"The Prologue" by Michael J. Walker Esq.

The silence was deafening.

That was the first thing Yanaga could remember: silence. Silence so thick, so heavy, that she dared not speak nor move, and hardly dared to breathe, for fear that the silence would break and come crashing down about her.

If silence was the first thing Yanaga remembered, darkness was the second. The darkness enveloped her like a blanket; it seemed she was enwrapped inside a chrysalis or pure dark. It was so impenetrable that it might have been a wall. It was cold, too, in this dark and silent place. Yanaga should hardly have been alive if she was human. But she wasn’t.

Yanaga was, however, the only living creature in that oily black darkness. For she was in the Spirit World, where souls begin their journeys and rest after their time in The Lands Above has ended. Yanaga was the only living thing around because certain souls were separated from the others. Some souls are special, you see. Yanaga’s soul was one of these. She was a Hero.

But in addition to being a Hero, Yanaga was special in another way. She was the last Hero’s Soul. All the others had been sent to The Lands Above, one at a time, and became great rulers, or warriors, or mages. Sometimes they had come to tell their tales to the Heroes who had not yet been sent up. But those days had ended, because Yanaga was the last.

Suddenly the darkness ended. Yanaga was surrounded in an ethereal white light. It was almost tangible, as the darkness had been. There was a tiny pinprick in the whiteness, and Yanaga willed herself to move closer. The tiny pinprick grew, and soon it was a large window that showed the entire world. The image changed in a flash of light, and Yanaga saw a great castle. The image changed once again. Now Yanaga could see a room, and she knew it was inside that castle. There was a bed in the center of that room, with luxurious sheets and an old man sleeping in them. The bed was surrounded with people: healers and old learned men, from all around the world. But the sleeping man was beyond help, and soon he would die.

A shadow brushed past Yanaga, and she shivered. Where it had touched her, she felt even colder than she had in all the years she had spent waiting. She saw the shadow go through the window, and covered the ancient form lying on the bed. It came off of him after a few minutes, and the man seemed to have been drained of all color. The shadow went through the window again, chilling Yanaga as it passed through. Yanaga watched as the healers filed out of the room and then the image changed again.

Now she saw the northern continent, but only for a moment – the image changed again. She saw a flash of the western edge of the continent, then a quick peek at the small village there (it was called Shea, she somehow knew), then a brief glimpse of a farmhouse, then a room inside that house. Now the window stayed where it was, and Yanaga looked in at what was happening.

There was a woman lying on the bed in that room. She was on her back, and in labor. There were a few other people in the room as well: a midwife, her younger apprentice, and another woman holding the birthing woman’s hand.

Suddenly, Yanaga understood exactly what was happening. Then the window went blank, and she knew no more.

And so a child was born unto May and Glenn.