Moonrise on Redew Springs
In the Now School universe, this story is attributed to my OC Miguel Algarbe. 5 chapters, ~8k words as of the first 4 chapters; original post contains both chapters 1&2.
Chapter 1
Sam knelt down to tie her shoes before stepping into the tall grass behind her house. She’d already learned the hard way that playing in the tall grass with untied laces was a literal slippery slope, and at the bottom she would come home with muddy stripes throughout her clothes - and then she would be put in charge of a bonus round of dreaded laundry cycle chores. It was bad enough being the only child in her house required to do chores, but having to do them sometime other than Saturday morning was an even worse fate.
“Hurry up!” called Lindsey, the boy who had moved in across the street about two weeks earlier. He was already standing in the shadows of the treeline beyond the tall grass, wearing clothes he clearly didn’t mind getting muddy. He had straight black hair, braces, and a tall, stick-skinny tanned frame which stood in comical contrast to Sam, the shortest girl in the sixth grade with pale freckled skin, curly red hair, and blue-green glasses frames that almost matched her eyes. Sam hadn’t been eager to meet the family that had moved into her former best friend’s former house, but after a week of school the two of them had discovered they shared a love of fantasy books, a disdain for their small school’s sports pep rallies, and complementary strengths (Lindsey’s in math, Sam’s in English class) that made their long bus rides home a very effective study hall.
Sam stepped carefully through the grass, past Lindsey, and began to lead the way toward the creek. She knew the way by heart and liked to listen for bird calls as she walked. Now that she was accompanied by someone a foot taller constantly swiping branches out of his way, there was no way she was going to hear anything else with all this noise. Almost completely fed up, she turned to glare at her companion. Getting as far as “Can you Possib-“, she spotted something glinting several yards off the path.
Lindsey bumped into her, began to apologize, and was similarly interrupted as the cloudy afternoon cleared just enough to make the glinting patch light up in the middle of the forest. “What – is that?”
“I’ve never seen it before. Wanna go check it out?”
Lindsey agreed, and this time Sam wound up making the excessive noise as she crushed the light-starved plants, taking two steps for every one of Lindsey’s graceful strides between patches of rock and dry soil. The understory parted and the two found a single tree with a ladder up to a wide split in the trunk, a tire swing hanging from a branch, and several broken planks on the ground that looked like they might have once been a treehouse at the top of the ladder.
“Dibs on the tire swing!” yelled Lindsey, and before she could argue, Sam watched as he leapt over the broken boards and hoisted himself onto the tire swing. As he began leaning back and forth to move the swing, Sam noticed something amiss.
“Umm, Lindsey, where are your legs?”
“Well, they’re right he— whaaaa?”
At the back of his arc, Lindsey had fallen through the tire swing and vanished into whatever was on the far side of it. Sam sprinted toward the swing and caught it coming toward her. Sticking her head through the tire swing, she saw Lindsey lying on what looked like a grassy bog. Before she could see much else, though, she felt plastic slipping up the back of each ear and watched helplessly, arms pinned back in the real world, as her glasses vanished into the blur of somewhere completely unfamiliar.
“Lindsey! Can you hear me?”
“I can! I can see you too, or at least your face and shoulders. You’re kinda floating up there!”
“Are you OK?”
“I … think so. I might have cracked my watch when I landed.”
“Do you see my glasses anywhere?” Sam closed her eyes, trying to keep the panic down.
“Ummm…” A few seconds of silence followed. “Found them! They’re over here on the next patch of bog, but I think you have to come down here to get them back.”
Sam stood up, took a deep breath, and opened her eyes. The leaves of the trees above might as well have been a Monet portrait done in spraypaint. With one more deep breath, she hoisted herself onto the swing, and slithered through the tire into a freefall. Four seconds later, she found herself waist-deep in a pontoon-sized pad of peat moss, her jeans getting slowly soaked by water as she climbed out of the hole she’d punched. “Lindsey! Where are you?”
“Right over here!” With a leap, Lindsey landed on her pad, and she felt the landing push them adrift as he stumbled to a stop. “I grabbed your glasses so you wouldn’t land on them. They got a little muddy, sorry.” He finished wiping off the glasses frames while Sam hoisted herself up to sit on their slowly drifting bog. “How many of the Narnia books have you read?”
“All of them, but it's been a while. I really haven't read any of them since I started Eragon last year.”
“OK, well, I think it's pretty obvious we just fell through a portal, so I'm gonna stick with Narnia to make sense here. Did you look at your watch before it broke?”
Lindsey flipped his hand over out of habit, wishing he'd received an analog watch for his birthday. “Well, the bus dropped us off at 4:00, and it's probably been 30 minutes since then, right?” Sam nodded, and he continued, “Time hopefully moves differently here. When do you have to be home?”
“My parents and my brothers will get home around 5:30. What about you?”
“Mom will call me to set the table for dinner around the same time. What else do we need to figure out?”
“Well, we should probably figure out if there's a war going on or any other trouble we might get into, but we gotta ask carefully.”
“OK. And I don't even see the tire swing here, so we'll have to find another way back.”
Sam rolled her eyes at Lindsey's obvious statement, dunking her glasses into the bog to try to wipe off one last smudge on the lens and drying them with her right shirtsleeve. Finally putting them on her face, she breathed a sigh of relief and took stock of the new landscape. “So, which way to civilization?”
Chapter 2
“Well, I see one tall tree over yonder, and I think I saw something moving under it,” offered Lindsey hopefully. “Shall we head that way?”
