lx (full first chapter)

It was Monday and to start the day off I had an hour of PST.
The teacher for that subject was very strict but in my personal opinion during that subject I was stricter, which for me was strange. I would usually be off task telling tall tails about saving galaxies from wars or breeding and cross breeding wyverns but today I was fearfully strict and emotionless as well. If I’d gone to work that week I probably would have been fired for having lost my gift. The bell went to signify the end of period two and the start of CSI. My school was the sort of high school where your only choices were hate it and wag classes or hate it and treat everything it throws at you as a joke. CSI for example isn’t a subject but two or three minutes of a teacher reading the notices to you. As usual that particular teacher was the last two arrive. She put her laptop down and started reading the names off. She reached my name and stoped.
“Did anyone else feel that?” she asked.
We hadn’t but we were about to. The earth started shaking and the Fire Alarm went off. The teacher lined us up and we all went out to the oval. I brought my bag with me and ran past the oval to jump over the back fence. I wanted to stop, but quite frankly I had no idea how I was running that fast in the first place. I reached the other side of the road looked back at the group of teachers who could almost catch up with me and then I dropped my bags and walked through the house in front of me as if I was a ghost.
Then I woke up.
*
I couldn’t have been dreaming. Could I? A dream that real? I looked it up in mum’s dictionary of dreams and it told me that I was expecting an upheaval in my life and that I was about to under go an important transformation. It made no sense so I disregarded it. The day turned out to be Saturday. Two days until the earthquake if it was going to happen. Dad had decided that today he would wake up before me and cook French toast for breakfast. I enjoyed French toast but I hardly ever got to have any because of money and other problems. Sam was already eating his so I just sat down and ate with him. The way he would wolf things down and I’d probably swallow a cow whole was one of the many disturbing details of our family. Another was how my mother couldn’t eat garlic or she’d have a seizure and my dad seemed to be cold resistant. I would have been straight to work on TAFE modules then however given that I’d already finished the one for that and the next week and didn’t have any from previous weeks to work on he decided, unless I wanted to continue on them, I could take some time off. Rather than play computer games, which I didn’t really enjoy doing anyway, I decided to have a second search for the monster that I was convinced lived in my back yard. Unbelievably I found it, or rather its corpse. I showed mum and the next thing I new we had a zoologist, a veterinarian, half a dozen news reporters and all manor of other people in our yard, all of them wanting to know how it’d died, whether or not there were more of them somewhere, and what I was going to call it.
One of the men in science uniforms said that somehow it was perfectly healthy until a few hours ago when it was attacked by something and was being eaten when the sun came up and the predator had to retreat to wherever it lives.
“You wouldn’t think so though when you look at it.” They said “it appears to have been here rotting for weeks.”
Another scientist then made things even more confusing by listing over a hundred natural weapons that could easily have been used in self defence. This left one conclusion whatever the predator was it would be impossible to fight against. It also gave me the corpse’s name, ragadozókong loosely translating into super predator. That was one of my things I couldn’t just name something I had to give it a name that sounded cool in every language it was said in. It was as if I was trying to create a universal language or something along the lines of one. The day had already been strange to the max first a nightmare that feels like a prediction of the future, then dad waking up early and now the corpse of something that had evolved to not be killable. I decided under the circumstances working on modules would probably be the best thing to spend the day doing considering that with my brain pre occupied by work I wouldn’t notice any more strange things happening around me. While I worked I started thinking about what the ragadozókong’s attacker might have been. My mind created the image of a giant wolf-scorpion-turtle-rhino-rabbit-gorilla creature with twice as many natural weapons as the ragadozókong and around about that point I realised that it had snowed in my room. The heater was on just about full blast and yet everything in my room was frozen over. I wasn’t however, just a bit of snow on my clothes but I was fine. In fact apart from my computer not working anymore I felt right at home. It wasn’t like snow ether it was more like the inside of a freezer, with everything iced in place and the wispy fog of coldness. If I wasn’t safe from madness in my computer where would I be safe? The door at last was busted open and mum and dad told me that we would have to leave our house and take nothing with us. They said neither where we were going nor when we might get there just that I new the place well.
*
The car turned off the road and onto a gravel path which then faded into a dirt one and finally disappeared all together. We still continued driving threw the tall grass until we reached the entry to a valley. It wasn’t until we stoped in front of the little cottage house built into the valley wall that I realised where we were. This was where I’d always tell my friends I bread wyverns. Dad opened the door and held it open for a while so I decided to walk in. The inside of the house was massive, a three story entry with stairs and balconies and when I looked up a painting on the ceiling that I couldn’t quite work out what of. I felt a tug on the leg of my pants and looked down expecting to see a dog or cat but instead found the wyvern who had stared in so many of my discontinued stories.
“Hawk!” I exclaimed happily picking him up.
He started licking my face with his fur tipped tongue and waging his tail like a dog. It was hard to tell which way his insectoid eyes were facing but when his tail stoped waging and started into a scorpion like wave I knew that he wasn’t looking at me. I turned and so did my family. All looking now at the door we found the ragadozókong’s attacker. It was hunched over and swaying like it wanted to look like a man but couldn’t. Its bones and muscles were exposed and one of his arms was hanging half chopped off. In places there were pieces of skin hanging just barely onto his rotting body. First it looked at mum then at dad then at my younger brother Sam. It was telling them it only wanted me. They walked out of the room and I stuffed Hawk into my pocket. The creature let out a raptor-like cry and then stepped away from the door as the ragadozókong stepped in, still dead and still half-eaten but moving none the less.
“This is the fate of everyone around you.” The creature said pointing to his apprentice “Unless you come with me now and fulfil you destiny.”
“I don’t believe in destiny.” I shot back before walking up the stairs to join my family.
“Suite yourself.” The creature returned. It then walked outside followed by the ragadozókong.
It took me a fair while to find where everyone else had wandered off to; when I did I found them in the stables feeding the larger wyverns. Some of the other animals in the valley like bunyips had also snuck in to steal what little food fell to the ground. Actually I hadn’t a clue what they or anything else was but Hawk looked familiar to me so I called him Hawk. I was in that stage where although I knew I was awake I told myself I was asleep because it made more sense. For example in my normal everyday life there were no wyverns or bunyips, no indoor blizzards or dreams about me doing the wrong thing and in my everyday life there most certainly wasn’t any death threat waving zombies. I decided to go to bed. Maybe this time I’d be able to stay in the school grounds.
*
I found myself in an ice cave holding a little gothic girl like I was defending her from something.
“Lacewind.” I said to her.
“Yes father?” the girl answered lifting her head to face me.
She was my daughter? I was a father in this dream? Who was the mother?
“Lacewind you must promise me that you won’t let anyone in.”
“What if its you?”
“Not even me. Lacewind as long as you’re in this room you’ll be safe, don’t leave the room, don’t open the door and don’t let anyone in not even me.”
“But father?”
“Lacewind there are some really bad people looking for you if they find you here you will die.”
“Father… I understand.”
I then walked out and then woke back up.
*
Wake was not brought to me the usual way of ending the dream but by the constant sound of screaming. I ran to the source and found mum back in the stables, hung above each stall by means of hooks was the carcasses of every last wyvern (not including Hawk who I found beside my bed when I woke). There was a note carved into one of the wooden columns as well. It read:1

