The Stardippers Book I: The Portus Codex Prologue

THE STARDIPPERS
BOOK I: THE PORTUS CODEX
PROLOGUE

WHAT CAN WE SAY OF PORTUS? That it is a portal planet is evident from its name. The Portusian peoples and their accumulated metaphysical and alchemical lore have long caused intrigue to flourish because they alone possessed the technology for space travel to and from their planet. To be welcomed onto the planet, say, for the annual Trade Fair or a conference, one had to be invited. One had to dock at assigned locations, and one could not take any kind of reconnaissance flights over Portus. These rules caused chagrin in the more open and powerful nearby realms. The less they were allowed to visit Portus, the more they wanted to. Some sought to occupy the planet, thinking that would provide access to the sophisticated Portusian technological advancements.

The Resonant War was brought on by the treachery of certain avaricious people who found a way to land off-world armies onto Portus. The brief advances these armies made onto Portusian soil were repelled decisively by the planet itself. Some ships simply vanished into heretofor non- existent crevasses, others met with sudden gale-force winds, and were drive in to the sea, while still others crashed into mountains. Those that landed on the mainland were met with forces of Ælfen and never did reach the islands. Treachery prolonged the war, but also allowed for new levels of diplomacy to develop. After the war, the traitors caught or fled, the resumption of diplomacy in all things gave people hope that Portusian alchemists would share more and yet a little more of their technology.

Nowadays, of course, the alchemists were mostly Ælfen, but also, from among the Dragon- people, so there was that to take into consideration. Everyone knew the Ælfen don’t, as a rule, bargain. Or reveal their secrets of space flight, though it did take the war to drive those messages home. The other realms had their own methods of space travel and had therefore to content themselves with their own considerable resources. It was in this climate of détente that news of the catastrophes on Earth came to be known. Ultimately, each of the planets in the system found reasons to look forward to welcoming refugees from the imploding planet, not the least of which were the final mining opportunities to extract precious ores from Earth.

Beyond Portus, particularly on Earth, knowledge of the Ælfen had been shrouded in myth for centuries. But the peoples of the near Universe, who were in a position to more intimately know the Portusians, knew only a little more than these same myths. The Ælfen, the humans, and others including the Traders from Portus possessed both tradition and star lore that were coveted by the Dragon-people from Tartus; the Sea people from Amrit; the Sky people from Resu; and the tall, bronze Giants from Kron. The Portusians had reasons to be secretive and those reasons were also secret.

After the Resonant War, and when conferences and the annual Trade Fair allowed for a resumption of travel to and from Portus, people continued to be far too interested in Portusian principles of star lore, physics, and space flight, so thought Bjorn Havard of the Ælfen, Chief Warden of the Regin Islands. He took it upon himself to safeguard the Treatise on Time and Space wherein key principles were recorded and expounded upon, by hiding it on another planet, in another time.

As he was of the Portusian Ælfen, and so could master time travel, he was fairly certain he would be gone from Portus and return before anyone noticed. Then, if polite or other inquiries were made about borrowing the only known copy of the Treatise on Time and Space, the Chief Librarian could honestly say it was out. Bjorn of the Ælfen was less certain, however, if such a magical object could pass through time and space when he made his crossing. So, first he changed the cover, a delicate process of working with calfskin and vellum, boiled gallnuts and coloured inks to rename it The Book of the Portal World. He sealed the treatise inside a metalsharkshin codex before setting out to a time over a thousand years earlier on a planet named Earth, known to be home to Ælfen. There he intended to see it stored in some castle archives far from prying eyes.

But as Bjorn traveled that life-altering path through the stars, he was joined by an unwanted companion. Aidan, of the Dragon People, who happened to be on Portus at an alchemist’s conference, caught wind of the voyage and contrived to affix his energies to those of Bjorn’s. Who knows where the Dragon People acquire their lore? As it happens, Aidan was entirely successful,though the two of them wrestled for most of the journey, only to be wrenched apart as they arrived in Earth’s atmosphere, squalling and enmeshed, talon to talon, in a circular, downward spiral close and ever closer to the mountains and the sea.

