by Tony Abbott
Everyone turned to Galen. He was quiet for a long moment, then he spoke. “The truth is that only great magic can fight Ko now. But the Pearl Sea is no more. The base of the Medallion my mother made so long ago has also been destroyed. Only the Ring of Midnight remains intact. But once that is gone, Droon, all of it, will fall. The Empire of Goll will have returned.”
Eric thrust his hand in his pocket and took out the Twilight Star. “We found Sparr’s forge in the Underworld. We have his part of the Medallion.”
Galen trembled to gaze upon the gleaming object. Then he turned to the Ninns. “Could this be the hope we have waited for?”
There came the sudden sound of a harp being plucked inside the cabin. This was followed by the squeak of a wheel spinning rapidly.
“What’s that?” asked Keeah, climbing to her feet. “What’s that noise?”
“See for yourself,” said Galen, waving his hand toward the cottage door. “Behold the Queen of Droon.”
“The queen? But you said —” Keeah rushed through the cottage door and saw her magic harp, floating in the center of the room, playing a soft melody. On a little stool behind the harp sat a young woman bent over a stone wheel that she turned with foot pedals. Against the swiftly turning wheel, she held a silver sword.
“Queen?” said Keeah.
The woman turned her face up from the wheel.
Keeah gasped. The woman was her older self, beautiful, grown up, but still young.
“Oh!” said the queen. She leaped up from the stool and grasped her younger self as if she were her own daughter. “You came! You came!”
Eric felt his eyes well up with tears. Seeing Keeah older, and the queen, made him deeply happy, as if he knew it should be so. It also made him wonder for a moment about himself, the one who had seen Ko’s terrible victory.
Had he died in battle, too? Which one — the third, the seventh? Or was he at home in the Upper World, a man sixty-plus years old? And not a part of Droon anymore? He shook his head to wipe that thought away.
“Why are you sharpening this blade?” he asked the queen. “Who are you going to fight? Galen said the battle is over.”
Queen Keeah stood up and took the sword in her hand. “There is one fight I will never give up fighting.” She stared deeply into Eric’s eyes. “The fight to free you.”
Eric felt his heart quiver when he heard the words. “To free me? What do you mean?”
Max hobbled into the room. “Sensing that the city would fall, Galen defied danger. Oh, he was brave! He stole into the city at night to retrieve the Moon Medallion his mother made in her sacred grove. He said that if ever there was a time we needed it, now was that time. He was nearly free when a troop of vicious beasts descended on him. Boldly and bravely, Eric came to rescue him. Galen got free. But poor Prince Eric …”
“Prince?” said Eric. “I’m a prince?”
Queen Keeah’s eyes grew moist. She nodded. “He — you — lies imprisoned in the deepest levels of what was once Jaffa City. I am going tonight to try once again to rescue him.”
Eric couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“But, Princess, how?” asked Captain Bludge. “All the beasts have gathered for the destruction of the Ring of Midnight. Even with us at your side, we are still fewer than ten in number.”
Eric breathed deeply. He turned to the others and smiled. “If I remember, being totally outnumbered is pretty much our style.”
“That’s the Eric I remember!” said the queen.
“Hoo-hoo!” crowed Galen, jumping like a much younger man. “People, we’re in business again! Captain Bludge! Ninns! There is hope once more. Ready yourselves!”
Bludge gargled a Ninn laugh. “We have been ready for years!”
Eric’s breath caught in his throat.
He looked at Max and Galen.
He turned to Keeah and the queen.
“To Jaffa City!” he declared.
Too old and frail to fight, Galen and Max waved from the cottage door as Eric, Captain Bludge, five Ninn warriors, and two Keeahs made their way swiftly to the edge of the Farne Woods.
Taking cover behind a large bush, the little band stared out across an open plain to Jaffa City.
Eric swallowed back a gasp as he again glimpsed the once-pink walls charred black from fire. Armed gray-furred beasts paraded along the top, while from the sunken palace dome a powerful searchlight beamed back and forth across the open ground around the city.