Sam shrugged, and asked him to lead on. She began mumbling to herself, trying to figure out what questions she could ask without “turning partisan” and, thanks to the height difference, Lindsey barely heard any of it.
After about ten minutes of walking and jumping, and only one missed landing into the bog, Lindsey spotted the movement again. “Hello there! Excuse us!” he began, waiting for a response and hoping that whoever was bobbing around in the bog below could understand English. Lindsey repeated his greeting.
First a hat surfaced, then a face, then shoulders of a gray-skinned elf emerged. He began to speak, and seagull-like noises emerged from his mouth. Lindsey offered one more time “Hello! Can you help us?” before the elf pulled a large basket of black round berries out of the water, and fished around in it to find three large pill-bugs. The elf delicately picked one out of his hand and set it in the end of his pointed ear, then proffered the other bugs to the children. Skeptically, and with a healthy amount of disgust, each took a bug and the seagull noises began again. Sam winced as the bug touched her ear –
“--this basket of inkberries for the festival, and you would be most honored guests if you came to our village. Please stay, for tomorrow night is the full moon. You,” he gestured to Lindsey, “do not need much of a trim, but you,” now he turned to Sam, “you could visit our barber either today or tomorrow. It is an ill omen to show long hair in general, but especially so at the festival.”
Sam’s mind went blank - for all the subtle political questions she'd imagined, never had her shoulder-length hairstyle been a concern. “Please, umm, – can I get your name?”
“Treppilo, at your service.”
“Mister Treppilo, can you please explain why long hair is a problem here? In our home culture, I would get strange looks if I were to cut it short.”
“Of course, and I am sure we would make an exception for a traveller. Our festival has two meanings, one for merriment and one for safety. At midnight, the monks come and ring a gong 12 times, and if you hear all 12 tolls it means you are not compelled to revisit the past this time, and it is safe to go home and sleep. But for those who are compelled to revisit the past, or for any who make the forbidden journey into the forest at the full moon, their hair will grow long, and this long hair is their only clue that they have awakened in the past.”
Lindsey interrupted, “How many villages observe this festival? And are you at peace with all of them?” Sam elbowed him. “Uh, Mister Treppilo, I mean, is there any other faux pas a visitor might commit to break the peace?”
The elf pinched the bug out of his ear, dunked it in the water, and replaced it. “You have such broad questions, and I will answer as best I can. Our kind have settled in four villages on this coast. We work the land and the sea for our food and our tools, and while some visitors come from beyond the mountains, we have never had any come from this way as you have, tell me where from again?”
“Coraville,” offered Sam hastily, eager to not derail the conversation with geographic trivia.
“Yes, you are the first from Coraville. The mountains have two passes we know, one in the north, and one that also cuts through the center of the” [untranslated seagull noises] “forest. Nobody comes through that forest, and I hope none of its magic disturbs you as you stay among us. But for that magic we have been at peace for seven generations, since we settled here.”
Sam and Lindsey traded glances. The mention of magic seemed to buoy their hope for getting home, and Sam dug in. “Who can we meet to learn more about the magic?”
Treppilo turned to wade toward the shoreline and beckoned the children to follow. “You might be able to ask the Monks of the Grotto. They won't speak to any of us folk, and I hear their vow is to keep them from being compelled to revisit. They keep a library, and they communicate by pointing to words and sentences within their scrolls. Tomorrow, I can take you toward the grotto, but I will have to leave you at the edge of the forest. I, like many of my clan, cannot breathe in the forest while the glassflowers are blooming, as they will until the next new moon. Also, legend says the forest is home to wraiths who feast on the despair of anyone who seeks the” [untranslated seagull noises] “springs at the heart.”
This time Lindsey peeled off his bug, trying to re-wet it before they all climbed the coastal embankment away from the bog. “Could you repeat the name of those springs? And maybe tell me what words’ meanings are in the name?”
Treppilo sat down at the top and extended a hand to help the other two reach the top of the embankment. “I said nothing about a metal spiral. But you asked after the middle of the forest, so perhaps you were speaking of the bubbling waters and the pool.” Lindsey nodded, so he went on, “Their name means to revisit and coat with water droplets.”
“Re-dew springs?” asked Sam hopefully.
“Well, it sounds clunky to the tongue-leech in my ear but the name should be good enough for your language.” It was nearly sundown when they all arrived in Treppilo’s village. Both Lindsey's and Sam's clothes were thoroughly stained by the inkberries in the bog, not to mention that they'd barely dried out during the afternoon. First Treppilo called on the village tailor, who seemed to owe him a favor, to lend the visitors some festival robes. Lindsey came back from the tent with robes barely covering his knees. Sam, very relieved to learn that the tent had generous private spaces for changing, found a hooded cloak which had to be hemmed up with many pins, but would at least conceal her hair. Next, Treppilo introduced his wife Quilline, a taller green-skinned elf who came from the northernmost village, and whose voice sounded more hawk-like when she said a word with no direct translation. As the two elves traded off between their earbug and cooking duties for serving a simple fish dinner, they formed a plan for the next day. Quilline, who was not allergic to the glassflower blooming season, would guide Sam and Lindsey to the monks the next morning, work the fields for the afternoon (while Treppilo would make the inkberry pie), and in the evening everyone would attend the festival together. Lindsey slept soundly, Sam fitfully, and in the morning, they set out toward the forest.
