Cantrip: A mischievous or playful act; a trick.

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The boy threw himself onto his cot, mousy hair askew from running. He still had mud on his boots but he didn't care. It wasn't fair that he had to come inside even though there was plenty of light out. His parents had yelled at he and his brother, Peri, for no reason and sent them to their rooms. They hadn't even been doing anything!

 A familiar knock sounded from the other side of the wall. spot runes, they called them. A smile crossed his freckled face. Two long knocks, one short, then a pause and a rattling staccato that trailed off. Kel laughed, his blue eyes twinkling -they may have been grounded, but his brother was determined to spell out dirty words from his own room. It made Kel proud to have taught him.

"Really Peri...that's just rude." He chuckled as he silently worked out how to knock his reply. He raised a hand, then set his first knock. "BOOM!" A shockwave knocked him back onto the bed. There was a crash as his window shattered, sending glass flying into the room. 

For a moment, Kel wondered if he had somehow caused whatever just happened, until another explosion ripped through the air. Now he was outside, Peri clutching the back of his tunic and his right hand. He could feel his hand shaking. A wide, glowing gate rotated slowly before them, reaching high into the sky and seeming to eat down into the earth, a semicircle of runes and eldritch shapes yawning into oblivion. Beyond the unearthly greenish hue, shadows swirled. Something was coming.

There was a flash and waves of furious vibration all around him. Screams pierced his ear; whether his mother or his brother or both, he couldn't tell. Where his brother's soft skin had been, he now felt something rough and hard.  Then all was dark.

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Kel shook his head. That same dream again. The candle on the desk was burned down to an inch and his eyes were blurry. It hadn't happened that quickly in real life, of course. There were details in between, moments that seemed to hang in suspension when he reflected on his memories. He rarely did so voluntarily.

 Kel turned the stone over in his hand, the jagged object from his dream. It was a shard of glass,  sand and metal that had been fused together during a cataclysmic event. The wise men called it “gate glass.” That was a new name, though  - no one had ever encountered it until five years ago. The candle on his desk flickered and he instinctively returned it to his pocket, turning his gaze to the book that lay open before him. 

There was a creak as the door opened behind him. “Hal’s fire, boy!” Caaron, wise man and Kel's guardian, stared at him with his one good eye. “It’s three-past witching and I’ve already slept and woken. Yet here you are,” he thrust his cane at the pile of books on the desk “rummaging through this garbage when you should be sleeping.”

“Its not garbage." They had this argument on a near-weekly basis. It would have been near-nightly if Caaron didn't sleep like the dead most nights.  "You're the one who told me to read as much as I can!"

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

"Yes, but during normal waking hours!" There was a vein pulsing in his forehead. "And I said various books - not the same subject!" He motioned toward the three books that were propped open on the desk, floor, and opposite chair: The Fae: A History, Faerie Roads and Those Who Walk Them and the newest simply called Book of the Taken. The former two were dusty, held yellow pages tenuously within their cracked yellow bindings as if afraid to let them go. The latter kept closing because it was not yet used to being open at all. 

"But I can’t sleep, Caaron. I've told you before: I barely sleep as it is. One hour before rising is all I need.” He had been dozing just now, it was true, but magical texts tended to relax him in a way that was counter-productive to, well, productivity of any sort. 

“Don’t give me that nonsense again. You’re just a hyper boy with no responsibilities – there’s no faerie magic in you.”

“Odd William can heal people. Tell me there’s no faerie in him!”

“May be true, but you and Odd William are worlds away – he lived there. In their kingdom. For twenty of their years, he says. And that was before…” He fell silent. They had broached the subject that was always around them, swirling like clouds. 

“Before they took my family and left, for good.”

The old man hesitated, his hand hovering before patting the boy's shoulder. “It has been five years. I can’t expect you to give up completely, but you must understand – there’s a difference between hope and folly. Chasing the Fair Folk is definitely the latter.”

Kel stood. It was time to go. This was generally where their conversations on the topic typically landed and from here, it was only a matter of minutes before the wise man became truly irate.

“Wise man, I take my leave.” He made a short bow that was more a ritual than a true representation of feeling. He generally respected Caaron, loved him even - how could he not? But Kel was not yet old enough to separate disagreement and respect just yet. 

“Young man, I give you my blessing.” Caaron smiled his twisted smile. “Even if it is with my boot!” He feigned a kick at Kel and the boy scampered away, laughing. There were times that it was not a joke, but he had become adept at sensing the old man’s moods. Today was a laughing day.

Kel now lived in a loft up in the barn next to Caaron’s house. It had long since ceased to be a home to livestock, but the smell of hay and sweat lingered. It was better this way. Smells of a house - roasting meat, smoke from a fire, the cool touch of hardwood - these would only have reminded him of home. Here was better, where he could convince himself that his tenure was temporary, even if it had been five years already.

There was no need for a lantern. Already, grey morning light was creeping over the fen and into the clearing around the homestead. Aged wood creaked as the boy crept up the ladder. One of these days, he thought, one of these rungs is going to bust. And then I’ll have to go to Will to get the bone set right. He sighed as he reached the top. A bed of an old cloak stretched out over hay, a small desk for studies, last night’s supper half uneaten. The window was covered with an old sheet so that he could sleep through the first hour of the day. He had told Caaron over and over, but the old man simply thought he was lazy. 

Kel settled into bed, fluffing the second cloak he had repurposed as a pillow. It never got cold enough to use cloaks anyway and the rain was always short. If anything, the Fae Taking had somehow cleared up the weather in Fellow’s Glen. As he closed his eyes, Kel still imagined the rough stone in his hands, the faces of his mother and brother, the glowing gate.

Then he slipped into sleep and dreamed of nothing.