It’s #BookQW and this is the ‘night’ Cor’s story starts.
Excerpt from: Chapter 1 ~ Methods of Escape
Bonterra City, in the Windborne Britain District
Well past midnight, Cor glided in a serpentine motion down dark, tree-lined streets. His longboard’s wheels made a rhythmic thump crossing the concrete’s seams, and he pumped his wings every five thumps to keep up his speed. As the houses, dressed up with flowers and guarded by fences, spread farther apart, he slowed and turned a corner. Ancient rowans arched overhead, making the passage feel like a cathedral. Tonight, he’d timed his entrance perfectly with the crescendo mounting in his earbuds.
With a flourish of swinging arms, he pointed left, then right. Gold magic sailed from his fingertips and filled the gaps between branches. Some shone like soap bubbles, others caught webs and left glowing lines in lacy patterns. The best trapped leaves. His magic lit their tissue from within and left the veins as dark skeletons.
At the block’s end, Cor swung a wide arc in the intersection to face his creation and halted with a stomp of his foot, Dvorák’s violin concerto racing to its crashing peak. Every tree was aglow with his stained-glass windows, the farthest fading ones enhancing the impression that this natural wonder extended forever.
The music ended. With his thumb, he clicked off his mobile phone, savoring the last notes and flickers of light until his magical forest fell dark again.
If he could get to a truly wild version of these old trees, he’d never leave.
Cor pulled a pair of leather gloves from his pockets, tugged them on and picked up the longboard. To earn an internship at a Windborne forest took being in one place long enough to build complex tree spells. These rowans contained his best shot from the summer. Not the light show. That was the icing on the cake. The underlying magic he’d sparked came from weeks of developing a defensive spell against boring insects, a project he could show wizard foresters at the Windborne Arboriculture Conference.
If he managed to get into the exclusive meeting.
He walked across the intersection, checked to verify no one else was about, then flapped his dark brown wings to rise above the high stone wall surrounding the Gruen Estate. Spruce boughs reached from the inside, giving the illusion of an open, friendly place—only an illusion. Still, the branches were useful for marking his entry point, and their shadows camouflaged his brown skin and black clothing while he hovered between them and searched the top of the wall… Red stone, red stone…
He spotted it and lowered to inches above the wall’s magical shield before he shrank his wings to nothing but pure energy and drew it in. That, and the rest of his magic, he shut into his storage cores. The estate’s security would detect a magical-aided entry—and a physical one if he wasn’t careful.
~~~
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