The Darkangel Trilogy
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The Darkangel Trilogy is a series of fantasy novels by American author Meredith Ann Pierce. Set in the distant future, when the Moon has long since been terraformed into a lush paradise complete with its own animals, plants, and races.
In the first book, The Darkangel, we meet young Aeriel, a slave, whose mistress, Eoduin, is carried off by a darkangel to be his bride. Aeriel, determined to rescue her mistress, returns to the peak from which Eoduin was stolen and waits until the darkangel should return. Eventually, he comes for her as well, but not to be his bride. She is to continue her existence as a slave, but now she has twelve-and-one mistresses, the darkangel's brides, who have all been reduced to wraiths by the stealing of their blood and souls. Unable to tell which is Eoduin, Aeriel eventually learns to love them all for her mistress' sake.
Wandering in the garden of the darkangel's keep, she comes upon a duarough, a tiny man who turns to stone in sunlight, but becomes flesh in shadow. He is a mage, and he gives her a rhyme and sends her on a quest, for if the darkangel can be destroyed before he can take his fourteenth and last wife, then the power of the White Witch will be checked for a time.
And so Aeriel flees the castle and begins a quest that will take her wandering far into the desert to find the hoof of a starhorse, the traditional guardian of the realm that the darkangel has usurped. With this talisman, she can defeat the darkangel.
The second book, A Gathering of Gargoyles, opens with Aeriel and Irrylath, her redeemed darkangel and husband, in Isternes, the realm of his mother. Aeriel should be happy, but she is not, for Irrylath shuns her, not allowing her to even sleep in the same room with him. Into this time of grief come the maidens who were once Irrylath's other brides. They give Aeriel the second part of the rhyme that sent her questing before and send her once more into the world.
Her quest this time is to find the traditional guardians of the world's kingdoms, the lons, fantastic animals created by the mage Ravenna in ancient times. Along the way, she meets Roshka, a prince who may be her brother, and Erin, a dark-skinned girl who refuses to be parted from her. Fleeing bandits and another darkangel, Aeriel eventually comes back to the land where she was raised and enslaved, there to seek the advice of the sibyl of Orm. But the sibyl is not all that Aeriel expects.
The finale, The Pearl of the Soul of the World, opens with Aeriel stumbling through a cavern, nameless, voiceless and with no memory. An agent of the Witch has placed a device in her skull that renders her harmless to them. Found by a trio of duaroughs, Aeriel is called to the City of Crystalglass, a stronghold of the Ancients, where the mage Ravenna still lives alone, save for one retainer. There, Aeriel is healed and given the third part of the rhyme and the final portion of her quest begins.
There she also learns the truth about the White Witch and about her own world, which is dying little by little. The Witch must be persuaded to turn from her evil and take up the task of saving the world. Aeriel must be the one to persuade her.
