Princess Etheria and the Lost Queen Read online

PRINCESS ETHERIA

  and the Lost Queen

  A fairy tale that anyone can realize.

  PART 2

  in the Princess Etheria Chronicles

  Written and Illustrated

  by

  DWAYNE R. JAMES

  Copyright 2013 by Dwayne R. James

  Visit the Princess on the Web:

  https://www.princessetheria.com

  Also by DWAYNE R. JAMES

  Gingers & Wry

  Available from https://www.gingersandwry.com

  The Princess Etheria Chronicles

  A five part series from Dwayne R. James

  PART I

  PRINCESS ETHERIA

  and the Battling Bucks

  PART II

  PRINCESS ETHERIA

  and the Lost Queen

  PART III

  PRINCESS ETHERIA

  and the King's Surprise

  PART IV

  PRINCESS ETHERIA

  and the Stone Trees

  PART V

  PRINCESS ETHERIA

  and the Magic Words

  DEDICATION

  For my daughter Violet,

  who fills my waking world with wonder.

  The whole thing’s for you Peep,

  especially Chapter 24.

  May your dreams always be happy,

  May they all come true.

  May they live inside your memory in daylight too.

  And if you start to lose your faith in what dreams can do.

  Just remember my best dreams came to life with you.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 5 - Thunderhouse

  CHAPTER 6 - The Gallery

  CHAPTER 7 - Integration

  CHAPTER 8 - A Princess in Two Worlds

  CHAPTER 9 - The Memorality Ends

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 5

  Thunderhouse

  In Thenken, you can do more than simply reflect upon a memory, you can re-experience it completely if you wish. It’s something called a memorality, and it feels very, very real. It feels just as real as, well, a dream. So, even though Etheria was sitting in the glade holding a cup of tea, the moment she began to deeply think about and revisit the memory in her mind, she could feel it gradually taking hold of her.

  It was an odd feeling; it was like being in two places at once. She could still feel the rock beneath her, but the abrasive sounds of the angry bucks were well off in the distance now, and the bright colours of the glade were steadily washing away. She was crying in the memory so, once the memorality took over her eyes in the glade, they too began to water. The Princess closed her eyes, even as she brushed away the tears with the hem of her cloak.

  By closing her eyes, she appeared to hasten the onset of the memorality because, all at once, she could no longer feel the rock beneath her, and she was hit with the terrifying, uncomfortably familiar sense of vertigo. When the Princess opened her eyes again, she was now hanging in the air hundreds of feet above the ground, being held aloft by her arms, which were spread wide on either side of her, and adorned with large brown feathers tipped in white.

  True to her memory, it wasn’t an upsetting experience that was making her eyes water, but instead a strong wind that scoured her face as she was flying in the sky as a bird.

  As far as the memorality version of the Princess was concerned, occupying the body of an entirely different species of animal was still a new sensation for her. Just a month before this memory, she had learned the art of transfiguration, and she was out with her father the King trying to get the hang of it—literally.

  They had each assumed the form of a bird; Etheria of an immense eagle, and Rowan of a tiny barn swallow. Etheria had chosen the larger form because she had assumed that it would make it easier to manage high winds, yet even with this much mass behind her in the air, she was still finding herself being tossed around and buffeted. She was amazed that her father, in his much smaller form, didn’t seem to be having this problem. Her father looked as comfortable in the air as he did on the ground, and he was flipping and fluttering all around her. Although his wings were much smaller, and he hardly appeared to be beating them at all, he was still clearly able to keep pace with her. In fact, it was almost as if he was flying through sheer force of will alone. The Princess was also convinced that once, when she glanced over quickly in his direction, there had been a tiny elephant flapping oversized ears where her father should have been, but when she did a double-take, she could only see a swallow.

  Although Etheria’s flying skills had improved quite a bit since her first attempt last month, she was still getting used to the fact that the air had suddenly become a thick syrup that could support her weight, and that even the smallest movement of her wings affected the way in which she moved through it. She had learned to adjust her altitude to take advantage of tail winds, and found that she could glide for great distances and not lose any of her speed or height. It was because of this, she reasoned, that she wasn’t the least bit tired even though they had been flying for several hours while following the upstream course of the Sweetwater River.

