Thrice Born

By Jon Jacks

Cybela dabbles with magic, calling down the Moon in the hope of bringing love into her life: but it is a time when the era of magic is coming to an end, when young girls like Cybela are hunted down as witches. A dying priestess hands Cybela a scroll, one the witch-hunters wish to destroy – and now the gods, too, are searching for Cybela.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Jacks
• Release date: Dec 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370136469

Jon Jacks

While working in London as, first, an advertising Creative Director (the title in the U.S. is wildly different; the role involves both creating and overseeing all the creative work in an agency, meaning you’re second only to the Chairman/President) and then a screenwriter for Hollywood and TV, I moved out to an incredibly ancient house in the countryside.On the day we moved out, my then three-year-old daughter (my son was yet to be born) was entranced by the new house, but also upset that we had left behind all that was familiar to her.So, very quickly, my wife Julie and I laid out rugs and comfortable chairs around the huge fireplace so that it looked and felt more like our London home. We then left my daughter quietly reading a book while we went to the kitchen to prepare something to eat.Around fifteen minutes later, my daughter came into the kitchen, saying that she felt much better now ‘after talking to the boy’.‘Boy?’ we asked. ‘What boy?’‘The little boy; he’s been talking to me on the sofa while you were in here.’We rushed into the room, looking around.There wasn’t any boy there of course.‘There isn’t any little boy here,’ we said.‘Of course,’ my daughter replied. ‘He told me he wasn’t alive anymore. He lived here a long time ago.’A child’s wild imagination?Well, that’s what we thought at the time; but there were other strange things, other strange presences (but not really frightening ones) that happened over the years that made me think otherwise.And so I began to write the kind of stories that, well, are just a little unbelievable.

Book preview

Thrice Born

Jon Jacks

Other New Adult and Children’s books by Jon Jacks

The Caught – The Rules – Chapter One – The Changes – Sleeping Ugly

The Barking Detective Agency – The Healing – The Lost Fairy Tale

A Horse for a Kingdom – Charity – The Most Beautiful Things (Now includes The Last Train)

The Dream Swallowers – Nyx; Granddaughter of the Night – Jonah and the Alligator

Glastonbury Sirens – Dr Jekyll’s Maid – The 500-Year Circus – The Desire: Class of 666

P – The Endless Game – DoriaN A – Wyrd Girl – The Wicker Slippers – Gorgesque

Heartache High (Vol I) – Heartache High: The Primer (Vol II) – Heartache High: The Wakening (Vol III)

Miss Terry Charm, Merry Kris Mouse & The Silver Egg – The Last Angel – Eve of the Serpent

Seecrets – The Cull – Dragonsapien – The Boy in White Linen – Porcelain Princess – Freaking Freak

Died Blondes – Queen of all the Knowing World – The Truth About Fairies – Lowlife

Elm of False Dreams – God of the 4th Sun – A Guide for Young Wytches – Lady of the Wasteland

The Wendygo House – Americarnie Trash – An Incomparable Pearl – We Three Queens – Cygnet Czarinas

Memesis – April Queen, May Fool – Sick Teen

Text copyright© 2016 Jon Jacks

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Akrourobore Kodêre popular (derisive): Abracadabra – Magical invocation, summoning the Great Serpent of The Underworld, Akrourobore

Chapter 1

Deep within the sphere, worlds flowed, stars spun; and what must be was revealed.

Must be?

Not when it concerns the Great Mother Goddess, surely?

Astraios, God of Prophecy, frowned as he tried to place the sphere back in its box, only for Dione to stay his hand.

It was a frown that spoke for him; it must surely be, when it also concerns the great Polynomos – He Who has Many Names.

Of course Dione, All Dominant Triple Goddess, wouldn’t accept this.

I can’t allow this to happen; not to the daughter I nurtured, said Demeter-Deio, who had herself been torn apart when a serpentine Polynomos had ravaged her mother Rhea.

(Thankfully, we are talking of the actions of gods and goddesses, not regular men and women: it is a plane of existence in which mothers quite readily become their own daughters and sisters, even if needs be brothers or sons.)

She must be protected, insisted Meter Oreia, Mother Mountain, who listens to the prayers of all.

Yet she cannot know of what might prevail, pointed out Daeria daô, Knowing Goddess of Moisture.

I shall send her down to the other world, Demeter-Deio assured them all, and have the dragons of my chariot guard her.

*

Chapter 2

Whirled around in the air, the golden spheres roared like bulls.

Cybela ignored the noise, even though she knew the procession was drawing ever closer.

He had ignored her for eleven days; and so Cybela had decided to draw down the Moon herself to ensure he would visit on the twelfth day.

She twirled the three-spoked wheel around in her hands, entwining the three purple threads supporting it. She stopped only when the entwined threads appeared to be rising up from the opened beak of the iynx, bird of madness, rising up in the wheel’s centre: such that the threads could be its serpentine tongue, carrying messages to the gods.

On releasing the wheel, it twirled as it descended, the nine birds on its rim singing as air rushed through the carefully positioned holes in their beaks.

Cybela knelt before the whirling wheel, letting her mind think only of the wheeling, singing birds; the ten that became twelve, when the venomous Serpent of Scorpio split to birth both Virgin and Dike of the Judgement Scales, of the Vengeful Sword of Aesa.

The incantation she must recite came naturally to Cybela.

‘Iynx, iynx, draw him hither….’

*

Cybela pleaded for the help of each bird, ten incantations in all; though, of course, the firebird in the centre was the Three That Are One, making twelve.

The puppet of wax, with its burning lock of hair, melted before her, just as she prayed that he would melt with love, that he would come whirling around her door like one suffering the ‘madness of horses’.

As she sensed the blushing Moon being drawn down ever closer to her, Cybela changed her incantation.

‘List, good Moon, where I learnt my loving. For in the very first hour of night, with some of Dionysus’ own apples in my pocket–’

The thunderous booming of the procession’s bull roarers had become too loud to ignore. Cybela’s absorption in her spell had been broken.

The twisted cords of her wheel still caused it to fall then rise again, fall and rise, but its power was waning.

Irritated by the interruption, angrily snatching up the smaller jewelled disc he had given her as a token of love, Cybela drew away from the altar and strode towards the open doorway. She briefly caught a glimpse of her reflection in the bronze mirror set into the wall, a mirror deliberately warped, showing the viewer only dimly against the backdrop of the more clearly defined altar, the resplendently portrayed goddesses.

And yet Cybela saw