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A Whispering, a Muttering, a Hum.

There was a whispering, a muttering, a hum. There weren’t so many of them that a birthday was an everyday occurrence. Especially not this birthday.

There were worn floors that had seen better days, scrubbed clean by capable hands. The boy followed the others along grooves etched by hundreds of feet, between the dormitories and breakfast tables and school rooms, counting the hours.

There were hearth fires, not blazing enough to reach into every corner, but warm if you stood near enough and never moved, because once you stepped away you’d be twice as chilled as before. The first signs of spring budding on the trees and poking up from the earth had not yet crept indoors.

There were scents, of rain and smoke and something sweet baking in the kitchen.

There was saliva dripping down the chins of those accustomed to watery porridge.

All the younger children looked at the boy with excited smiles. The matrons gazed at him with thin-lipped grimaces.

Well, they would miss him, wouldn’t they. For this was the last time he would hear these whispers and walk these floors and smell these smells.

He was about to receive his Gift.

Af supper, a package would appear, shiny and bright as one of the foul cough drops Nurse gave when the winter winds came and the children could hardly speak. Though it was not needed, a label, on which someone had written his name, would flutter from the ribbon, the whole representing the only two things in the world that belonged to him, and him alone.

Oh, he would be given food, and warm clothing for his journey, but those didn’t count. Everybody had such things, even if the food was barely enough to fill a belly, the clothes full of holes.

He would take his Gift, and Head Matron would take the large brass key from the string at her waist, fit it neatly into the lock of the orphanage’s front door.

The bell rang.

The package was blue, a blue of skies and flowers. He’d seen them in all colors over the years, for as long as he could remember. “Open it,” the others begged, but the boy shook his head. That wasn’t done. He ate his stew in silence, eyes never leaving the small, square box. While the rest of the children exclaimed in delight over the rare cake, he scarcely tasted it. Only a faint impression of sweetness left itself on his tongue.

“It is time,” said Head Matron. The key caught the lamplight. The box was heavy in his hand and the blue paper shimmered.

“Well,” he said, looking up and down the long tables. “Goodbye.”

There was a whispering, a muttering, a hum, and it swelled as he reached the door. They were guessing. In his time, he’d done plenty of that himself, every time he’d watched someone else celebrate this birthday.

Head Matron didn’t say a word. She draped a warm cloak round his shoulders, held out a coarsely woven sack for him to take with his free hand. The boy saw the one who taught him maths wipe her eyes. Well, he was good with his numbers, and he’d always taken care to help the ones who struggled. Perhaps she’d miss him most of all. He gave her a smile, which she returned with a weak one of her own.

It was a long walk down the path to the gates set into the walls that surrounded the orphanage. A second brass key, this one from Head Matron’s pocket, turned the lock with the tiniest of clicks. The gates creaked.

“Thank you,” said the boy, because he felt he should. She had, after all, kept him safe and warm and fed his whole life, or near to it as mattered. He’d kept his bed and table tidy, never been rude at mealtimes, or spoken out of turn in lessons, and thus she had never given him a cruel word.

And now, she gave him none at all. Nodding, she gestured through the gate and, for the first time, he stepped outside the orphanage’s confines, with the entire world spread out before him like an adventure. When the gate swung shut and locked behind him, he barely heard it.

The Gift slipped in his slightly clammy hand. He could open it now, if he wished, but curiously, he did not. Not yet. While it was still wrapped and pretty, it could be anything, and there was a delightful wonder to that, wasn’t there? Certainly, the other children would still be guessing as they made their way to the dormitories and climbed under scratchy blankets.

Some said it was a fat gold coin, enough riches to make life in the city on the other side of the forest that surrounded the grand, old, crumbling house. Others thought it was a map, unique to each child, with which they might find any family left to them. It could be the key to a palace, a blood red jewel the size of a plum. Those with great imaginations and a keenness for fairy stories were sure it was a gift in the truest sense, and that opening the package would grant something wonderful, magical; the ability to soar high above the treetops, or become as invisible as the wind which rippled the boy’s new cloak.

If it would let him fly, he wouldn’t have to walk through the woods, which at the moment looked very deep, and dark, and getting darker with each inch the sun dropped in the sky. Behind him, the windows glowed, and the boy thought for a moment about turning back, asking to stay until morning. But the Gift always came with supper, and nobody ever returned. He would not be the first. He would brave the forest, as every child before him had, and make his way to the city. Yes. He would walk for a while through the trees, and when he became tired or hungry, he would find a clearing and curl up for the night. There, alone, he’d open the package and see what clue to his new life it held.

