Queen Of Dreams (The Masks Of Under Book 3), page 1
Queen of
DREAMS
The Masks of Under
Book Three
By Kathryn Ann Kingsley
Queen of Dreams
Copyright © 2019 by Kathryn Ann Kingsley.
All rights reserved.
First Print Edition: May 2019
Limitless Publishing, LLC
Kailua, HI 96734
www.limitlesspublishing.com
Formatting: Limitless Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1-64034-591-1
ISBN-10: 1-64034-591-4
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
The Houses of Under
House of Flames
Ruled by King Edu. They are marked in red. They are the conquering force. They are warriors, fighters, and believe in the right of might above all else. In Edu’s absence, Elder Oanr rules. King Edu reigns as the story begins.
House of Shadows
Ruled by King Aon. They are marked in black. Their oversight is learning to wield the marks bestowed on them by the Ancients and tapping into their power to wield magic. In Aon’s absence, Elder Navaa rules. As the story begins, Aon is asleep in his crypt.
House of Fate
Ruled by Queen Ini, who slumbers in her crypt. They are marked in blue. They are given visions by the Ancients and do what they can to guide the direction of Under to match their will. In Ini’s absence, Elder Ziza rules. Ziza is also the Oracle of the Ancients, responsible for conveying visions and relaying their will.
House of Words
Ruled by Queen Vjo, who slumbers in her crypt. They are marked in purple. They are scientists and historians. They study all that can be known of Under that does not pertain to the marks on their skin, as that is the purview of the House of Shadows. In Vjo’s absence, Elder Maverick rules.
House of Blood
Ruled by King Rxa who slumbers in his crypt. They are marked in white. They are the vampiric caretakers of the Ancients where they slumber in their prison. They both worship them and yet are their wardens. In Rxa’s absence, Elder Otoi rules. Lyon, the Priest, was once elder of this house but sacrificed his title to wed Kamira, as those of equal station cannot otherwise do so.
House of Moons
Ruled by King Dtu who slumbers in his crypt. They are marked in green. They are shapeshifters and creatures dedicated to the wild. In Dtu’s absence, Elder Kamira rules.
House of Dreams
Originally ruled by King Qta. They were marked in turquoise. Aon killed the Qta during the Great War, some fifteen hundred years ago. Murdering him doomed Under to the void. But all that changed, when Lydia was murdered by Edu and Aon buried her in the Pool of the Ancients.
Lydia is now the Queen of Dreams, queen of all the monsters born of Under and not created from stolen souls of Earth.
Major Players
Nick, Lydia’s best friend. Thirty years old. Went to medical school with Lydia but became a security guard at the same lab where Lydia works. Fell to the House of Moons as a fairly high-ranking shifter.
Evie, full name Evelyn. Belongs to the House of Words. Wound up in Edu’s jail for attempting to kill someone in her own house. Was taken from Montana in 1922. Wanted to be a movie star.
Lyon. The Priest. Former elder of the House of Blood who gave up his title to marry Kamira. Born in 232 CE, in the region now known as France. Became a Roman legionnaire before being taken to Under after losing his wife and son in the Crisis of the Third Century.
The Ancients
The original creatures that embody Under. It is those seven gods from whom all the rest of the world originates. They are imprisoned inside the lake of blood beneath the Cathedral of the Ancients. If they were to die, Under would cease to be. There is one for each house of Under.
Elders and Regents
Kamira. Elder of the House of Moons. Born in 22 BCE in southwestern Spain (Tartessos). Married to Lyon.
Maverick. Elder of the House of Words. Born in 1832, England. Known as the doctor. Married to Aria, who also lives within the House of Words.
Ziza, Elder of the House of Fate. Born in Italy, 417. Also serves as Oracle to the Ancients and relays visions granted to her.
Navaa, Elder of the House of Shadows. Born in Bunyoro (Modern day Uganda), 1377.
Otoi, Elder of the House of Blood. Born in Bucharest, 1721.
Oanr, Elder of the House of Flames. Born in Iceland, 544.
Chapter One
Lydia was dreaming.
Or was she dead? Was there even a difference now?
I don’t want to die.
What was a person, really, when it came down to it? What did it mean, the sense of self? What defined a person? The limits of their mind? Their soul? Voices rang in her head, each speaking over the other, demanding she choose. Choose now! Choose what?
Please, don’t let this happen…
Where did we begin and end with ourselves? What created that endless list of ones and zeroes that became an individual? Were we only a product of our memories? A collective string of choices that turned us into who we were? Or was it defined earlier on, at the moment of our birth? Were we steel tempered by our lives, or were we a whisper of smoke, given form instead?