“We’ll never get to the walls without being seen,” said the queen. “The distance is short, but there are only seconds between each sweeping of that light.”
“If only the woods were closer to the city,” said Eric.
The Ninn commander made a sound like a laugh. “Junior Prince Eric! What a good idea!”
He turned to him. “Um … it is?”
“Bring the woods closer!” said Bludge. “We hide behind branches and move forward. When the light passes over us, we stop. Yard by yard, step-by-step, we reach the walls. This is what you meant, right?”
Eric’s heart skipped a beat. “Sure, that’s what I meant. Let’s dress up … as plants!”
The little troop gathered fallen branches, hid behind them, and moved over the open ground toward the walls. When the beasts’ spotlight swept toward them, they stopped.
The moment they were hidden by darkness again, they moved on. Soon the troop arrived at the foot of the city walls.
Keeah remembered that since Jaffa City was on the water, there were tunnels beneath the city that allowed the tides to ebb and flow under it.
The queen smiled. “I know the nearest tunnel. It will take us to the lowest passages under the palace.”
Five minutes later, the little group had slipped under the walls and entered a world of crumbling black stone. The hallways twisted oddly, creating a terrifying maze that Keeah hardly recognized as her home.
They entered one passage that took them nearly up to ground level before slanting down again.
Through cracks in the passage walls, Eric glimpsed the courtyard outside the palace. It was filled with beasts that were erecting a column made of giant trees hooped together by thick bands of iron.
“What is that?” he asked.
The queen paused. “It looks like a handle.”
“For what?”
“A big hammer?” she suggested.
“Why do the beasts want such a huge hammer?” Keeah asked.
The queen gulped. “Maybe to break something with?”
Errrch! Inch by inch, the beasts lifted the giant hammer into an upright position over the courtyard.
“We need to move on,” said Bludge. “Prince Eric lies in the lowest level of the palace.”
As they pressed deeper through the passages, Eric wondered what his older self might look like. He knew he would be old. After all, he was not a droomar as Keeah was. Nor was he a wizard like Sparr or Urik or Galen. If he ever was such a wizard, he certainly wasn’t anymore. He would have aged like Max had aged. To say nothing of having lived in a dungeon for so long!
Would they even find him alive?
“Footsteps,” said the princess.
Queen Keeah whirled around. A troop of scale-covered beasts with horned heads hissed when they saw the friends.
“Spies! Get them!” their leader snarled. “Bring them to Ko —”
Queen Keeah did not hesitate. Saying nothing, she flashed her sharpened saber in the dark, and the beasts fell back, howling.
A moment later, an alarm sounded in the passages.
“They know about us now,” said Eric.
“We Ninns will guard the way,” said Bludge. “Do what you must do. Go. Go!”
There was no time to argue. The footsteps returned, and there were many more of them.
Wishing the Ninns good luck, the queen, Keeah, and Eric raced deeper and deeper through the black passages. The two wizards ran ahead into the dark, guided by the queen’s gleaming saber. Eric hurried after the
m, only to find himself lost at a place where the passage split in two.
He stopped and whispered as loudly as he could into one passage, then the other.
“Keeah? Keeah!”
There was no answer from either tunnel.
“Uh-oh,” he said to himself.
He moved tentatively into one tunnel, went around a sharp corner, and found a torch lying on the floor. When he picked it up and held it high, he was stunned to see what he thought was a face hovering in the darkness ahead.
He froze.
“Hello?”
“Hey. How’s it going?”
Eric gulped. “Who’s … there … ?”
The face approached. It was a youngish woman with a thicket of thorns for hair. Her face bore a green tint.
“Salamandra!” said Eric, holding the torch to one side. “What are you doing here? How did you even get here? Wait … is the Portal coming? Are you coming to get us? Do we have to go back to the present? We only have the Twilight Star. Don’t we need the Ring of Midnight —”
“Whoa, Eric!” the thorn queen said. “One question at a time. A girl can only take so much. Besides, I’m not even here.”