Looking out from the dormitory window at the vast swathe of green treetops, he’d imagined the forest to be a calm, quiet place, far more peaceful than a house full of children. Now that he was inside it, however, it sang with a symphony of noise; birds and leaves and scuttling creatures. But it was not unpleasant, indeed it felt like a sort of company, so that he was not so very alone.

With no clock, and the moon hidden away, the boy didn’t know how long or far he walked, only that he did so until his feet inside his hand-me-down boots were sore and blistered. On he trudged, peering through the gloom until he saw light, moonlight pouring into an empty circle of trees.

He thanked his luck at such a perfect spot. A large boulder, its surface worn smooth, gave an ideal place to lean against as he sat on the hard ground and placed the blue-wrapped package in front of him. Still, it could be anything.

In the sack was bread and cheese, plus a stoppered bottle of what turned out to be water, still chilled courtesy of the night air. The boy ate and rested his aching feet, drawing his cloak around him as the wind picked up.

There was a whispering, a muttering, a hum.

And it grew louder. Louder. LOUDER.

Wailing, ghostly figures emerged from the trees to surround him. A cry of fright trapped in his throat, unwilling to come out. The blue paper caught the moonlight. It must be something to help him, protect him! With near frozen, trembling fingers, the boy tore open the Gift, paper blowing away across the clearing.

The box shook. The swirling, wispy creatures came closer, closer.

He tore off the lid.

The air filled with a scream, bursting from the box to join the cacophony of sound in the forest. He could not run back, they would chase him and it was too far. He couldn’t warn the others at the orphanage.

The scream kept going, billowing out of the small box that was growing lighter in his hands.

Closer. Closer they came.

He knew the scream.

It was his own.

A Map to the Center of Now

It began, as things so often do, with a map.

A map is a pleading thing. Explore me, it begs. See where I lead.

It would be a mistake to say that it is always dangerous to obey, but equally wrong to say it never is.

And stories are rarely told about uneventful journeys. Or, at least, interesting stories are rarely told.

Well, my dears, have I an interesting story for you.

The Cabinet was dark and mostly quiet, the only light in the entire place flickering from the lamp at my side, the only sound the occasional rustle or quiet scream from one of the collections. It was cold, so cold my breath crackled in the air before me. My fellow curators, being far cleverer than I, had fled the building and the snowstorm that raged around it, and I hoped they were searching for new treasures in warmer climes.

My fingers, cold and stiff as a corpse, sifted through the chest. The chest that was the reason I was still in our Cabinet of Curiosities, and not in some far-flung place, gathered around a cozy hearth with a group of murderous ghosts, or the like. I had been planning to go, you see, for there are many tales across many lands that have yet to be explored, collected, and displayed in our wondrous museum.

I had, in fact, been so on the verge of leaving that I almost didn’t notice the chest, placed directly outside our door at some point since I arrived back from lunch. Preoccupied and absentminded I may occasionally be, but I am quite certain it wasn’t there as I stepped inside and set down a box containing a most delicious slice of honey cake. Nonetheless, it was assuredly on the doorstep as I stepped out, eyes on the horizon and head full of a rumor of a mysterious potioneer somewhere on the other side of the Malevolent Mountains.

We shall, if you do not mind, gloss smoothly over the heap I found myself in after tripping on the chest, and move directly to my curiosity as to its contents. Curiosity, after all, is what we do here. Our specialty, you might say.

Where was I? Oh, yes, it began with a map.

The chest contained many intriguing items, letters, photographs, all worthy of exploration at a later date, but the map was what grabbed my attention the moment my chilled fingers set upon it. I’m ashamed to say I scarcely glanced at the other things, and perhaps I should have, but the map…the map. The edges of the parchment were ragged and frayed, the ink faded, but I could see the route, clearly marked. For it wasn’t simply a map, an illustration of strange and mysterious lands, but instructions, a path to follow in order to discover something in those lands. What that something would be, I did not yet know, but I was overcome, yes, overcome, with the need to find out.

Leaving a note for my fellows, should they return in my absence, I packed a satchel of those things that are always useful on such a trip: a compass, a notebook, a small leather case of various potions and elixirs whose lack I have regretted in the past. I watered the Cabinet’s collection of carnivorous plants and set on my way, out through the still-falling snow.

