Lightscript Legends Episode 8
“Betrayed by Blood”
Missing footprints, broken bonds, and a frozen forest…
Sparkling streamers of galactic green and gold fell away, unveiling an elegant house brightly arrayed with Christmas lights and colorful decorations. Elina found herself standing among the ribbon-draped trees and lit-up reindeer scattered throughout a snowy backyard. The locket was still in her hand, keys dangling from it shimmering in the glow of the dazzling holiday display.
Unseen, Skyvior hovered at her side on slowly beating wings that stirred the dissipating Lightscript like a flurry of golden snowflakes.
Dravial, in the middle of recovering his human mask, stumbled in the snow to her left.
Elina was too distracted by Dravial’s startling half-dragon-half-man form to immediately notice the young couple in the alleyway. And once she saw them, hiding beneath the snow-laden boughs of a towering evergreen, it was their companions that actually caught her attention. The hazy forms, flickering in and out of sight like candle flames and wisps of smoke, were obviously shifters.
She sucked in a sharp breath and took a step backwards. “You guys are everywhere!”
“That is what our kind say about humans,” Dravial muttered, shaking his talons as they regained the shape of fingers once again.
Elina inched a few more steps back, clutching the locket tightly in her fist. She had hoped snatching it would somehow wake her from this strange world between worlds, but now its light was gone…and the Shadowshifter was not. Worse yet, more of his kind were appearing!
Hushed voices turned her attention toward the couple under the tree. Both of them looked straight through her, as if she were a ghost. But the eyes of the shifters locked onto her with clear curiosity.
Elina stepped sideways and then back again a couple of times to test her apparent invisibility. The shifters watched her awkward movements with amusement while the humans remained oblivious.
She looked down at her stocking feet, scanning the snowy ground where she had been stepping. “This is creepy.” She stretched out her toes, poking at the snow as if it might bite. “I’m not leaving any footprints.”
Skyvior looked at Dravial and blinked. “Out of everything she has been seeing…I would not have expected that to be the most astonishing.”
Dravial shook his head. “Humans are strange creatures.”
Unaware of Skyvior’s part in the conversation, Elina looked up and frowned. “If I’m strange,” she gestured from Dravial to the shifters with the couple under the tree, “what does that make you…you…things?”
Dravial snorted. “You come face-to-face with a vastly superior being and the most descriptive word you can conjure from your ‘writer’ vocabulary is thing?”
“Well, excuse me for being at a loss for words! It seems like that would be a common side-effect of being turned into a ghost and drug into an alien world by a…a…”
“If you call me a spooky thing, I shall probably kill you,” Dravial interrupted. “And you are not a ghost, nor are you in an alien world. You are simply a Dreamscape visitor to this page.”
Elina blinked. “Page? You mean…the pages of Time? Like in the Firstborn…”
Dravial cut her off with a sharp hiss that made her jump, blood running cold. His pupils dilated and his human mask wavered slightly, letting a glimpse of his dragon form seep back through for an instant.
He regained composure so swiftly that Elina wasn’t sure what she had just seen. Not that she was sure of anything while adrift in this uncertain space between seen and unseen worlds.
Satisfied that she had stopped speaking before the full title of The Firstborn Legend burned his ears, Dravial folded his hands in front of him as if nothing had happened. Calmly and causally, he watched the couple under the tree.
The young man had started pacing, antagonized by the anxious whisperings of his own Shadowshifter companion. “What is taking her so long?” he whispered hoarsely. “I’m freezing!”
His girlfriend glared at him and held a gloved finger to her lips, gesturing with her eyes toward a frosted basement window.
Elina followed the young woman’s gaze just in time to see a slender figure climb out of the window, close it softly, then rush across the yard to join the others under the tree. She caught glimpses of flushed freckled cheeks, coffee-brown eyes, and a few auburn curls escaping from under the little thief’s black beanie when she dropped a handful of jewelry into the older girl’s outstretched hands.
“Nice job, Talvi!” the older girl praised, shoving the loot into her coat pockets. “I knew we could count on you.”
The young man gave Talvi an approving smile and a firm pat on the back. “Not bad, Kid. I didn’t think you could pull it off, but you proved me wrong after all.”
Talvi blushed with pleasure, and the jet-black Shadowshifter stoically perched on her shoulder smiled wickedly. “Well done,” he whispered. “They have finally accepted you.” He shot the white Lightshifter on her opposite shoulder an icy sideways glance as he added, “You are practically one of them now.”
Elina squinted, trying to get a better look at the iridescent white light hovering over Talvi’s shoulder. With the exception of Dravial, the shifters appeared hazy and undefined to her, like wraiths flittering in and out of sight. But why was every character except for her flanked by both a shadow and a light?
“I’m right here,” Skyvior said softly, sensing her unspoken question.
Elina’s attention returned to the trio of thieves as they hurried off toward another house a few blocks away. The youngest girl paused while the couple ran ahead, drawing a small camera from her coat and snapping a photo of the picturesque backyard Christmas display before darting down the alley after them.
Curious, Elina followed in their footprints…still bewildered by the lack of her own.
Elina, Dravial and Skyvior caught up with the thieves where they stopped at the last house on the street. They were huddled behind a tool shed, whispering.
“Okay,” the young woman was saying. “I’ve been watching this house all week. These people are on vacation and the timer on their displays will turn off in just a few minutes. That’s when you dart for the door.”
Talvi, winded from running through the snow, stared up at the stately home while her panting breaths formed a trembling cloud on the cold air. “Alright…but…should we really do two in the same neighborhood on the same night?”