  As always, her father was taking advantage of every opportunity to teach her something, so he was quizzing her and asking what landmarks she was able to recognize from above.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever had the opportunity to fly like a bird before, but let me assure you that, once you do, you have a whole new respect for birds, and their ability to navigate without the benefit of labels and north arrows. We may use maps (that are always, conveniently, oriented so that north is up) to get around on the ground, but once you’re actually up in the sky, nothing looks remotely like what you’d expect, and you can hardly ever tell what cardinal direction you’re facing.

  Etheria was slowly getting used to it though, and was getting quite good at identifying things she recognized but, understandably, it was getting progressively more difficult the farther they flew from home. As they were now in an area that Etheria had only ever heard of, her father had switched roles from quiz-master to tour-guide.

  “THAT’S THUNDERHOUSE FALLS,” her father called to her over the sound of the wind, and gestured with his tiny beak towards something on the ground far below.

  Etheria followed her father’s indication. She had heard stories about Thunderhouse, and how impressive it was, but could see that, even from this great distance, the stories hadn’t done the place justice.

  The rugged canyon walls were very high along this area of the Sweetwater River, and directly ahead, the river abruptly and sharply changed course. From this angle, it looked like an immense V, and another, smaller, river joined the Sweetwater at the point where the two branches in the V came together. The smaller river flowed through a deep notch in the canyon wall, and into the Sweetwater over the edge of a very wide waterfall. Etheria’s sharp eagle eyes could see that several evenly spaced slabs of rock stuck up vertically like teeth all along the lip of the falls, giving the impression that the flowing water was being filtered.

  Impressive as this was though, her eyes were immediately drawn downstream from the junction of the two rivers to a gigantic pillar of rock. It looked to Etheria like an immense finger pointing up to the sky; a sentinel that rose well over a hundred feet up out of the river. The tip was flat, and it had sides that were so smooth that they looked as if they had been chiselled and sculpted by skilled hands. The pillar broadened slowly to a wide base, and a jumble of large rocks scattered the river bed where it finally met the churning water.

  The King was fluttering just to her left, and seemed to know exactly where she was looking.

  “THE WATERFALL IS KNOWN AS THE STRAINER,” h
e said loudly (using a name that Etheria decided was very appropriate), “AND THE COLUMN IS CALLED CONJURING HOUSE ROCK.”

  They began to descend to get a little closer, and angled their flight so that the ‘V’ in the Sweetwater was now on its side beneath them. As they drew nearer, Etheria’s eyes followed the smaller river upstream, and she realized that there was more to Thunderhouse than she had thought. There was another waterfall—no, wait—two more waterfalls! There were two more distinct chutes of water, each of them just as impressive as the Strainer, directly upstream.

  Once again, her father anticipated her gaze as he called out to her. “THAT ONE AT THE TOP IS CALLED THE ELIMINATOR.” Again, Etheria reasoned that it was an excellent name, as this waterfall was by far the most abrupt of the three.

  The Eliminator had a wide mouth, and a very distinct separation between fast flowing river and swiftly falling water. It was as if some giant hand had smoothly and sharply folded the river directly where the water went over the edge. The fall was quick, and turbulent. It was also, she reasoned upon seeing the numerous sharp rocks peeking up out of the mist at the fall’s base, most definitely lethal.

  Her eagle eyes were drifting down river towards the next chute when her father’s voice spoke again.

  “THE ONE IN THE MIDDLE IS CALLED THE SQUEEZE.”

  Etheria laughed, and in her present form, the sound whistled through her beak, and came out as a weak screech. She was amused by the names of the individual falls that made up Thunderhouse as a whole, and impressed with how incredibly fitting they all were.

