Free The Claiming of the Children (The Veil of Death) by D. K. Manning

The Claiming of the Children
     
     
    The Veil of Death series
     
     
     
    D. K. Manning

    Text copyright © 2014 D. K. Manning
    All Rights Reserved
     
     
    This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

    Dedication
     
    This book is dedicated to the Immortal Children who are bound to mortality and attached to the planet called Earth.

    Books in The Veil of Death Series
     
     
    The Claiming of the Children
     
    Book One: The Protector of Memories
     

    “Some books leave us free and some books make us free.”
     
     
    Ralph Waldo Emerson

     

     
     
     
    MOUNT OLYMPUS [i]
     
    “My daughters! My daughters! Oh Zeus. My daughters!” Eurynome [ii] shouted as the Four Seasons – Guardians to Mount Olympus – opened the shimmering golden gates. She ran across the main courtyard, stopped beside the central fountain and searched for Zeus. [iii]
    The whisperings of Instinct told her where Zeus’s presence could be found and casting her sights over toward the eastern corner of the Universe, she gazed upon the image of Zeus standing at one of the twelve windows within the Throne Room of Mount Olympus’s Eastern Tower.
    Eurynome watched Zeus’s shifting energies of blues, silvery-greys and sparkling whites but not a flicker of acknowledgement to her presence did Zeus create.
    “Zeus,” she called. “Your wife Hera is hosting a party upon the Earth. But it is only your children who are the guests within it.”
    Eurynome waited for Zeus to signal that she had the right to access the Easter Tower.
    She knew with absolute certainty that even if her words had not managed to reach Zeus’s senses, then her echoes piercing the airwaves would have.
    But no signal arrived.
    She witnessed not the electrical threads of yellowy-oranges that left her sight momentarily dazzled. She heard not the sound that she loathed the most; an explosion of thundery shards. Their noise seared into the depths of her hearing and whilst her energies regained balance, Eurynome’s senses would be left within a state of deafness.
    The longer Eurynome stood and waited, the stronger Annoyance grew within its strength.
    She was wasting precious moments on rules and regulations. Such things that Eurynome considered to be nonsense? In fact if her friend Hindsight was with her right now - she would be telling Eurynome to ignore such nonsense. Abandoning all notions of rules & regulations, she ran toward the Eastern Tower and using the distance of the courtyard to her advantage, Eurynome shouted out words of accusations toward Zeus’s wife, Hera.
    “We must stop the party that has but began upon the Earth! Hera is its hostess and her intentions are to harm the children within it!”
    She arrived at the entrance, stepped not over its threshold but waited until the echoes from her words wrapped themselves around the mighty Mother of Earth. [iv]
    Eurynome then climbed the spiral staircase of the whitest of marble, glided along Mother-of-Pearl’s corridor until she reached the archway made from thunderbolts and lightning; the entrance into Zeus’s vast and majestic Throne Room.
     
    ∞
     
    Those who see the Throne Room for the first time take not a step onto its flooring because it is carved from the purest of white marbled stone.
    Such is its whiteness you believe that you gaze upon a carpet of cloud. Reflections from both light and shadow determine how deep, billowy or tempest the whiteness shifts within the marble – adding to the illusion that clouds are what you think you see - so not a movement would you make.
    So… what do you do?
    Turn your back and forever wonder ‘what if’?
    Stay still?
    So still that eventually Mother-of-Pearl has gathered you within her arms and you are now a part of her corridor like the others before