When Darkness Begins Read online

  When Darkness Begins

  Tina O’Hailey

  © Copyright Tina O’Hailey 2020

  Black Rose Writing | Texas

  © 2020 by Tina O’Hailey

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

  The final approval for this literary material is granted by the author.

  First digital version

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-68433-495-7

  PUBLISHED BY BLACK ROSE WRITING

  www.blackrosewriting.com

  Print edition produced in the United States of America

  Thank you so much for reading one of Tina O’Hailey’s novels.

  If you enjoyed the experience, please check out our recommended title for your next great read!

  Absolute Darkness by Tina O’Hailey

  A thrill ride through time that will make you hold your breath.

  Sitting by the campfire, Brandy admitted a secret to her friends. She swore she saw a ghost when exiting a cave earlier that day. Was she seeing things? Did they believe her? The next day, breaking a cardinal rule, she snuck back to the cave alone. No one knew where she was. What if she fell or was trapped? There would be no rescue.

  For ten thousand years Alexander had kept the time streams of this universe safe from an eternal destructive force that continually threatened to tamper and destroy all. Locked in an unremitting battle, the two foes become sidetracked by an unexpected visitor. An entangled journey begins with chilling twists and turns until becoming locked into an inescapable death in a submerged cave.

  DEDICATION

  To my loving family and creativity enablers:

  John (Mr. O), Danny, and Joseph O’Hailey.

  To my Dad: my first storytelling buddy.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book was written thanks to the communal spirit created by NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), the Black Rose Writing Authors’ Facebook group, and the Sh!tty Writers Group—even though they threaten to kick me out for getting published.

  The core idea of the Vechey’s three circles and what those represent came from Sherron Ostrander, the editor of the first of the Darkness Universe books: Absolute Darkness. She had written a short sentence in the margins, “wouldn’t it be neat if.” It was, indeed, neat if.

  Special thanks for notes and endless support from alpha readers John O’Hailey, Dr. Denise Smith, Matt Maloney, Sherron Ostrander, and Myrna Attaway. Your honesty and patience push me forward.

  Final words from the author:

  I hope you enjoy When Darkness Begins. My confession to you is that I do not read YA and I have never read YA—even when I was of the age. I started reading not-age-appropriate books in middle school. My apologies if this isn’t like other YA stories that involve high school, bullies, first-loves, lost-loves, soul-searching about what one’s purpose in life is, etc. I guess this book is all of those things set in an un-modern time, with an unusual group of beings, in a touching and complex multiple-timeline story; just what I would have wanted to read when I was 16.

  A NOTE ABOUT TIME AND PLACE

  The Vechey have no concept of time or modern day calendars. They do not live in time as we do. The timeline above represents where the story takes place as it relates to present day, your present day.

  Main-Time: This represents where the “present” currently is. Though it varies, as there are scenes set in modern time, mostly the “present” is at least 9,000 years before you hold this book in your hands.

  Home-Time: Is a place 40,000 years in the past where the Vechey’s founder and leader, Eterili, has brought her tribe. They live there linearly in time like humans (or “Linears”) to grow their young and prepare them for the ritual that pushes them to their individual frozen-time.

  Frozen-Time: Each Vechey who passes through the ritual gets locked into a single moment in time. There, time stands still. They no longer experience it. Meanwhile, Main-Time (the present) continues to trudge along for the rest of the time-dwelling people (you and me).

  Icaeph’s frozen-time is 25,000 years in the past. Aithagg’s frozen-time is 10,000 years in the past.

  Vechey must move to Main-Time to feed. They protect Main-Time from being destroyed by the soul-devouring Manipulators.

  The Manipulators: These energy beings posses the Linears and must live through time linearly. Their sole need and passion is to destroy time in a desperate attempt to find release from their hellish existence on earth. They have lost all reasoning and memory of who they once were.

  The Ritual: While many touch points in the story are based upon archeological findings, the ritual event itself is fabricated to exist 80,000 years ago. Such events have been recorded throughout history but not necessarily in the place that I have put this one.

  The setting for most of the story takes place in Tennessee and Kentucky, with travels to the ritual site, which is located in South Carolina near the Topper Site. The caves represented in the book are mostly real. The home place of the Vechey is in Mammoth Cave 40,000 years ago. Icaeph and Aithagg’s cave is actually a small “cave”, which is only about 35 feet long, below the mountain-bluff cabin where I live. I have composited my favorite caves into what I wish was beyond the small crawl at the back of that 35 foot opening into the mountain. This particular small walk-in-shelter “cave” is what started my fascination with dark holes in the ground.

