This is a story about Jim Lake Junior, his best friends Toby Domzalski and Claire Nuñez. About a normal boy that found a magical amulet.
At least that is what Jim Lake Jr. thought as he believed himself quite normal. He started his day as normal. Then he followed a mysterious voice to an amulet in a pile of rocks in the middle of the aquaduct. He waved goodbye to his best friend Toby as he put his bike away as the sun started to fade into a warm sunset.
So finding a woman sitting on his couch inside the locked house quite surprised him.
"Ah!" Jim cried out.
The woman smiled at him. "Hello, Jim. I'm your mother-"
"No, Dr. Barbara Lake is my mother. Who are you?" Jim demanded in an angry voice.
"Oh, sorry! I mean god mother! I'd never want to take your mother's place. I'm so sorry, I'm making a total mess of things. I don't get out much!"
Jim blinked. "Oh, sorry. So what are you doing here? My mom won't be home until late."
"Oh, I'm doing this for my baby brother and I've got a gift! Just for you!" she babbled. Why did she mention her brother? She pulled out an engraved silver rod about ten inches long. "It's a torch, you see? All fancy and special!"
The boy took the rod and examined it. It being a flashlight. "Oh, a torch like out of Harry Potter!"
The woman blinked in confusion. "Right. Exactly. You will need The Left Torch. It won't work like sunshine, but it will reveal secrets to you." She stood tall. Suddenly looming as if a giant. "James, son of Hestia, you are born to a divine fate. Be safe and be brave."
And with the crackle of a fire going out, she disappeared like a mirage.
"What the heck?" Jim looked down at the flashlight in his hand and clicked it on. Yellow-orange and warm light shown. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the weird amulet and put it in the cone of light.
The strange lettering squiggled and changed. "For the glory of Merlin, daylight-" A crash from the basement sounded and distracted him from the blue-white glow of the amulet. "Ah, man. Raccoons again?"
He stuffed the amulet into his pocket and then walked down the stairs. A glance to his new and very fancy flashlight had him shrug. He grabbed a broom to swat any animal pests with and started to search for the source of the noise.
Six eyes blinked at the warm light that illuminated his face.
"Aaaaaaah!" Jim screamed out in shock. He pointed his broom at the four-armed rock-being in front of him. "Someone slipped some drugs in my drink."
Blinky coughed into his upper left fist. "Not at all, Master Jim. I know we trolls have hidden ourselves away, but we are quite real."
Jim turned the flashlight towards another figure. "Ahhhgh!"
"No, Aaarrrgghh! Three R's," the very large troll said.
The teen blinked. And then fainted dead away.
A warm light woke Jim up. He shaded his eyes with a hand. "Quit flashing that in my eyes."
"Oh, sorry Master Jim. Quite intriguing, don't you agree, Aaarrrgghh?"
The bigger troll shrugged. "Warm like fire."
"Who are you? What are you?" Jim demanded.
"You may call me Blinky and I am a troll, like my good friend Aaarrrgghh here. You have been chosen by the Amulet of Daylight to ascend the most sacred of offices!"
"Orifice?" the bigger troll asked. Then winked at Jim.
"I mean as responsibility or position."
Jim took his new flashlight back. "Sacred office? Does it have to do with my godmother?"
"Oh, no. Not at all! You have been chosen as the Trollhunter! To protect two worlds against the threat of the Gum-Gum!"
"That doesn't sound too bad." How chewy could it be?
"Master Jim, I don't think you understand. Gunmar and his evil Gum-Gum are a terrible threat!"
Jim raised an eyebrow at the six-eyed troll even as he tried to dodge away and the bigger troll batted him about like a rubber toy. "What is a Gum-Gum exactly?"
"Evil trolls that wish to destroy all good trolls and even the human world! Unbeknownst to your kind, there is a secret world, a vast civilization of trolls lurking beneath your very feet, hidden from view."
"So you-you are Tr-Trolls?" Jim managed to sputter out as he scrambled on all fours to get away.
"Indeed, Master Jim! And it is now your charge to protect them." The four-armed troll stood tall and puffed up his chest. "For you, Master Jim, are the Trollhunter.
The teen just blinked as he felt himself about to faint as he managed to get to his feet again.
"Trollhunter. This honor is yours to accept. So, what say you?"
Jim sat down hard.
"Is that a yes?"
"Can't I say no?" he heard himself ask.
Blinky looked confused and shared that look with Aaarrrgghh. "I don't know why you would want to- Oh, right. Human. Well, it is your best chance to survive?"
"What!? Look, this is such a weird day! I-I-I can't deal with this right now!" Jim said as he could not believe he had not fainted.
"Tell him Bular," Aaarrrgghh said as he patted Jim on the shoulder.
"Ah, yes. Bular is an issue. And a danger to overcome!" Blinky leaned back as Jim glared at him. "But perhaps we can continue this later. It appears we are causing undue stress to the, er, young lad."
Aaarrrgghh walked over and opened a passageway in the basement wall that led down into the sewers. Jim blinked at that as he had lived in this house for years and never seen that.
"Huh." He needed to do something mundane. Normal. Safe.
