The Starlight Symphony Movement One: The Kindling. (Sneak Peek)

The following is the first draft of a new scene I have incorporated into my work in progress. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it!

New business had pulled Ronin’s nose into the deeper and darker areas of the Colosseum market.

Relief washed over him after unshackling those two from his guidance, admittedly. The number of guards and police dwindled as he swerved the thinning crowds.

Ensuring that there were none following him, he slipped into a black and purple tent, its precise location of no importance.

Only now did he remove his hood.

Inside, a thick blanket of heat enveloped him. Upon every eerie shelf and table, candles burned in the hundreds, barely piercing the darkness in all corners.

A pair of burning amber eyes met Ronin.

‘Mmm… Ronin my dear…’, a sinister voice said sweetly.

‘Marama’, Ronin answered.

He hung his hat and cloak on a coatrack made of bone. The touch of it put his hairs on end.

‘Why does the inside of this tent keep getting bigger every time I visit?’.

‘Oh… What’s the harm in expanding your horizons once in a while?’, the dark witch croaked.

With each erratic movement of the seer’s head, a large hat of a wide pointed brim tilted with her, adorned with countless trinkets. It had not changed since Ronin’s last visit, it put even Theresa’s large hat out of commission.

Ronin played with a candle that sat inside a skull. ‘A change in décor wouldn’t hurt’.

A cold draught brushed past him, as every candle was immediately snuffed out one by one around the tent, like a rabbit dashing in a circle.

Only two candles remained lit, sitting either side of the uncanny seer.

Marama glared from behind her black dreadlocks. ‘I like it this way…’.

She drummed her fingers on the purple table cloth. Her many rings dazzled, the cloth softer than silk.

Faint blue tattoos were etched upon her skin of umber midnight.

Ronin pointed at her thousands of drab sashes and loose robes cocooning her. ‘You haven’t aged a day you know that? Could still pass for my age if you wanted’.

Marama sneered through her candid grin, ‘Thank you my dear… I’ve been practising… But flattery will get you nowhere none’.

She then snapped with a firm, mocking tone, ‘Now why have you come here, tell me’.

Ronin took a seat. ‘Surely you of all people would know that’.

‘What I can see can only take me so far, my dear…’, Marama murmured. ‘I see severed roots, choking in blood…’.

‘I don’t have time for this’, Ronin started, ‘I’m putting myself in a lot of danger by coming here. I feel like I’m under a damn microscope’

Marama produced a handful of small stones black as ink, scratches of blood red scrawled on each.

‘From out of the woodwork, the match returns to the fire it started… You have become a lone wolf my dear… lost from your pack…’.

Ronin dug his fingers into his thigh, ‘No one needs your gifts or services to know what happened, the press did enough snooping around’.

‘Calm my dear, calm… I am not so entirely empty yet to know what vexes thee. I felt it in the earth. Solomon was one of so few who had garnered my affections…’.

‘Yes, that’s why he trusted you with it’.

‘With what, pray tell?’.

Ronin smirked. ‘If you knew I was coming, then you know what I’m here for. Where is it?’.

The black stones rattled like chicken bones in the lady’s thin hands. ‘Patience my dear… patience, and stay a while…’.

She urged Ronin to hold forth his hand, which he did reluctantly.

The stones were colder than he expected, like ice cubes never melting. They pulled down with a great weight for such small stones.

It left him uneasy to hold them, with a tingle he couldn’t shake off.

Marama whipped the cloth off the table, revealing a surface of black wood that sucked in light like a black hole.

Purple strands, like a spider web, poured from Marama’s fingers. She traced a perfect circle in the air, with intersecting lines within and mysterious symbols appearing at the edges.

A blast of fire made Ronin flinch. Embers crackled as the glowing rune burnt into the wood.

Marama grinned thinly as she pointed at the circle.

Ronin slouched. ‘You know I don’t care for this stuff, right? I mean I know you’re the only licensed dream-weaver this side of the realm but’.

‘You’ve already done well to know that I am not one of your petty Hjartan charlatans and peddlers. Do not pretend that the tides of fear did not shake you the last time I divined your fate, my dear’.

Ronin curled his tongue. Destiny and fate were concepts he most despised, but both he and Solomon, a long time ago, had seen what the seer could be capable of, magic or otherwise.

‘Paper or no paper, I carry no tricks. You know that as well as I and he, my dear’.

Ronin eyed the stones once more. ‘Will you give me the journal after?’.

‘Of course, my dear, but he left behind more than that… Now… sate my curiosity…’.

With great hesitation, Ronin eventually placed his open hand upon the circle. Shafts of purple flicked up from the lines like an aurora.

The spell was ready. He removed the hand.

Taking a deep breath, Ronin tossed the stones onto the table.

Like magnets, they flicked to eight equal points on the circle, like those of a compass. They floated and twirled in the air, the circle brightening.

Marama held her own hands either side of the table and stared widely at the circle, her fingers flexing constantly as the stones rotated.

Faster and faster the stones spun, puffs of soft cloud pouring from the circle. Ronin shivered as images of an unnatural nature materialized from nowhere above the table, emerging from a swelling cloud like stars from the nebulae.

Marama described in haunting detail what the two began to see.

‘In the South West…’, she murmured, ‘lies Death. A great change has befallen you, and not entirely for the better. Traditions have been flipped and the water has been disturbed, a tree uprooted…’.