I warned you about your decision.
Be thankful that I chose to start with your pets.2

“He hunts by night.” I said once mum had calmed down.
“Gee you think?” Sam answered back sarcastically.
“Sam, although he said it rudely, is right we already know how he hunts what we don’t know is how to hunt him.” Dad said sitting down at the table and starting to eat his omelette.
“What we need is some background, someone who can tell us how he hunts and maybe how to hurt him.” I said kind of thinking aloud.
“Lumi’s seen him be…” Sam began to speak but mums foot in his shin convinced him otherwise. We silently finished breakfast and went off to separate corners of the house. If I had known at that point what everyone else was doing I would have had the monsters head on a stick the next morning unfortunately I didn’t and so he went on killing. I decided I’d go looking for Sam, if I could get him by himself I’d be able to ask him who Lumi was and what was going to be said about him.3

When I finally found Sam I found him in the garden. He looked different. It was one of those really obvious differences that you don’t want to bring up so you beat around the bush until they bring it up.
“Sam?” I started.
He turned to face me in a panicked motion and then quickly (and in a way that looked quite painful) changed back to how he usually would look, after seeing something that I was really starting to hope that I was indeed only dreaming but I also had my doubts. Whatever was going on was beyond simply passing as a dream. I had over a hundred questions it was time I sought the answers.
“What is going on here?” I asked.
“Ben.” Sam began to reply.
“No I don’t want cover-ups. I want my answer.”
Sam lent over and began to whisper in my ear. “I know so much and I know people who could tell you what I don’t know but mum won’t let me tell you. She says that everything will sort itself out.”
“Sam! If everything is left to sort itself out we’ll all wind up dead!”
*
Whilst running up the stairs behind the anubite that my brother had turned back into so that he could find mum easier, I suddenly realised that given the current situation my dream the day before defiantly wasn’t going to come true although it didn’t seem like the changes happening were “much needed” ether. I stoped and looked down to see how far I’d climbed. As I’d thought there were so many floors beneath me that I couldn’t see the ground.
“As you’d expect we aren’t inside the valley wall anymore.” Sam said coming back down a few steps to tell me to move on.
“Then we’d be in that castle I saw near the ledge.” I answered as I started climbing again.
After another few minutes I stoped again and Sam stoped beside me.
“If you wish I will carry you the rest of the way.” He said holding his hand behind me so I didn’t fall backward. I nodded and he lifted me onto his shoulder and started climbing.
*
The door was big and dark and old. The doorknob had claw marks carved into it from something big trying to get inside, possibly a long, long time ago. The anubite who once was known as Sam but now went by Pharaoh opened the door and immediately the mood dropped from scary to terrifying. The blood of several different animals was dripped and splattered everywhere. Bones were constructed into tepees and set on fire and the floor was the disgusting pink of bat droppings.
“Is she a vampire?” I asked after putting two and two together.
“Yes she is, and a royal vampire too.” Pharaoh answered quietly.
A swarm of bats dropped off the rafters and circled in front of Pharaoh. Like a coward I climbed onto Pharaoh’s back and hid. Slowly the swarm took on the shape of a woman and then it began to speak.
“Pharaoh, darling, Tell me what bothers you?” The swarm seemed to say. That was defiantly the voice of a vampire. A calm and kind seductress who’s kindness puts fear in the hearts of men.
“Lady Deloraine. You’re child wishes to speak with you about the Night-man.” Pharaoh started.
Instantly her mood changed to anger.
“What have you told him about the mater?!” She demanded.
“Nothing mistress just that…”
“Just that what Pharaoh?! I gave you food and shelter and took you in as my own son; all that I asked in return was that you never spoke to my son about his past!”
“I told him not of past occurrences. All I said was that you may be able to introduce him to Lumi.”
A giant bat dropped form above the door and with a pained screech, transformed into human form.
“If you wish to meet Lumi then follow me.”