by RD Le Coeur
SUNSHINE
&
SHADOWS
Book One
By
RD Le Coeur
Published in 2014
Copyright © Text R.D. Le Coeur.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Published by RD Le Coeur
Look for me online at:
www.rdlecoeur.net
Originally published as The Sunshine Chronicles by Firedrakes Weyr LLC.
Rights reversion to the author 2010.
Other books by this author:
The Spartacus Prophecy
New Shoes
Dragon's Heart
Belvine
Vengeance (Book 1)
Vengeance (Book 2 Troubled Times.)
Vengeance (Book 3 Dragon riders.)
Strata Florida-A tale of the Grail
A Nun's Tale
Catcher of the Wry
Ethics
In a time, not long ago, before tablets and smart phones...
Sunshine & Shadows
Chapter One
He was fat, he wore spectacles, and he was miserable. Worse than that he had a large mop of red hair and his given name was Sunshine. He scuffed his feet in frustration on the soft sand on the beach. Expelled again. This was the third time, and he was running out of schools. He trudged on. He would have to face his parents again and give them the bad news. They would say, 'cool'. They were always cool about everything. It drove him mad. In his eyes, his parents were not cool. They were the last inhabitants of a former hippy commune, who spent their lives living in La-La land, as far as the locals were concerned.
Try as he might, he could think of no-one else who lived in a tepee, had no electric and who had to bathe in a stream. His clothes were out of the ark and from charity handouts. He just didn't fit in. What other parents fixed medical problems by waving magic crystals about? None he could think of. He had no friends. He just wanted to be accepted. Despite his stupid name, he had hoped beyond hope that they would just call him Sunny. But No. Chub, Ginger Minger or Four Eyes was about the best he could expect. He would even have preferred eco-freak at a push.
It wasn't his fault he was so good at reading either. He was rubbish at sport, couldn't operate a pc, or even keep up to date on the latest soaps. Reading was his only hobby. It was the only thing to do. He had read "The Lord of the Rings' when he was seven and actually understood it.
"Stupid headmaster," he cursed under his breath. All he had done was to mutter a spell he had learned from this old book he had found in a derelict cottage, and the class hamster had turned into a pig. OK, the girls had screamed. The boys had said, 'Cool' like his parents would, but that stupid teacher had got her knickers in a twist and called the headmaster. Still, it was a change not to be expelled for truancy.
A light misty rain was coming in off the sea. Sticky rain he called it. You seemed to get wetter with that, than with a hard rain storm. Just my bogging luck, he thought.
He stubbed his foot on something and bent down to examine it. It was a peculiar shaped clay vessel, which roughly resembled a bottle.
"Odd," he said. His Mother would have turned this into a candle holder of some description and sold it at the weekend boot sale along with the other bric-a-brac, scavenged from the beach and sold as sea sculptures or something.
He grasped the neck and prised it from the sand. It had a peculiar looking top as well. He examined it carefully against the light. It was in no way transparent. He shook it. There was definitely something inside. He shook it again and got an eyeful of grit for his troubles from under the rim. What was that inside? he wondered. Try as hard as he might he could not prise the top from the bottle. He had already decided that he did not want to smash it, if his Mum could get some cash for it at the boot sale, then so much the better. Maybe they could even afford some proper sweets.
That was another thing that bothered him. How could you get fat on a diet of lentils and vegetables? It was just the sort of thing that people went on to diet, not to put weight on.
The top would not come off. He ambled down to the sea and washed the sand off the clay bottle to inspect it more clearly. A wave caught him unawares and now he was soaked. What the rain had not half doused, the wave had. This made him even more miserable. He was cold, he was wet, and the top wouldn't come off the damn bottle.
He shoved it in his pocket and sauntered up the beach, over the sand dunes, through two fields, jumped the stream, skipped over the puddles in the woods until he came to 'Home Meadow'. The field was covered in a fine sea mist and you could not really make out the homely, eco friendly design of the field. Beneath the mists lay several tepees, most empty, a disused two berth caravan that was at least forty years old in design, that bulged like a cardboard box left out in the rain, and a well laid out and tended vegetable patch. All was eerily silent, the mists had damped the sounds of everything. He sought out his own tepee and lit a candle. It may not have been much but it was his own space. He changed out of his soaking school clothes and put on clean ones.
Won't be needing those again, he thought, and good job. What other parents would make an overweight fourteen year-old wear grey flannel shorts to school? he wondered, but knew the answer. More comfortable and relaxed now, he took the clay bottle up again and tried his darnedest to remove the top. It would not budge. Deep down he wanted to smash the bottle to vent his frustrations, but could not bring himself to do so. Where was that book of spells? Maybe it had a spell for opening things. He fought the desire not to open it, as it was yet again, the cause of trouble to him. Sometimes he wished he had never gone into that derelict cottage, let alone dug beneath the hearth.
He rummaged under the floor rug and found his secret hiding place. Carefully pulling the rug up, he pulled out a wooden box that lay half buried in its own little hole in the ground. It came up easily. He levered open the lid and retrieved the book. It was very ancient, had a thick black leather cover, but it had no title on the front. The pages inside were made from some form of animal skin and were not cut evenly to size.
It had a very musty smell, not at all pleasant and he had noticed that if it got very damp, the pages were hard to separate. It had a contents page as the first page and he scanned the weird handwritten texts for "opening spells'. This was not easy to do.
The text was written in ancient Welsh, and to make things more difficult it could only be deciphered when read in a mirror. He knew from experience what letter patterns to look for. <
br />
'slleps gninepo' he turned to the page and found many spells for opening different things. There were loads of them.
He found sreniatnoc and thought that it would suit his purposes. He wrote the spell down in normal script and placed the bottle before him on the ground. He always thought that there should be some ceremony that preceded this, but it worked just as well by clutching the book, with his translation inside, looking at the object, and muttering the words. He whispered the spell, and the lid miraculously and silently fell to the floor. He checked the lid first. He could never have unscrewed it, as it had no thread. Closer inspection revealed that it had no obvious way of attachment and should by rights have simply fallen off with a good shake.
He shook the bottle and a parchment similar to that of the spell book fell onto the rug. It had a funny smell of Lily of the Valley he thought, and this made him think of old people.