My footprints sank deep into it and were quickly erased behind me. One might have taken this as an omen, but if I did, it was a positive one. Adventure looks forward, not back! I arrived in good time at the train station and purchased a ticket for as far away as I could travel by such means. This was not, according to the map tucked safely away, my destination, but it was as near as I could get.

The sky darkened and the train chugged along, emptying at each stop until I was the only one upon it. This, too, I perhaps should have taken as an omen.

The lights went out. “It’s only a tunnel,” I told myself, though this explanation made, even to my own ears, little sense. I had seen much more frightening things in my time as a Curator.

An instant before the lamps flickered back to life, the violins began. And I was no longer alone. My fear was replaced instantly by excitement, for I knew this story, though I had only heard it secondhand.

“I’m on the skeleton train,” I whispered.

“Yes,” the skeletons cried, surrounding me. “Dance with us!”

Well, I have always been partial to a dance. How could I refuse? I felt young as I danced, skipping and leaping among the tangle of bones. I knew better, however, than to linger too long, so in the first rush of sunrise I leapt from the slowing train, and checked that my landing had broken none of my vials tucked away in my satchel.

I also checked the map. My journey would continue south, and I set off with a spring in my step toward the woods ahead. Dark as daytime, they were, when I was in the thick of them, trees on all sides of the worn path I traveled. A rumbling came from behind me, causing me to jump aside for a string of carts, piled high with circus tents and led by a boy with a great, bright red bird atop his shoulder.

“Lucky Luke,” I said, but the boy did not hear me, and the carts rumbled on. I followed in their wake, to the edge of the woods and out again, to the base of mountains that rose high above me.

The map fluttered in the cold breeze that swept down from their peaks and across the foothills on which I stood. My sleeves fluttered, too, and the cuffs of my trousers dragged in the mud, but I did not pay as much attention to this as I should have, too entranced was I by this adventure, leading me—I was sure now—back to places and times of which I had only heard, or hadn’t visited since my early days of gathering oddities and whimsy. Indeed, the landscape became more and more familiar as I trod the roads and passed through towns. Here, the dragons, there, the girl who had made grave errors in her birthday wishes welcomed me as an old friend and made me a cup of rather welcome tea.

But I did not linger. Possibly I should have. She might have seen. I might have seen, in a mirror over the sink.

I kept on, my warm cloak dragging on the ground behind me, over the mountain pass and onto the broken road. For days I walked, sleeping nights in the shelter of rocks and trees. From this height, I could see in the distance the city where a shadow had crept, and the forest where the spiders sang.

In a familiar village, I left my last bottle of honey in the town hall for the people to find.

And I kept walking. I knew, now, that something was amiss, but I had come this far.

High in the mountains, there was a lake. A lake of which I had only heard, and the map led me straight to it. It took more days, more weeks to reach, my worn shoes—too large now—stumbling over every dip in the track. My nights were restless, plagued with nightmares I had once thought long forgotten.

Not so forgotten now.

You might ask why I continued. It is a fair question, but I had to know. Not once had I shied from an adventure, no matter how terrifying the stories that warned of it had been. Danger is part of our collection. And so I kept on, and when the lake came into view, I knew precisely what I would see in its pure silver surface. I was not afraid. After all, I could always simply turn away, walk back the way I had come, visiting with my old acquaintances on the way, and reverse the effects of walking the map.

I slept that night by its shores, warm despite the mountain chill, my small hands curled up inside my oversized clothes.

I should not have done what I did, but it was early dawn, my dreams still swarming in my head. I wasn’t thinking, or I was thinking with a mind much less experienced, and I was thirsty.

So very, very thirsty.

I knew immediately I had made a rash mistake. I did the only thing I could do.

My notebook was full, after my long journey. There are always so many stories to collect. But the reverse of the map was clear. My pen crackled on the parchment.

Dear fellow Curators,

Please find me. I fear I may not remember you, or any of this, much longer. Come to that, I fear I will soon forget how to spell. I am six, perhaps seven years old, but time is different here, and the mountain wolves are howling.

Curator Trevayne.

***

Note: Curator Trevayne was successfully rescued, and is recovering with the help of the right medicines, which we have had to invent. She awoke long enough to recount this tale and ask for a slice of cake. All is back to normal.

One Times Two

Mama always told me not to answer the door.

It was dangerous, she said. You never know who might be on the other side, she said.

