The Fathomless Fire

by Thomas Wharton

  For Conor

  Not so long ago, or very far away…

  WILL LIGHTFOOT, a boy from our world, ran away from his family and stumbled into the Perilous Realm, the world of Story. There he was stalked by terrifying spectres called fetches, but was rescued by Rowen, a girl from the city of Fable. Her grandfather, Nicholas Pendrake, a toymaker and master of lore, feared that Will was being hunted by Malabron, the Night King, who wished to destroy all stories but his own. At the library of Fable, Will accidentally awoke Shade, a talking wolf who became Will’s protector and loyal friend. Determined to find a way home before Malabron’s dread servant, the Angel, tracked him down, Will set out from Fable with Rowen, Pendrake, and Shade, as well as Finn Madoc, a young knight in training, and Moth, a mysterious archer whose companion was a raven named Morrigan. With his new friends, Will travelled far and faced many dangers before he finally found the way back to his own world. In the end, however, it was revealed that the Angel had been sent to capture not Will but Rowen, who discovered she had hidden powers of her own, and a destiny greater than she had ever imagined…

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  And so Will Lightfoot went home to his own world beyond the Realm, and you might think that was the end of the story, but it was really only the beginning.

  – Tales from the Golden Goose

  HE WAS LEAVING TONIGHT. He couldn’t wait any longer

  Will stuffed the bottle of water into his pack with the apple and the energy bars. He looked around his tiny, low-ceilinged bedroom, wondering if there was anything else he should bring. It all depended, he thought, on how long he would be gone. And that was something he didn’t know.

  From the floor below came a clatter of pots and pans. Dad was making dinner, and apparently destroying the kitchen in the process. The noise was surprisingly loud, as if Dad was in the same room with him. Will wasn’t used to the way sound carried in this new house, but then he wasn’t used to a lot about it yet. His family had moved in only a few weeks ago, after travelling across the country from the town that Will had lived in all his life. He hadn’t wanted to move in the first place, and when they’d first pulled up in front of this ramshackle little two-storey house, with its peeling paint and unmown lawn, his heart had sunk. But now, despite the unfamiliar smells and the cramped quarters, made worse by all their still-unpacked boxes, he had to admit there was something he liked about the place. It was at the edge of town, on a quiet, tree-shaded road lined with other houses of the same age and state of repair. There wasn’t much traffic. It was a place where you could come and go without many people around to notice.

  Looking out of his window now he could see trees and a few scattered rooftops. The house, he thought, stood between two worlds, the city and the country. And that was it. The house was like him. Between worlds.

  “What are you doing?”

  Will jumped and turned to the door. His little sister Jess stood there, a doll tucked under one arm and a wide-eyed look of curiosity on her face.

  “Nothing,” Will said quickly.

  “Are you going somewhere?”

  She was eyeing the pack he was still holding in his hand. Since they’d moved in Jess had been coming into his room without warning, as if the house was so new to her she was still figuring out the living arrangements. He shouldn’t have left his door open.

  “For a hike, maybe,” Will said, tossing the pack onto his bed with what he hoped looked like a casual gesture. “Tomorrow, if it’s a nice day.”

  He expected her to ask if she could come along. She was always tagging along behind him whenever he went anywhere. But to his surprise she only watched him silently, with an odd expression he couldn’t intrepret.

  “Dad wants you downstairs,” she said as she turned suddenly and walked away, leaving Will with the uneasy feeling that his plans were not as secret as he had thought. But how could Jess know anything about them? She and Dad had no idea what had happened to him during the trip to their new home. They didn’t know he’d gone on a journey of his own, to a place far stranger than this unfamiliar house.

  And now he was going back. He had no choice. Not after what had happened last night.

  Last night, Will talked to a shadow…

  It was a warm summer evening and he couldn’t sleep. The house made strange noises at night, soft little creaks and odd knockings. He lay awake in his bed for a long time, listening to these sounds and trying to guess what was making them. After a while he gave up on sleep, climbed out of bed and started unpacking some of the boxes in his room labelled Will’s stuff.

  To his surprise he realized that one of the boxes wasn’t from the move. On the lid was his name, written in his mother’s neat, graceful hand. This was a box of his things that she had packed away long ago.

  He opened the box and began to unpack it, and each thing he lifted out brought memories with it. His old stuffed animals. Plastic figures of superheroes and monsters. Crayon drawings of his from years ago. And at the bottom, books.

  He lifted the books out one at a time and turned the pages, remembering. There were his favourite storybooks when he was very young. The Wolf and the Three Little Pigs. Jack and the Beanstalk. Little Red Riding Hood. The bindings were loose and the pages tattered and torn. Some pages had his childish crayon scrawls on them. He hadn’t treated books very well back then.