Bjorn, descending, as if from Valhalla, to the Gribskov forest, bearing a gift from Portus so that the dreams of sky lore and visions, magic, and poetry, could be housed away from the political storms in his own Trappist Universe, was close to prevailing over Aidan. As they twisted and turned upon one another, falling through Earth’s atmosphere, Bjorn saw a magnificent white gyrfalcon. Since Aidan was in his dragon form, Bjorn chose at one and the same moment to hurl a spell upon Aidan while sending himself into the gyrfalcon. The great bird, hunting above a lonely castle, seemed the perfect vessel. But in the transformation into a falcon, he failed retain his hold on the codex. All he could do was try to land safely here on Earth.

Throughout that downward spiral, Aidan of the Dragon People argued that Bjorn had violated the Agreement on the Interaction With Other Solar Systems, which, as far as Bjorn knew, did not exist. And anyway, in such an event, the proper channels would have been for the Dragon People to speak with the Portusian envoy, not the Chief Warden. The clash of interferences between Bjorn and Aidan activated certain magical properties on Earth, including its gravitational field. As they plummeted to Earth and pulled apart, they caused a time twist and the spell Bjorn had aimed at Aidan blew back upon himself, causing Bjorn to forget who he was and what he’d done.

Yet, and of course, as a codex filled with spells, star lore, and other powerful craftings, the manuscript, like other magical objects, wanted to be found. So as it fell from them, it landed on a beach where a young girlchild found it bobbing in a tidal pool and brought it to her nurse. When the two of them returned to the castle for lunch, they brought it to the child’s mother, the lady of the castle, who set it in a book cabinet in her boudoir.

Bjorn’s powerful (and failed) spell made him a beacon, and he was located by a seer living in a dark forest. Aidan, it should be noted, flew free and fast above the forest, once Bjorn had twisted free, and though he noted the seer making her way toward what was left of Bjorn, the dragon focused instead on finding the magical item Bjorn had been transporting for it too was calling out like a signal fire.

Aurinia, a giant of a woman known as a seer of the Danes, followed the echo she sensed like a heartbeat in the world to the forest’s edge. There, she found a falcon inside a frozen piece of time and space lodged on a crag of rock overlooking the sea. She threw her shawl around it and picked it up, heavy, but not too heavy for a woman of her size and strength. She bore it to her hut in the forest and placed it gently on the ground in front of the door. There she sat in her big outdoor chair next to a pile of willow and wove a large cage. When she was finished, she inched the cage inside the hut, and built up the fire and lit the lamps, for the day was growing cold, and clouds darkened the sky. She brought the shawl-wrapped, still throbbing artifact and placed it inside the cage by means of lifting and replacing the entire top of the cage. Then she pulled her shawl off and through the slats, gently crooned soft, reassuring words to the vague image of a gyrfalcon she found there as if trapped in ice. If Bjorn was safe here, he did not yet know it for certain, for the woman shut and locked the cage, and made her way to the sea, and thence along the shore to the Roskilde castle to speak with the nobles living there. She hurried, for she sensed the shadow of a dragon flying overhead.

As soon as she approached the castle, she felt again the shimmer of magic, and schooled herself to ignore its call so that she might craft a response that would convince the nobles she had a right to view it, whatever it was. Being allowed to speak to the lady of the house was a gift in itself. The men were away hunting. She presented herself as a middle-aged woman, and because she carried her staff and her beauty as proof of her abilities, the lady of the house welcomed her, hoping the seer would be able to tell her some of the future.

