Advent

  ************

  “Sir come with me quickly!” I heard my aide call to me hastily and I looked up at him from my desk in the mobile tent. We had left the main camp at the Citadel, as directed by the Empress and I was in a tent that wasn't my usual tent, which looked mostly bare. The long war had changed much, no longer could I enjoy the benefits of my position as the commanding officer of this army. The mobile tent was cubic and made with easily detachable material, built for function rather than looks; it was without doubt the preferred tent for a moving army. Its interior was littered with bureaucratic paper work around the main desk, to think that at a time like this I still had to do paper work, I shook my head at the thought. Around the desk were the essentials, a communication post, a gun rack, a food processor and a bed. Well I guess you could call it a bed, but it wasn't as comfortable as my bed back home in Deazon. We were all far from our homes, at the other side of the forbidden forest...

  “Master Thalbeon. The time has come,” a voice called, and so I got off my seat with great haste; so much so that my seat fell over. I followed him out the tent a few meters, to a clearing signalling the end of the forest. The Sages had told us that one would come to our aid and my Empress directed me, I was blessed to witness it first hand. My men were around me and all heads were turned to the sky.

  “Messenger!“ I called and a man came to me.

  “Announce what goes on here to the Empress,” I ordered.

  “Yes sir,” he responded and went to operate the controls of the transmission pedestal, and I returned to the object of my attention. It was a clear blue sky with our two suns invigorating the air, their glare extended and touched a lone cloud in the sky... The glare got brighter becoming a spectacular sight, a primal red flashed at the centre followed by the rumble of thunder. Suddenly the cloud began to glow golden, and then there were flashes of blue, purple and every colour of the rainbow in a sort of geometrical pattern; before my eyes, the colours merged into a singular bright light. The light was so pure that I had to avert my eyes and as I did so, I heard a crack of thunder and felt the rush of the wind, so I shielded my eyes. My gaze returned to the cloud, which was still shining but much dimmer than before, and it seemed something was materialising in the distance, within the cloud.

  The ground beneath my feet began to shake and some warriors fell off their feet. The same patterns began to form on the ground, there were two of them and they shimmered like small suns on opposing sides as two creatures walked out. From the left emerged a black cat the size of a big dog, its coat had short black fur and from the right a spotted cat of the same size, and it too had short fur. Its coat however, was orange with black spots like a leopard; they both had big paws and thick bodies, truly they were majestic cats. I would have assumed them to be leopards but they looked different from any cat I had ever seen. They came together and seemed to greet each other... I looked up again, towards the cloud where a form had now materialised; it was a cloaked man, who seemed to ride the air as he approached us. The big cats let out a call hailing his arrival and I too bid my warriors to salute, and as the rider approached I realised it wasn't a man but a woman. She looked like someone from the east of our world and her bronzed skin glowed in the light. Streaks of silver lined her jet-black hair and her cloak ruffled in the wind revealing a skin tight, light armour underneath. She wore a wide belt on her waist, which held the rest of the cloak to her bosom. She was beautiful to look upon; was she our goddess of war, I wondered. By now she was a stone’s throw away, riding what looked like a metal board. She jumped off and slowly descended to the ground, while the board changed form, vanishing somewhere in her cloak, and the air was calm as she landed before us. We all watched as the big cats went to her and she greeted them, and in the background I heard the messenger relay the situation to Empress Shade. The goddess walked to us, escorted on both sides by her cats and when she reached speaking distance she simply said, “I am Traveller, second of my kin.”