Liminality, p.1
Liminality, page 1
Liminality
The Ancient Ones Trilogy Book II
Cassandra L. Thompson
Liminality by Cassandra L. Thompson.
Book Two of The Ancient Ones Trilogy.
Published by Quill & Crow Publishing House.
While based off historical fact and actual mythology, this novel is a work of fiction. All incidents, dialogue, and characters, except for some well-known historical and public figures, are either products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Although real-life historical or public figures do appear throughout the story, these situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning them are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events nor change the fictional nature of the work.
Copyright © 2021 by Cassandra L. Thompson
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Quill & Crow Publishing House, LLC, Ohio. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. www.quillandcrowpublishing.com
Cover Design by Lauren Hellekson
Printed in the United States of America.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-7371049-4-0
Author’s Website: http://cassandralthompson.carrd.co
Contents
Foreword
Preface
I. In Vargr, In Mani
1. The Visitor
2. The History of Lycanthropy
3. The Ghost
II. Aingeal an Bhais
4. The Return
5. The Underworld
III. Excornare
6. The Hunters
7. The Messenger
8. The Galère
IV. L’Amoureux
9. The Fire
10. The End
V. Chaos
11. The Daemons
12. The Boat
13. The Sacrifice
Epilogue
Revelations
About the Author
For
* * *
L.
Foreword
The Ancient Ones is a story twenty years in the making. From the initial idea at fifteen, to the moment I got the courage to finish it in my thirties, the entire process has been an incredible journey. I knew in the back of my mind, I wouldn’t be able to stop with just one book, and no sooner did I finish The Ancient Ones and sent it for editing, did Lucius creep back into my mind.
I was driving through the Cleveland Metroparks, listening to Tool’s new album, when I got a vision of him and Morrigan in the Underworld. I realized that I’d only written a small piece of an epic story. There was an entirely different perspective that needed to be heard. I suppose you can guess whose perspective that is.
Within one year, Book Two and Three were finished, and I am so excited to give readers a completed trilogy that is exactly the type of story I have always wanted to read. I hope that if you were a fan of Book One, that Liminality will not disappoint. We begin the story right at the point where we left off, but in case you need a quick reminder, allow me to assist.
Book One tells the story of an ancient immortal named David, the last of his kind, who is in the midst of an existential crisis. The year is 1857 and David has just bought an old, abandoned house called Lardone Manor, once a countryside cathedral. After a particularly long depressive slump, he heads to his favorite Limehouse pub where he meets a brash, unapologetic lady of the night who is dying of consumption. After taking him along for a taste of her self-destruction, she convinces him to tell her his story.
David reveals he was born in Ancient Gaul, the son of a Druid Elder. Julius Caesar invades their tribe, kidnapping him to be sold as a slave. On the harrowing passage home, he is comforted by a mysterious woman who protects him from harm. After a particularly gruesome arrival at the Roman Port, he realizes she is The Morrigan, a Celtic war goddess who has decided to look after him. In the Roman forum, he finds a young slave girl named Gaia who takes him under her wing and into the forced employ of a winemaker named Eridus. She gives him his Roman name, Davius.
Eventually, Davius falls in love with her, convinced that one day he will earn enough money from his paintings to buy their freedom and get married. But strange things start to occur, including nightmares of a hideous, bloodthirsty dragon. Eventually, he meets a strange man named Lucius, who seems to be a world traveling philosopher. He hires Davius to paint for him and the two become fast friends. He is warned by the apparition of a boar that he should steer clear of Lucius, that he is not all he seems.
Davius learns Eridus wants to marry Gaia and panics. He looks to his new friend for help and finds out he is a reincarnated dark god, brought to the earth flawed, therefore becoming the world’s first immortal blood drinker. Lucius wants Davius to join him, but Davius flees in terror. He returns to the villa to learn Eridus knows he’s been sleeping with Gaia. He sells her off to an abusive slaveowner named Nirus and beats Davius half to death.
Davius wakes up to discover Lucius has rescued him and killed Eridus. Lucius encourages him to use his inherent Druidic power to rescue Gaia. Davius realizes he has command of the wind—he can create windstorms and channel its energy. Unfortunately, Gaia dies and Davius vows to avenge her death. He decides to become a creature like Lucius to do so.
Five years later, in Ancient Greece, the boar that once warned him returns, revealing that he is a liminal being named Libraean. He reveals more about Lucius’s past, including the fact that Gaia was pregnant with Davius’s child at the time of her death. Davius decides it’s time to avenge her death. He decides to summon the Morrigan for help, unknowingly igniting a war between him and Lucius for her attention. She says she will help, but only if they make her one of them. Lucius doesn’t think it will work, but Davius insists it will.
