Darkness stretched deep into the woods during the early weeks of winter. The days had shrunk back to nothing at the turning of the season and shadows had free reign. And in a part of the woods where no artificial light was there to keep the darkness at bay, on the night of a new moon, when one couldn't see the hand in front of their own face, Anika slept soundly. There was no fear to her dreams, no darkness hiding in the corners of her imagination. There was a smile tugging at the corner of her lips as she dreamed of the snowfall that had yet to come this season.
She and her friends were making snowmen in her dreams and she had just set the head on top of the first two mounds of snow when she paused in confusion. She could have sworn she heard music on the wind.
"Anika? Was ist los?" one of her friends asked. Anika didn't reply though. She was sure of it now, she could hear the ghostly tune of a tin whistle echoing from somewhere in the forest.
"Ich bin gleich wieder da," Anika said, reassuring her friends as she hurried off towards the woods. When she got to the edge of the forest, she looked back over her shoulder to make sure none of them were following her, but they were gone. The snowman had vanished, as if none of it had ever existed. That was strange, she decided, but thought nothing of it. She'd find them later, for now she wanted to know about that song she was hearing.
A couple more steps into the snowy forest and suddenly she was opening her eyes from sleep. She was in her room, as before, but the music hadn't stopped. The tin whistle was still playing, the notes echoing sharply in her room. It came from her closet and she could swear she saw a bit of purple light glowing there. She could remember a time when she had been afraid of monsters in her closet, but that didn't scare her anymore. It was silly to believe in monsters.
She hopped out of bed, opening the closet door and just like that disappeared from her room.
There was a cold front moving in on Germany that evening. They could expect snow by dawn if Jack Frost had anything to say about it. The clear stars were quickly being covered by cottony clouds. The first of the flakes began to fall just as streams of golden sand lit their way through the darkness. Jack smiled to himself to see Sandman's trademark and ran his hand through one of those golden rivers. Dolphins dove through the sky, in and out of the sand-stream as though it were water.
The wind billowed up beneath Jack and he shot upward as though he'd been fired from a cannon, settling down on the edge of a golden cloud where Sandy was just starting on his night's work. After a moment, the small man turned around and raised an eyebrow curiously at Jack. A pocketwatch appeared above his head and and he looked at Jack with mock judgment, going as far as to wag a finger back and forth, though he couldn't hide the smile in his eyes.
"Yeah, yeah, I know," Jack laughed, "I'm late. I got hung up in France for a while. Paris is having its best snow day in years though." The Sandman smiled and turned his attention back to the dream sand. Jack watched him at work, fascinated by the network of gold splayed about below them, constantly moving, shifting and changing. Sandy's eyes were closed in concentration. He seemed to be able to see more than what Jack could, like he had a mental connection to the sand that was more than just the ability to control it.
Quite suddenly one of the strands of dream sand disappeared, falling away like dust caught in the wind. Jack narrowed his eyes, squinting to try to see where it had been coming from.
"What was that?" he asked in a low voice. Sandy shrugged. An alarm clock appeared over his head and Jack nodded. Something must have woken up one of the sleeping children.
"Why would someone be waking up in the middle of the night?" he wondered aloud. With Pitch out of the picture, it was unlikely it was because of a bad dream. Deciding that finding out for himself was the easiest way to quell his curiosity, Jack hopped down from the cloud. The wind snatched him up as easily as it had for the past three hundred years and he careened forward through the clouds.
A bit of frost marked the edge of a little boy's window as Jack settled precariously on the sill. He could see the kid rubbing sleep from his eyes as he peered intensely at his closet. Jack climbed quietly in through the window, but the kid didn't notice even for a moment. To Jack's surprise, as soon as he stepped into the room he could hear music playing, the cheery tune of a tin whistle.
"Hey, kid," he said, trying to get the boy's attention, but he didn't seem to be heard. He was worried that perhaps this boy was one of the ones who hadn't heard of him yet. As one of the newest Guardians, Jack had a much smaller following than the others and while he was working on growing that, there were still plenty of kids who would walk right through him. Still, something about this situation made Jack nervous. The kid walked into his closet and the music stopped. The dead silence immediately woke a sickening fear in Jack's gut and he immediately went to go check on the kid. But when he pulled the closet door aside, there was no child to be found; he'd vanished.
