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The Vale

J R Harlow

Prologue

It all began when I was nine. In the year of one thousand forty-eight, in the village of Fairtime. My father was a cobbler, it wasn't the most glorious life but there was at least food on the table. I had two older brothers, and we'd play in the field outside of town for hours... That's all taken away from me now. Shortly after my ninth birthday, my brothers and I were playing just behind the house. We were playing hide and seek. I wanted to hide where I didn't think my brothers would find me, so I went to the edge of the forest. That's where it all went wrong.

I was crouching in a bush, waiting for my brothers to find me. There was a hand on my shoulder, it pulled me backwards further into the bushes. I cried out because the thorns tore at my skin, and the dress my dad had just given me for my birthday, but my captor didn't care. I noticed through my tears that the forest didn't look quite like it should. Trees changed colors, as if cycling through all the seasons at once, and danced in a nonexistent breeze. The sky changed to purple, then green, then a sort of red color. The only constant was the thorn ridden hedge that seemed to close shortly behind us.

When we finally stopped, my captor drug me up roughly, then slapped me back to the ground. "Quit your crying girl." He warned, kneeling down. "I won't make a profit off you if you aren't presentable." I saw my captor for the first time then. He was very similar to a werewolf, tall and muscular, his eyes were full of fury, and he had the face and fur of a wolf.

He violently thrust his clawed hands against my stomach. With a bright light my clothes and wounds began to mend. He tied a tight rope around my neck. With a sharp tug he began to drag me down off of the hill we'd been standing on. That was my first view of the shining city Arcadia, home of the fae, my home for the next twelve years of my life. I wasn't on the slave market long. In fact, I can't even remember going to the slave market. The man who became my master met us on the way into the city. His name was Lorzana'athala Ortheise. He was a short, bespectacled, young fox-man. When I first saw him though, he looked every bit as impressive as the city of terrible wonders that surrounded him. He told my captor, whose name I always remembered from that point on, that he owed him some debt. After an intense argument that almost went to blows, I was reluctantly handed over.

Ortheise, his unique name as he called it, insisted on being called Harlow. He wanted me to use the name that he used when he traveled to worlds like mine. He told me that he had to keep me for a while, some sort of fae law having to do with the previous debts. However, he was a kind fae. He taught me how to read and write, so I could keep his books organized for him. He taught me the basic magic needed to survive in the twisting and fluid world he lived in. Over all, he almost treated me like I was his child instead of his slave. One day he came to me and said I could go free. He told me to go back to my world where I belonged and he showed me how to get back through the hedge surrounding his world.

Even though my time there had been enjoyable enough, given the circumstances, I was excited to get home. There was a catch though, one Harlow even forgot about. Time in the Vale, the world where Arcadia is located, doesn't move in straight lines like it does in my world. It moves in random patterns. For me, twelve years had passed. For the rest of the world, two hundred and fifty years had passed. Harlow apologized, not knowing what else to do. In his way of "making it up to me," he set me up with a decent enough life. He got me a job at a library, gave me a house he owned, and left me enough money to survive the first while on my own. With a final sorrowful hug, and an attempt to fight off crying, he left back through the hedge.

I can't blame Harlow, it wasn't his fault the entire situation occurred. No, there is only one person I still blame to this day. The one who took my family, my life, everything away from me, and left some construct in my place to live my life, have my kids, and die on my deathbed. My entire life was literally stolen from me. I will not stop until I have my revenge, I will not stop until I catch the slaver of the innocent. I screamed his name aloud as I cut my palm with a knife, planting it on the ornate runed circle in the ballroom of the mansion. "Therindeir'olas Aseir!" I shouted as the purple-blue light filled the room. "I have found a way to tame a hunter more fierce than yourself, and though it may cost me my life and soul, I know I'll drag you down with me!" The room went dark. Somewhere behind me, beside me, and in front of me, on all sides all at once I heard a laugh. Cold and dark as a winter night.

I had done it, I'd reached into the darkness of another plane, I'd pulled from it the apex predator, capable of bringing entire empires to ruin by themselves.After all, I thought, what match is a fae for a demon?

Chapter 1:

From the gathering darkness I heard an echoing laugh. Sarcastic and cruel sounding. Eventually the darkness swallowed me whole. A female voice rang out, "if you've found the way to summon me, you must know the price for what you ask." I felt a presence shifting in the darkness around me. "Very well then, speak your purpose. If I accept, I'll make a contract with you. If I don't, I'll extract my reward for coming all the way here right now."

"Demon," I called, "I wish for you to aid me in exacting vengeance against Therindeir'olas Aseir of Arcadia." I placed my bleeding hand back against the circle. "As your reward you will obtain not only my soul but his."

That laugh again, every time it made me shudder. "A fae soul? That's harder to take than you think dearie." The voice said, I realized that I was being analyzed like a prey animal as her voice circled me. "What is to stop me from rejecting this request?"

"I've found a way to kill him, but I need your help to get it."

The circling sensation stopped. I felt her focus fixed just behind me. "Well... If what you say is true, I've always wondered what those bastards taste like." There was a small pause, as if she was thinking. "You've got a deal, now all you have to do is sign the contract."

