You can now read all instalments of the Eoss Trilogy combined into one volume.
Part 1 Platara Mountain.
Imagine modern magicians becoming involved with a parallel world where human beings are still in the Stone Age. Imagine this involvement precipitated by a kind but much-feared Horse Goddess who was created on Facebook. Alexandra has just left school and is looking for love and a vocation in life when that scenario becomes her reality. She comes to care deeply about both the Horse Goddess and a young family in the parallel world. The experience transforms her into a magician.
Part 2 Mount Clexa.
This story is told in the first person by Clexa, the daughter of the Horse Goddess Eoss. She is bound in service to a magician who forces her to help with a magical curse, and to venture into the realms which are known as the Enochian aethyrs, as explored by Aleister Crowley. Clexa has her own ideas about what she wants to do.
Part 3 Silver Manes.
Arran is a Kabbalist, a young professional man, and his accident comes at a critical moment in his love life. It also serves to deepen his connection with one of the kingdoms of Hell.
He enters an extended coma, which becomes a test of character and teaches him lessons about both love and archetypal symbols. Many of the people around him get the chance to petition a Wishing Horse for three wishes. What is the connection between the Horse Goddess and the Wishing Horses?
Prequel - Heather of Heather Bay.
This story is about the resourceful Heather, a servitor mare who is created by a chaos magician. The magician has a grand vision of magic and life as a chessboard. Three young flatmates seek help from the servitors, and we see them through Heather's eyes as they grapple with the threat of being homeless. Heather learns and grows, and becomes the first in a line of similar entities.
Excerpt from Platara Mountain:
“Eoss isn’t a comfortable friend; she belongs to the chaos, and she stirs things up.”
Alexandra nodded. She was sitting on her mother’s knee wearing a white nightgown, and she had been trying to explain to her mother about the other world.
The world she saw in her visions was one where people hurried along pathways made from grey stone slabs, and shiny metal shapes whizzed by on the other side of the paths.
Twelve years later it was all the other way around. Alexandra lived on Earth, in the world she had seen in her visions, and she remembered having been somewhere else up to the age of four. But the details had escaped her except for one name: Eoss.
She looked up ‘Horse Goddess’ in the public library and found Epona. It was Epona, not Eoss who was the horse goddess. Unlike Eoss, she wasn’t a horse herself, and officially she was no longer worshipped. Cowboys in wild west films said ‘hoss’ which sounded closer to Eoss, but the correct word was ‘horse’ to rhyme with ‘course.’ Horses for courses.
***
Eoss was galloping across a field in the world Alexandra had forgotten. Someone had asked for her help to restore his settlement, and because she dealt with order as well as chaos she wanted to help. When she arrived, the settlement was all scattered wattle and stone where the huts had been torn down, and clouds of dust lingered from the smashed boundary walls. There was grit in the air which scratched the face and nostrils of anyone there who breathed.
Eoss sought for people, to whom she would say, “Build! Start now and build!” Although it is order when you build, chaos comes first and levels the place to rubble so that its complement, new building, can begin.
She headed for the stables, and mercifully there were no horses left in them dying of hunger and thirst. There were no human beings around either.
If the humans had gone, and had left some horses trapped in stalls, Eoss didn’t know whether the laws under which she operated would have allowed her to unbolt the doors. She was what is known as an egregore, but she had not been developed from a servitor. A group of people had conceived her right from the start as a strong entity who serves many. This group knew one another only on what was called ‘the internet’ in that other world, the Earth.
Eoss had come here because there was no barrier to her passing through the vortices that lie between universes, and she felt drawn to this particular universe. Then one day Sandra, her rider, had somehow travelled to Earth. Once she had arrived there, she was from that time called Alexandra.
Eoss had no idea how her rider had moved from one universe to another, and it was perplexing the way those who called her Alexandra thought she had been there all her life instead of only from the age of four. Eoss made no attempt to move her again because she herself could gallop in both places, and as she did not understand the strange forces that had moved Alexandra, she thought it best not to interfere. Yet she was saddened to observe that Alexandra often felt lost in that other world.
So now Eoss was a riderless horse, but she was far from lost. She always knew where she was going as she knew today, directed by a prayer rather than by a bridle towards the human being who had called on her.
She found him sheltering in a damp cave with the others from his family: a woman and three young children who didn’t look as if they could survive for long without better shelter.
“Build!” Eoss called out. “Start now and build!”
The human shook his head. “I have no materials with which to build, and no-one to help me build. There are no other survivors but us. We were outside the settlement when it was destroyed.”
“Go and find someone to help you; an ally, not one of those who destroyed the settlement.” Eoss was well aware that her advice was both blindingly obvious and impractical to carry out, so she added, “I will go myself and seek such a person.”
That was the human prayer answered, or was it? For it would not be resolved until she found the one of whom she spoke, or preferably more than one. There was also the question of the spark of power she needed in order to assist, like the flints these people rubbed together to light their evening fires. However, Eoss could play with time and that meant her payment could be pushed into the future, to be taken later. She didn’t like seeing it as a transaction anyway.
She began to gallop, covering many kilometres in a few moments, and searched for another suitable tribe in this country primitive yet congenial to herself, on this planet primitive yet congenial.
Eoss found another tribe, although they were some distance from the stricken family. She was satisfied that they were not the ones who had destroyed the settlement as she could not smell the weapons on them, and she tried with both physical and psychic senses. She whinnied and pulled one of the sturdiest young men by the arm with her mouth. “Come- rescue the fugitives.”
He looked round, shocked, and made a religious sign in the air with one hand. In his language he said the equivalent of “I am not riding the nightmare. Let the fugitives come to us.”
Eoss sped back, not feeling any malice towards the tribe as they gathered around a fire behind her, smoking herbs in long reed-shaped pipes. It was just their tribal superstitions. She turned aside into a landscape that was a mixture of prairie and forests, and accosted a shaggy beast with humps; a beast which looked a little like a camel but did not use the humps to store water. They were just part of its shape. She persuaded the beast to follow her and drove it back towards the demolished settlement.
When they arrived night had fallen, and the woman and three children were shivering and sleeping fitfully under flat mats in the cave, while the man stood at the entrance brandishing a stick, looking around him. He appeared exhausted but afraid to lie down.
Eoss went over and nuzzled his hand. “Ride tomorrow on my friend, Kell. Not on me, I’m not solid enough to take you all. We’ll get to safety.”
“That’s if we’re still alive in the morning,” the man said.
“Make a fire,” Eoss suggested.
She couldn’t go with the man to find fuel; it was an activity too rooted in the earth element, and all she could do was send him the courage and strength to do it. In the end he moved away from the cave leaving Eoss and Kell standing at the entrance, and gathered firewood from a sparse patch of woodland that could be reached by crossing several of the stretches of grassland. He made a fire, and Eoss and Kell knelt on the ground beside it while the family edged as close as they could, and the man pulled one end of a mat over himself and finally fell asleep.