  The Squeeze, as its name intimated, was a constriction in the river, and the waterfall was lodged uncomfortably into a high narrow wedge. The water seemed to be channelled into this chute against its will, and was folding back onto itself along the edges as it rushed through to fall sharply into the emptiness below.

  As the Princess turned to change directions, a strong wind hit her head on, and she was able to adjust the angle of her wings so that its velocity gave her enough lift to hover in one place. In essence, she was now floating on the wind. From this vantage point, she had a perfect view of the three waterfalls, and stared in wonder as the river tumbled down through the Eliminator, was pushed stubbornly through the Squeeze, briefly caught its breath in a short foamy gap, and then finally rushed down over the serrated lip of the Strainer. Then, the water entered a stretch of angry standing waves before it decided what side of the pillar known as Conjuring House Rock to descend, and whether it should get caught up in the eddy that danced behind it.

  Her father had caught the same strong wind, and even now floated virtually motionless off to her left. They stayed like that for a long time; father and daughter, King and Princess enjoying the moment that they were sharing together.

  Etheria was soaking up the pleasant sensations that were washing over her through her enhanced senses. There was the view beneath her as seen through her sharp eagle eyes, the dry scratchy sound that the wind made as it moved through her large feathers, and there was a joy that made her feel even lighter (as if that was possible considering she was already floating in mid-air). It was one of those moments that stays with you; the kind that imprints itself on your brain as if your brain was made of photo-sensitive paper. The Princess knew that no matter where she went in the future, she would always be able to come back and visit this moment, and re-experience the joy that lived within it. In fact, in some ways, she would likely never leave it.

  She glanced briefly at her father, and he winked at her. Then after a few more minutes, he finally spoke out loudly enough to be heard over the wind, “LET’S LAND. IT WILL BE EASIER TO TALK.”

  Her father pulled his wings to his side, and then his tiny form flipped a few times, and dove down towards a stand of trees that was roughly half-way between the top and bottom waterfall. He landed softly on one of the highest branches of an impossibly tall pine tree.

  Etheria followed after him, and aimed for the same branch. Unfortunately, she hit it sideways, skidded most of its length, and then fell off completely to land awkwardly on the branch directly below. Reflexively, she grabbed on to this branch tightly with her great talons, and spread her wings to catch her balance as her father dropped down from above to perch beside her. He looked so small compared to her, but when he reached out with a tiny wing and touched her, Etheria immediately felt a lot more comfortable, and was easily able to find her center of gravity.

  She caught her breath, adjusted her perch, and looked down at the incredible landscape below.

  It didn’t take long for the Princess to figure out how the place got the name Thunderhouse. Even here, in the uppermost branches of one of the tallest trees she had ever seen, she could feel the vibrations, and taste the sweet mist that the falling water of the three falls threw up into the sky. There was an electrical current here, and the air was filled with the low rumble of what could only be described as thunder.

  “THERE ARE…” started her father until he realized that he was still yelling even though he no longer needed to be. He paused for a moment, and then began again at a more reasonable volume. “There are many cultural artifacts, objects, or monuments from the physical world that have appeared in the forest over the years, but this is one of the few naturally occurring landscapes that exist in both the physical world and here in Thenken.”

  Etheria knew what her father meant when he said cultural artifacts, as she had seen a few of them herself here in Thenken. She had explored the ancient Egyptian pyramids many times as a child, had lived in the ancient city of Alexandria for a summer, had frequently watched the sun rise between the massive boulders at Stonehenge, and had climbed a tall Italian tower that looked ready to topple at any moment. All without ever leaving the forest.

  Apparently though, there were more such treasures from the physical world hidden in Thenken if Fowler the beaver was to be believed. When Fowler had returned from his first expedition several years before the events of this memorality, it had taken the eccentric beaver a full two weeks to recount his many adventures (but truth be told, Etheria was sure it could have been done in an afternoon if Fowler hadn’t enjoyed the attention he received in telling his stories so dramatically). In that time, they had all shared countless cups of synchroniciTea, in which Fowler had reproduced images of cultural artifacts that were considerably more modern than the ones that Etheria knew of. Many even surprised her father. Among other things, Fowler had shown them an image of an airplane that he said had been flown by a woman named Earhart, a schooner called the Erebus that he said had once belonged to a captain named Franklin, and a gigantic metal ship called the Titanic that needed no description, even to Etheria.