With my slashed hand still pressed to the circle I turned to the demon. "My blood is my signature, my body and soul the payment, my command yours to follow." The circle reignited with purple flames that wrapped around my arm, burning me to the core. The darkness cleared, I saw her for the first time. She stood nearly eight feet tall, from the waist up she looked very similar to the fae slaver. A sleek female wolf shape, with the arms and bare breasts of a human. Her eyes were the same shining purple as the flames scorching my arm. Her lower body was that of a black widow spider, with eight long legs, and a bright red symbol on her back. Not a sand timer, but the nine pointed star of summoning that called her into existence. Around the demon's slender neck was tattooed a pattern of runes, and when the fire on my arm cleared the same pattern spiraled across my arm from wrist to elbow.

I felt light headed. The world swam around me, and I felt myself fall. When I awoke I was laying on one of the sofas in the living room. The television, which I had only gained understanding of a short while ago, was turned on. A young girl, about the same age as myself, sat with her legs crossed and her head on her chin idly watching it. She was about my height, with short dark hair, dark green eyes, a denim jacket with torn off sleeves was draped over her shoulders, she wore a pink and black striped tank top, and black sweat pants and blue sneakers. Over all, she was pretty cute. I began to wonder where she had come from, until I saw it, that same purple pattern around her neck, masquerading as a tattoo. "Did you sleep well?" She asked sarcastically, without even looking over her shoulder.

"What happened?" I asked her, sitting up on the sofa.

"Magic doesn't naturally exist in your world, at least not as powerfully as it does in others." She said, "If you hadn't had the left over magic from Arcadia itself still in your veins, you probably wouldn't have been able to summon me at all." She let out a snort, "Irony there being, the person you're hunting gave you the ability TO hunt him."

I was suddenly puzzled, "if magic doesn't exist here, how did he get here in the first place. I mean, you just said yourself, if magic doesn't exist in a world you couldn't have come through to it."

She turned and looked at me, "Wrong, I said you couldn't have summoned me. Not that beings can't come through to this place, or leave." She turned now fully facing me on the floor. "The Vale is the world on the northern edge of the void, where magic is the strongest, your world is in the middle south, where it's getting weaker." She noticed my confusion and sighed, "The void at the edge of all realities is exactly as it sounds, void. The worlds in between the borders of the void laid out on a typical map, north, east, south, west represent a sort of bizarre phenomenon. The world's further in the "north" of this map are more magical, The Vale being furthest out. The world's at the "south" have no magic, or less magic, the furthest out there is called "Earth." A being can move from a magical world to a non magical world with no problem. A fae can go back easier because of the sheer residual magical energy clinging to them." She pointed to herself, "I'm a demon, I come from a magical plane, sure, but demons are often summoned because of contracts, and etcetera. We also cannot typically leave our home world if we get sent back there. It's a sort of hell-like environment, where you're there to stay once you've gone back there."

When I blinked with no response to her grand educational lecture, she smacked her palm to her face. "So how does summoning work on your end?" I asked her.

"Well," she said, folding her legs out straight and leaning back, "when you cast the spell, every demon in the pit heard your voice. There was a large white hole in the sky in the shape of your circle you drew. We had to claw and clamor to see who got there first, luckily I was the fiercest, fastest, and hungriest of all of them."

"Hungriest?"

"Each soul we eat sustains us only as long as the person we took it from lived."

"So when you take mine?"

"It will satisfy me only about twenty or so years before I have to go hunting again." She shifted again, to a kneeling position. "Speaking of which, you signed the contract... What orders would you give me, my lady."

"Firstly, what is your name?"

"My name is Lelith De BellaNocturne."

"Very well, I order you, Lelith, to um... I don't know what to do I've never had a servant before."

"Well what do you want?" She said, cocking her head to the side.

My stomach grumbled, "Well I guess both of us are pretty hungry," I said with a laugh.

"Very well, my lady, I shall fetch you food as quickly as I can." Her form shuddered a little, as she disappeared from the living room. She appeared again a few minutes later with a brown bag in her hands. The smell of food from the small place down the street filled the room.

"How did you know what I wanted?"

"I read your mind, not so much your thoughts, just your feelings." She sat down and began to unpack the food, "I can read thoughts, but I generally don't want to. Humans either don't have anything interesting going on, or they have some sort of perverted notions of what they can do with my human form... Some even want to try things with my demon form." She said popping a piece of orange chicken into her mouth.

"That must be awkward for you."

"Funny that you should care so much for me, though we've barely met, and all I really want from you is your soul."

"I can't help it, it's just, I've never really had any friends my own age, not since I've been taken away to Arcadia, it's nice just to sit and talk."

"I am four hundred and eighty three years old, I highly doubt we are the same age."

"You know what I mean though."

"It's not as awkward as you'd think," Lelith said, shifting the subject back off potential friendship, "with as many masters as I've had I've seen, heard, and been ordered to do it all."

We sat eating in silence for some time. "You should rest soon," Lelith said, "we have a long way to go tomorrow, and I want to start out early."

"But you don't know where we're going."

"Remember, now that the contract's in place, I know exactly what you want and why. I know you have the desire to get your hands on an ancient chain, forged by dwarves, to capture beings with godly strength. We both know where to find it, but you can't get there without me. From there we have to gather a holly spear, the spear covered in the blood of Baldr, am I correct?"

"Very well, I guess you're right." I put the last empty container of food on the table. "I'll take the couch and you can have the bed," I said flopping back down, "it must have been tiring getting here."

"I do not require sleep." She said, standing up and grabbing the trash of the table. "So I do not need accommodations for such."

"Goodnight then," I said pulling the blanket back up over myself, and I whispered, "Starting tomorrow you bastard, I'm coming for you."