About the Shadowed Places

She knew about the shadowed places. She knew there were places in the shadows and dark corners of this world that could lead off to other places set at an angle to this world. She knew that to pass through those shadows and dark places could bring her out into a world not like this one, but out into a new world.

She knew there were other worlds and other kinds of realities, and not just the ones where she would be the Warrior Princess of the Nine Kingdoms, riding into battles of destiny with her faithful war tiger at her side. She knew there were worlds beyond those places where she took her pick of young lovers and led them from the flickering brightness of the camp fire off into her tent where they would spend the night entwined on her bed of furs.

She knew too of the monsters and demons that crawled out of those dark shadows into the safety of the night to clamber and claw their way into all our dreams. She knew too, that she could step off into those shadows and walk the dark alleyways and convoluted corridors of all our dreams, taking arms against those monsters and demons so that we could all sleep safe.

She knew all this and yet she walked past those shadowed places every morning on her way to her ordinary life, knowing that the time was not yet quite right for her to walk out of that life into some new land, some new way of living... not yet, anyway.