The teen headed up the basement stairs and went through the calming steps in making three sandwiches for three lunches. One for him, one for Toby and the last for his mom. It became almost a meditation that soothed his frayed nerves.
He looked out the window and noted that he still had at least an hour of sunlight.
The urge to talk to someone rose in him. Not his mother as she had a busy night and a surgery. Along with whatever emergency cropped up at the hospital here in Arcadia. The idea to visit Mr. Strickler rose up, only to be pushed down. He didn't want the teacher he looked up to, to consider him insane. And talking to him about trolls would be just that. Insane.
Bular walked in the shadows on the bridge that he had fought the Trollhunter Kanjigar. He scraped the concrete of the aquaduct with his clawed hands as the shadows finally stretched closer to the remains of the fallen troll.
Under the dim red and orange of an ignored sunset, Bular started to go through shattered rocks of Kanjigar's remains. Half an hour later, he roared in frustration and started to run with abandon through out of the concrete canal and then through the forest. More than a few trees lay shattered from his rage.
An older model car drives up to a garage and Mr. Strickler steps out looking around in calm confidence.
"Stricklander! The amulet was gone! All that work to catch Kanjigar alone and tired, for nothing!" Bular stated in a loud tone of voice from the shadows under a tree. His eyes glowed in anger.
The changeling looked unruffled. "Untrue. It will take time for Kanjigar's son to master the powers of the Trollhunter. Time that we can use to finish the work."
The larger troll stood up to his full height. "Find the Trollhunter. I want no interference, changeling. If the new Trollhunter discovers our purpose here in Arcadia, the plan could be set back years."
"The Order will succeed, Bular. And Gunmar the Black will return to destroy our enemies!" Walter Strickler said as his eyes flared to life in yellow light.
"It is on your head. Discover the Trollhunter's identity so I may capture this one."
Stricklander nodded and then turned to walk to his ordinary home as Bular disappeared into the night.
Tobias 'Toby' Domzalski looked at the coiled loop of golden metal in his hand.
"What's that, Toby Pie?" his grandmother (Nana to everyone!) asked as she caught the sight of a reflected light.
"Just some bracelet, I think. You never mentioned mom wearing it." Toby looked at it harder. Was that a flame carved out of a black piece of onyx. "It looks more Polish than Irish."
"Oh! That's probably your father's! He always wore it on his left arm. He said it was for you when you got older, Toby!" The old woman smiled at that.
The teen boy blinked his green eyes in confusion. "Huh. I must have found it, but then I had a double-super-beuno-caliente burrito! Man, I had the strangest dream that this shadow that looked way evil said it was my father." He shook his round head. "I mean, not like 'I am your father, Toby! You know it is true' Starwars way. He said my fat will protect me from the cold, but not the fire that is coming. Then I woke up on the ground late for school."
"You should keep it and anything you found with it, Toby. It could... protect you," his Nana said to him with a strange sense of seriousness.
"Really? I've got to show Jimbo tomorrow." Toby shoved his chubby hand through the loop and then up his arm. He frowned (with his tongue stuck out) as it went past his elbow with ease and then stopped at his bicep. "Whoa! That's so cool! He's going to be so jealous!"
"Back to your supper, Toby Pie! The hamburgers aren't going to eat themselves, you know!"
In a dark bedroom, a girl sat on her bed and rubbed one hand at the choker on her neck while the other trailed her fingers along the bone-white staff on her lap.
Yesterday, all her eyes could see were dark shadows as the sun set. Tonight, the darker it became the better she could see. The inhumanly small skull at the top leered at her even so. Thirty-two teeth lay carved with little clear gems in twenty-nine of them. Three blood-red rubies shown with a soft light from the middle two pairs.
"Mi hermanito. Mi querido padre y madre!" She shook her head slightly. "But none for your life and safety, Baron Saturday? Or is your health none of my business as your real hijita? Or will this be a dark trick?"
But Baron Samedi had told her she needed the darkness and to choose between life and death.
She took a deep breath and touched both forefingers to her ink-black choker and then drew a voodoo square-cross in the air with sickly green light from tracing the air. "Oscuridad dentro de elevar con mi alma y abrir mi ojo oculto!" Darkness within raise with my soul and open my hidden eye!
A glowing green eye opened on her forehead as she stood up. The red gems in the teeth of her skull-staff wended a light-path to their way to different places within her home.
Two more strong strings of scarlet fate went out the window and into the night. And, just as her first casting showed, did not go towards the part of town where her best friends lived.
"What fate does this night darkly show?" she asked the brisk air.
In the distance a blue-white light flared for a second.
"No, way!" Jim Lake Junior said as the overly large (but not too heavy) sword shrunk down to merely huge. "Magic armor and sword from the amulet. This is amazing!"
He started to swing the sword around as if it only weighed less than a heavy stick. It still thunked home into the rock, but a hard tug pulled it right out. With another swing he tried to cut a smaller boulder in half. The sword stopped halfway and it took a full minute to pull out which left the rock in poor shape.
"Toby is not going to believe this!" He put his hand to the amulet above his heart and pulled it off.