  When Darkness Begins is the prequel to Absolute Darkness. Absolute Darkness takes place in your present day and Alexander’s time 10,000 years before today. However, given the timeline nature of this book series, this prequel also has a storyline that ties directly into Absolute Darkness, making it a prequel and a continuation. How much fun is that? You can follow this book without having read Absolute Darkness but to see the whole tragedy you must read about Alexander’s modern day love, Brandy, and her fate in Absolute Darkness.

  The Darkness Universe, where all of my novels reside, is a multi-verse. Major things occur and cross between the books, however, there are differences, as one would expect in a multi-verse. Certainly, it isn’t because I lost track of things. It’s science.

  “A ritual includes the letting of blood. Rituals which fail in this requirement are but mock rituals…Dont look away.”

  -Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

  “It’s astounding - Time is fleeting.

  Madness takes its toll.”

  -Rocky Horror Picture Show

  The Heaviest Burden…“This life as you live it at present, and have lived it, you must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it…and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees… The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and you with it, you speck of dust!”

  -Friendrich Neitzsche- the Gay Science Book IV – Aphorism #341 1882

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Recommended Reading

  Dedication

  Acknowledgemen
ts

  A Note About Time and Place

  Quotes

  1 CIRCLES IN TIME

  2 THE END

  3 THE BEGINNING

  4 NEW BEGINNINGS

  5 HOME

  6 HOME BEFORE

  7 MADNESS

  8 LAST ONE THERE

  9 FALL TO TRUTH

  10 KEEP AWAY

  11 SECRETS

  12 A LOOMING PRECIPICE

  13 THE PROMISE GIFT

  14 HOPE

  15 PROMISED

  16 JOURNEY

  17 ALONE

  18 VOICES IN THE DARK

  19 LOST

  20 EXHAUSTION

  21 THE WAY

  22 HERE AND THERE

  23 ENTANGLED

  24 RAGE AND LOSS

  25 102

  26 ALEXANDER AND BRANDY

  APPENDIX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  BRW INFO

  1 CIRCLES IN TIME

  For someone who walked through time unimpeded, Alexander was bad at keeping track of it. What had Brandy called him? A time-lord?

  He had confessed his true nature to her, but she was incoherent at the time: sedated and healing from being pushed under a bus by his nemesis—Yindi.

  She had slurred, “Are you a time-lord, or something?” Then she fell asleep, the truth of his nature still a secret to her.

  Alexander stood, unseen on the porch—wild flowers in hand, watching Brandy feed bacon to a stray orange cat. For months he hid her in the past to heal. Here the Manipulator, Yindi, would not find her. Yindi was locked in present time, 10,000 years in the future from where Alexander now stood, wild-flowers drooping in his hand. She was safe. Meanwhile, Alexander had worked tirelessly slipped back and forth through time preparing things for the coming battle with the Manipulator. Not being able to keep track of time’s minutia which she experienced so inherently, he left her alone for days and weeks at a time. He brought flowers hoping to apologize for his absence.

  Alexander stood in a frozen second of time, not part of the Linear time progression. He stood and watched her, afraid to sync with time and enter the inevitable confrontation with her. He feared what bearing his true nature to her would bring. Fear? Judgment? Loathing?

  A smile, sad and lonely, crossed his face. 10,000 plus years ago had not his first love feared the same? Catha. She feared what their people, the Vechey, would think of her when they found out she was not developing her Vechey time-slipping skills. Instead, she was doomed to be a Linear: one who stayed trapped in time.

  Linears: disparaged, shunned. Shamed for being mortal and trapped in time. Unworthy of the Vechey tribe. Unworthy to become a time-guardian and protect the world from the destruction wielded by the Manipulators. Unclean. Food for Vechey. Pawns of the universe.

  Together Catha and Alexander had prepared for the Vechey coming-of-age ritual. A ritual that weeded out the unworthy. A bloody rite of passage that only the strong adolescent Vechey survived. It pushed the surviving Vechey out of time, where they would forever guard time from the Manipulators’ malevolence.

  The Vechey endured endless circles of existence and struggle: Linears, Vechey, Manipulators.

  Alexander watched Brandy a moment longer while contemplating his first love ages ago. He had accepted Catha with his whole being. Now he understood his continual love with Linears was him looking for the same unconditional acceptance in return.

  He smirked. Had he though? Did he not try to help Catha through the ritual, to be a Vechey even though she had not developed the traits? Had he not persistently insisted she be by his side? Was that for her or for him?

  Alexander considered. Perhaps he continually fell for Linears to deny himself long lasting companionship, to torture himself for failing Catha.