He stepped back. “What do you mean?”
She gave him a look. “Think, Eric. I’m not here. If I’m not here, I must be somewhere else. If I’m somewhere else, then who are you talking to?”
He stared at her green face. She looked annoyed at him. He gasped suddenly.
“A … a …”
“Say it….”
“A … vision?”
“Bingo!” said Salamandra with a smile that lit up her face. “So, good job, Eric Hinkle. Now, find the prince. He’s thataway.” She pointed over her shoulder. “I’ll take my staff now. It goes with my hair.”
“Your staff?” Eric looked at the torch in his hand only to find that it was not a torch at all. It was Salamandra’s magical staff, glowing in its own thorny fire.
She snatched it from him, then faded from the passage as if she were nothing more than smoke.
Eric stared at the hand that had held the staff, then blinked into the darkness ahead, dumbfounded. “What just happened here? The last time I held Salamandra’s staff, it took all my powers away —”
He stopped. At just that moment, he heard the sound of stone scraping on stone. Shaking his head to clear it, he repeated the queen’s words.
“Thataway? So okay. I’ll go thataway!”
Eric stumbled ahead in the dark until he found an iron door set into the stone. A heavy bar was laid over its frame. With all his might, he lifted up the bar and dropped it to the floor with a clang.
He pulled the door open. Inside was a small stone cell. Hunched over, bound in an intricate web of thick chains, was the shape of a man. He was digging at the floor.
“Uh … me?” said Eric.
The man raised his head from his work and turned slowly to the doorway.
Eric saw his future self.
He was young! He looked perhaps twenty years old, as old as Queen Keeah. Though this was five decades in the future, it was the same face — his face — only a few years older!
“Prince Eric,” said Eric, “we’ve come to free you!”
The prince beamed. “I can’t believe it. It’s just as Galen hoped. You! I mean, me! Eric!”
All at once, the two Keeahs ran in.
Eric and Princess Keeah watched as the queen rushed to the prince, tore away his chains with a single blast of sparks, and raised him from the floor. Then she hugged him tightly. It was an embrace that neither seemed to want to end.
Finally, though, the passages resounded with the sound of fighting.
“Captain Bludge is protecting us, but there are lots of beasts,” said Keeah. “We need to get the Ring of Midnight and get out of here!”
Prince Eric nodded sharply. “Ko plans to destroy the Ring of Midnight at midnight tonight, when the moon is full.”
“The hammer!” said Eric.
The prince nodded as he darted out into the passage. “Ko’s hammer is loaded with the ancient dark magic of Goll. We have no time to lose.”
While the Ninns held back the beasts, the prince, the queen, Keeah, and Eric raced through one narrow passage after another until they arrived on the edge of the courtyard.
It was filled with more roaring beasts than they could have imagined.
The giant hammer was upright now, poised over a flat stone disk. Barely visible on the disk was a silver ring the size of a bracelet. It was tied down like a victim at a stake.
“The Ring of Midnight!” said Eric.
“If that is destroyed,” said the queen, “Ko will wage his final attack on Galen and surely defeat him.”
The giant emperor stood before the beasts and quieted their roar with his four hands. His twin horns spurted tall columns of green flame nearly as high as the dome itself.
“Beasts!” he boomed. “Five decades ago, we marched on Jaffa City and set it to the torch. It has taken all this time to find and destroy all the parts of the Moon Medallion that protected the city. Only the final part remains to be created. If I know Gethwing, he will find it. And if I know myself, I shall soon have it!”
The beasts roared wildly.
Eric held the Twilight Star in his hand. It burned like fire and ice at the same time.
“If only Galen were young enough to be with us now,” said Prince Eric, glancing at the Star. “Only a son of Zara can unharness the Medallion or its parts. I’m not even a wizard. I lost my powers long ago.”
So, thought Eric, in this future, I never get my powers back.
“Tonight,” continued Ko, “we destroy the final vestiges of the rule of wizards. Tonight the Empire of Goll rises to its full glory!”