  Fowler believed that these objects appeared in Thenken once they had permeated the waking world’s collective consciousness for many years. They were each physical objects that were very familiar to so many people, even though so few of those people had actually seen the real objects themselves. With so much attention directed their way, the objects naturally transcended their physicality to become ideas. As such they were able to live on beyond their earthly life span, and came to live inside the shared imaginations of an entire population.

  “So many people have dreamed and puzzled about these particular things for so many years,” said Fowler with that faint whistle in his speech that the Princess noticed got more pronounced when he got excited. “It’s no surprise then that they’ve all eventually shown up here in Thenken.”

  “Thunderhouse is different from the objects that Fowler has told us about,” said her father as if he were reading her mind again. “For one, it’s completely natural. I suspect it is here in Thenken because, over a period of many thousands of years in the physical world, the Ancients considered it to be a place of power.” He stopped talking for a moment, and the two of them watched the moving water in admiration.

  “For another, it predates the written word. So, by definition, it is the only such object that I know of in Thenken that is old
er than history itself.”

  Etheria pondered this for a moment, and thought that she could see a contradiction in what her father had said. “So, if nothing was written down about it,” she began. “Then how do we know anything about it at all?”

  “Good question,” her father answered. “In pre-history, knowledge was preserved and passed down from one generation to the next through the spoken word. So, in the waking world (her father seemed to emphasize these words), the original oral histories about Thunderhouse have been lost forever.”

  Etheria spun her head slowly so as not to upset her balance, and looked down at her father. He had paused, and seemed to be smiling, prompting his young daughter to draw her own conclusion.

  “But not here?” she said tentatively.

  The eyes of the little blue swallow twinkled as it spoke, “Exactly. Such is the wonder of Thenken. The original legends—the way they were even before they were committed to the cultural memory—are stored all around us.” The King spread his wings, and seemed to be gesturing at the trees in the forest below. “Earlier, I told you what we call these waterfalls in modern times, in the waking world. I can tell you that the names aren’t what they used to be. The original names, well, they change the meaning of this place when you know them.”

  He stopped speaking again. Etheria guessed it was for dramatic effect. The silence rumbled on.

  “In ancient times,” he finally continued, “and naturally in an ancient tongue, the first waterfall was known as the Head, the second one as the Throat, and the third one as the Heart.”

  Etheria wasn’t sure if she had eyebrows in her current form, but if she did, she was pretty sure that they had just both shot up to what felt like several feet in the air above her. Her eyes went wide with surprise, and she tilted her head in thought.

  There was more silence between them. Etheria looked again at the wonder below her as she processed what her father had just told her. She stared first at the waterfall called the Head, then at the Throat, and finally at the Heart. She narrowed her eyes as she concentrated. None of the cascades looked anything like the part of the human body that they were named for (she assumed that the bodies of the ancients were the same as hers—well at least the same as the body she normally wore), although they did kind of appear to be in the right place if she imagined a giant lying there in front of her. But, she reasoned logically, this idea was far too ridiculous, so she dismissed it entirely, and gave up puzzling about it altogether.

  “I don’t understand,” she said resignedly to her father.

  “Well,” he said encouragingly, “use your imagination, and picture a very large person lying down there in front of you.”

  Etheria rolled her eagle eyes. She had stumbled upon the right answer after all, but had thought it too fantastical to be feasible.

  The King was pointing with his wing now. “See how the waterfall at the top is roughly where the giant’s head would be, and the bottom chute is more or less aligned with his heart. In between the two waterfalls lies the third chute; it is just below the head, and in the exact position of the giant’s throat.”

  Etheria followed along, and was starting to see what her father meant.

