The Dark Shadow of Spring

by G. L. Breedon

  They stopped where Magnolia Street crossed Main Street to become Tulip Street, on the east side of town, near the Town Hall. This was the street Alex and Nina lived on and they said their goodbyes to the others. Alex had wanted to walk Victoria home, although he couldn’t explain to himself exactly why. To thank her again, he finally convinced himself. That was it. But she lived in the opposite direction, and farther into town, on Raven Street. He was forced to say goodnight to everyone together and the only words he managed to offer Victoria were, “Thanks again.”

  “Any time.” Victoria smiled again. Alex smiled as well, although he hoped there would never be another occasion where she would need to save him.

  Alex's family house sat in the middle of the street with a wide front lawn and two huge oak trees standing like sentinels near the picket fence that enclosed the yard. As they walked along the driveway to the covered front porch that wrapped back along one side of the house, Nina spoke up. “So what are you going to tell Dad?” she asked. “Don’t tell him too much, because you know how he wheedles things out of you, and don’t look at his eyes too long, or if you look at them, don’t look away too fast, and be careful of Mom, because they work like a team, with her playing all understanding to trip you up.”

  “Relax,” Alex said. “I’ve done this before. I’ve got it all figured out.”

  Events, however, did not unfold as he had planned. For once, his mother had made dinner at dinner time, which meant that Alex and Nina were late and, to make it worse, his parents had both waited for them to arrive before beginning the meal.

  As they stepped into the kitchen, Alex’s stomach rumbled in response to the smells of the food. His mother’s cooking reflected her Italian birth and heritage. A dish of baked ziti sat in the middle of the table, surrounded by smaller plates with buttered asparagus and steamed broccoli. A basket of fresh-baked bread beckoned to him, its aroma mixing with all the others and making his mouth water.

  “Where have you been?” his mother asked, her midnight black hair curling around her heart-shaped face and down to her shoulders. Her deep brown eyes pinned him into place as he stepped into the room. “And don’t think about sitting down at this table before you’ve washed your hands.”

  “Sorry,” Alex said, as he and Nina quickly scrubbed their hands in the kitchen sink. “The hike took a little longer than we’d planned.”

  “We’ve been waiting nearly an hour,” his father said, the tone of his voice unreadable. His father was a large, well-muscled man, with jet-black hair pulled back in a ponytail and a handsome, if somewhat too angular, face. But it was his eyes that caught most people’s attention. They were gold-flecked grey. His father’s quiet, intense presence was enough to unnerve most people, even when he wasn’t staring at them. Alex shuffled his feet and glanced over his shoulder.

  “Alex fell in a cave,” Nina blurted out, gesturing wildly with her arms, even as Alex tried to nudge her with his foot. “And he got knocked unconscious, but he was saved by this centaur girl and she’s really beautiful and really cool and he heard a voice in his head.” Nina gave Alex a sheepishly apologetic look, realizing that she’d babbled everything out all at once.

  Alex couldn’t help himself and sighed extravagantly.

  “Are you alright?” his mother asked, getting up and coming around the table to poke and prod him with her hands.

  “I’m fine,” Alex said through clinched teeth.

  “Victoria healed him,” Nina said. “She’s the centaur.”

  “So I surmised,” his father said. “The Radcliff girl, I assume. They just moved in to town.”

  “Well, we’ll have to thank her properly and invite her to dinner some night,” Alex’s mother said, much to his horror. The thought of having Victoria over for dinner to meet his parents made him uneasy in about seven different ways. Things were happening altogether too fast and he realized he had totally lost control of the situation.

  “You seem fine,” his mother pronounced, placing her hands on her hips.

  “Except for hearing voices,” his father said. “What did they say?”

  Alex shot Nina a glance that said this was a question for him to answer alone. She gave him back an innocent look that seemed to question why he would even suggest that she would interrupt.

  “It was one voice,” Alex said. “And it said it was coming back for its revenge.”

