“The two of you need to come with me,” he said. Joe looked up suddenly at the sound of his voice, but he didn’t say anything.
The man pointed towards the sun, which now hovered just over the valley skyline in the west. Amber looked down towards the village nestled at the foot of the valley. It lay covered in deep shadow.
“It gets dark quickly,” the man continued, “and you don’t want to be out here when that happens.”
“There isn’t anywhere safe around here,” Joe said tiredly.
“Well, nowhere is completely safe,” the man admitted. “But there’s a place in the woods further to the east from here...”
A place in the woods? Amber found fear rising within her once again. And someone else who tells us we don’t want to be out here when it gets dark? Maybe outside in the dark is the safest place we can be!
“I don’t think so,” she began, getting to her feet, although she didn’t think she’d be able to run more than a few more yards without collapsing.
But then something completely unexpected happened.
“I know who you are.” Joe stood up and stared at him. “I think it’s one of Mark’s memories. You’re Stephen. He called you the Exile, or something like that.”
Stephen smiled at that. “The Exile,” he repeated. “Yes- that’s what some people call me.” His smile faded. “So, Mark was the name it gave itself. The last of the Guardians. And you’re the nearest thing to a Guardian that the Order have now, Joe.”
Amber saw Joe almost jump at that. “You know my name,” he said. “How can you possibly know my name?”
I’m beginning to think everyone here knows your name, Amber thought.
“I knew your name- and yours as well, Amber- when you found your way here. I had a feeling that you would find your way into this world sooner or later. I know when certain things happen. Especially the opening of doorways between the worlds. I can assure you that that is something that doesn’t happen very often. So I went looking for you.”
“Can you take us back home?” Amber exclaimed. “Please?”
Stephen walked over and squatted next to them. “I can try and keep you safe here,” he said, “but only you can find your way back. You see, nobody ever ends up here unless there’s a good reason.”
“But we didn’t mean to end up here! You don’t understand, we have to find my dad and...” Amber paused. She didn’t know whether or not to mention who her dad was, but Stephen said, “You can’t, Amber. Not here, anyway. And first you need to find out why you’re here.”
“I think it happened when we were at the farmhouse,” Joe said. “But I don’t know how.”
“We can talk about that,” Stephen said.
Amber noticed that it had got darker still in the last few minutes. The sun had now fallen below the valley skyline, and they could already see a couple of stars in the sky. Amber wondered suddenly if the stars and planets were the same here. She could identify some of the brighter planets like Venus and Mars easily enough, and she remembered that Venus had definitely been in the sky around sunset a few days ago. You couldn’t miss Venus; it was by far the brightest of all the planets. But she couldn’t see it in this sky, nor could she see Mars or Jupiter, which were also often quite easy to spot.
Stephen looked all around, and nodded to himself as if he had just reached a decision about something. “Come with me to my house in the forest,” he said, “and then maybe we can talk about all this.” When they just looked at each other he smiled uncomfortably. “I know- it sounds like something from a creepy fairy-tale, doesn’t it? And you’ve no reason to trust me, I realise that. I can’t compel you to do anything. But if you want a chance of finding your way back, you need somewhere to hide first. The Lost will be looking for you. You need to know a little about this place and how it works.”
Amber stared at him. For a moment their eyes met, and in that instant she somehow knew all sorts of things about him. She knew that he wasn’t one of the Lost, although he himself was lost. She saw a deep sadness in his expression. He had made mistakes, he had suffered, and he was alone. All of these things she learned just from that quick glance, and the realisation almost took her breath away. How can I know such things about people? she asked herself. It was the same with that old woman, that creature in the village.
“We’ll come with you,” she said. Stephen just nodded, and they set off with him over the grassland towards a distant line of trees.
“We don’t even know what this world is called,” Amber pointed out as they walked.
“It has many names,” Stephen told them, “but these days, those few people who know about it at all call it the Emptiness.”
“Because there are hardly any people here?” Joe asked.
“That very much depends on what you think of as people.” He glanced at them both. “I was looking down on the village when I saw you running from there. I also saw what you were running from.”
Amber felt a chill inside her. He didn’t say who you were running from, she thought. He said what.
She reckoned that whatever Stephen had seen, it hadn’t been an old woman with glasses and a blue cardigan. He had seen the monster underneath. Amber wondered for a moment what it looked like, and then quickly decided that she’d rather not know.
“We shouldn’t have ever gone into the house,” Joe said, looking reproachfully at Amber.
Stephen shrugged. “You weren’t to know. I couldn’t get there in time to warn you.”
“But why didn’t she come after us? She could have done, couldn’t she?”
“Not necessarily,” Stephen told him. “Remember who you are. Both of you.”
“I’m no one special,” Amber muttered tiredly.
“Oh, you are. Who do you think guards the Guardians? Who keeps those people from harm?”
“I couldn’t keep Joe or myself from harm.”
“You’re learning, Amber. In fact you’re learning every moment, with every breath, without realising. Your father taught you about the Order and what it’s for, didn’t he?”