  His mother had read him these stories at bedtime. He had asked for them over and over. And when they both got tired of the storybooks, she told him stories that she made up herself. Most of her own stories were about a boy who could run faster than a hare and leap higher than a deer, so the people called him Light-of-foot, or Lightfoot for short…

  Will’s mother had died three years ago, not long after Will’s eleventh birthday, but he could still hear her voice, as clearly as if she was here beside him, telling him about Lightfoot’s adventures. At first Will believed the stories were true, and he was thrilled to have the same name as this boy hero of long ago, who was always outwitting monsters and menaces of every kind. He was not only fast on his feet, he was clever, too, and it was quick thinking that got him out of more than one tight spot, like the time he stood up to Captain Stormcloud and his Lightning Warriors…

  It didn’t take Will long to realize his mother was making it all up as she went along. But he still loved to hear about Lightfoot and asked her for another of his adventures almost every night. He tried to recall how the story of Lightfoot and the one-eyed Captain Stormcloud had ended, but he couldn’t, and then he remembered why. His mother had never finished it. It was a long story with lots of surprising twists and turns: she had been telling it to him over many nights, and then she had fallen ill, and went to the hospital. There were no more stories after that. He never found out how Lightfoot defeated Stormcloud and his warriors.

  He remembered how every time she finished one of her stories and was tucking him in, he would ask her for just one more. And she would tilt her head, and smile, and say…

  A gust of wind swept in through the open window, sending Will’s drawings flying and knocking over the reading lamp on the table beside his bed
. Before he could catch it, the lamp landed on the rug and the shade sprang off the bulb. Will lunged, rescuing the shade before it rolled under the bed. As he was about to put it back on the lamp, he heard a sound behind him. A very distinct and unmistakable cough. The kind of cough someone makes when they’re trying politely to get your attention.

  He whirled around.

  There was no one else in the room. The door was closed. All he saw was his own looming shadow, thrown by the bare bulb onto the far wall.

  But there was another shadow, standing next to his.

  Another person-shape, where there shouldn’t be one. Will turned his head slowly to the side, his heart pounding. There was no one beside him casting that other shadow.

  “Hello,” said a voice.

  Will raced for the door.

  “Wait!” said the voice, although it was not quite a voice. More like the hollow echo of a voice. “Why do they always run away?” it muttered.

  Much to his own surprise, Will didn’t flee out of the door and down the stairs. Instead he stopped, turned and faced the shadow. He wasn’t sure why, but it was at least partly the certainty, deep down, that this impossible thing had come from that other world he had visited, and was hoping to return to.

  His dad’s voice boomed from the living room below: “What’s going on up there?”

  “Sorry,” Will shouted. “Just dropped something.”

  The shadow of someone who wasn’t there moved away from Will’s own shadow, towards the corner of the room. An old saggy armchair stood there, on which Will piled his clothes at the end of the day. The shadow-person raised a shadow-hand and gestured to the shadow of the chair.

  “May I?” the voice asked. How a shadow could be speaking to him, Will didn’t know, but the voice sounded … right somehow. A shadow should sound like that, he thought, like the edges of a voice with everything in the middle taken away.

  Will nodded his head slowly.

  The shadow of someone settled into the shadow-chair with a long sigh.

  “That’s better,” it said, patting the arms of the chair. “It wasn’t easy getting here, believe me. I’m a bit out of breath. The truth is I’ve never had to travel this far before to carry out my task.”

  “Where are you from?” Will asked.

  There was a moment of silence.

  “You don’t really need me to answer that,” the shadow replied, with the slightest tinge of sarcasm.

  “No, I guess not. What are … who are you?”

  “That’s a better question. Unfortunately, the answer is that I’m not anybody. I’m a shadow.”

  “A shadow of who?”

  “Just a shadow. No who.”

  “But every shadow has to be a shadow of something.”

  “Perhaps, but that’s not important right now. I’ve got a task to perform, so I’d better get to it before my time is up. I’m here to bring you a message.”

  “What message?”

  The shadow seemed to lean forward in the shadow of the chair.

  “A stone will speak,” it said slowly. “The sky will come to earth. And a friend will fall.”

  “What are you talking about?” Will said. “I don’t understand. Who sent this message?”

  “No one sent it. But here it is. A stone will speak, the sky will come to earth, and a friend will fall.”

  Will couldn’t make sense of the first two things the shadow had said, but the third was disturbing. A friend will fall. He thought of Rowen, her grandfather the loremaster, and Shade, the wolf, and fear shot through him like an electric shock.

  “What do you mean, a friend will fall. Is someone going to die?”

  The shadow sat back again in its shadow-chair.

  “I know only what I’ve told you.”

  “My friends were fine when I left,” Will said. “Do you know what’s happening to them?”

  “I’ve told you all I can tell you. Now I’m just going to catch my breath, if you don’t mind, then I’ll be on my way.”

  Will’s mouth went dry. He stared at the shadow, frustrated by the fact that it had no face. There was nobody to look at. Which made everything it said doubtful. This could be the shadow of anyone.

  “Who sent you?” Will demanded. “Tell me.”

