Chapter 1

Serpin lay along the branch enjoying the warmth of the sun.

The smell of the morning storm was still fresh in the air. Droplets still worked their way down through the canopy above her and plinked as they hit objects in their path. The branch jutted out over the wide river, it was thick and supported her weight with ease.

She lowered her broad, flat head and wondered if she was hungry enough to fish for breakfast. As her keen eyes surveyed what was below her, she picked out the strange round boat caught in the roots of the massive tree that lay beside her tree.

The old mother had long since lost the fight and succumbed to the whims of the river. She had toppled when the earth was washed from her base in a storm before Serpin was even born. Now her massive time-hardened root ball served as a home for fish to hide under. It also caught all manner of interesting things that tried to float down this side of the river.

Serpin noticed that something was within the strange craft. Then the smell caught her attention. Curiosity got the better of her and she had to go and get a better look. Her mother had often warned her that her curiosity would get her into trouble one day.

Serpin twisted her head and upper back along the branch. As she released and gripped with her lower coils, she slithered back along the branch until she connected with a limb, she could use to make her way down. The new branch was still attached to the old mother that had become entangled in her tree when it had toppled.

The leaves and smaller branches had long since been stripped from it and the lichens and mosses served as anchors for her scales to grip, as she made her way down towards the root ball. Lifting her front section higher she slithered over to a root that was two and a half metres from her.

When you are a seven-metre-long Slider, this is easier than it may seem to most humans.

Serpin’s people resided in Boavale.

It was a village on the north side of the western end of the southern arm of the Slither Mountain Range. The Serpentine River was a massive river system and dominated a region known as Scale Valley.

[Maps are in the Wiki: https://keltria.fandom.com/wiki/].

The Scale River, with all of its twists and turns, was close to seven hundred kilometres long. The main river channel was over a kilometre wide where it entered the sea. Along its path to the sea, the massive river fed several lakes and was the lifeblood of the valley.

Scale Valley was surrounded by two arms of the mountain range, which fed the river system all year round. The two arms stretched to the west and the river kept them apart, so it could make its way to the sea. It then spread out after forcing its way between the arms into a broad delta swamp over five klicks wide.

Much of the valley was covered in broad swaths of grasses and shrubs due to grazing animals. However, the river and its tributaries were well treed with the dominant species being the Boa trees. These trees grew to massive proportions and great age. They were home for many animals and other plants.

Two of the most dominant species were the huge Sliders, more commonly known as the Boa-Shifters and the Flickers. Flickers were small primates that were long-limbed and tailed. It was rumoured that both species were sentient and that the Faerie people could even talk to them.

The Boa people’s histories said that strange two-legged creatures came to the land when many of the oldest Boa trees were but saplings. Karun, who was reputed to be a great huntress, over ten-meters long, tried to eat one of the creatures and swallowed her alive.

The creature was a magical being and cursed Karun and all her hatchlings to also to take her form. Because Karun killed the Mage’s two mates, the Mage cursed her so that she required the seed of two males to produce young although many of the other races didn’t know this.

In the centuries that followed, all of the Boa-Shifters could trace their ancestry to that significant day. Karun had also gained a long life and the magical abilities of the Mage, she learned much about magic in her lifetime.

As she aged, she stopped shedding her skin each tri-year. It was said she only did it when she needed to make magical items for her kin. None of her kin had been able to duplicate her feats of magic. While it was said that her knowledge had been retained in a magical item that was hidden in her nest, its location had been lost to her people.

Two thousand or more years before this story, a Great War had been fought between the rulers of the Sister Islands. Much of the old knowledge had been lost and the populations had been decimated. While the people had rebuilt and tried to regain the lost knowledge, their reliance on magical people had increased.

The magical people had tried to stop the wars and often became the first victims, due to the ruling party’s greed. It was not until after the war that people understood magic was meant to be used for the good of all the people or it would be lost to them as punishment by the Gods, as it nearly had been.

However, humans being humans, over time these lessons had again been forgotten. When the magical crystals that sustained the items began to fail a hundred years before, the people came up with many excuses, their own greed not being one of them. Small groups with their own agendas began to emerge and once again, magic was under attack by the unscrupulous.

