MAIA
byDaku

Prologue

I was born to parents of royalty as a female, unfortunately. They had both, well, my father, anyway, desperately craved a son to carry on their reign as the king of Ketrys when they passed on to the Dark Realm. I later learned from someone who guided me with my magic that I had not been born to the mother I knew. Instead, when my father slept on his own one night, the Mother Deity passed through him and, far away in the blizzard lands of Naphold, through my untrue mother. The mother I knew bore me, although I was truly the daughter of the Mother Deity, who was then only a half-goddess, a demi-goddess. She later rose to the position of Mother. When I was born, I appeared as a girl, as I am, and my parents were so angry that they banished me in my early life to the Commoners’ Village. There, I was raised by a thief woman, Iona, and learned the ways of the people who would have been mine.

I learned from Iona how to pickpocket, shoot a bow, wield a sword, ride a horse, and move in secret without making a sound. This came in handy as I grew older; I had to get money for us to survive. Much of the time, I snitched from the very belts of nobles surveying the city, but on lucky days, I managed to find a temporary job, such as herding sheep, which I loathed, or, rarely, helping the men on a hunt through the alpine depths of the Ivory Woods. Due to ancient magic, it always snowed there, hence its name. It was here, with the commoners, that I grew until I was nine years old. That was when I started craving adventure.

* * *

Well after dark, I managed to sneak into the stables at the palace, past the watchful eyes of stable hands still at work. My goal: to find a suitable horse for my next task at hand. The king and queen, whom I still did not know were my own parents, or one of them was, at least, had recently ordered a new herd of colts, the finest and rarest from all around Ketrys and just large enough for riding, to be taken to their stables for examination, and then acceptance, honor, or a lowering to the inferior class, my own, as workhorses. The idea now was for me to find a method of stealing the best horse and keeping it as my own.

I used every skill that I had been taught by Iona and fellow villagers to get past three guards and a sleeping stable worker. The floorboards creaked noisily, the result of years of neglect, and each time I began to step on one, I would have to freeze in place, not daring to breathe. The penalties for being in those stables without authorization were harsh, and by now I knew them well. It was enough motivation to get me to the untamed ponies at the stable’s far end.

Here I had to scan quickly, looking at the colts’ muscle, behavior, and reaction to the intruder in their home. Suddenly I saw two who stood out from all the rest. One was a bay, a mare, who stood calmly with her ears pricking at the slightest noise I made. She held her head erect with a proud look in her hazel eyes. I noticed a cluster of white that caught every draft in the stables around her shoulders-she was a Pegasus, older than the other, but still a Pegasus. I could train her. The other was an unbroken young stallion, blacker than ebony and a moonless midnight combined. The thing that instantly set him apart from the mare was his miraculous, beginning set of wings, a collection of black, shimmering, downy feathers clustered at his shoulder blades, and the stub growing from the middle of his forelock, silver, and just beginning to develop. I could tell it wouldn’t get very long when it was fully grown in, but that was only natural with Winged Unicorns like him because they had to share the genes. His wings would be wide and powerful, thanks to the togetherness of the muscles from his parents. All Winged Unicorns had to be born from a combination of a unicorn and a Pegasus, as this one was. I chose him.

The next part about stealing a horse was the hardest by far. His tack was hanging on nails on the side of his stall. Silently I lifted each part of it from the makeshift racks and properly attached them to the Winged Unicorn, and then opened the door of the stall, mounted the stolen animal, and escaped the stables through the back entrance. It was nearing dawn when I galloped home.

The moment I stabled the horse, I staggered into our hut and collapsed into bed, waking up much later, after noon. It was then that I told Iona about the Pegasus mare in the royal stables. I offered to go back for it so she could have a Pegasus of her own, and when she refused to let me, I persisted until Iona gave in and permitted me to get her a Pegasus. This time, I tried stealing the Pegasus in the daytime, when the guard might be even less heavy. They would most likely expect raids at night. Fortunately, when I slinked in for the second time, the king and queen still hadn’t checked their stabled horses, and so would most likely not miss the two I confiscated until they had the guards do a count. Every time, they ordered the same number of horses: 50 on the dot. In this case, they were going to end up with 48 after I escaped the country with Iona.

When I approached her stall, the mare recognized me from the night before, and nickered softly at my arrival. I shushed her, and gave her a sugar cube as a peace offering. Her tack was in the same place as my black horse’s had been in his stall. Her bridle and saddle were brand new, but there was not yet a saddle blanket for the Pegasus, so I had to ride her bareback with the saddle just in front of me. I had already tried this before with one of the old workhorses at the village, but it, being old, was tamed, and this filly was not, so I had a hard time getting her out of the stables.

Then, at the door: "Halt! Don’t move a muscle!" A guardsman. Instead of stopping, I urged the horse into a canter towards the guard and on my way past, pummeled him in the face with the saddle I carried, and ran off with the new horse.

