Prologue: The Coming
The train station was more crowded than usual. Cars, taxies and shuttles scurried frantically past the main doors like field mice scuttling for food. Everywhere one looked a dizzy dance of colors and flurries of motion met the eye as an endless flow of passengers rushed past from platform to platform. Like a painting by Claude Monet, the colors – blotches of crimson, dabs of emerald, and highlights of gold – seemed to melt from a far into each other.
One figure, at least, did not move. Far in his own small corner of the open air restaurant booth and dressed in deep indigo and black, Will Stanton sat sipping the hot tea he had just ordered. To the casual observer, the sight of a young man, about the age of fifteen, sitting alone and lost in his own private contemplation would not be uncommon. The thing that set this boy out apart was his face. Except for the slight movement of his arm holding the cup, Will was completely motionless as he stared unblinkingly at the crowd with his face set like cold, etched granite. Concentrating. Calculating. Searching.
Found.
Will's ice blue eyes narrowed over the top of his hot drink. There, in the shadows between two great pillars, an infinitesimal flicker so slight a normal person would not have seen it, winked in and out of sight. People walking past the shadows unconsciously hugged their jackets closer to their bodies and quickened their strides ever so slightly. No one walked through the shadows.
Quickly he gulped down the rest of his cooling tea and grabbed the backpack which lay at his feet as he stood up. Tossing the Styrofoam cup away in the nearest garbage can, Will turned and walked slowly and purposefully in the direction of the shadows. He could see and hear them more clearly as he moved closer to the pillars. And they could sense him as well. They attacked.
A sudden blast of icy wind blew in from the great doors of the train station. People shouted in surprise as hats and loose papers were unexpectedly blown away, and in that brief moment, Panic entered the building. But Will Stanton kept walking, completely unobstructed by the crowd and wholly unfazed by the frozen gusts. When he reached the edge of the shadows, they shrieked with anger, unable to muster the strength for coherent words, and they writhed with the pain only one of the Light could bring them. Will Stanton did not look at them with remorse or anger – instead his face was blank as he stretched the five long fingers of his right hand straight out at the shadows and said one word.
And both the wind and panic were gone.