Davius is approached by a strange council of creatures who tell him they want him to bring back Morrigan. He meets Anubis, and they fill him with power to help him. Davius succeeds in killing Nirus and brings Morrigan to life. The problem is, she decided Nirus’s wicked daughter, Delicia, would be her vessel and instead of taking her over, the two souls braid together, making her half-Delicia, half-Morrigan to become an entity called Morgana.
Jump to 15th century Wallachia. Davius (now called David) lives with Lucius and Morgana in a Romanian castle. Lucius has stolen the identity of the Wallachian prince, Vladimir Dracula, and presides over a court of self-created nemorti and revenants. Tension is at an all-time high: David and Lucius are at odds, compounded by Morgana slowly losing her grip on reality and bouncing back between Delicia and the Morrigan. Delicia seems content with Lucius as her lover, but Morrigan and David have a special connection that neither one of them quite understands. She begs Lucius and David to kill her so she can be a free goddess once more, but neither one of them are willing—they love her too much.
At a feast, Lucius brings in a prisoner for entertainment, who turns out to be a hideous lycanthrope. He terrorizes the entire court, forcing David to take Morgana’s blood so he can shapeshift into a wolf and stop him. Her dying wish is for him to follow the wolf to a witch named Hekate. He obeys, discovering a group of otherworldly beings called the Council (the creatures from before), who inform him they are responsible for all magical workings in the world and they need his help to stop Lucius, who is upsetting the balance on earth. He meets Dragos, one half of a pair of healer twins, and he discovers the true identity of the beast, a reincarnated Viking god who goes by the name of Danulf. He learns there is an Insurgence rising up against Lucius made of human subjects and escaped nemorti.
Eventually, Lucius’s knights catch up with David and Danulf in the Carpathian Mountains as they travel to find Hekate. Lucius ties him up outside to die in the sun, but Danulf saves him at the last moment, and delivers him to Hekate, a pregnant healer/witch who holds the secrets to his past.
As she heals his wounds, she reveals that all of them—Lucius, David, Morrigan—were once part of a quartet of Egyptian gods who existed at the beginning of time, reincarnated on earth with no memories of their past lives. She reveals that Lucius and Morrigan were once husband and wife (named Set and Nephthys), but David (Osiris) slept with Morrigan, impregnating her with his sons (gods Anubis and Horus). Morrigan flees, letting her sister, Isis, raise her sons as her own in order to protect them from Set. He still manages to find out, and murders Osiris.
The sisters, Isis and Nephthys, decide to bring back Osiris from the dead. Anubis and Horus, now grown adults, assist, knowing they have to use Set’s blood to revive him. The plan fails—Horus kills Set, but not before Set plucks out Horus’s eye, therefore cursing his reincarnation, and Osiris comes back wrong, biting Nephthys’s neck and forcing Isis to stab him in the heart.
Nephthys and Osiris (Morrigan and David) go to the Upperrealms (heaven), Set (Lucius) is banished to Tartarus (hell) with Anubis guarding him. Isis frees her soul and puts her body and magic in an acadia tree. Horus reincarnates as Libraean.
With this new knowledge, David is ready to end Lucius for good, and freely joins the Insurgence. Anubis and Libraean contact him beforehand and Librean gives him the last bit of power so David is strong enough to defeat him. After a brutal war, which includes the deaths of Dragos, Hekate, and Danulf, and one last embrace with Morrigan in spirit form, David evokes the power of all the elements and slays Lucius, who had become the horrible creature from hi s dreams.
Throughout the story, David and his companion (the prostitute from the tavern) arrive and talk at Lardone Manor, but towards the end, David learns her death is coming quickly. She still wants to hear his story, and after he finishes, he is content to hold her in his arms until she passes. At the last moment, and with the help of some very ornery crows, he realizes she is the Morrigan incarnated. He runs to find Libraean, who has also been alive this whole time, living in the secret vaults underneath his cemetery. Libraean turns her into a blood drinker and they happily reunite...until there is a knock at the door. It is Danulf, surprisingly still alive, come to tell them Lucius has returned.
Hope you enjoy Book II of The Ancient Ones Trilogy, Liminality.
Dreadfully Yours,
Cassandra L. Thompson
Preface
For as long as he remembered, he hated the little boy.
He observed him quietly from afar, dressed in rags, grime perpetually smeared across his face, dirt trapped underneath his fingernails. He watched the boy neglect the endless array of alluring books his tutor presented each week, scowled at his untouched piano in the corner, and salivated over the painstakingly prepared lunches brought each afternoon on a silver plate. Although the boy’s parents were never around, he had a full staff under his command and control, and oh, how he hated him for it.
His keeper scolded him, pulling his ear and clicking her tongue, reminding him that he was an orphan whose survival depended upon the good graces of the de Sadet family, and that hating their only son would not do him one bit of good.
So, he became clever. He hid himself so well that none of the other servants saw him as he studied the boy’s every detail. He noted the way he crossed his legs, the way he grasped his quill, his languid drawl when forced to recite Latin. He learned all his lessons in secret, taking notes with bits of salvaged ink and the parchment he’d hidden behind the wall.