Or was it not about lives lived at all? Were we merely what we chose to do in those bare few moments where we were not given the option to think? Where instinct alone may rule? In the split second that primal rule took hold, was that truly the judge of who a soul may be?
Questions crashed through her mind, a million at once, tangling with memories. Over it all, she heard the voices demanding she choose.
Choose now.
A soldier in the trenches, sweat mixing with blood and rain alike, was soaked in the ever-present mud around him. Who thought digging ditches and fighting in them was ever a goddamn good idea?
A flash of a memory that was not hers. Or was it? It was so hard to tell where things began and ended. Where she started and stopped.
An object, no bigger than his fist, fell in the mud next to him with a thick plop. There was shouting and panic and the scramble to save their own lives. The scamper of limbs as men tried to escape what should honestly have no business being so dangerous, it was so small. They had no chance to get away.
In that moment of instinct, did you save your life or others? Did you leap upon that grenade or use their bodies to climb to safety?
The swerve of a car. That hair’s breadth to avoid the vehicle in front of you. Instinct. Reaction. Primal desires. Was that what defined us? Was that what we were when boiled down to nothing? That made us who we were?
To live or die.
To be or not to be, wasn’t that the age-old question?
Dying was simpler. Easier. Hamlet said it himself. And he wasn’t wrong. Her situation might be different, but the question was the same. Live or die, knowing accepting death would spare herself more pain and suffering.
Voices rang out in her mind, deafening and wrong. Whispers as much as they were shouting, filling her very soul with their presence. Seven voices, speaking in turn. Each ghastly and horrible.
“You will suffer, Child. You will die.
Once more and again, as all must do.
What will you decide?
Do you wish to live, or to die, knowing what waits for you?
For He waits for you. Our Favorite Son. His heart is yours.
His love will bring you nothing but pain.
It is your choice to make. It will always be.”
Fire licked up her flesh, turning her skin black. Her nerves were dead, and now she could only watch as the fire curled up her skin that darkened, bubbled, and flaked away. The roar of the inferno around her had taken the air from her lungs, and as darkness took her, she could only pray for her soul and the souls of those who did this.
These weren’t her memories! The voices were doing this. Why?
It is the decision they’re giving you. You must choose to live or die.
A rope tangled around her neck as the men pulled the chair out from under her. She spasmed as she was denied the quick drop of a hanging and instead felt her throat crushed by the cinch of the biting hemp against her flesh. Her eyes bulged as they screamed at her.
Pain like this and more will wait for you.
Tied to the tree. Her hands were tied to the tree. Oh god. No, please! Struggling, she screamed in pain as she realized her legs wouldn’t move. They hurt.
Looking down, she sc
He looked at her, mad eyes wide with glee as the knife suddenly entered her throat.
Seen enough?
Whose memories were those? Not hers. She hadn’t died like that. She had died with a man’s hand burning holes in her heart. Setting her blood on fire in her chest.
Decide. Now.
In that split second, she had her answer.
Her hand pressed against a stone surface. Crawling. On her stomach, if she had to. It was the first real sensation she’d had. Water was in her lungs. She had to climb out. She had to. There wasn’t a choice to be made. In that moment of primal instinct, she wished to live.
She was already dead, though. Wasn’t she?
Pressing herself up onto her hands and knees, she felt the water pour off her. She hacked and coughed, retched, and finally felt air fill her lungs. Oh, that felt like heaven. She wheezed, trying to fill her burning body with more of that blessed and vastly underrated substance.
At this rate, she might as well learn to breathe water, with the sheer number of times she’d been nearly drowned lately.
Funny. I’ll work on that.
Who was that speaking? What had just happened to her? Had Edu messed up? Had he not managed to kill her and Aon saved her at the last minute?
No. She had been dead. She knew it. Just simply felt it to the core of her body. Was she even alive now? What happened?
Lydia raised a shaking hand to her face and placed her palm against her cheek, tried to rub her eyes. Something blocked her path. Something hard and strange. She ripped it from her face and, for the first time, opened her eyes.
She was kneeling on a stone floor in a dark room. The air was wet and damp like a cave.
In her lap was a full mask, made of bits of stone, glued together in a mosaic. It was grotesque and made to terrify. It looked almost Aztec but twisted in a nightmare, arranged into the face of a feathered snake.
It was made of turquoise.
“No!” Lydia hurled the mask away from herself. She watched it sail into the waters of a pool of glowing crimson liquid, over which loomed the carved faces of demons and monsters. She watched the mask splash into the surface and sink beneath the ripples it created. “No…no, that’s not me! That will never be me…”
She was back here at the Pool of the Ancients, looking up at that waterfall, at that glowing red liquid like blood pouring from the enormous stone faces and from their eyes and mouths.