  “Well, you did hit your head,” his mother said, guiding Alex and Nina to their seats and handing them each a piece of bread. “Are you sure you didn’t imagine it?”

  “It hurt when I heard it,” Alex said. “Like a blinding white light in my head.”

  “Where is this cave?” his father asked.

  “The Black Bone Mountains,” Alex said, unable to resist the call of the food and stuffing his mouth with a forkful of baked ziti dripping with cheese and tomato sauce.

  “Maybe you should take a look at it, Logan,” his mother said, exchanging a silent look of concern with his father.

  “I think you’re right,” his father replied, staring deep into Alex’s eyes. His father’s gaze felt like a weight that had suddenly settled on his shoulders.

  “Tomorrow morning, you and I will go look at this cave,” his father said. Alex hadn’t anticipated going back to the cave. His eyes went wide and he swallowed deeply, a fork of ziti held just before his lips. Suddenly he had lost his appetite.

  Chapter 8: Cold Snap

  As Alex lay in bed that night, he couldn’t stop his mind from playing out the events of the day over and over, although not in any particular order. The words of the dragon Gall’Adon speaking what was surely his destiny blended with the image of Victoria pulling him from the cave, which melded with chasing the Mad Mages through the woods, which merged with the memory of running from the dragon’s fire, which mingled with the voice in the cave searing its words into his brain.

  Thinking about the cave made him think about going back to it the next morning with his father. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. Nina was incensed that she was not included, but their father had firmly stated that this was not an adventure of their little club. This might have to do with real magic, and if something dangerous was in the cave, he wanted her nowhere near it. The only reason he was taking Alex was so that he would be sure to find it. She had pouted the rest of the evening. Alex wouldn’t have minded trading places with her. His mother’s worried glances at him throughout dinner did nothing to calm his fears.

  Finally, Alex relaxed enough to fall into slumber, his mind drifting off peacefully, thinking about Victoria’s smile, when a familiar voice whispered, “I am coming!”

  Alex’s eyes bolted open, but he was too afraid to move. He listened carefully. The branches of the trees in the backyard clattered against the side of the house and the old house itself creaked in the way it always did in a light breeze, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Reassuring himself that he was alone, he sat up in bed to confirm it. Shadows filled the room, but none that seemed threatening or that threatened to move. Had he heard it again for real or had it been a vagrant memory floating to the surface of his mind as he sank into unconsciousness? Alex did his best to convince himself that it was just a dream, just a figment of a sleepy mind. It took an hour to persuade himself that he hadn’t heard anything real and to fall back asleep.

  He woke up to a quiet knock on his door and found himself still propped up in bed against his pillow. His father’s deep voice spoke softly from the other side of the door. “Time to get up, Alex. Need to check on that cave of yours.”

  Alex’s groan became a yawn as he heard his father’s footsteps receding along the hallway and down the stairs to the first floor. Alex looked out his window to see the sun just beginning to crest over the horizon, its dim light illuminating a frost-painted window. Getting out of bed and going to the window, Alex saw that the entire town and valley were covered in a deep frost.

  He shivered. His room still held a slight chill, the wood stove not yet hav
ing warmed up the house. The shiver was not from the cold and he knew it. A frost in early April was nothing unusual, but something about the sight of the valley in icy grey made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. For some reason he couldn’t explain, it made him think of the voice in the cave. The cave he was going back to with his father. He shivered again.

  The smell of fried bacon wafted into his room and he licked his lips. Dressing quickly, he hurried downstairs to find his mother serving pancakes and eggs alongside the bacon that had so motivated him. As he stuffed his face with syrup-drenched pancakes, some part of his mind noted how calm his mother seemed, while another part remembered that she never made bacon for breakfast unless she was worried about some dangerous business his father had arranged for the day. The thought did not help his digestion.