I kept the key in my hand the whole way from school, held it so tight it left a mark that was always gone by next morning and back again next afternoon. I locked myself inside the house at the end of the row, all exactly the same. Red brick and white shutters, pointy roofs and shiny mailboxes.

I’d do my schoolwork, and count the hour until mama came home.

There were seventeen minutes left. I was multiplying nine times seventeen, and I liked how neat that was.

The doorbell hadn’t worked in years. The knock was soft at first. It stopped and came back again, louder.

Nine times seventeen is one hundred and fifty-three.

Finally, the knock went away.

Twelve minutes later, the door opened. “Adam? I’m home.”

“I’m in here,” I said. “Someone knocked a little bit ago.”

“Oh,” said mama. “I’ll check to see if they left a package. Are you hungry yet?”

“Starving!”

Mama laughed.

After dinner, I finished my math and took a bath. That rhymed, and I liked how neat that was.

My eyes were almost closed, blankets pulled up to my chin. A tap rattled the window, like the spindly wooden fingers of a branch, but there were no trees outside my room. Bugs sometimes flew too hard into the glass and I’d find them squished on the sill, messy and disgusting. I pulled the blankets higher and fell asleep.

The key mark was still on my palm. Eight times thirteen is one hundred and four.

Knock, knock.

“Go away,” I said, much too quietly for whoever was on the other side to hear me. I wouldn’t open it, because of what mama said. It could be anyone.

The same thing happened the next day, and the next. I told mama every time, and she went up and down the street, to all the houses with their red bricks and white shutters and pointy roofs and shiny mailboxes to ask if it was the people who lived there, needing something. But it wasn’t any of them, and they hadn’t seen anybody on our porch. We must have been at work, they said. Helen must have been at school, they said.

The tap on the window was loud enough to wake me up. I climbed out of bed, wriggling my toes in the soft rug before I pulled the curtains apart an inch to look outside. There was nobody there, nobody I could see.

Six times eleven is sixty-six.

I was almost expecting the knock, but I jumped and dropped my pencil when it came, anyway. The lead broke and skittered away across the floor. “Go away,” I said, a little louder this time, still too quiet to be heard through the thick, locked, safe door.

“Please, let me in.”

I ran upstairs, soles of my shoes slapping on the wood, loud, but quieter than my heart thumping fast. I slammed the door to my room so hard the window rattled and that made me jump, too.

“Adam? I’m home!”

“I’m up here,” I whispered.

“Adam?” Mama climbed the stairs and knocked at my door. “Are you in there?”

I stayed curled on my bed, watching the handle turn, even though I knew it was just mama, who smiled when she saw me, and whose smile turned into a frown. “What’s wrong, sweetie?”

I couldn’t tell her, not this time. She’d think I wasn’t old enough to stay home alone for an hour after all, and I’d have to stay at school where it was noisy and messy and impossible to remember what five times nine was.

“I’m not feeling well,” I said, which wasn’t exactly a lie.

“Stay here,” she said. “I’ll bring you some soup.”

All night, something tapped at the glass. “Please,” it whispered. “Please, let me in,” and no matter how many times I told myself it was the wind, I knew that was a lie.

“You still don’t look very good,” said Mama in the morning. “Let’s stay home today.” She called the school to get my work, and I sat on the couch with a fresh pencil that made nice, sharp marks. I liked how neat they were.

Three times seven is twenty-one.

Mama was upstairs, folding away socks. Someone knocked and it was safe, safe to answer while she was home. I listened as I tiptoed to the door, but there was no voice this time. Probably the mailman with a package.

The lock clicked. A breeze blew as I turned the handle and pulled.

There was no one there.

“Hello?” I called, stepping out onto the porch in my bare feet. “Is anyone there?”

The wind blew harder; the door closed with a shattering slam. I saw too late that everything was different.

There were no other houses on the street, no red bricks or white shutters. Beyond the porch was just barren grass, far as I could see, and farther still. Overhead, the sun was hazed with clouds, hot, but the wind was cold.

“Mama?” I called, knocking on the door hard as I could. “Mama?”

She’d been at the back of the house, upstairs. I ran from the porch and onto the grass, pebbles biting at the bottom of my feet, little teeth hidden in the grass. Around the house and into the overgrown backyard. “Mama?”

I called for her until I couldn’t anymore, my throat hot and raw as the sun that was, now, sinking down in the sky. She’d notice I was gone soon, open the front door and find me there, sitting against it, knees pulled to my chest.