“Sort of,” she admitted, “although I didn’t understand all of it, and there wasn’t much time for him to explain it.”
Stephen gave a little laugh. “I don’t know if I should tell you this, but I was once a member of the Order. That’s how I know about the two of you. They cast me out.” When Amber stopped and looked warily at him, he said with a smile, “They have very tight rules and standards. I suspect your father knows more about that than most- as he and your mother went against those rules and had you.”
“They didn’t mean to,” Amber pointed out.
“A poor excuse, the Order would say, and I’m sure they did. I should point out that I never knew your father that well. I think I must have spoken to him perhaps three or four times in as many years. Anyway, I found that I couldn’t possibly live up to their standards. Or rather, they found out.”
“So they exiled me,” Stephen continued as they made their way into the woodland. Amber had thought it would get much darker here, but lamps hung from the branches of some of the trees. A few of them looked as if they might be battery-powered, but many looked like old-fashioned oil lamps. Each one they passed under gave out a slightly different colour of light and lit up the path beneath in different ways.
“You mean they sent you here?” Joe asked.
“Indeed they did. Forever. And forever is a long time, as the old saying goes.”
“So you’re trapped here until you die?”
“That’s another thing about the Emptiness, Joe. No one dies here- not naturally, anyway. Some of the Lost who exist here have already died in the old world, for a start.”
“That’s impossible,” Amber said.
He glanced back at her, looking faintly amused. “Is it? I suppose so. Then again I expect you’ve seen many impossible things with your own eyes in the last few days. Do you not believe them?”
Amber shrugged, trying not to think about what she ou
ght to believe and not believe.
“But whatever happened to them on the other side, they don’t age here,” Stephen continued. “Time doesn’t work in the same way.”
Amber tried to work out what that might be like, but just couldn’t.
“What exactly did you do?” she asked. “To be sent here, I mean?”
“Oh, I had my own ways of dealing with the Lost. The men and women who rule the Order decided that they didn’t like them. I suppose you could say they punished me. The funny thing is, the Lost are even more powerful here in the Emptiness. Some of them even appear to enjoy living in this place- even though they’re shut out from the world of people. The world where it’s easiest to create chaos.”
“Who would want to?”
“Create chaos?”
“No, I mean who would want to live here?”
“The Emptiness is mainly beyond the reach of the Order, so the creatures of the Lost have free rein to do what they want. Then again, the pair of you are essentially part of the Order, which makes things interesting.”
Amber thought about that for a moment. “If you’re no longer in the Order, and they sent you here, you’re a little like one of the Lost yourself.”
Stephen looked troubled. “I would hope not. I’ve spent most of my life protecting people from them, or trying to. The truth is they’re not easy to define. They’re responsible for much of the evil in your world and almost all of it in this one, but they move in the shadows. They’re not always obvious at first.”
“I know,” Amber said, thinking straight away of Patrick, a man of the Order who she felt certain had become one of the Lost. How does that happen? she wondered. Was he tempted by them somehow? Or did he do something terrible? Did that help turn him into one of the Lost? Is he like that woman in the village, a monster hiding in the shape of a human?
“And I do have many secrets,” Stephen confessed. “Some of them I’ll never speak of. They’re mine, and they mean nothing to anyone else. You could say I also move in the shadows- the shadows of this forest which is my home. But I’m not one of the Lost, Amber. And I know that you already know that. I still have a heart that beats. I can still laugh and cry- not that I laugh very much here as you can imagine- and every now and then I even feel a faint hope in my heart.”
“What do you hope for?” Joe asked.
“Oh, everything some days and nothing in particular on other days. It’s more of a general feeling, a hope that things won’t always be like this I suppose. It doesn’t last. I look around, or wake up, and I remember where I am. That sinking feeling I get when I wake up in the morning... I never get used to that.”
“You want to go back, don’t you?”
“Yes, but I know it can never happen. Then again there are some days when the magic of this place is especially bright and strong, and that’s something I would never see on the other side.”
“Magic? You mean real magic?” Amber asked.
“Well, I call it magic, because I have no way of explaining it and I suspect you wouldn’t either, so you’d probably call it magic too. The two of you arrived here because you woke up some great power that can’t be properly explained by the likes of us.”
“What sort of things do you see?”
“Rather than try to describe them,” he said, “I will show them to you. I have a feeling that tomorrow will be one of those days. It may even have something to do with your arrival here.”
After a short while the path they were following widened out into a large grassy area. Just a little further on there stood a cottage of craggy grey stone and diamond lattice windows made of stained glass. It looked pretty in a darkly mysterious way, Amber thought as they approached. The building was clearly very old- the tiles looked uneven and were covered with moss in places. A few tendrils of ivy crawled around near the windows.
“Well,” Stephen said as he took a large key from his pocket and turned it in the iron-studded wooden door, “this has turned out to be a strange day in many ways. I’ve never had guests here before. And I’m sure it’s even stranger for you..”