  The hike to the cave did not take nearly as long as the previous day. His father drove the official town patrol car out to the edge of the forest at the base of the Black Bone Mountains, parking it beneath a chestnut tree. The car was a Studebaker sedan in gleaming black. There were not many cars in the town of Runewood. With few places to go and the town so small, most people walked where they needed to go or rode a bicycle. Some still rode horses and there were a handful of wagons and carriages still in use. In the valley, the farmers tended to have large trucks for hauling their produce to town.

  Of course, none of the motorized vehicles worked the way they would have outside the valley. All of them had been converted to use magic as a means of propulsion rather than the foul smelling gasoline that was used by Outsiders. As long as there was magical energy in the land of the Rune Valley, the automobiles would run indefinitely.

  It occurred to Alex, as he led the way toward the familiar deer path up the mountain, that Victoria’s father probably enchanted cars like the one his own father used for town business. And that thought made him wonder what Victoria was doing that day. Would she have stayed inside because of the frost? Would she be out wandering the forest again? Would he run into her? Why he should care and why she kept popping into his mind, he wasn’t sure. After stumbling over the root of a tree, he decided to focus on the trail.

  “Daydreaming?” his father asked with a soft chuckle.

  “Thinking,” Alex said, trying to imply a difference with the tone of his voice.

  “Think about where your feet are going,” his father replied. “You need to stay alert in the woods. There are plenty of creatures in this forest that would do you mischief. Not so many as in the Crimson Forest, but enough.”

  “I know about creatures in the woods, Dad,” Alex said with a hint of exasperation. He couldn’t very well tell his father that he’d recently faced a creature far more dangerous than a wood gnome.

  “Speaking of creatures in the woods,” his father said, “what was young Victoria doing out in the forest at night?”

  “She’s not a creature,” Alex said firmly. “And she was out taking a walk.”

  “She’s a centaur,” his father said in a softer tone. “But you are right. She’s not like other magical creatures. Centaurs are the most human of the magical creatures in the valley. But they are not entirely human and that is something to remember as well. They will sometimes be as mysterious in their ways to us as we are to them. Which is probably why it seemed perfectly natural to her to take a walk in the woods after sundown.”

  “Lucky for me she did,” Alex said, wondering, not for the first time, what would have happened to him if the voice had continued to echo in his mind and the searing white light had continued to fill his skull.

  “Lucky for us all,” his father said in a near whisper.

  They walked in silence the rest of the way to the cave. His father bent down to the hole in the ground, motioning Alex to stay back. His father pulled a glow-wand from the satchel slung over his shoulder and spoke the rune-word for light. Lowering his head into the hole, he examined the cave by the light of the wand.

  “Interesting,” his father said.

  “What?” Alex asked, stepping closer. He had feared that, as he approached the cave, he would hear the voice again, but he heard nothing but the birds in the trees and he felt a little more at ease.

  “This is not a natural cave,” his father said. “It was constructed from the rock of the mountain with magic. The hole you fell through in the ceiling must have been weakened by something. Maybe an earthquake at some time. But the cave doesn’t seem to have been intended to have an entrance. Do you hear anything?”

  “No,” Alex said, edging closer to the hole in the frost-covered ground and looking down into the dark recesses of the cave below.

  “I’m going to go down and take a look,” his father said.

  “I’ll go with you,” Alex said, not exactly sure why he had said it. He didn’t want to go back down in the cave, but he didn’t want his father to be alone in the cave, either.

  His father squinted, his eyes serious in their stare. “Alright. But don’t tell your mother. She’s already mad at me for bringing you along. If she knew I took you back down there, she’d serve me for dinner.” Alex gave a weak smile as his father gestured to join him at the lip of the cave opening.

  His father placed his arm around Alex as he intoned the words for air and motion and the two of them were suddenly hovering above the ground. That’s a neat trick, Alex thought. Magical energy could not be seen the way electrical energy sometimes could, but it could be sensed and Alex did his best to perceive how his father was controlling the flow of magical energy to create motion by surrounding them in a cushion of air. As his father continued to softly speak words of air and motion, the two of them moved gently over the hole in the ground and then began to gradually descend, the light from the glow-wand illuminating the small cavern.

