Presenting... Swan Girls Book 2! (Patreon)

Surprise! Swan Girls book two progress :) Chapter 1 will be posted in about 5 minutes after this :D

Swan Girls Book Two - Candace

Prologue - Return to the Palace of Arca Endia

Freya walked along the checkered path leading up to the royal palace of Arca Endia. The sunless sky of the True Lands was dotted with fractaline clouds, creating a beautiful, infinitely deep assortment of light and shade along Freya’s apprehensive path. She, the fated warrior princess, had to report to the leaders of Arca Endia that Earth was a trifling. A cesspool. A planet not worthy of their time, that would never bear fruit or profit or glory.

It was midday in the True Lands. Freya missed the chaotic lighting and the pastel colors of her homeworld; even despite falling in love with Earth and out of love with Arca Endia’s manifest destiny of conquest of all known worlds, she had still felt homesick. The sky darkened for no reason at all. The rigid, neon trees with their gray trunks and pink cotton candy leaves glowed in the darkness, illuminating her path.

And all paths led back to the Courts.

The Arca Endians considered it the center of all worlds. The greatest hub of power and time. It passed faster in their realm than in any other realm; a century there could be only a year on a lesser plane. Others, maybe decades. This strange flow of time, in addition to the Arca Endian lust for battle, growth, and conquest, meant that they evolved faster genetically, made rapid advances in technology, and given enough time, could overwhelm any improbable plane that could have possibly posed a challenge to them. A race on a lush, resource rich planet could be far ahead of Arca Endia’s prowess, and a year later, someone like Freya could make them look like cavemen fighting against a planet-obliterating phaser with rocks and slingshots.

So Freya was the planet-obliterating phaser that the royal court had sent to Earth.

She unfurled her large alabaster wings, unfurling those unused limbs. It was the only visual cue that set her apart from the humans of Earth realm—well, that, and her absolute otherworldly beauty. Freya had been amused to discover old Earth folklore. Faeries, seelies, flying spirits... Arca Endia had visited there before, but had abandoned the backwater planet once before for lack of interest. So there was precedence that Freya would invoke with her little planned fib.

The humans thought the faeries magical, benevolent beings. Well, to them, certainly someone like Freya would’ve appeared magical. Strong beyond reason, faster than the naked eye, absolutely tireless, and conjuring the mythical fire with nothing but a gaze of their pale irises. Or some of those powers back in that era, anyway. But they were certainly not benevolent. No, even playtime with humans often led to an unavoidable, gory result. It seems the history of the Arca Endians—or Arcadians after centuries of Earthen word of mouth—had been whitewashed. Or perhaps the Arca Endians themselves had manipulated Earth to whitewash it.

At least Freya didn’t have any family to answer to. Her “parents” were the Arca Endians who had weaved their champion warriors, the Swan Maidens, out of light and shadow, a task that took countless decades, even by Arca Endian time. And it was prone to failure too. Attempts to select only the most powerful, potent swirls of energy proved to be wholly unsuccessful—even the biology of an Arca Endian couldn’t withstand the mysterious power of the cosmos. Or at least, not yet. They needed more than power; intelligence, wisdom, willpower, grit, unquestioning obedience, the resolve to serve the True Lands no matter what...

She had been given thirteen years for the conquest of Earth. Her alone. Arca Endians simply became... more in a lesser plane. And Freya’s quest was more than just destruction. In addition to subduing the entirety of humanity’s weaponry and martial abilities, which Freya would be able to disable within a year, the plan had been for her to spend the next twelve subjugating the natives into obedient slaves. Break their wills, conquer their souls, even twist their situation into undying love for their beloved Swan Maiden, erecting statues for their beautiful, brutal, but ultimately benevolent goddess.

But Freya ceased communicating to her superiors. Had something happened to the greatest Swan Maiden that Arca Endia had ever created? Freya was fated for glory. A great push forward. Hundreds of lesser planes would fall before her before she retired as the gold standard for all future Swan Maidens, born in her lineage and set to her image.

Her programming had taken an unexpected turn. A human by the name of Harrison Connors had stolen a piece of her pelt. And her mind began to spin with fantasies of that beautiful green planet. Of living there, playing with the natives without malice, swimming in the endless oceans, or soaring through the sky completely unaided without her wings. The whole world was her oyster, and a path of bloody conquest was the last thing she wanted to do.

So she put it off. She could always do it tomorrow, she reasoned. And it was true. She could do it in a day. But Earth had so many simple pleasures to offer her. And the holder of her pelt, Harrison Connors, was quite a dashing man. She knew that he held unreasonable influence over her, but she could’ve taken it back at any time. Snapped his neck. Put her pretty little fist through his chest. Yet he never tried to exert any control over Freya. He was wholly, completely, utterly smitten. They had two daughters. The child of love, as Freya came to love the Earth. Later when Harrison nearly died to save Candace, they made the child of respect together, her sweet Coral, named for the one thing on Earth that rivaled the fractal beauty of her home.

Dereliction of duty became rebellion. For her daughters, she began to sabotage the paths between Earth and the Courts. She closed the last “Doors to Underhill” as the superstitious humans once knew them. Earth would be just another place lost in the churning seas of potential that surrounded the True Lands. The Eternal Lords champion would seem to have become a victim of crude probabilities, to be quietly erased from the records of the Court’s eternal march toward universal dominion.

And then suddenly, her thirteen years had past… then fourteen… She was safe, free to raise her daughters in peace and to gently toy with the beautiful world that had been given to her. Free to be Earth’s eternal secret Goddess.

Until one day it wasn’t true anymore. She felt inquiring eyes upon her. Somewhere, somehow, they knew. A door she had missed, or perhaps some dimensional bore made through higher alchemies - who could know how far the Court’s technologies had advanced in her absence? A voice called out to her in the old tongue, and her perfect future vanished in an instant. Time moved slowly on the Lesser Planes, but to Freya, it had been cruelly fast. She had to leave. Now. This instant, before the Lords came in person to rescue her from her “plight”. She had to protect her daughters. She had to tell the arbiter from Arca Endia that Earth was still not a planet worth conquering. That the unevolved apes had, in their total lack of wisdom, obliterated themselves and left the Earth a toxic wasteland that would need at least a decade of rapid True Lands time to heal. Meanwhile, Freya had served as its steward, mostly idle and eager to get back to Arca Endia in anticipation of a lesser plane that would truly be worthy of her.

She cried bitter tears as she kissed her daughters goodbye in such haste, leaving them both a prized possession from Arca Endia. A blue crystal that would help suppress their superior nature to manageable levels. They wouldn’t have the training or scrutiny that Freya had as an entire race’s champion warrior princess.

She would have given anything for one more hour with them… but one more hour would have doomed them. The great weavers would tear them appart strand by strand to sample their flavors and their light. To shred them into cold dead equations to serve their next great weaving.

Then, unsealing the door in Australia by which she had first arrived, she crossed back to Arca Endia to meet the arbiter at the gates and explained the situation.

Nobody even fathomed that Freya could have been lying.

No one but another Swan Maiden, with none of the glory or destiny promised to Freya.

Sarika.