“Does anyone else live in the forest?” Amber asked as they went inside. The hallway opened into a comfortable-looking living room where a fire burned low in the hearth. It looked well-furnished, almost like a country cottage where she and her dad had stayed one time.
“There are other creatures that live here. Some of them I’d struggle to describe properly to you. But humans? I don’t think so. I think I’d know if anyone else lived here. And the Lost don’t like this place- certainly I don’t see them often here- so it’s as safe as any in the Emptiness. That doesn’t mean it’s entirely safe of course- where is? But it’s the best option you have for tonight.”
A little later he poured everyone some water which he drew from a well in the back garden. “It’s safe,” he said when they hesitated. And he drank half a glass of water to show them.
Stephen made them a meal. It was like a sort of casserole and both Amber and Joe thought it was delicious. Afterwards, the warmth of the cottage and having a full stomach made Amber even more tired. She couldn’t stop yawning, at which point Stephen said, “Come on-I’ll show you the room where you can sleep.”
The bedroom was furnished only with a large bed, and the sparse white walls and black beams across the ceiling somehow made it seem larger than it really was. “Sleep well,” Stephen said, and left them. Amber sat on the side of the bed and listened to him going downstairs. Her eyelids began to droop again and she turned to Joe. “What are we going to do...” Tomorrow, she was about to say, but Joe was lying on the bed and had already fallen asleep. How did he manage to do that so quickly? she wondered.
Amber tried to do the same, but something odd happened. Instead of just drifting quickly off to sleep, she actually began to feel more and more restless, and after a short while she didn’t feel tired at all, even if she lay down and closed her eyes. Every now and then she glanced across at Joe, feeling a twinge of jealousy as she listened to him snoring faintly. Why can’t I get to sleep? she thought to herself, puzzled.
A long while later, she was staring at the faint shadowy outlines of the trees through the window and listening to the leaves rustling in the breeze when she felt a sudden feeling of dread that made her quickly get up. She felt more alert than ever, but more scared than ever as well.
There’s something near the cottage, she thought. One of the Lost, maybe. I don’t know. But it’s something bad.
Amber padded quietly across to the window and looked down at the clearing next to the cottage. Almost immediately she saw something move from out of the undergrowth, and her heart pounded urgently as someone- or something- came into view in the silvery moonlight. It looked like a young woman, thin and dressed in ragged clothing, but Amber was already certain that it was not. Something about the way it walked, the way the rags clung to the body, told her that this was not a human being.
She was about to scream Stephen’s name, to warn him that this creature was approaching the cottage, but at that moment she heard the cottage door open and a moment later Stephen stepped out and into view, illuminated by the soft light from inside. Arms folded, he stopped no more than ten yards from the creature and stood looking directly at it. “Destroy it,” she whispered, but he didn’t. At the same time she heard him speak to the bony woman-creature.
“They don’t belong to you,” he said.
“Everything belongs to us in the end,” it said, and Amber took a step away from the window in sudden revulsion at the thick, rasping sound of its voice. “One day even you will belong to us, Stephen.”
“Well, that day is some way off. And I will not give them to you.”
“Why not? What are they to you? Hand them over to us, Stephen. Give them over to our keeping and we will leave you in peace to live out the rest of your lonely days. You’re not a member of the Order. You have no need to protect those children.”
“I’m no friend of the Order, but I’m sti
ll your enemy,” Stephen said. “I already told you, I will not give them over to you. Turn and leave, and tell your masters what I’ve told you. I make no deals with the Lost.”
Amber saw Stephen move his hands close together, and a pulsing glow appeared from somewhere between them. What is it? she wondered, staring at the eerie light. Is that magic of some kind?
The creature snarled suddenly at him, as if it had already lost patience with talking, or the strange light in Stephen’s hands made it uneasy. Amber held her breath, wondering if it would try to attack him, but instead it just spat on the ground and turned and walked off without a backward look. Within a few moments it had disappeared back into the forest. Stephen watched it leave and then stood there for a while longer. Amber continued to watch him from the window, thinking that he looked suddenly so much older and more tired than before.
He must be so lonely, she thought as Stephen knelt down, his head bowed as if he barely had any energy left. He has no one else here, and now one of the Lost has even found its way through the forest and right to his front door, probably only because of me and Joe. What if more of them come? He can’t possibly defend us against all of them!
She felt afraid, but more than that, she felt guilty as well. Even though Stephen wasn’t a member of the Order and had been banished here by them- Amber thought that was a terrible punishment- he had decided to help her and Joe. But what good would it do him?
The two of us should leave rather than stay here and make things even worse for him, she thought. But where would we go? We don’t know this world. More than likely we’d just walk straight into some trap prepared for us by the Lost. Just like we walked into that house in the village because we were desperate and didn’t know what we were doing.
Amber didn’t know what to do. All three of them were in danger, and Stephen didn’t really need to be- at least, no more than he had been before.
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