To Ally with the Guardians

Chapter 4: Whisper

Matt nodded without hesitation, partly out of truth and partly out of the desire to have a Guardian on his side. "Yeah, definitely."

"It's very possible," Duran corrected.

"I personally think the cure would be worth using, to save her and Haven and the other children. After all, we can just turn each other back real quick if one of us turns into a Fearling." Yes, that would work. They knew to watch for that now, so this time, they would be prepared.

"Where do we start?" Matt asked, grinning.

"Follow me." Bunny started down the wooden pathway through the hazardous terrain to North's workshop, and Matt and Duran put on their coats over their dry winter clothes and followed. "Like North said earlier, we've seen Fearlings and Nightmares, but not Pitch. We don't know what's going on or what he's planning. We think he's maybe trying to get revenge on Jamie for helping us defeat him last time, and his sister and father happened to be with him when a huge army of Nightmares attacked. How long have you been targeted by the Fearlings again?"

Matt frowned. "They chased me for six years before they started attacking. They've been doing that for about a year. Haven began getting chased when she was eight, and Angelia when she was nine. I was ten. The Fearlings started also going after Duran and Garvit this year. That last guy left the L.E.R. right before you came because he was scared."

Bunny furrowed his eyebrows. "L.E.R.?"

"Lunar Eclipse Resistance. We...uh..." Matt struggled to come up with a way to say it that wouldn't paint the Guardians in a negative light.

"That's just what we call our group- Haven, Angelia, and us," Duran said.

"I thought we needed our own name since we had to be our own Guardians," Matt added.

"North should've searched more for those letters," Bunny said with a nod. "We shouldn't've left you on your own. Sorry about that." Matt opened his mouth before being cut off. "But at least now we have a Fearling cure. That cave seems pretty suspicious to me, though. Whoever put all that stuff in there kept Pravitas Crystals from being destroyed, and I can't think of a single reason anyone in the right mind would want to do that. If they knew they could use them to create a Fearling cure, they would've just done it."

"At least the orbs work, though," Matt said, hasty to defend using the cave's contents. After all, he had read one of its books and used a special metal from it to create weapons before the Avery sisters had discovered the cure. Also, Haven finding a scythe in it had saved Angelia's life.

"They work."

Matt hesitated before speaking again. "If we're gonna come up with a plan, then I should probably tell you that the Fearlings know about the curse it causes." He remembered how the shadows had started targeting Haven after she realized her skin had started to turn gray and strange. Heck, after the large number of Fearlings he and the others had been curing to defend themselves as the Guardians had shown up, it was probably beginning to happen to them, too, unless the curse only showed up in "doomed souls."

"So they might try to use it against us."

Matt nodded, and Duran frowned.

"And the hard part will be finding Haven and Vivian," Bunny continued. "The other Fearlings could try to keep them away from us. We might have to storm Pitch's lair to get to them- safely, of course."

*/*/*/*

Mallory held his breath as he scoured the room, hearing Yetis' footsteps constantly passing in front of the other side of the door. This had to be Santa's personal workshop area, with all the ice prototypes of toys and random objects everywhere in the frosty room, or at least a special place. Maybe Mallory could find a snowglobe-portal in here.