Jack frantically searched through the closet, pushing things aside, looking in toy boxes and dresser drawers, any place a kid might try to hide. But it was no good, the kid was gone. But how? Pitch was gone, so what else was there to be worried about in the dark? Whatever it was, the other Guardians needed to know about it. They needed to do something. They needed to find this kid, bring him back, and make sure this didn't happen to anyone else.
"So you're telling me that a kid just vanished? Just up and 'Poof!' disappeared? In his own bedroom?" Bunny was eyeing Jack with his usual skepticism. The others seemed more concerned. Sandy had been there to see Jack go running off and Tooth and North seemed to trust Jack's instincts on what he was telling them.
"Yes!" Jack insisted. "One second he was there, he walked into his closet and suddenly he was gone. I checked everywhere, he wasn't in that room."
"Could he have maybe run out when you weren't looking?" North questioned. From the way he was looking at Jack, it seemed clear that he was taking this seriously. But North was not the kind of person to go rushing into things without asking questions first.
"There's no way," Jack replied. "I was watching the whole time. Also... there was music."
"Music?" asked Tooth.
"Yeah, like someone was playing a flute or something. And then when he walked into the closet, the music cut off and it was like he'd never even been there," Jack explained. North nodded pensively, his brow knit in deep thought, Tooth watching him as though there were a question on the tip of her tongue.
"We know Pitch had job before Guardians," North conceded. "Keep children safe from things adults do not always see, things they cannot see. It's possible, Pitch is trapped and now these things come back, now our job as Guardians is all the more important. We promised to safeguard the children of the world. If these threats are coming back, we need to stop them."
"Sounds like step one is to figure out what we're up against," Bunny said. Jack was a little relieved to see that he was finally accepting the reality of what was happening. A musical note and a question mark appeared over Sandy's head.
"I don't know," Jack replied. "A flute? Or a whistle of some kind? And the kid seemed... distracted, like nothing else really mattered."
"That music must have some power over the kids who hear it," Tooth said. "So we just have to find the source and we'll have the one responsible."
"Yeah, but I didn't see anyone there playing it," Jack replied. "It was just disembodied music."
A frantic clinking sound caught Jack's attention and he noticed that the Sandman was staring at the lot of them with frustration etched over his face. He was holding an empty eggnog goblet and a fork which had apparently served as his noisemaker a moment ago. Once he was sure everyone was watching, he created a picture of a swirling vortex, similar to the portal that North's snow-globe opened up. He showed a picture of a musical note and a child going through the portal and then a picture of the Guardians following.
"Of course!" North bellowed. "A portal in and out of the room. It must be what makes children disappear. We go in portal after it and it takes us right to source of music!" Sandy nodded and Bunny and Tooth both seemed to be on board. It was a good way to find the source of the music alright, but Jack hesitated on how this plan seemed to be going.
"Hang on a second!" he said. "We're just going to sit and wait for him to strike again and hope we can get there in time? There's got to be another way to track him! We can't just use kids as bait to catch this thing. Who knows where they're going or what's happening to them." The others were looking guiltily at the ground, and after a moment of silence, Tooth spoke up.
"Jack... we want to help, but we have no idea how to find this thing. We don't know where it comes from or where it's going to go next. I don't want anyone to be in danger, but we won't know how to find this thing before it opens up that portal again," she said. She was trying to reason with him, but it wasn't getting through.
"What other way is there to stop it?" North asked. "None of us even know what it is." Jack looked away, a dark thought suddenly brewing in his mind.
"Jack?" Tooth asked, putting a hand on his shoulder. Her pleading expression was a mix of hope and guilt. It was terrible to see.
"You're right. None of us know anything," he said. "I'll meet you guys in Pennsylvania to keep an eye on the dream sand. It should be getting dark there around now."
The others were quiet as he left. The wind carried him to Pennsylvania, to Burgess, home. But he flew past the frozen lake and past Jaime's house, out to a clearing in the woods where a dark hole still remained. He looked down into the blackness that seemed to swallow up everything. Jack steeled his nerves, gripped his staff with both hands, ready for a fight if one awaited him, and hopped down the hole into the darkness that waited below.