After The Path of the Stone and The Rise of the Stone, The Fall of the Stone will end the series. How soon I will be able to release this book, I have no idea. The previous two books in this series just flowed out of me – perhaps because they were both based on a dream I had – but the third book is taking a little longer.
Nevertheless, I would like to share an excerpt with you now. In The Path of the Stone, the harpy Calliope revealed something about her dark past, and in The Fall of the Stone, more will be exposed, since she – now a “feeble” human – needs to recover her lost memory. I can’t explain more, because then I would be giving you spoilers from both The Path and The Fall of the Stone, and they would be huge spoilers. So, without giving you much info at all 😉 here is an excerpt from The Fall of the Stone.
“Remember, Calliope!”
“Remember!”
Remember what? If only they would tell her! Why wouldn’t they give her more details, give her clues as to what they so desperately wanted her to recall?
Her memories were of a happy childhood, all was blissful and good. She had loving parents who supported her in every way. Nowhere in her recollections did any harpies appear.
She felt the urgency in the harpies’ voices. Calista sounded frantic and Meena’s face was a mask of distress.
Remember!
But what?
“Calliope, please!”
“Make an effort! You must remember!”
But she did make an effort. She was digging into her brain as she had never done before, attempting to plow some hidden or suppressed memories she might have, but at the same time, she knew that it would be impossible to pull them up now. If something was suppressed, there had to be a good reason, and without the help of a professional, those memoirs were lost forever. And probably for the best.
She went back to her childhood, all the way to kindergarten, and remembered a beautiful place with tall trees that formed a circle around a red-brick building with wide windows. The tree crowns waved gently in the breeze. A path wound its way from the main gate at a quiet street to the school entrance where no one was waiting. The smiles she envisioned belonged to no faces and she realized that the image of the kindergarten was vivid in her mind but she saw no friends, not even classmates. She didn’t remember a single child.
“Hurry, Calliope!”
No one had ever called her that. People had always called her Callie. Nonetheless, she couldn’t recall a single person who had done so, and all she saw of her loving parents were gentle smiles and welcoming arms, but no faces.
“Remember!”
Why had she never wondered about it? Her parents had always been a part of her life, or had they? She had grown up in Baker Street, in Central London. It was the area that she knew best. Then why could she only remember shops and cafés in Covent Garden, Piccadilly, Tottenham High Street, and – ultimately – West Kensington where she and Daniel had moved to? She knew nothing about Baker Street. How was this possible and why had she never wondered about it?
The answer came to her at once. She had never had any reason to doubt her blurred past since she believed that it was concretely there. How had it always been concretely there without any faces? How could anyone explain that?
A vision of her slashing a man’s throat shocked her to her real past. She wore something that resembled a long tunic and the man was older than she. He looked stunned when the knife cut through his skin and blood burst out, splattering her face. As if he had not expected this. As if they had been close.
Father!
As horrified as she was by the discovery, she knew that this memory was real. It was too vivid, too detailed… When Calista and Meena saw the disturbed expression on her face, they knew that she had finally succeeded.
“Stay in the memory,” Meena urged her.
Stay in there? In a memory of blood and murder? Had they gone completely mad? She wanted nothing to do with this! However, as much as she tried, she still found herself in that ancient atrium, staring at her father as he fell onto the ground. Blood streamed out of his throat and pooled around him. His eyes gazed at her, still with the same wonder, and perhaps a slight sliver of guilt.
Guilt about what?
She saw herself drop the knife and leave the house, never to return again. She ran into the streets under the cover of a moonless night that hid the blood spatters on her tunic.
Callie looked at Meena and Calista. The memory was gone, but the images were stuck in her mind forever.
“What was it? What did you see?” Calista asked.
I killed my father. I killed my father. I murdered my father.
She couldn’t tell them that. It was too terrible to even contemplate. “My… house. I saw my father.”
“And?”
“That’s it.”
“You looked terrified.”
“He… uh… was angry with me,” she fibbed.
“About what?”
“Give me some time, please,” she said, “This is … a lot to handle. I need time to digest it all.”
Did she ever? How could anyone live with the memory of such a horrific act? If she had indeed a past life, she now understood why she didn’t remember it. There was a reason why past lives remained forgotten…
From The Fall of the Stone