A hollow skull stared with empty sockets. Ronin felt it scan his soul.

‘Get on with it’, he said.

A white robe with no face nor body walked upon a still lake.

‘To the North East my dear… walks The Pilgrim’.

‘A lonely road? Going on alone? What’s wrong with that?’.

‘None to fret for my dear, at least if it were True North. But things cannot be this way for long. A bird must call for its mate. A bicorn to its herd’.

The arms of the robe raised and became golden scales.

‘The Scales, to the South. You hang in the balance my dear. No equilibrium. Such a dim scale will collapse. Of this, you have not known until now’.

Ronin checked the tent entrance. ‘It will collapse if I’m caught’.

Something smacked his hand.

‘Ow! What?’.

‘Focus you fool… Solomon would be ashamed’.

Ronin stared at the scales. Doesn’t matter what he thinks now.

A red heart hovered over a faceless crowd of white.

 Marama sighed pleasantly. Compared to the past symbols, Ronin felt that reaction comforting.

‘The Few’, she said, ‘In the West… You have lost much my dear, but it seems-‘, she stared deeper into the vision, ‘-that you have also gained. I see a boy and girl…’.

Ronin went cold.

‘The girl… she is troubled. Cast in a shadow that she cannot control… Something preoccupies her, dominates her thought. How unusual…’.

‘Leave them out of this’, said Ronin.

‘And the boy…’, Marama trailed off. Ronin sat with bated breath, watching her golden eyes travel far away.

The mercenary leaned in.

Marcus? The seer had never frowned like this before in any reading.

‘Strange, I cannot place a proper mark on him… I see dark clouds and lightning… There’s a heavy pull of gravity at the core of his soul, but I cannot see why or how… There’s… There is-‘.

She flinched.

‘Something, something else… something beyond… I see… movement in the dark, and… and…’.

‘What?’, said Ronin.

‘…A cage…’.

‘He’s trapped in a cage?’.

‘No… Something else is… it’s… I can see no more…’.

Ronin didn’t dare move. For she did not.

As the vision of The Few evaporated, the distant seer removed herself from her trance.

‘I sense these two are of great significance. I see intricately woven fabric, and glistening rivers that join as they flow down a mountain…’.

‘What interest are they to you?’, said Ronin.

The seer’s blue tattoos shimmered. ‘It’s you who should be taking greater interest my dear… whether you want to or not…’.

A heavenly triangle floated among a cluster of stars above the cloud.

‘Ahh…’, Marama whined curiously, ‘The Matrix, how unusual…’.

Ronin noted the points of red, blue and yellow at each of the triangle’s corners, not unlike the orb that Marcus had discovered.

‘Unusual? I’m no sorcerer, am I? And you know I’m not exactly the most emotional guy, eh?’.

‘Wrong’.

Ronin recoiled under the seer’s stare, her eyes livid with anger. He shifted in his seat.

‘The Emotional Matrix upon which the three paths of magic stand, is at the cornerstone of our hearts…’, Marama hissed. ‘The Matrix is our emotion, and yours stands neutral with no direction, and as such is the most unpredictable omen of all…’.

Ronin stood up. ‘Enough of this, where is the journal?’.

‘How you respond to what is happening to you in the present, will be your salvation… or your undoing…’.

She pointed a gnarled finger at him. ‘I see fire and black smoke, much fear and hatred within you, Carlyle’.

Ronin threw up his hood, taking a deep breath. ‘Marama, please. No more. I need that journal. It’s not safe for me here. Please’.

Marama eyed him suspiciously, her finger still pointing. Sweeping an open palm over the circle made it vanish from the table. The visions evaporated. Time up.

Her smile returned, ‘Mmm… polite. How quaint…’. The finger moved to a heavy, shackled treasure chest that would fit right at home on a pirate ship.

‘A box of rosewood…’.

Inside the chest, Ronin found the object the seer bluntly described.

It was smaller than a jewellery box, and thin like a short book. The varnish upon the scarlet wood gleamed.

Inside, lay the journal. Bound in black leather and tattered round the edges, it looked older than the mercenary, the pages thick and stuffed with all other manner of paper.

‘What’s all this in here with it?’.

‘Things that he entrusted to be passed on…’.

Ronin paused. He’d hoped the journal would be all he needed to take, but at least the box looked discreet enough to hide on his person.

Clasping the box shut, with journal et all, Ronin readjusted himself and made for the exit.

‘My dear…’.

He froze.

All the candles reignited.

‘I have seen the Masked man… And his existence and nature appear to evade even I…’.

Ronin looked back to Marama. She looked weary, troubled.

‘This is no ordinary individual my dear. His scope of power is great yet incalculable, and revenge is a double ended blade with no knife…’.

‘I know what I’m doing’, said Ronin.

‘I’m sure you do my dear… but be wary of what I have shown you… For if you continue on this path of wrath and vengeance…’.

Her eyes gazed at him longingly. ‘I fear, the destination may be disastrous…’.

She retrieved the black stones, twirling them around her fingers. ‘But… perhaps… these new souls may yet serve a purpose in all this…’.

Ronin came back to the table, depositing a generous pile of coins. He kissed her hand.

‘There need be no charge, my dear…’, she said.

‘I know’, Ronin answered, ‘Goodbye’.

• Daniel