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Xaila Caya woke up late having stayed up the night before working on wedding plans. The next few weeks would be hectic before her marriage to Lanbito Wynnett. Xaila felt great about the preparations for the date she and her fiancé had looked forward to for months. She was thrilled to begin her new life with the man she loved since she was eighteen. Her stress came from ensuring her other responsibilities were handled while she took the time to celebrate.
Xaila would be turning twenty-seven the next week. Despite the prodding of her family and friends, Xaila didn’t see how she could fit a birthday party onto her to-do list. Even if someone else did all the planning.
Xaila worked two full-time jobs. She owned Heartbeat, her successful nail and cosmetology salon. She would spend hours meeting with her associates, providing clear instructions to all those who would handle things for her so she could enjoy her wedding and honeymoon.
In addition, she also served as Convenor of the Table of Enchantresses. This would be her first extended vacation since her accession to the Table six years ago. The Table's business had settled down in the past year and a half since the crisis in Turquoise Sky, when Xaila defeated Heryn, the Rival Enchantress. With harmony restored to the Elemental Balance of the Land of Enchantment, day-to-day living became more routine and less preventing the entire state of New Mexico returning to its almost uninhabitable chaos.
New Mexico’s rapidly shifting weather may be chaotic still, it is nothing compared to the calamitous climate this region endured thousands of years ago before Enchantresses brought harmony among the Four Sisters of the Elemental Forces, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, to allow the Land and its people thrive as the Land of Enchantment it is today.
The current group of seven Archidimentrists (to use the contemporary term for “Enchantresses”) worked each and every day to maintain this harmony continuing the traditional duties of their ancestors. Xaila was appointed to become the Convenor of the Table of Enchantresses just before she defeated the Rival Enchantress Heryn, who had sought to gain sole power over the Dimensions and Elemental Forces.
After finishing a slice of toast, Xaila drove to the coastal cliffside, to the Interdimension between her hometown of Turquoise Sky – on the West Coast of New Mexico in her dimension – and the city of Santa Fe in the north central part of the landlocked state in its dimension.
During her short stroll through the Interdimension into Santa Fe, Xaila sang herself a lilting tune in the archaic language of Cielan that the first inhabitants of Turquoise Sky spoke. Her song had the effect of raising her internal spirits and calming her emotions in preparation of the elemental work she needed to accomplish before she could resume wedding and business arrangements.
Xaila needed to level her emotions this morning. As the wedding day grew nearer, her mother came up with an increasing list of “suggestions” which slanted in a different direction to her own. Xaila always got along well with her mom, but the upcoming weddings of both her daughter and her son brought out an unseen facet of Kalisa Caya’s personality. Xaila's older brother, Onjin, would be getting married several more months from now, but mom was already peppering Onjin’s fiancée, Tanylo, with “ideas” to be “helpful.”
But now it was time to focus attention on the meteorological conditions for Santa Fe. A well-designed plan in the morning would set in motion all the important actions to complete the day for the Land of Enchantment. Xaila knew this would need to be a windy day with considerable gustiness from the northeast. The bright golden leaves that had recently turned on the cottonwood and aspen trees, without a doubt, would be all blown off by late this afternoon. She sighed, but such were the tough choices that an Archidimentrix must make to avoid a day when entire limbs would have been torn off by fierce winds. With temperatures dropping toward winter’s onset, there would be a biting wind chill as well. Sorry, but today’s misery would be bearable compared to a calamitous day. Perhaps this day would wrap up with brilliant red-orange clouds at sunset.
Completing her work, Xaila turned a quick circle to survey the landscape. She realized that it was colder than her sweater was made for and a shiver came from inside her. Pulling her arms around herself, she walked back to the place where the Interdimension would open to the path toward Turquoise Sky.
Down on the ground, a crack in the rocky soil caught her eye. She remembered that spot. It was the place where the spear her Rival threw grazed her thigh before its sharp point burrowed more than a foot into the hard ground. The javelin-like weapon was an ancient Enchantress’s Pike. Without Xaila's reflexes applying her most expert dimentricy skills to alter its trajectory, it would have killed her that day.
Xaila stood still a few moments studying the crack, and without moving, her shivering increased. The crack in the ground expanded into Xaila’s emotions and she began to cry. The cold had her muscles convulsing, and her knees and waist folded. She slumped to the ground into a tight ball, hugging her knees to her chest, the tears pouring from her eyes. She had done the same thing, on this exact spot, after fending off Heryn’s attack.
She understood she was overwhelmed. But today, it was not life-or-death as it was then. The prolonged stress of maintaining her self-control while simultaneously running her salon, arranging details for her wedding, carrying the responsibility of an Archidimentrix and Convenor of the Table of Enchantresses had reached the point her emotional state required a reset.
The memory of the time and place she came an instant away from losing her life was the trigger Xaila needed. This meltdown was not a failure of her years of training and practice. It was a necessary skill for Xaila to preserve her mental health while shouldering the burdens passed to her by her colleagues and ancestors every day.
She wasn’t sure how many minutes she sat crying and trembling in a fetal curl, but the episode soon subsided. As her sobbing quieted and her shaking lessened, her cracked, raw emotions healed and reintegrated at her center. Taking a few deep breaths, Xaila was ready to stand up again. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve and blinked to clear her sight.
Xaila resumed her walk into the Interdimension, but her attention kept pulling back. She turned her head around to stare again at the fissure on the Earth’s surface that had set off her memory.
She asked herself, “Did I see a glint of light from it?”
Dismissing it as a residual artifact of her emotional reset, she resumed her course back home. Yet, as she returned through the Interdimension into Turquoise Sky, Xaila could not shake the sensation that, somehow, this fault in the surface was growing in her direction.
Ancient Light is the sequel to my earlier book Enchantress of Turquoise Sky. You can read and enjoy this new story whether or not you have read the previous book, but if you would like additional backstory on the characters and the world of Turquoise Sky, please check out Enchantress of Turquoise Sky via the link above. Thank you for joining me on this creative journey and I look forward to your comments about Ancient Light!
Glad you are enjoying the story. Thank you for your interest.