beautifully accented with the echoes of the Scots, but had been brutally painful and full of curses. Breaking her own self-decreed rule to never pass through the veil again, she had swiftly pushed aside the figurative curtain and sent her body to the time and place of Mordecai, Liege of Valhalla. The man had been everything his voice had conjured; a mighty Scotsman warrior, imbued righteously with the element of Death – and in so much physical and emotional pain Dana had promptly fallen to her knees upon first laying eyes on him.
After quickly picking herself up and listening to a few more of his half-drunken accusations and recriminations, she had boldly approached him with no forethought as to where the night would end. Mordecai’s offhanded remark about creating something to cure the chade infection had sparked an idea. Yes; she could create a weapon – a tool – that would act as a cure for the disease wiping out her precious wardens. Little did she know, that tool would one day be her beloved daughter, known affectionately as Max. Dana had in fact named her daughter for what she would become; the great one.
Titania.
That night, Dana knew she would be creating life – it’s what she did – she was a Creator. But never having carried and birthed anything from her physical body before, she had been ignorant of the feelings it would inspire. From the very first moment she felt the stirrings of life in her womb, she knew she had made a grave mistake. Not about conceiving her daughter – never that. But that her daughter had been made solely to serve a purpose. Dana knew what it would cost Titania – Max, rather – to rid the world of the taint evolution had wrought and had considered aborting her initial plans innumerable times. She had even once resolved herself to let the wardens and paladins die out, for that was exactly where their path had been headed. The loss of nature’s guardians and their knightly protectors would have meant the total extinction of every living organism on the planet. But looking at her precious daughter as she laughed and played in the Eden Gardens in Otherworld, Dana had been prepared to let the world descend into oblivion. It had been Max who had insisted on fulfilling her purpose.
Dana sighed, thinking of Max’s inner strength and wondering for the millionth time how she had managed to raise such an awe-inspiring woman. Max had just been entering the first blushes of womanhood when Dana had felt another cataclysmic shift in the balance. Emmanuel and his deranged parents had begun to make greater strides in their evil plan, consuming more and more vitality and infecting more and more wardens. The poor rangers were inundated with chades and the Councils seemed oblivious – or they had simply given up.
Thinking of it now, Dana knew Max had been correct in her initial assessment and judgement of their government and society. It had degraded into complacency and had placed inappropriate emphasis on warden hierarchy and the caste system. At the time of the power shift, Max had insisted she be allowed to enter the Earth plane and begin her task of healing the lost souls. Dana had cried rivers of tears and clung to her flesh and blood child so hard that Max had needed to pry her off. Max had then given her one of her now well-known, righteous speeches leaving Dana feeling like she was the child and her daughter was the wise crone. Unable to deny Max anything, in the end, Dana had kissed Max on her forehead and bestowed her blessings.
Passage from one plane to the next was not necessarily a difficult task, but it was governed by rules and the laws of nature. Souls had no trouble passing through the veil between worlds. But physical bodies? That was another act of physics entirely. Dana had no such issues because she was a pure goddess, but Max, on the other hand, was a mix of mortality and divinity. She was a custodian of the flesh, and though she had been able to successfully cross, maintaining the physical body of a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, the passing had some unforeseen consequences.
Amnesia.
Dana had been absolutely horrified and had been about to pass through the veil and retrieve her when a piece of paper near the metaphysical barrier had caught her eye. There, in her daughter’s neat handwriting,