Pulling in a shaky, wavering breath, Lydia did the only thing she could think of that made any sense.
Lydia screamed.
***
The panic and bickering between the lords and ladies of Under was beginning to grow nigh insufferable, even for Lyon’s considerable patience. Keenly in this moment, he had no greater desire than to go home with his wife and enjoy what little calm they had before the storm.
Before Aon made good on his threat to destroy them all.
Instead, he had been bid to attend Edu here in his home with all the others. And so he stood in the keep of the King of Flames and watched the fire burn in the great pit in the center of the main hall. Everyone was on edge. Even the king in question paced back in forth in front of the perpetual blaze that illuminated the carved dragon heads and monsters that decorated the arches and posts of his home.
Burned into his thoughts like a brand, Aon’s threat echoed in Lyon’s mind. “For millennia I have had to listen to you all whimper and whine like children about how I seek to destroy this world. Heed me now, Priest, and know that you have not once seen me try.”
When Lyon relayed the message to the others, it had sent them into an excited jabbering of panic and fear. For good reason. If the warlock meant to end the world, none of them were certain he could not easily do so.
Lyon knew the words he had said were true. Aon was correct in his assertion that never once had the warlock ever truly desired to destroy Under in its entirety. Now, he had no reason to let it linger for the last hundred years before the void claimed them all.
The din that raged around him was nearly unnavigable. Too many were attempting to speak, and it made the thread of conversation barely discernible.
“He means to do it!”
“Of course, he does.”
“But why? Over the girl?”
“Does he even need a reason?”
“This is asinine! She was only a human.”
“Perhaps he only needs an excuse.”
Lyon knew the truth. He knew it by the way Aon had carried himself in his grief. The magnitude of the suffering he had felt coming from the warlock had been palpable. That Aon had chosen to bury her in the Pool of the Ancients alone, and by his own hand, meant only one thing.
Aon had loved the girl.
Lyon was the only one present who knew the truth of Aon’s Great War. The real reason behind the death of King Qta made the tragedy of Lydia’s death far more poignant. Indeed, it made Lyon wonder if they did not, in fact, deserve whatever revenge Aon was about to pay them.
To be denied love was one thing. To be robbed was another. And to be robbed of the woman he loved by Edu, Aon’s greatest beacon of hatred in this world…Yes. This would spell their ruin.
Lyon held his tongue and did not offer the truth he held or his observations of the warlock’s behavior, for reasons twofold. First, he still felt some manner of desire to protect the dread king’s dignity in his grief. And second, it would do no good to say it.
No one would believe him.
It was the mindset of all the others in the room that Aon was not capable of love. That it was either a feeling long since removed from him by the ravages of time or madness or that he never held the capacity for such things in the first place.
That would be the straightforward opinion to hold, after all. The notion that Aon had no heart beating in his chest made him effortless to despise. They would dismiss Lyon for being the soft-souled creature he was if he said his mind.
“You said she had to die to save this world,” Kamira snarled at Ziza.
The Oracle was not fazed. Through all the shouting in the room, she stood silently with her eyes shut. She was placid as the frozen lake her countenance resembled. “And so she did. And so she has.”
“This world will be burned to a cinder by the warlock! We have little hope of stopping him, if all six kings and queens of old could not stand against him. You—” Kamira’s shouting was broken off as a sound interrupted her. The noise silenced all the rabble of the group assembled at once.
Thunder.
Rolling, booming, and echoing in the distance. At first, Lyon thought perhaps he had mistaken it, but for that a second low rumble followed.
It may have been the arrival of the warlock himself, heralding his approach, if not for another strange sound. This new sound even stilled Edu’s pacing.
“What is that?” Maverick was wary as he stood from his chair.
Whatever it was was small and persistent. It was a noise Lyon had not heard in a very, very long time.
Lyon moved from where he stood against a column and quickly headed for the door that led outside. He knew by the flurry of steps behind him that he was not alone.
He burst through the door, tossing it open in front of him and hearing it smash into the entryway, careless for how quickly he moved. As his feet touched the landing outside the entrance to King Edu’s home, something tapped him in the face. Cold and strange. Familiar yet as foreign as a dream.
And wet.
The sound of thunder was not Aon’s doing.
Lyon looked up and saw the clouds that had covered the skies overhead, blanketing the abyss of the night sky in a dark gray, only highlighted by the faint glow of the moons beyond. Kamira moved to stand beside him, holding her palms up before her, looking at them in confusion. The others slowed to a stop upon the landing, each experiencing this new truth in their own way.