  Perhaps.

  Eterili, the clan’s leader, had called him out on it once when he was young, when he was Aithagg. She knew. She knew all.

  He stepped into time, flowers in hand, and approached Brandy. He hoped he would not fail her as he had Catha. Maybe he was only trying to atone for his teenage mistakes 10,000 years ago.

  2 THE END

  The last thought that rambled through Eterili’s ancient skull was a mixture of relief and understanding. She smiled because at last the nature of the universe was clear to her. It did not stay; it built up. Tore apart. Built up somewhere else. Tore apart again. To her it was like a vessel filled with water. Empty the vessel into multiple cups. In turn, pour those cups into yet other vessels. That was how the universes were to her. Souls and energy poured from one place to another, taking shape here or there, moving and flowing constantly over the eons.

  Darkness fell across the sun. The surrounding air seemed to dim as the shadows cast upon the ground became soft and distorted.

  Her last breath, for she did breathe air unlike most Vechey, released in a silent shudder.

  The sun sunk into itself and imploded, destroying all in its path. The energy it expelled pushed all Vechey, including Eterili, through time and into the next plane where they would begin again.

  The darkness signaled the end of this universe—which had grown and stretched until the sky was void of stars. It was a homecoming.

  Eterili smiled. It was good.

  3 THE BEGINNING

  The tree would fall. There was no mistaking it held its last grip of the earth. The ground tried in vain to hold the struggling roots. Birds feasted on the grubs that made a home of its bark. Squirrels, large and fat, gathered its final pinecones and nestled in its branches. It reached its needle-covered branches to the sky in one last attempt to reach something. It wasn’t sure what it reached for. Something it missed? Something that was there? It did not remember. Its dying needles no longer sensed the warmth of the sun to remind it. The moisture from the morning’s dew shook in fine droplets to the ground. The grass underneath the tree soaked up the water droplets greedily. They flattened their blades to the sky offering more surfaces for water to funnel into their stalks. Their root system tunneled through the ground and weaved around the tree.

  A gentle wind blew. Clouds parted and gave way to a deep blue sky. The sun burned off the morning fog and marched towards its zenith. It cast reflections in a nearby pond that danced and sparkled.

  A lone leaf floated on the water. A small ladybug, dark red with uneven brown spots, walked the edge of the leaf—continually in a circle, never knowing it was repeating its same track.

  The air was cool but not as chilled as it had been eons before. The ice had retreated and now the rains fell. Grass grew. Trees tried to reach the clouds without remembering why.

  Eterili stood beside the tree and placed a comforting hand upon it. She bade it a good journey and watched as it fell pulling its roots from the ground. Its energy released, dissipating into the rest of the energy that was the world and the universe beyond. It was good.

  She was an old woman, even now. She had survived growing up with Linears not by chance, but by sheer wit. Even in the womb she had known she was different. She was not as the Linears. She had opened her eyes in a utero-darkness and listened to the world, the surrounding universe. Linears, even the woman that birthed her, did not see the things she saw nor hear the things she heard. They did not have memories of lives before as she did. They had not seen the universe die and be re-born countless times as she had.

  The incalculable times she had been born and lived were acts of patience and endur
ance. Seeing much. Waiting to move. Knowing an end would come only to begin again, finding no release from the tedium.

  She had been one with the sand, the trees, the air, while the planet formed and life inhabited it. Much like the tree had yearned to touch the sky and the vastness beyond—she too had yearned when she was nothing more than particles scattered across snow-capped mountains: conscious, aware, remembering all.

  Eventually the particles that were her gathered into a raindrop, a mist, or the morning dew, and would come closer to the bipeds of the world. This gathering was not conscious—it occurred—and she had stopped trying to control that aspect of her existence thousands of rotations ago. Eventually she would awake in an embryotic stasis not knowing how she came to be there.

  Then countless times she had been born to a woman and lived as long as the universe did, moving through time and learning all there was. The universe would extinguish in an eruption of fury and she would lay wait, another element adrift in the vastness, until she took form again.

  The eve before the universe collapsed this latest time, Eterili headed the signs and considered her choices. She had moved through the universe alone, time and time again. The loneliness weighed heavily on her this particular rotation. What if she did not go through this alone? She pondered.

  The lands she had inhabited nearly all followed along a similar path. The upright-biped species emerged, fought for food, died out, eventually a people would survive. They would begin vocalizing, communicating, developing. Tools followed. Control of the elements such as metals came soon after. Information exchange and language. War. Expansion. Religion. Factions. Agriculture. Science. Revolutions. Curiosity. Arts. Industrialism. Technology. Exploring.