He kept his muscles still even as he watched the boy beat the family hounds into submission, letting his self-produced seed spill onto their wounds as they cowered beneath him. When the boy became a young man and turned that same whip on the servant girls, he forced his own hand over his mouth, lest he scream out when the terrible boy relieved himself on the poor girls as they cried.
He continued to watch until the moment the shy, raven-haired piano teacher arrived to teach him. She was older than the Marquis’s son, but he looked at her in the same lustful fashion as the others he’d abused. The servant boy tried to remain detached like before, but she had been kind to him when she noticed him lurking in the shadows, ignoring his shabby clothes and rustled hair. They quickly became friends, sharing lunch together while the rest of the staff was preoccupied. She complimented his peculiar eyes, and he impressed her with his ability to recite the works of Plato and name the constellations. He looked forward to her company, a beacon of light in an existence hidden by shadow.
He continued to watch until the moment he witnessed her attack, two days after the Marquis’s son turned thirteen. It happened during a lesson when she accidentally brushed up against him, causing his fleshy face to turn red with excitement. He threw the sheet music to the floor before grabbing her, twisting her arms behind her waist as he had done to the others. The servant boy silently withdrew from his hiding space between the two walls and pounced, moving so fast that not a sound was heard as he wrapped piano wire around the Marquis’s son's throat, choking him until he grew limp and fell to the marble floor like a sack of potatoes.
He feared her reaction as he caught his breath, but the piano teacher merely beamed. She surprised him further by assuring him that if he would drag the body to her room, she would take care of the rest. Though his heart hammered in his chest, shocked at what he had done, he trusted her, calmed by her words and demeanor.
He looked down at the bloated, purple-faced body and knelt, gently removing its powdered wig and slipping it over his own unruly black curls. He struck a pose for the piano teacher, presenting the perfect imitation of the Marquis’s son.
She lit up as she realized his intentions, offering him a playful curtsy in response. They met each other’s eyes, coming to a silent agreement before he dragged the asphyxiated corpse out of the parlor while she trailed behind. From that moment on, he was no longer the servant boy hiding in the shadows, longing for greatness—he was the wealthy son of a Marquis and heir to a small fortune. She would make sure it was so.
He was only nine years old.
Part I
In Vargr, In Mani
Wolf, Moon
1
The Visitor
David
London, 1857
David stared mouth agape at the man in his doorway dripping rainwater onto his floor.
“My word,” Libraean murmured from behind him. “It’s you.”
Danulf attempted a close-lipped smile as he nervously fiddled with his hat.
“If this night reveals one more shock, I think I might finally keel over,” Libraean whispered to David. He lacked his usual cap, his graying hair in disarray around the blunted horns that interrupted his hairline.
“My sentiments exactly,” David agreed.
Libraean placed a hand on his shoulder. “I am headed to the vaults to fetch her some of the leftover pig's blood in my pantry. She still appears calm, but I remember the thirst of the newly transformed and I don’t think we should depend on her placidity for too much longer.”
David nodded, patting his hand in appreciation before the creature slipped through the doorway into the night. David turned his attention back to Dan, resuming his astoundment. “I thought you were dead—I knew it, actually. I folded your arms over your silent heart.”
“Perhaps our guest would appreciate the warmth of a fire in your parlor?” Old Man Jacob appeared behind them. He’d changed out of his robe and into a formal housecoat, his snow-white hair slicked back from his large forehead, accentuating the thickness of his eyebrows. He moved quickly to lift the dampened cloak from a surprised but compliant Dan, draping it on the nearby coat rack.
“I don’t think he minds the cold,” David hinted.
Jacob’s light eyes widened with understanding. “Are all of you vampyres, sir?”
“Let us move to the parlor.” David gestured Danulf fully into his foyer, pulling the door shut behind him with an echoing clang.
Dan’s eyes swept the manor as he followed Jacob, beholding the vaulted ceilings and the twin staircases that crawled up dark papered walls holding dusty black sconces. A few chandeliers glittered in the dim light, the dreary storm outside preventing the illumination that normally radiated through the stained-glass windows above. The house was drenched in shades of burgundy and ornaments of darkly stained wood, which would have given the house a stately facade had they not faded with time.
Jacob entered the parlor first to prepare a fire, regardless of the vampyre presence. The fireplace attempted to dwarf the room, a substantial structure that held its own next to the ornate furniture upholstered in silk, the crimson walls and rugs, and the ostentatious grand piano that sat, unused, in the farthest corner.
The building light offered David the opportunity to observe Dan as he sat awkwardly on the sofa, his oversized legs crossed in front of him. His movements were more graceful than David remembered, despite his bulky frame, his suit made from French silk and tailored to fit his unusual size. His current nervousness was peculiar to David, an expression he would have never attributed to the bold heathen from his memory.
