I have joined the community of writers and readers on Wattpad, serialising a YA fantasy novel that retells some old Arthurian myths and tales through the time-travels of a thirteen-year-old boy and his eccentric twin-lifed grandmother.
An excerpt from The Dark Rider:
Warren slept until the early stretches of morning. He opened his eyes, suddenly awake with a sense of foreboding. Something huge and menacing and invisible lay nearby, watching him, waiting for something. He dare not move, in case he set off an unstoppable chain reaction of events from doing so, but he had to. His nose itched.
The time on his glow-in-the-dark alarm clock read two-thirty. That magical hour in the depths of the darkness where everyone is asleep, in silence, and the hedgerow creatures come out to hunt or be hunted.
A soft noise came from outside the window.
Warren sat up in bed, a silent shadow, tensed, listening. The sound came again, a sort of whisper. It seemed to be coming from the sky. Was it snowing after all?
The carpet felt alien. He trod quietly to the curtains and pulled one back. It was dark, too dark to see anything on or above the horizon. Mist blurred the street-lamps into pale, fuzzy dots which seemed to shiver on the spot.
Then one of the lights moved. And another. And another. They were not street-lamps at all.
Warren’s heart palpitated. He stood rigid, watching. The lights were small, round, white and perfect, like cat’s eyes reflecting torchlight in the blackness. They moved in pairs, vertically, one above and a fainter one below, like a reflection of a reflection. All of them were moving now, some drifting, others increasing in speed and beginning to roll around one another.
The curtain fell back in front of Warren’s face, and he jolted, suppressing the urge to yelp. In his surprise he let his hands go slack, forgetting he was holding anything. The night was still silent, but it was a peaceful silence and he did not feel afraid any more. His fear had been burned away by curiosity.
He padded onto the landing. Everyone was so deeply unconscious, he could not even hear his father snoring. He couldn’t hear anybody breathing. It was eerie.
In the front hall, holding his battery-powered torch between his knees while he struggled into a jacket, he stopped.
What if the lights had seen him?
He had come this far. It would be embarrassing to give up and go back to bed, though nobody else would know of it. Warren opened the front door and stepped into the lane.
The lights hovered in the sky, floating around and around each other, spinning so much, he grew dizzy. The sky was paling in the east already. How could it be dawn at half past two? A shape moved across the paler bit of sky and Warren held his breath. It looked like a tail, for a moment. A long, ridged tail.
The sky burst into light and he saw them: giant lizards. The lights were their eyes. They were ghostly, insubstantial, but bigger than the mind could accept. They rolled and writhed and snapped, fighting in a cloud of scales and wings – wings?
“Dragons?” Warren’s voice was faint and puny in his ears.
The stars were moving near and through the dragons’ misty bodies, arcing across the sky from left to right. Shooting stars.
The dragons each took it in turns to bite into something in the air, a bloated carcase of clouds, maybe, and when they bit, they rolled death rolls such as crocodiles do, tearing off mouthfuls of it as they tumbled.
Warren did not notice the woman standing next to him.
“What is dangerous can be beautiful,” she said.
He turned, startled.
She was tall, taller than Iain Dyfed, who was easily six foot three. Her hair was white, cut short but sticking in all directions like an electric shock. She wore a long, pale tunic or dress – it was hard to tell which, it had so many folds, and they kept moving despite the lack of a breeze – but it was her eyes that Warren found most unusual.
“Hello?” he said. She had nothing on her feet. Even in June, it wasn’t warm enough to walk barefoot and be comfortable. Not at night.
“Good morning, Warren Dyfed.”
“You know me? Are you a friend of my Da?”
“No.”
“A friend of Gran’s, then?”
“No.”
“Oh right. I get it. I’m dreaming.”
The sky shone pearl-grey now, the stars not visible. The grass underfoot was black. He looked behind him and the house had vanished. The lane was gone. There was only the field.
“Am I going to wake up now?”
“You already have, dear.”
“Who exactly are you?”
“You may not know my name at this time. I am come to warn you of the peril that lies ahead, and to give you this.”
The woman took his hand and he flinched, expecting her touch to be ice. It wasn’t. It was warm, like sunlight on a back porch. She opened his fingers and pressed something into his palm, closing his fingers around it tight.
“What is it?”
“It is your star. Keep it safe. Do not look upon it yet. Later.”
If you like the sound of that, you can read the tale as I update it twice a week here:
It’s free to read, there’s three parts so far, new instalments every Wednesday and Saturday. And if you’re on Wattpad, feel free to give me a follow and I will return the favour…
(NB, don’t worry, Codex Corvidae is still in the pipeline. I am not neglecting my writerly duties.)
And “A Dark Heritage: The Nighthunter” is still available on Amazon, lest we forget.
Nightwalks 