The lit-up displays shut off at that very moment, blanketing the yard and house in darkness.
“This is too perfect to pass up,” the young man said eagerly. “You will be basically invisible!”
“Which is a strange feeling,” Elina murmured, poking at the snow with her stocking toes once again.
Skyvior sighed. “You have no idea.”
The older girl gave Talvi an encouraging nudge in the shoulder. “Go get ‘em, Little Sis!”
Resolve strengthened at her big sister’s bidding, Talvi tiptoed up to the back door and carefully picked the lock. After a few anxious moments, the door opened, and she slipped inside the dark house.
Seconds later, a siren split the snowy hush of the night…and both of her allies bolted without hesitation.
Elina’s chest tightened, and she subconsciously clutched the locket against it. “Wait! They can’t just leave her!”
“Of course they can,” Dravial scoffed. “They are humans. It is what they do.”
“With the encouragement of your kind,” Skyvior muttered under his breath.
Dravial lowered his voice below Elina’s detection and smiled slyly. “Ah, but the choice was their own. Can you blame us entirely for being chosen over you?”
Skyvior’s eyes dimmed, memories flickering through them in glassy reflections of backs turning…hearts going dark…hands reaching for the shadows and crushing the light between crumpling folds of paper… The images receded into his deep eyes until only Elina’s reflection remained, haloed in a mist of mingled shadow and light.
Talvi scurried back outside to find her companions gone and blue lights flashing down the street. Panicked, she bolted across the dark yard and ducked behind the shed. Finding nothing left of her sister but retreating footprints, she ran off down the frozen alley with Elina following close behind.
Around the last bend, where the neighborhood faded into the forest, Talvi came to a skidding halt at the sight of headlights. Warm relief washed over her when she realized it was her sister’s car…but she shrank back into the shadows when it pulled up alongside the police vehicle.
Her blood boiled at the sound of her sister’s boyfriend politely telling the officer, “Yes, we saw it. There was just one kid.”
That anger turned into icy shock, like a frozen blade piercing her to the core, when her sister’s voice joined in. “Look! Right over there! That’s the girl!”
Elina’s blood ran cold when, in an instant, the Shadowshifter hovering at Talvi’s left shoulder grew sharply clear. Every feather on his body was jet-black. His talons were like blades of black ice and his eyes like glinting dark diamonds. Even the shadows he breathed appeared harshly cold, jagged and blacker than ink.
“Ahhh…” he sighed, sipping at the shadows rising from Talvi’s clenching fists as hot tears flooded her eyes. “Treason is so my taste.”
Momentarily numbed by a rush of adrenaline, Talvi ran into the woods as if she would never stop. The crunching of snow and snapping of twigs beneath her boots was muted by the thrum of her own pulse. Her broken heart sent hot blood coursing through her veins. The blood she shared with her sister…which a single moment of Time had turned from meaning everything to meaning nothing.
Once out of sight, Talvi made a few sharp turns before walking backwards for several yards, in order to leave footprints in the snow pointing away from her actual direction. Chest heaving and hands shaking, she scrambled up the frost-encrusted branches of a large evergreen. And there she waited, clinging to the trunk like a treed animal.
It didn’t take Elina long to catch up. There was a peculiar weightlessness to her motion as she dashed across the snow, glimpsing fleeting flickers of light rippling through the trees alongside her, while Dravial’s slithering shadow trailed behind.
Skyvior landed on a low-hanging branch below Talvi’s perch when Elina reached the tree. Not knowing what else to do, she lingered near its base, heart aching for the young stranger shielded by its shaggy limbs.
Lacking her empathy entirely, Dravial leaned casually against the trunk and waved to Talvi’s Shadowshifter. “Splendid show, Shadar. I am thoroughly enjoying it.”
The impossibly dark creature perched just above Talvi and glared down through the gnarled branches. “I am working here, and you are not welcome.”
Elina shrank back, wishing she could be as invisible to the shifters in the Dreamscape as she was to her fellow humans.
Dravial just flashed his sly smile. “No one is ever welcome in your presence.”
Shadar dropped to the ground, stirring up a cloud of white powder that went dark at his touch. He hit the frozen earth in the form of a small dragon, and rose from his cloud of blackened snow in the form of a massive man. A mane of jet-black dreadlocks framed an angry face scattered with scars, like jagged cracks in a frozen lake. His black eyes glinted as he growled, “Take your bright-eyed Lightshifter nemesis, your pretty-boy-masked self, your cute little Dreamscape tourist, and leave.”
“Tsk tsk. Colder than ice even to your own kind. And by the way, your human is even smaller and cuter than mine.” Dravial chuckled. “That must be embarrassing after your previous prized assignment. What was he again? A drug lord or some such thing? I really should remember, considering how often you boasted about him.”
Shadar looked ready to brawl, but even his attention was momentarily diverted to a flashlight beam flickering through the woods.
Talvi held her breath and Elina felt the urge to hide despite her invisibility. But evidently the little thief wasn’t worth an intensive search through the snow, so the light vanished as quickly as it appeared.
After a few minutes passed in silence, Talvi descended the tree and ran on.
Elina tried to chase after her, but the setting suddenly blurred with the rushing wind sound of turning pages. When her new surroundings crystalized, she realized they were both running across her own yard…straight toward a younger 2020 Starlight Trail.
🏔️💫Lightscript Legends💫🌲 is an ongoing series of bite-sized stories and sip-on-the-go serials. Click here for the full list of published episodes and subscribe to get new installments in your inbox!