  “That ridge of rock kind of looks like one arm,” said the tiny King pointing off in the distance beyond the waterfall, “and that line of trees on the right is another one. Lastly, the sharp bend in the Sweetwater looks like a pair of legs. Very long legs mind you,” he said with a smile in his voice, “but legs nonetheless.”

  Her father finished tracing the form in the air in front of him, and as she stared openly at the landscape, it suddenly made sense to her. Even though she’d had a hard time of it earlier, she could clearly see the form of a human body below her now, and she wondered why she wasn’t able to visualize it before when it was so patently obvious now.

  After a few moments of silence, Etheria spoke. “This is familiar somehow, but different too.”

  The Princess paused, and when her father didn’t speak up, she cleared her throat to continue. “A few months back, I saw a documentary on TV. It was all about ancient symbols on a plateau.” Her words were being delivered at the same rate that her thoughts delivered them, which was slowly and quietly. “The symbols were gigantic. So big that you could only really see them from the sky.” She paused for a moment, seemingly grasping for one detail in particular. “Somewhere in South America I think. Peru?”

  “The Nazca lines,” said the tiny swallow immediately.

  “Yes, exactly! They were patterns that were made on a desert plain by clearing away rocks and pebbles. Along with the symbols, there were also several very long, very straight lines.. On the ground they were just, well, random areas of earth that had been swept clean. You had to see them from above, like a couple of kilometres up, to be able to understand them.”

  “And this reminds you of that?”

  “Yes it does,” she answered. “Are they related?”

  Her father smiled enigmatically. “In a way, yes. What do you think the Nazca lines were made for?”

  “Um. Well,” the young girl began tentatively. She was not used to being the one with the answers. “The documentary suggested that they might not have been meant to be seen from the sky at all, and that they could just have been foot paths that a student could follow to gain enlightenment. It claimed there were other such spiritual mazes in the world.”

  “Interesting,” her father said thoughtfully. He seemed genuinely interested in what she was saying, so she continued with a little more confidence.

  “And one scientist even claimed that the lines were, um, signposts, put up to guide alien visitors. Maybe even built by aliens themselves.”

  The King chuckled kindly at this, and Etheria joined him. She was speaking much louder now and didn’t seem to notice that her balancing on the branch was now practically effortless.

  “The documentary also said that some people have even postulated that the lines and symbols may have been used to assist human spirits on their way to the afterlife, or even those spirits who were only temporarily separated from their bodies through an out-of-body experience.”

  Etheria stopped speaking for a moment and realized that it was funny how, from the perspective of living in a world of dreams, an out-of-body experience didn’t seem nearly as crazy to her as it once did.

  “Do you know what they were for?” she finally asked the King.

  “Actually, no I don’t. Not for sure. I do know though that many current researchers make the mistake of assuming that ancient cultures were primitive and ignorant. That’s why I was laughing at the suggestion of alien involvement. That scientist assumed that our human ancestors didn’t have the abilities to make the geoglyphs—for that is what they’re called—themselves. The fact is, the ancients had knowledge far more advanced than we give them credit, and much that we simply don’t understand, but that doesn’t make them primitive.”

  The swallow moved a little further along the branch, the fact that Etheria had gained her balance had not gone unnoticed.

  “I think the Nazca geoglyphs are some kind of message, and that the message is actually quite a clever one.“

  Etheria looked at her father hopefully.

  “I don’t know what the message is though,” he said defensively, “but I suspect that the lines and symbols held some deep significance to the people who made them. It was a significance that they likely assumed would be recognized as a message by future generations. Not unlike Thunderhouse actually.”

  Etheria gave a sudden start, and almost toppled from her perch. “There’s a message in Thunderhouse?” she gasped. “But it’s natural, it wasn’t made by human hands like the Nazca geoglyphs. How could there possibly be a message here?”

  “Well, let’s save the discussion on how physical objects such as this can actually spring from the human mind for another day, and simply say that there are actually a surprising number of ‘naturally’ occurring geoglyphs in the waking world.
Admittedly, only a few have been recognized as such, and they are generally skeptically rejected. The only times that they are widely accepted is when they are thought to show a religious figure of some kind.”