With the Boa-Shifters living in a less inhabited region, they had tried to stay out of the wars, but they too had been affected. Many of the magical items of their higher orders had become lost to them when they felt compelled to help stop the war on their island.

It was a known fact that strong magicians who were capable of making such items had them return to them upon the death of the recipient. With the knowledge of Karun’s lair being lost and their ranks above Mage being gone, many of the Boa-Shifters had again tried to cut themselves from the general population.

They had not totally achieved this, but even so, strangers were not encouraged to dwell amongst them. They did still trade with the people of West Keep, on the other side of the range, and some of the people even lived there and in other cities on the island but Boavale was not as hospitable.

The fact that most of the homes were high in the trees also made them hard to visit.

Serpin was twenty-seven summers old.

She knew many of her people thought she was an oddity but so be it. Unlike many of her kin, she spent more time in her human form than she did in her Slider form. She had never had a mate either. She had even lived in West Keep with her father, Oliver, for most of her years.

She had attended their schools and worked with him to learn his art until he died two years before. Oliver had taken her as far as the capital Rockslide many times when selling his wares or delivering his commissions. She had loved being with her father and missed him.

He had been a smith of the Genteli race, and his business mostly worked with wrought iron and specialised in making fancy decorations and gates for homes and businesses. His side craft had been weapons. He had only made them in limited quantities, and he had loved teaching Serpin his art.

Oliver had been known to spend a year making a commissioned item. He loved to experiment with the mixes and processes to get just the right steel for his famous swords and matching dirks. His business employed four other smiths so he could indulge in his passion. He had passed the business and his passion onto Serpin.

Her parents had met as a chance encounter when Oliver had been looking for iron in the Range. Luckily, for her father, her mother, Silvia, had been looking for a new mate. He had been in an area that the Boa’s mined themselves and she could have just as easily chased him off or even killed him.

Silvia had stayed with Oliver for ten years and then left Serpin with him when she had headed back home for good, due to her own mother’s death. She had become the Duchess of Boavale, and Serpin wasn’t her oldest child, so she had left her, at Oliver’s request.

Serpin had been enrolled in the local schools and her father took her home to Boavale every winter to visit. It was difficult to travel there in the wet summer season, as her father had learnt the first time. While the road was accessible by lanky with a cart not much wider, the people of Boavale had resisted attempts to widen the pass for any other type of transport.

Since most of the commercial iron was extracted on the southern side of the Range and closer to West Keep, the track was mostly used by the locals. Non-Boas were not encouraged to visit, as many of Serpin’s relatives preferred their Boa form.

Serpin peered down into the strange round boat and at the man who lay in it.

Collin de Ullina awoke but he wasn’t ready to move.

With the influence of his father no longer controlling him, Collin was still as much adrift in his mind as his body had been during his days in the sea. How was he to know that the damn ship that he had escaped on was run by pirates? His father didn’t talk much about his businesses and to be honest with himself, he hadn’t wanted to know, as long as there was coin to spend.

After the Captain had thrown him overboard with the little round boat, that they called a coracle, they told him to paddle east. If he was lucky, he would reach Boa Island. In deference to Collin’s father, since it had been one of his ships, the Captain had tied a water bag and a rations bag to the boat.

The Captain had also added a rolled blanket and a bag with a compass, a knife and some fishing line in it. At the last minute, he had tossed in Collin’s pack. His final words to Collin were, “Time to grow up son, or perish.”

Ten days in the little boat at the mercy of the sea had given Collin a lot of time to think. He had often wondered if it would have made a difference to how his life had turned out, had his mother lived. He knew the fact that he had been born male had upset his father. He had told Collin often enough.

Males didn’t tend to inherit titles in his society. His father, Carl de Ullina, was only called a Lord because of his dead wives. The main reason Carl had the wealth he did was that when Collin’s mother died, she didn’t have close female relatives to take it from him.

Carl had also been an astute businessman and he had increased his personal wealth many times over. Being near seventy when Collin was born, Carl had the time to do this. It was only recently that Collin learnt how his father had gathered some of the wealth.

Collin often wondered where his father got the medallions and the artefact from, but Carl had never shared this information with him. He found his hand reaching for his medallion again. He still didn’t understand why it hadn’t deserted him. By all rights, the entity in it should have ripped his mind asunder for his past deeds.