The stars began to twinkle. The moon was bright. My eyes dropped closed, and when I opened them, my whole body hurt from sleeping that way, a solid ache from head to toe. The grass was glassed with frost. My stomach rumbled. Mama still hadn’t noticed I was gone.

I knocked until my knuckles were bruised, blue as the morning.

There was still nothing to be seen in any direction, just my house sitting there in the middle of the nothing.

I multiplied things in my head to stay calm, keep my heart from hammering. It was afternoon, I think, when I remembered the ladder, left in the backyard last summer, now covered with moss and mold and snails. Messy and disgusting and I didn’t want to touch it, but I did, now, dragging it as far as I could and propping it against the red brick.

My bare feet slid on the slimy rungs. I tapped at the window, but there was no answer. I knocked at the door again. “Please,” I said. “Let me in.”

I don’t know if it was the next day, or the one after that, or the one after that when the handle turned. I knew I was cold, and my ribs stuck out, and my mouth tasted of the disgusting hose water that had been the only thing to drink.

The wind blew as the door opened.

One times two is two.

I saw myself.

And we both screamed.

Welcome to August. Please, open the door…

There is a long, winding path. Trees stand tall either side.

At the end of the path is a house of crumbling brick and turrets pointing into the sky. At the top of the steps, a door stands open, a door that is one of many. Step inside, and it already smells of secrets and starlight, of wind and mysteries.

Thick layers of dust cover furniture that once gleamed with polish. Cobwebs string the corners light Christmas lights.

Climb the stairs. Note the doors that line the corridor on the first floor, all locked tight. Climb higher.

And higher still.

Floorboards creak underfoot. The door to one of the turrets is open, and the staircase inside is winding, winding.

There is another door at the top, this one locked, too. The key is heavy in your pocket, but you don’t know what lies behind the thick wood, the brass handle.

It could be anything.

Here There Be Dragons

In the ancient, walled city of Oldlight, night had fallen with the snow. Both covered the stone buildings with a heavy hush. All of those who lived in Oldlight had shut themselves safely inside; hearth-fires flickered from every window, catching the blankets of white on the streets outside and setting them to sparkle.

It was beautiful—a jewel of a city. And such a shame, therefore, that no one could visit it.

And no one could leave.

The walls around the city were high, built of huge rocks nestled together so close a whisper would not fit through the cracks. The gates were just as tall, iron bars thick as branches, topped with razor spikes.

There were jokes, that the barriers were all for protection, to keep the dragons out, but only because they had to laugh at something. The dragons never bothered them, though they could occasionally be heard in the distance, growling and snarling. Sometimes, jets of flame lit the sky, two jets that met in crackling balls of flame and eventually became just one that faded away, leaving the scent of scorch behind it to float past on the wind.

Nonetheless, in a way, the jokes were right, as all jokes contain a grain of truth, even if those telling them aren’t aware of it.

By far the nicest of the buildings in Oldlight sat right on the edge near the tall gate that was never opened, itself surrounded by small walls that weren’t meant to keep anyone in or out. The gates to the castle were never closed, and people came and went. The girl who sat in the castle’s tallest turret, watching the snow, was perfectly allowed to leave, if she liked, to explore the city around her.

But she’d done that already, knew every inch of the city, and all the people, too. They called her Princess as she passed, and curtsied or bowed. She had walked every mile of the high walls and stood at the gate, and then returned, sullen, to her turret.

~*~

The snow was worse in the mountains. The boy and the old man shivered over a fire more steam than flame, built of sodden twigs and leaves. They had paper, but it was the one thing they would never burn, sooner they’d set their few bits of clothing alight. The old man kept pulling the scroll further from the sparks, then leaning forward again so as to read the tiny, cramped writing that scuttled over it like a thousand spiders.

“Are we close?” the boy asked. Personally, he thought the old man quite mad. Surely, what he claimed couldn’t be true.

But if it was…

“Closer than I’ve ever managed before,” whispered the old man, a strange fervor in his eyes. “My life’s work, this. And who’d have thought, with nothing but a scrap of a lad for help. Not that I had much’ve a choice, no one else believed any more…”

The old man had said as much when he’d stamped into the orphanage, one gnarled hand on a walking stick topped with silver, the other clutching a fistful of it. A fair price, he said, for an assistant to carry compasses and bread and blankets.

And now, now he said they were close. They must be. The last village’d been more than a week past. Here there was nothing but mountains and bitter wind and, below, a vast, flat expanse of emptiness.

