A Light in the Dark: The moon

Chapter 0.5: An introduction

Hansengrove looked at Margretta, her student, who was eating her breakfast. What she knew of her could collapse her whole world. Etta was told she had lost her mother during childbirth, and since her father was mostly away, she was raised by the school, a boarding school for riding. Hansengrove had stepped in to fill a motherly role since kindergarten. Her own child would have been Etta's age, but alas, the béarn had died before she could discover the world. Hansengrove pushes the painful thought away. Nothing could be worse than losing a child. She supposed that she and Etta filled in missing pieces for each other. In truth, nobody knew who Etta's parents were. There was another world, the government was aware of it, and it was a druid world. There, Hansengrove was about to take her parents' throne, as her eldest sister had gone missing. Until then, she worked at the school, hoping to spot young druids for the High Circle of Druids, leaders and protectors of the Druid village, or even one of the four soulriders. The village of the hidden land was hidden deep in the Rockies, and nobody could reach it without taking the train. It was made up of Druids, and their purpose was to keep the world safe. There was a dark force called Garnok, and it wanted to destroy the world. It used creatures known as empty men as minions to do its bad deeds and bring it back to full strength. The empty men were men and women with no souls, who fed on human fear. After feeding on one's fear, they sucked out their souls, and this created more empty men. The Druids constantly caught the empty men, doing their best to stop them from bringing Garnok back from the bottom of the sea, where hundreds of years ago, a girl known as Aideen had banished it. Soulriders were the very descendants of Aideen, and when one died, another child selected by fate took their place. The Soulriders were special Druids who could use magic, just like regular Druids, but they found the energy to preform the spells from the bond between them and their soulhorse, the horse they shared a soul with, instead of inner energy, resulting in unlimited energy for spells. They were meant to keep the force of Garnok dormant, through a ceremony they preformed every 50 years. In order to do it, they needed the book of ceremonies, and the four soulriders, of four different powers, sun, moon, lightning and star. Hansengrove was the soulrider of the moon, and Etta, possibly her predecessor. Etta would be the final soulrider of the new generation. Had she born in the land of her people, in the hidden Druid land of Valedale, Etta would have been presented to the four stones at the age of about four years, in a grand Druid ceremony. Hansengrove thought back to her own ceremony. She had been just little, her mother, the queen, had spent the day dressing and preparing her daughter herself, for this ceremony was a proud moment for all Druid parents. And so, aged four, her hair up in an elaborate updoo with a mirade of braids and wildflowers picked fresh from the fields, and dressed all in her best flouncy blue dress, Hansengrove was presented her first runestick, by none other than Frip, a talking squirrel but he hated to be called that. He had insisted it should be for him to present the runestick to Hansengrove, he had had his suspicions about her powers from the day she was born. How, Hansengrove would never understand, perhaps some form of moon power, the ability to see in the past, present, and future almost at will. Usually it was the child's mentor who would present them the runestick. Having been born outside of the hidden world, Etta did not get that special ceremony, as should have been her birthright, but if Hansengrove's suspicions were correct about Etta, it was crucial to keep Etta safe from dark forces. Perhaps in another time, before the book of ceremonies had gone missing, before the threat of the newly named dark riders, Druids gone twisted mad and darkened of soul, opposites of the soulriders and their powers, she could have been home, but this could not be. It was agreed within the high Druid circle that Etta would go back to the hidden land on her 16th birthday. Until then, the world would have to wait.