The Marechal Chronicles: Volume V, The Tower of the Alchemist by Aimélie Aames Page A

paths that slipped from shadow to shadow.  There were the great salamanders whose least touch meant death from a fire that could not be extinguished.  The lions of thunder whose flesh was yellow stone and their prey, the great gazelles whose tears always ran down to find gold hidden deep underground.  These, too, answered the call of Lys, and they would lie down together at her feet and they would no longer know fear or avarice in her keeping.
    And so it was that the goddess drew to herself all manner of rare and strange beasts, and among the least of these was a wild boar, his pelt jet black and his eyes bloody red.  He had been born to common sangliers but when his kin saw him for his differences, they sought to crush him under their hooves and slice his belly open upon their tusks, but he was uncommonly strong and uncommonly fast.
    Before long, the young boar had visited the fate intended for him upon those who had sought him out and among the dead, he saw the carcasses of his own sire and the sow who had birthed him. 
    The black boar knew chagrin and anger, and he ran away from the lands of his birth.  And whenever he came upon man, he was without mercy for it was the only answer he had known until then.  Strength and domination, death and destruction were the rules of his solitary existence until he, too, heard the call of the goddess.
    His angry heart knew yearning at the sound of her promise and after years and years of wandering and killing, the boar found his way at last to the valley of Lys.
    He stepped under the canopy of trees, and as he did it was as though their shadow pulled away the one that had fallen over him from his very birth under a dark moon.  The boar knew peace and came, at last, to kneel before the goddess.
    Lys was there.  Each day, she would descend from her mountain castle and each day, the beasts who answered her call came to her and she would pass from one to the next.  At times with a simple caress, other times to answer the riddles of the sphinx, or sing a song to calm the craggy hearts of the yellow lions.
    The boar saw her and fell to his knees, and when she touched him, he knew love for the first time in his sad life.  She crooned to him and bade him peace.  She scratched behind his ears, and the boar felt tears come to his red eyes as they fell like rain for the love he felt for the goddess.
    And so it was for a very long time until the day came, at last, and as she always knew it would, that Lys perceived the first of men to discover her valley.
    The snow-white dragons roared and said they would devour their frozen corpses.  The salamander's long tongue slipped between its jaws and it promised to immolate the men where they stood.  The sphinx proposed to confound them with riddles, and the lions said they would crush them in their rock hard paws.
    The boar was the sole creature among all the menagerie who made no promises nor vowed any oaths, for over his heart stole a thing he had not felt since he had come into the keeping of the goddess.  Its touch was cold and hard, but he recognized it for what it was because he had known it so very well and for so very long.  And that thing he felt then was named Fear.
    Lys stilled them all with a single word, then told them that she would go alone and tell the men that the valley was not meant for the likes of them, that their arrows would ever turn from their paths and that their spears would always fall short and that the hunt would never yield the least prize.
    The beasts bowed to the wishes of their mistress and watched quietly as she left them.  And among them, there was only one who thought that what she did was dangerous, and that all her magic would not be enough to overcome the power of men.
    The boar was not mistaken.
    For among those men there was one whose eyes sparkled with honest mirth, his jaw was clean and strong, and his arms well-muscled.  He stood apart from the men of his hunting party upon sturdy thighs and