Shadow Weaver (Back on Wattpad 2020!)

Chapter 1

*** UPDATE  FEBRUARY 2020 

SHADOW WEAVER IS COMING BACK TO WATTPAD. For some time, due to publishing restrictions, it could no longer be read in it's entirety on this site. But now, as from March onwards, I will be posting a new chapter every week until the entire book is available here. Once the whole book is posted it will only be available for a short time, so if you're interested don't forget to add it to your bookshelf so you can see when we're getting close to the end and not miss it.  Thanks for reading, Claire xox

CHAPTER ONE 

I splay across a rock, semi-frozen. The finger-deep layer of snow against my back softens the lumpy stone. My eyelids soak up the sun's amber rays. After three months of winter's endless darkness, I am making the most of this serene breath of sunlight.

'Mirra, get down here!' my younger brother Kel shouts. He'll be six during the third moon, only a few weeks from now.

'I'm coming,' I say. But I don't move. Steal a few more seconds, longing for the all-night sun when it will be warm enough to lose our heavy parkas and furs and jump in the cool flowing river.

A thin layer of ice cracks as my brother leaps to my side of the stream. His boots crunch and scrape against the snow. I smile at his impatience, haul to my feet and slide down the rock, tiny white avalanches falling with me. Near the bottom, I hook onto a pine branch to stop my descent. Flakes clasp the needles. Ice necklaces hang in little trails between the branches, and a grey-backed spider's web dangles by my gloved fingers. The spider rocks in its diamond woven centre. Dead. But not for long. Like the fish and the beetles and the worms, it freezes when winter sweeps in and reanimates in the spring.

'So what have you got?' I ask Kel.

My brother lifts his sharpened stick. He grins at the stiff pug-faced fish skewered on the end. He has excavated it from the bottom ice where the fish struggle for refuge as the top waters solidify during the onset of winter. No master spearing techniques.

'A Grump!' he says. 'Now you have to say it: Long live Kelson the great hunter!' Blonde tangled hair flops over his brow. His fur trousers and parka hang off him. He fattened up before the long-sleep but now he's skinny again. The golden flecks in his blue irises glitter and swirl, not yet settled.

'Excellent find, Kel. Well done.'

'No you have to say, "Long live Kelson the great hunter!"'

'Long live Kelson, the great hunter!' I ruffle his hair. He ducks and I stride across the stream to fetch my pack, bow and fire bundle. We haven't long before the sun begins its rapid descent. Better to leave now and trace our snowy tracks back to camp before dusk comes down over Blackfoot forest.

Kel's lined up the fish I scooped from the riverbed ice earlier - Rainbow Sparkles, nose to nose; Suntrouts nose to nose; Mudwaters nose to nose. Two by two. Except the last one. A Ghost fish, with alabaster white skin so transparent, you can see the veins.

'Did you do that?' I ask. A rhetorical question because there's no one out here for at least a four day walk in any direction. Because other than Ma, Pa and Kel, I haven't seen another living person since I was ten and Kel a baby.

My brother nods, dropping the spear and picking up his wooden beetle farm. He inspects a frozen bug, turning the shell so it glistens. I gaze at the neat lines of his fish display, organised like a ladder. I'm wondering what he was thinking when there comes a whisper on the horizon of my mind's eye. A flare of colour, so faint, I'm uncertain whether I'm imagining it.