  It didn’t surprise Etheria that people in the waking world would dismiss a naturally occurring geoglyph as being too fantastical. After all, she almost did it herself! She could have stared at this view of Thunderhouse for hours and, mostly because part of her was telling her not to see anything, she likely would have been unable to see the human shape that she couldn’t help but see now.

  Her father was speaking again. “I suspect that there are messages in all such geoglyphs, and they often contain answers to some of life’s deepest mysteries. The Universe has a funny way of hiding its truths in plain sight, and in a language that doesn’t make much sense to us, at least at first.

  “I know that I’ve often wished the messages could be more obvious, but truth be told, we do tend to reject the readily available answers in favour of those that are hard to come by. Think about it, would you believe a fortune cookie that claimed to contain the secrets of the universe? “

  “Probably not.”

  “Exactly. We’ve come to believe that we have to work hard for deep truths, so the universe has obliged, and for most of us does exactly that. It forces us to work hard to find the answers that really matter.”

  “So there’s a deep truth here?” For some reason, Etheria could feel her voice quivering, and her eagle tummy was flipping and flopping.

  “Yes. Absolutely. That human form below us is, believe it or not, telling us exactly how we can all live more balanced lives.”

  Etheria gaped at the giant that was below her. “Please tell me that you’re going to let me in on the secret, and not force me to puzzle it out for myself.”

  The barn swallow laughed so that it came out like a happy chirp. “Don’t worry Etheria. This is one of those deep truths that is actually pretty easy to grasp. I’ll walk you through it. It might help though, if I gave you a little background first.” He hopped easily up onto a branch that put him up at the same level as her shoulders. “First, let me explain that, throughout conscious history, the head has always represented logical thought, and the heart, intuitive feeling.”

  He touched the end of a wing feather to her head as if to point at it and continued. “You think with one…“ he reached well over, stretched out his little wing, and pressed directly on Etheria’s feathered chest, “…and you feel with the other.”

  He hopped back down to perch on the branch beside her, and continued, “It was believed that the head was the source of rational behaviour, and the heart of a person’s creativity. Where the head was rooted firmly in the physical reality, the heart was off exploring fantastic worlds and other ways of being.”

  While her father spoke, Etheria thought about what he was saying, and in his pauses, she tried to rephrase the concepts in her own words. Logic and intuition. Reason and emotion. Once again he was speaking about opposites, and she knew from experience that any time he started talking about opposites, he was leading up to a lecture on how important it was to balance them. In fact, he had already told her that this deep truth had to do with balance. He hadn’t yet mentioned the throat. Could that be how the balance was achieved?

  Her father continued. “Like so many things in Thenken, what seems real here is actually a physical manifestation of the thoughts and ideas of the world at large. Thunderhouse is no different.” He was gesturing again, but this time with both wings pointed out in front of him. “These ancient waterfalls are a physical representation of ancient human attitudes. Since the beginning of consciousness, it has been believed that the head and the heart are separate, and that the logical mind should be in charge.”

  He pointed down with the tip of his right wing, and showed how the water flowed first into the Head, and then down through the Heart, and then he mimicked the motion on his own body. It was clear, even without words what he meant. This was a one-way relationship, thought Etheria. The head was the boss.

  The King’s voice was getting more animated, and louder than Etheria would have thought possible with such little lungs behind it.

  “Some people have likened the relationship to the conflict between male and female, religion and science, or the political left and the political right. In all this time it’s been about one thing, and one thing only: separation.” He was practically spitting now, his bird tongue struggling to form the words as quickly as he was thinking them. “It has always been one or the other, never both. It has never been about integration.”

  Etheria was proud that she had seen this coming, so she spoke up quickly before he could continue and asked, “Is that possible? Is it possible to balance the two?”

  Rowan took a deep breath, and the feathers on his chest puffed out proudly.

  “Let’s find out,” he said. “Follow me.”

  With that, he dropped abruptly from the branch, and fell quickly into the canyon below.

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