In those days, the völva—the seeresses of the forest—were usually accompanied by wellmaidens, but Aurinia worked alone when she practiced seidhr. The Lady Roskilde had such deep respect for Aurinia, that she invited her to see what her daughter had brought home from the sea that day, and retrieved the codex from where she had stowed it. Bringing Aurinia to the kitchens, the Lady showed her a red box embossed with a long, golden dragon, and a puff of embossed smoke along its length. When Aurinia held it, her fingers trembled across the top of the box’s metal-like mirror, as if she were playing a tune there. Indeed, the Lady felt compelled to call for wine and refreshments so that Aurinia could spend some time examining the contents. As it happened, Aurinia preferred to take her refreshments deep in the undercroft, below layers and layers of rock, where, she persuaded the Lady, the codex would be most safe.

As the Lady left her in the vaulted undercroft for the afternoon, Aurinia found that she could decipher many of the runes and images in the codex, though it would take a lifetime to try to understand them all. It was a lengthy document of a kind she had never seen before, and she wondered if it might hold a trace of the thing she had found in the forest. As she schooled her energies to align with the heartbeat of the codex, it welcomed her, as if by provoking a trance. She startled awake, and pictured instantly the item she’d retrieved and now housed in a willow cage in her hut. The codex reacted swiftly to this image by imparting to her a different image, one of a page in the book. Curiously, she leafed through the manuscript until she came to the page that held the simple spell. It was a mirror spell that she felt she could use to treat her guest’s enchantment, and so, taking her leave, for the first of many times, Aurinia left the castle and made her way back through the forest.

She thought it would be perilous to try the reverse of the enchantment she had found, but more dangerous if she did not try, for she could sense avaricious entities, similar to the dragons that sometimes hunted these woods, and she sensed them honing in on her as she crossed the clearing to her hut. When she reached home, she closed the door behind her and said a warding spell, feeling the great shadow of a dragon drift over. She turned cautiously from the door, barely daring to breathe, but aware of the heartbeat drumming off the shimmering piece of time and space locked within the cage she’d built. In that cage, a white gyrfalcon flew steadily but remained in the confines of the cage. Then it shapeshifted into a tall, thin, and handsome young man running, glancing back over his shoulder, almost focusing on her and about to speak when he shapeshifted back into the falcon, and flew in place. She sat before him and tried to be present when he shifted back to manshape, but he never saw her. Using the heartbeat emanating from the trapped creature in the cage, she closed her eyes, relaxed her body, and entered the trance taught to her by the codex. From there, she located the other part of the man, flying also, but in another world, and unaware of who he was. She sought to bring this half of the creature, for she was certain he was not naturally a gyrfalcon, into a state of slumber, whereupon she might work dreamcraft upon him and help him return through time and space in another way, and without being detected. It was dangerous work, for there was a dragon nearby, although no longer looking for Bjorn. The dragon was intent upon the codex, but its aftereffects had worn off, and located in the Roskilde Castle, its beacons were muted. Auriana had been successful in warding the codex from others and was confident the Lady Roskilde would leave it deep in the undercroft of the castle.

Aidan of the Dragon People lived many centuries in his dragon form, coming to sire many progenies there, and was highly respected by the kindred spirits he found on this welcoming planet. He was, at heart, peaceful enough, now that the beacon of the Treatise was silenced and so did not join in any marauding adventures. He found that the dragons here took for granted that precious gems and metals had magical properties. He learned many new, Earth secrets of alchemy.

Aurinia would work many spells in her life, and save many people and countries from ill-fate, and many wondered, over the years, where her wisdom came from, for she never took on acolytes except for the wellmaidens who came to serve her near the brook that sprang out of the rocks behind her home, and she never had a school of her own. She remained content, all the days of her life, to live in the forest and visit with her many friends nearby. It was said that she was often entertained at Castle Roskilde and that she often treated patients of the well-to-do there, bringing with her healing waters and gifts of time.

Aurinia’s discoveries, derived from years of studying the codex, died with her but she did return the Earth-trapped Bjorn to Portus, back to the time he had left.

But when he arrived on Portus, this Bjorn knew himself for a gryfalcon, and though he came to have the gift of speech, he neither had a way to transform back into his Ælfen self nor an idea that he was once a man who was loved, and so now mourned, by a remarkable woman on his home planet.