Oran and the Dragon Crystal by A.J. Clinton

Author:A.J. Clinton [Clinton, A.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786234117
Publisher: Grosvenor House Publishing
Published: 2018-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Children of the Waters

Dara woke rather abruptly from his somewhat troubled slumber, to the sounds both of Holly’s barking and of Oran whistling some strange, yet beautiful melody which Dara was quite sure that he had never heard before. Still laid next to the perpetually roaring fire conjured by Oran the previous day, as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, he noticed that the mist which had cursed their journey so the previous day had now completely cleared, thankfully, and that he could now see very clearly where they had actually ended up.

As he propped himself up on one elbow in his make-shift bed, he gazed intently, for a moment, at the almost blinding shimmer of a great body of tranquil water that stretched out seemingly endlessly before him in the bright morning sunlight, reasoning to himself that it could, almost certainly, only be Lough Neagh, as it was so vast. He had, of course, never actually been here before, but had heard mention in tales, as a boy, of a great lake or lough that lay to the south, a lough whose expanse was so great that you could not see one shore from the other.

The waters before him were calm and still and although they stretched as far as the eye could see, he was sure that this could not possibly be the ocean, nor indeed the sea, although he could not see the other side - the far shore that he was certain existed off in the distance somewhere. For one thing, there were no waves crashing on the gravel beach nearby - waves that he would certainly expect to see were this the ocean - and he knew in his head and in his heart that they weren’t that lost, and also knew that they could not possibly have progressed that far - to the coast, that was - after only one day of very troubled travelling.

Oran was at the water’s edge nearby, entertaining Holly by throwing an old dead tree branch out into the calm, shallow waters for her to chase and fetch, which she seemed to be enjoying immensely as she barked and yelped at the young elf impatiently and excitedly. Dara watched quietly for a moment, smiling, as Oran hurled the branch out into the water once more, where it landed with a sort of a plop and a splash. Holly keenly bounded out into the shallows after it, splashing water up into the air around her as she went, and Dara couldn’t help but notice how the low morning sun illuminated each and every droplet brightly, almost blindingly.

His thoughts then turned, momentarily, to how well he had slept regardless of their present location and of the freezing temperatures, when a vague image slowly entered his mind. It was a hazy image at first… and more than a little disturbing - that of a dark, hooded, or perhaps shrouded, figure which appeared from the depths of his mind, hunched closely over him in the darkness of the cold night.

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