  The cave looked just as he had left it the night before, only now, with the sharp light of the late morning sun falling through the opening in the ceiling and his father standing beside him with a glow-wand, the rocky space did not seem nearly as threatening.

  “There is magic here,” his father said, sniffing the air. “But cloaked. Hidden. Do you hear the voice at all?”

  “No,” Alex said. “It was stronger near this wall,” Alex added, stepping over to the moss-covered wall where he had been so painfully attacked by the voice the night before. He kept his hands well clear of the wall this time.

  “If you do,” his father said, leaning in to sniff at the wall, “tell me right away.” His father slowly raised a hand and placed it on the mossy rock wall and closed his eyes. He spoke a few words of rune-tongue Alex could not make out. Opening his eyes, his father pulled his hand away and wiped it on his pant leg. “Definitely magic here. Can’t tell what kind or what for, but it’s very old. This cave might have been a marker of some kind. The antechamber for a burial tomb, maybe. You’re sure you don’t sense anything?”

  “No voices,” Alex said with a quiet sigh of relief. “Now that you’ve told me about it, I can sense some kind of magic in the cave, but not very well.” He had opened his mind to the sense of residual magical energy that was always present when magic had been worked, but what little he perceived was like the faint buzzing of a fly outside the window and across the yard — too dim to get any real impression of.

  “I’m not surprised,” his father said. “It takes years of practice to sense magic this faint. I doubt even your big friend Clark would have noticed it. But you’ll learn. In time. Now, do you want to take us up? I know you’re dying to try it now that you’ve seen it done. I’m sure you know the rune-words you’ll need.”

  Alex blinked in surprise and his father grinned. His father was not an unfeeling man, but he did tend to be stoic. A smile on his face looked unusual, but it was always a welcome sight. His father put his arm around him as Alex began to say the rune-words for air and motion, clearing his mind and reaching out for the magical energy of the valley, willing the air of the cave to wrap around him and his father and to raise them up. “Grath-Ton-Alth-Kal!”


  “Whoa!” his father exclaimed as the two of them shot out of the hole in the ceiling of the cave, rocketing into the air, and coming to a stop some twenty feet above the ground.

  Alex’s eyes were wide in surprise. “Sorry,” he said.

  “A little less might behind your magic next time,” his father said with a small laugh. “And try to set us down gently. I don’t want to be planted like a sapling.”

  “Right,” Alex said and focused his mind again, sensing the flow of magical energy controlling the air as he guided himself and his father to the ground. As Alex struggled to regulate their descent, he suddenly realized why mages in Runewood did not fly about the town — it was simply too difficult to maintain control of the magical energy needed to keep from crashing. After a precariously rapid drop, Alex managed to set them down safely several feet from the edge of the cave entrance.

  “Well done,” his father said, “even if a little too enthusiastically. Now here is something else you can learn if you know the words.”

  His father began to speak the rune-words for air and earth and stone and several others that Alex didn’t recognize and wondered when he would remember them. As his father spoke, small stones from around the forest slowly rose from their resting places in the hard mountain earth and floated to the lip of the cave. In less than a minute, a mass of medium-sized rocks and small pebbles obscured the hole in the ground.

  His father began to add more words and shifted the tone of his voice, the rocks suddenly beginning to glow with a deep reddish hue that gradually became brighter and darker. Alex could feel an intense wave of heat rising up from the rocks that had begun to glow blue-white. His father’s words shifted again to some Alex knew and more he did not and the rocks quickly cooled, revealing a solid piece of stone where the opening of the cave had been. As his father continued speaking, in a soft sing-song voice, dirt shifted from the nearby ground and a thin layer of mountain moss quickly covered the stone. The moss stood out like a dollop of bright green paint on the still-frosted ground.