“Get some rest,” said the old man. “Tomorrow we find them. Oh, yes. Tomorrow we’ll see them with our own eyes.”

~*~

The boy awoke. Sleep hadn’t come easy, the cold biting at him, waking him more suddenly than the bell at the orphanage, calling all the children to breakfast.

His stomach rumbled. He turned, and all at once, he wasn’t hungry at all.

It wasn’t right, that color, not on a person. The old man was blue as a summer lake, fingers curled and frozen and stiff around the scroll of paper.

“Wake up!” said the boy, grasping the old man’s shoulder, certain his own shoulders were shaking even harder. “Please, wake up!”

The old man did not wake. He never would again.

It was a dull, gray day, with a sky the shade of bad memories, and no villages had sprouted down on the plains overnight. Even with a spyglass, there was no sign of anyone, anywhere. Alone, the boy sat in the snow, curling his knees to his chin, beside the blackened remnants of the fire. Frozen himself, as frozen as the dead old man, but with indecision. Tears turned to ice on his cheeks.

Right. Well. There must be something down there, something he just couldn’t see, and it’d be closer than the last village, all the way back on the other side of the mountains.

And the old man had been quite mad, but if he was right…

Sniffling, the boy packed up all their things, and did his best to cover the old man with snow. All day he walked and slid down the steep mountainside, his footprints the only ones marking that anyone visited this place. Behind the clouds the sun arced, unseen, on its journey from morning to evening. Now and again, he stopped to check the scroll, still not entirely believing the words written across it.

~*~

The girl sat in her turret after supper, watching the candles wink on behind windows across the city.  She thought about going for a walk, to creep along the inside of the walls once again, but knew her parents would say it was too late. Which was silly, there wasn’t any danger, although in the distance she could see two flames, battling sun-bright in the sky.

“There’s nothing here,” whispered a voice. “He was wrong. Nothing at all.”

She jumped. “Who said that?”

No answer came.

“I demand you show yourself!” she said, checking behind the draperies. Then under the bed. And in a wardrobe full of dresses she never wore.

“Here there be dragons,” said the voice. “Here there be nothing, more like.”

There was something…odd…about that voice. It didn’t sound like any voice in Oldlight, not that she knew each and every one, but still, there was something strange about it. She wanted it to say something else, just so she could be sure.

It stopped talking, and began to make a…a sound. An awful, wet, sniveling sound. She began to follow it, down the stairs and out the front door, along the walls to the tall, barred gate, as it rang louder and louder and louder.

~*~

A noise tore through the night. The boy’s head snapped up and he rubbed his eyes to clear them, his blood turning cold as the snow underfoot. He turned all the way around, and blinked.

A girl stood in the snow. Well, she must be a girl, but there was something…odd…about her. She didn’t look precisely like any girl he had ever seen, but for the moment, the differences weren’t as important as what was behind her. A gate, flanked on either side by high stone walls.

“What–?” he asked, his voice bouncing over the whiteness.

She moved toward him. “I heard you,” she said. “We’re told never, ever to open the gate, but I heard you.”

“Why shouldn’t you open the gate?” he asked. “Who are you? What is this place?”

It was a lot of questions to ask, and he tried to listen for an answer as he fished for the map.

“I am the princess of Oldlight,” she said.

Oldlight. He squinted, and traced the spider-letters all over the scroll with his finger, searching… Searching, and not finding.

He peered at her. At her bright, round, golden eyes, and the lengthened fingernails, and the tiny scales that covered her, glimmering in light reflected off the snow.

Something roared, distant but nearing. The boy looked up, but not before he caught a flicker of fear on her face. “They never come this close,” she said. “Never!”

Here there be dragons, thought the boy as the ground began to shake, hard enough to toss the map from his hand. It flew up on the wind and exploded in a shower of sparks like stars falling to earth. The stream of fire hit the gates, another the buildings just behind. Another and another and another, until all of Oldlight was aflame. The girl screamed and the dragon whipped its head around to stare at her, its eyes enormous versions of her own, just as its scales and talons were. A searing jet of blue-white heat melted the snow in front of her and she screamed again. “We are no longer safe,” hissed the great beast. “For this, we will get our revenge.”

Dark shapes, a hundred of them, began to appear, dark against the night. The boy dashed forward. Her hand was cold, a strangely dry sort of cold.

“Run,” he said, pulling her along as, behind them, leathery wings flapped nearer and Oldlight, the no-longer-hidden land of the dragons, burned. “Run.”