Ilyria and the Lightning Bird

Chapter One: The Shadow across the Moon

Ilyria leaned back against the cool stone wall as she looked through the open window of her chambers up at the night sky. The moon shimmered silver-gold in the warm air, so fragrant with the scent of magnolias and jasmine her mother had ordered delivered by the thousand. The moon didn’t care about the bustle that had begun in the early hours of that morning in her mother’s mansion and had only now quietened down. The moon was oblivious to the water fountains pumped with cool water, to the conjured lights that floated like fireflies above the gardens, to the rows and rows of banquet tables, heavy with rare Deluvian silver. Tomorrow she would be married. The moon would not care about that either. She had not imagined this should be her fate. She had only that year completed her studies and she dreamed still of joining her mother’s traders in journeying across the desert, buying dripping moonfruit from Isfap or intricately wrought jewels from Itoulp or visiting the miraculous w