SNEAK PEAK BOOK TWO of the INCARNATIONS OF JOE SERIES

NOTE TO READERS:
I am admittedly well behind schedule, and have been a bit invisible over the past few months. I wanted to be sure everyone knows that book two is in fact still coming. I've tried to scale things back a bit so that I can focus on quality for book two. As a token of my appreciation I have posted a completely unedited first draft version of chapter one from book two. Over the coming weeks I will continue to let out some more information about the book, and will be looking for your opinion from time to time on my FaceBook page. 

​Thanks for your patience, hope you enjoy, and please send me a MESSAGE with your thoughts. 

​Sincerly Timothy Weatherall

RAW UNEDITED CHAPTER ONE OF BOOK TWO FROM
​THE INCARNATIONS OF JOE SERIES

Chapter One The Messanger

They came for her in the night. With dark grey hooded robes covered in soot, and skin aged and grey moving like phantoms across the landscape. Not a single soul woke in the village. Perhaps it was simply because their movements were silent, but more likely a bewitchment cast upon them. Not a soul stirred when a hand pushed open the door, or when they walked the hallway towards where she slept. They walked past her parents whose eyes remained closed as shallow breaths paused when their souls were tugged upon by dangers presence. Up the stairs one behind the other the men walked towards where she slept, and when they reached her they paused only for a moment. Her eyes opened in horror, but a hand with wrinkled dirty fingers drug across her eyelids closing them, and sending her back to haunted dreams.
They took her to where only soot and ash remained of the trees that had once stood on the mountain top. A forbidden place where these mystic men lived in the ruins left when one of the two volcanos on this continent had erupted long before her birth. In her sleep, in her dreams as she was carried she saw the great oceans that surrounded the continent, and she saw the mountain where she lived. It was a mountain so high that clouds past by as mist forming a vail across this place. Very few of the others, the ones below the mountain, in the hills, in the cities, or the Great Plains would ever come to the mountain top. Mystery is often seen as evil, or as danger, and the mountain had much of both.
There will always be some drawn to know the true nature of the things they don’t understand. All things except for the men from the ash as they were known. These men were thought to have great powers including sight of both the past and the future. But whatever gifts they had, be they either heavenly powers or otherwise were never gifts they shared. Legends told of brave men seeking help from the men from the ashes, and the legends all ended with men who never returned.
It took several hours for them to travel through the night, away from her home, away from her family. Held gently in the arms of one man who seemed not to notice her weight as they moved beyond where trees still grew. Higher they headed, a direct path towards the ruins. The rocks became lose and sharp, the slope was step, but never did even their breathing harden. It would be several more hours before the village would wake to find her missing, more than enough time to do what they intended.
The wind was still that night, as it was every night. Even the wind never came to this forsaken place. The moon light had been hidden by the trees, and then by the mist. As they neared the top rock turned to Kenyte, a substance as smooth as glass, and as hard as iron.  Ashes on the rock remained so deep at times it pasted their ankles, and parted like grey dead water as cloaks drug behind leaving no trace of footsteps. The men seemed to disappear into the mountain side without the use of any visible doorway. What happened inside the mountain, only they will ever know? What they said to her, or even if they spoke with open mouths I do not know. All I know for certain is that she emerged from inside the mountain awake, alive, and changed. She stood there on top of the mountain lost in thoughts, void of movement, with no discernible emotion. She looked through the dead of night and she saw the clouds above, and the great ocean, the forest, and the city below. Then a short glance, only a few seconds of a gaze towards her village before she began to slowly walk down the mountain side. She did not head towards home and family. She headed towards the city of Mestor. The men from the ashes did not follow, what they intended had already been done.
That morning the sun would rise as it always had. In her village people would wake unaware that unearthly feet had passed by them in the night. Her mother would go to her room, then fall frantic at her bedside when she saw her daughter was gone. Her father and the others in the village would tell themselves things that they hoped would comfort them as they searched for what her mother knew they would never find. And when all their efforts had concluded that the ashes were the only place she could have gone. Then they would mourn her, but they would never ever seek to save her.  
Adira was her name. She was barely twenty years old, but she was stronger than most even on the mountain, and those from the mountain had always been stronger than those below. Her life had been filled with hardship, with struggle for both food and shelter from the elements around them. Her family was large, like most in the mountain. She was the eldest of five, and the only daughter. Her mother sat alone for days as the tears that fell from her eyes drained empty the oceans of her soul. On the third day just as the sun set her father walked from inside the house to where her mother still sat in sorrow through the sleepless hours of the night. He had dressed for travel. A satchel on his back, and a small sword on his side. He looked at his wife with lost desperate eyes that sought to end this misery either by finding her, or finding death for himself. She turned her head towards her husband and without words she knew what he intended. Without words the gentle shake of her head told him she would not allow it. He fell to his knees and resisted it with all the inner strength he could muster. But misery has no mercy, and it struck him down that morning.
All that was left was hope. Hope that what their hearts told them was false. Hope that the fates of others who had vanished in the night never to be seen again would not be the fate given to her. It was hope that struggled hard to push back the anger that a parent feels when all they have done to make their child safe is taken without warning or cause. How does hope defeat anger, and regret? How would hope subdue thoughts of vengeance against an unknown evil? And could they’re unanswered prayers be enough to comfort them on their own death beds when they asked themselves in their final moments if they had done all they could have, all they should have?
She must have known what pain she would leave behind? She was a girl of both honor and intellect, of both courage and strength. How much they changed her I can never be sure, but I’m sure that she knew what harm her leaving might bring. Perhaps they told her she would return to take away the pain she left, perhaps she told herself the same. Fate tends however to care very little about the things we tell ourselves. Fate is to some like a path cut through time for each of us to walk blindly. To others Gods hand leads us through our lives if we extend our own hand to his. I have seen Gods hand both lift the dead back to life, and strike the living down to join the dead. What guides Gods hand is only for God to know.
Adira had been changed in the mountain. Be it the hand of God, the hand of the devil, or perhaps even another; she was not the same when she left as when she entered. She carried something that others wanted, she carried something that others would kill for, and she carried something that she herself had become willing to die for.        
 

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