* * *

Iona waited for me at the doors of our small stable, and quickly ushered me inside, still on the back of the Pegasus. After dismounting, I washed up inside while Iona undid the bridle and hung it with the saddle over the edge of an old stall.

Coming back out, I said, "Aren’t we ever going to name them? That’s what captures them, isn’t it? They’ll need to be broken in, and get used to us before we leave, but that has to be soon!"

The training started directly after I’d eaten my light afternoon meal. Iona fetched a saddle blanket for her mare, and we readied the horses for a long run. I had to get adjusted to how my horse ran, jumped, walked, and even fidgeted. Both had to be trained for fighting, taught how to rear up in the midst of a battle and lash out with their hooves. This would take time, but for the moment, we were only getting used to each other.

On the ride out of the city, Iona and I thought up names for our steeds. I scanned through the options in my head, choosing carefully. Being pickier about it, I came up with my stallion’s name after Iona did her Pegasus mare’s-she became Cypress. As I continued to ponder, we rode farther from the village, away from the castle. Suddenly, it hit me. The stallion had gold-flaked, red eyes, so why not Ember?

"I dub thee ‘Ember’," I said, and gently touched each of Ember’s shoulders as if I were knighting him. Iona chuckled.

"We must teach them to fly, and start now, so they will know what to do with their wings when they grow in," she said. I eagerly agreed.

So we instructed them by jumping over logs, running them to their fastest speeds and launching from the ground, and leaping from one spot without prior movement while we adjusted to the way their muscles flexed when they galloped, trotted, cantered, and walked. The practice lasted only a little while past sundown, when we both decided to retire the horses and ourselves.

We headed back to the village, careful not to be seen, and flopped into bed after stabling the horses for the night. We would leave tomorrow, and set a destination after we had ventured miles from the castle and were well out of sight.

* * *

It was a few precious hours before dawn. Iona and I secretly packed any belongings we would need on the trip to somewhere else. Luckily for us, the horses were strong, and could carry more than just what was needed. I brought other things, too, like my olivewood ocarina, which I had received from Iona the first day she knew me, which I had been too young to remember. She didn’t tell me until later that she was actually not my mother, or that my father truly had not been killed in a hunting accident.

Iona, being an early riser, made it out to the stable before I did, and when I made it outside, she had already prepared both Cypress and Ember. Wordlessly, I mounted Ember, careful not to disturb his downy wings, and followed in Cypress’s hoofprints to somewhere far away.

* * *

We had been riding for not more than three hours when the sun steadily rose behind us. The city was well out of sight, but as we could not maintain a consistent pace, the castle towers were still barely in view, and of course this meant we had to keep riding until they were not.

This took another small section of the day to do, and we finally found the edge of the Desert of Veph. An oasis had been situated there for as long as any one person could remember, save the Reminders, who held secrets and the forgotten and remembered history of our people’s past. It was here that the castle finally disappeared, and we stopped to rest the horses and our legs, which felt weak and strange after hours of neglect as we rode west.

It is now that I shall describe myself, and Iona. I was a slender girl, muscular from years of farm work, and I had light brown hair that bleached blonde in the summer. I was, most of the time, pretty much scrubbed clean. We didn’t have a lot of water available for washing, so the oasis was a welcome sight for it. My eyes were sky blue, and little sparkles of blood red were there, too. Everyone with magic had them-it represented the color of the magic they used. At that moment I wasn’t at all well instructed with magic because Iona didn’t have the ability, and so was unable to teach me to use it. However, I had taught myself very small things, like making a little fireball appear at my fingertips. I hadn’t been quite brave enough to throw one for fear of setting something on fire, but out here I could test it in the sand. Also, I knew how to create an equally sized ball of red water, and had tried throwing it into our washing basin. It filled the bottom, which was more than I had expected. By the day we got to the oasis, I had lived with Iona for nearly eleven years, as I was that age then, and had been given to Iona when I was around three months old, although at the time I still did not know this.

Iona, on the other hand, was appearing older than she was. Her hair, although she was only in her forties (she didn’t keep track, but she at least knew she was in that decade), was more of a gray color than the jet black it had been when I was young. Still, she was strong and lively as ever, and did not lose energy quickly. Her hazel eyes had no flecks of color; she was simply an ordinary person without magic. Since I had been abandoned to the villagers at only three months old, she had taken me in and raised me, I thinking that she was my real mother, and that my father had died in a hunting accident early in my life. Iona’s husband really had, but he was not my real father. Iona made for a total of three possible mothers I had: the queen, the Mother Deity (still only a half-goddess), and Iona. At the time I didn’t know of any mother, save for Iona.

We bathed ourselves thoroughly, scrubbed and removed the tack from the horses, and sat down in front of the oasis, watching the early sun’s reflections on the sapphire oasis waters and planning where to go.