passed him, his hand holding that of the slender elf, as they moved into the king's tent, and Salir saw them from the corner of his eye, and yet he didn't see them. He saw nothing, only the blacks shadows of strange and alien creatures moving and twisting on the walls of the silken tents around them.