n-moon-1

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New-Moon Stones

 Story by Allen Morgan

 art by Doreen Foster

Full length novel: ages 9 - 12

seventeen chapters - 160 pages

 

Chapter Thirteen (part c)

 

There was a large open clearing on the mound just beyond. A group of wonderfully strange and especially odd creatures were gathered there. It was almost as if the everyday world had opened up somehow and allowed all the countless spirits of the land and the sky to step out from inside. There were elves and sprites and dryads and wights, some silvery centaurs and a unicorn with bright golden eyes and a single white horn. There were many small sparkling lights in the air as well, fairies perhaps, but it was hard to tell, they were so bright and wild it was impossible to look at them for more than a moment and see what they really were.

The children stepped out into the clearing and joined the company of mythical creatures that were standing there. No-one spoke or made a sound. Nobody moved. The children stayed completely still as well, but their eyes darted this way and that all around the clearing. The grass was quite short and the ground was easy to see. But there were no stones of any kind anywhere in sight.

"Where are the new-moon stones?" whispered Jamie.

"I don't know," Jennifer whispered back.

"Well, what're they waiting for?" hissed Rachael. "There better be some new-moon stones around here somewhere. If we came all this way for nothing. . . . "

Suddenly Jennifer remembered what the muskrat had said.

"The crows!" she cried, and she pointed to the sky.

Rachael and Jamie looked up too, just in time to see the crows arrive by the sun. There were many more birds than there had been before and more of them came all the time. As the flock flew in it grew and grew, getting larger and more massive right before their eyes. Crows seemed to appear out of thin air, out of nowhere, flying out from the shadows of other crows to join the flock while hundreds more flew out from their shadows too. Soon their sharp black wings were slicing into the deep orange circle of the sun-first one, then four, then dozens more, many dozens, hundreds and hundreds, thousands, many thousands until finally the flock began to block off the sun.

Slowly the light began to fade. The orange of the sunset sky deepened and turned towards red, the red turned maroon, then maroon became grey. Day slipped away and disappeared, and the night that was hidden behind it slipped out. Twilight began and the stars returned.

Then all at once the moon appeared, it was suddenly right there in the sky just under the place where the sun had been shining. It had always been there quite secretly, but now that the day was hidden away, the new moon shone free for all to see. The world looked completely different in this strange new light. It felt warm and exciting, inviting activity.

And suddenly there were new-moon stones too! They neither dropped from the air nor popped up from the earth. They were there on the ground everywhere, appearing from nowhere and glowing with a light that shone out from within. Jamie and Rachael and all the wonderful creatures began racing around the new moon clearing, eyes to the ground as they looked for their own new-moon stone. But Jennifer could only think of the light, it was so strong and pure and so perfectly true that she felt it was shining right through her.

"I wish I could be where that light comes from," she thought and she looked back up to the sky again.

continue on to part four of Chapter 13

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