"Oliver!" A boy, about sixteen, red-faced from running, skipped a step and turned at hearing his name.
"Esther?" Waving over his shoulder to another boy he had been racing, Oliver ran instead to his friend, flummoxed at her appearance. "How did you get here?"
Esther grinned at him. He hadn't changed; he still had that wide eyed look of wonder whenever something magical happened, despite all he had experienced.
"Swaine," she explained, "invented this gadgety thing that works like your gateway spell. I kinda took it when he wasn't looking." Oliver grinned, imagining the scene that would play out when the inventor found out. He secretly believed that his two friends tried to find reasons to drive each other crazy.
"I had to talk to you," she continued. "We found this cave, and there's a spell written on the wall, so I-" Oliver stopped handy putting a hand over her mouth, glancing furtively up and down the road, at the residents of his very normal town milling about.
"Not here," he whispered, and beckoned for her to follow him.
They made their way down the road to Oliver's house, which looked the same from the outside as she had remembered. Inside, Esther noticed signs that Oliver may not have been keeping up quite so well with the housekeeping. Dishes were piled in the sink and a jacket was hanging from the handle of a vacuum cleaner.
"Redecorating, Oliver?" He gave her a pointed glare, not, bothering to answer.
"So what's this about a spell?" Oliver settled into a chair in the living room.
"Well," Esther began, redistributing a pair of crumpled socks from the couch and gingerly settling in, "we found this cave just outside of Castaway Cove. We thought it might be a good place to hide Swaine's cauldron-"
"Swaine has a cauldron?" Oliver interrupted in surprise.
"Yeah, I don't really want to know where he pinched it from," Esther continued, "but I have to admit that it's come in handy, since you left." She paused for a moment. "So anyway, we are checking out the cave, had to fight a few beasties to clear it out, then we saw a spell written in Nazcaan, and figured out that it revealed a message when we tried to use it. The message said that 'the savior will return by night, to prepare for battle between dark and light; he who devours the world of white will face the one who cannot fight."
Oliver looked puzzled.
"The one who cannot fight?" he queried. "what does that mean?"
"Dunno," Esther replied. "That's why I came to find you. You're the only savior I know."