  “I’ve already told you, no one sent me. I’m here because it’s what must be.”

  “Well, who told you a friend is going to fall?”

  The shadow had no eyes, but Will had the odd feeling that if it had, it would have been rolling them in annoyance.

  “No one told me. I serve nobody. I’m just here, simple as that, with a message for you about what will be. I’ll repeat it again if you like: a stone will speak, the sky—”

  “Is that all you can say?” Will broke in, his alarm turning to anger.

  “That’s all I can say.”

  “Meaning you don’t know anything more, or you won’t tell me?”

  The shadow sat for a moment in silence, then hoisted itself out of the shadow-armchair with a grunt of effort.

  “That’s a comfortable chair. Now if you’ll excuse me—”

  “No, wait. If you know more, you have to tell me. Are these things happening now, or are they going to happen soon…?”

  “As I said, I’ve done what I came to do. I am not able to give out any further information. The laws forbid it.”

  The shadow seemed to dim slightly, and Will was suddenly afraid it would disappear.

  “What laws?” he asked quickly. “Please, I’m not from your world. I don’t understand.”

  “The laws of Story, if you must know. I exist because of those laws. Or I suppose you could say I am one of the laws.”

  “But there’s more you could tell me, isn’t there? It sounds like you know more than you’re saying.”

  The shadow sighed.

  “I am a shadow of things to come. Things that haven’t happened yet. My task is to bring people warnings or hints about what’s on the way. Hints that many choose to ignore, unfortunately, but that’s their problem, not mine. All I’m meant to do is to cast a shadow back from the will be to the now, and what I do is what I am. And that is all.”

  “But you could say more if you wanted to, couldn’t you?”

  “A shadow has no wants,” it said mechanically, as if reciting something it had repeated many times. “A shadow does not give directions, explanations or advice. A shadow is its task and nothing more.”

  “But you’ve already broken the law,” Will said eagerly, the idea forming even as he spoke. “You told me what you are and what you do. So you have given me an explanation.”

  The shadow went still, as if it was startled by what Will had said. Then it scratched its head slowly.

  “I’ve bent the rules, haven’t I?” the shadow said in a dazed murmer. “I never did that before. It must be because I’m so far from home. I’ve never had to travel out here to deliver a message. This is all highly irregular and…”

  “Well, you might as well go ahead and tell me more,” Will said with a shrug. “Now that you’ve already started. What difference will it make?”

  The shadow didn’t answer straight away. It wavered and bobbed, as if it was being cast now by a flickering candle flame.

  “I must not,” the shadow said with what sounded to Will like a note of fear in its voice. “I’m … I’m a shadow of things to come. That’s all I am. And my time is almost up. I have to…”

  “Wait, please. I need to know what friend you’re talking about. Maybe there’s some way I can warn them, before it’s too late.”

  The shadow grew even more dim and wavery.

  “I can’t tell you what my message means or who it refers to,” the shadow said, its voice already sounding far away, “because I really do not know.” The shadow had almost faded away to nothing. “All I know is that somehow you left the story, you vanished into this … wherever this is, which has never happened before to my knowledge. And now you’re needed back in the story.”
<
br />   “You mean … maybe I can change what’s going to happen?”

  “I didn’t say that. But I do know that I’m here only because the story wants you back.”

  “But how do I get back?”

  “The same way you left,” the shadow’s voice said, but from where, Will couldn’t tell, because it had already vanished.

  In a daze Will looked around his room, as if he might find the shadow still lurking somewhere. He saw the fallen lamp, picked it up and set it back on the table. Then his eyes fell on the box of old books. He remembered that just before the shadow appeared he’d been thinking about what his mother always told him when he asked for one more story at bedtime.

  Don’t worry, she would say. The story will wait for us.

  He wondered now about the story the shadow had spoken of, the one he had been a part of and wanted more than anything to return to. Would it wait for him?

  When the hour came for his departure he took counsel with his hosts, and they told him of the several roads he might take, and the dangers of each. And when he had heard them out he made ready to leave, but he would not tell them his thought, nor speak of the path he had chosen.

  – Legends of the Errantry

  IN THE KITCHEN things were close to a state of chaos. Dad had pots overflowing on the stove, lasagna bubbling away in the oven, and the various ingredients of a salad scattered widely over the counter.

  “Well, howdy, stranger,” Dad drawled at Will over his shoulder as he chopped celery. Since they’d moved out west, Dad had been pretending he was a cowboy. The joke was already stale. “I asked you to set the table half an hour ago.”

  “I was busy,” Will said, hearing the annoyance in his own voice. The shadow’s warnings and Jess’s odd behaviour were still troubling him, and he was letting it show. If Jess suspected something and told Dad, things would get a lot more difficult.

  Dad stopped chopping, and stared at Will.

  “What’s up with you?”

  “Sorry.”

  “You can set out the mashed potatoes, too. Use one of Mum’s nice bowls.”