“I’ll make my way to the hammer and try to snatch the Ring,” said the prince. “Eric, stay in the shadows. We can’t risk the Twilight Star being stolen, too. We must keep it safe.”
“I’ll do what I can,” said Eric.
“Princess Keeah and I will blast the beasts and cover you, Prince Eric,” said the queen with a smile. “Just don’t get caught this time.”
The prince smiled back. “Let me think about that. Mmm … okay!”
“Is the hammer ready?” shouted Ko.
“It is!” yelled a chorus of beasts.
Prince Eric nodded at the others. “And so am I. When Ko gives the order, we move!”
Eric watched his older self move quietly among the crowd of beasts and was proud to see how he had ended up. Prince Eric was nothing less than a hero, with or without wizard powers.
“Then let the hammer fall!” Ko boomed, and Prince Eric took off through the crowd. At the same time, the two Keeahs blasted the courtyard with purple sparks. The beasts howled and dived for cover.
Prince Eric was inches away from the Ring of Midnight when Ko spotted him and fired a bolt of black fire. The prince was hurled away into a crowd of angry beasts. They surrounded him and held him down.
“Noooo!” yelled the queen. Together with Keeah’s sparks she repelled Ko’s terrifying blasts and sent him leaping away.
But the giant hammer had already started to fall.
“Save the Ring!” shouted Prince Eric as he struggled to get free of the beasts. “Eric — save the Ring!”
“Me?” Eric said from the shadows. “But what can I . . ?”
The Twilight Star burned in his hand hotter than ever. He felt his head grow hazy. His heart thumped as he saw the hammer falling, falling. All of a sudden Eric found himself running as swiftly as he could toward the Ring of Midnight. But he wasn’t fast enough. The hammer was nearly down.
“Nooooo!” he cried. He reached toward the Ring with his free hand, then felt suddenly as if his hand were being yanked through the air. His feet left the ground. He flew like a rocket across the courtyard, snatching the silver Ring of Midnight from the stone an instant before the hammer crashed down.
“What? What —”
He had flown
! He had flown!
Beasts were on him in a second, but he flashed around, with the Star in one hand and the Ring in the other. Silver sparks burst from his fingertips. His sizzling spray hurled the beasts back into the crowd.
“My powers!” Eric cried. “My powers! They’re back!”
“And so are mine!” shouted Prince Eric as his fingertips flashed. He blasted his way free.
All the beasts charged the four friends. Then came the gargling sound of Ninn laughter as Captain Bludge and his band leaped into the courtyard with blades flashing. With a cheer, the four friends sent silver and purple streams of sparks at the beasts until the terrifying creatures were all forced to run for safety.
That was when a giant silver web fell over the beasts, and Max and Galen appeared on the city wall.
“Well, what did you expect?” said the wizard. “We couldn’t miss all the fun!”
“Not a chance,” chirped Max. “Spider trolls were born for adventure!”
With that, the wizard and Max joined the Ninns, and the courtyard erupted into a mad scene of sparks and webs and growling and running. It was a terrible din, but above it all came the sound of a storm.
“The Portal of Ages!” said Keeah. “Eric, it’s coming for us. We have the pieces of the Medallion. We need to go back to the present!”
“When you get back to the present,” said Galen, “remember one thing: Meet me at the gates to Jaffa City! Meet me there!”
“Go!” said Prince Eric, his fingers sparking. “Save the future. Save Droon!”
The two children hugged their older selves, leaped up into the storm, and went spinning away — far away — and half a century into the past.
Eric and Keeah kept their hands locked together as the ferocious winds of time tried to drive them apart.
“Something’s coming at us!” Keeah yelled.
“Whooooooa!” cried a familiar voice.
“Something’s coming at us, all right!” said Eric. “Something called … Neal!”
Neal hurtled through the Portal at terrifying speed while Julie clung to his feet.
Reaching out with their hands, the four friends met in the swirling Portal. Together they bobbled and wobbled through the air, spun around a dozen times, then began to fall.
