"Knoff" by Robin Vickery

I cried. It was just a call…one, stupid little phonecall! She promised! She promised we’d talk today, she gave me a specific time…

I let it ring again, then hung up for the hundredth time in two hours. I tried hard not to hurl the phone at the wall.

That was it, then. My best friend for two years wouldn’t talk to me. Why should she? After all, it was just a stupid promise, right? All she had to do was pick up the phone and talk to me. She couldn’t even do that!

I felt so betrayed, so forgotten. It was the second time this week that she’d actually said the words. “I promise.” She knew I was mad! I was sure she knew.

I called again, Why?! Why should I?! But I did. I was almost angry at myself for it.

There was something different…I felt a sudden forbidding fall over my heart.

“Hello?” It sounded like a threat! And it was a man’s voice. I started breathing hard.

“I-is Jade there?”

I heard a roar of wind and crashing thunder and static so loud my ears throbbed--and dead silence.

“JADE!” I screamed. The phone spun away as my hand was hit with an electric shock. I grabbed my numb hand and clenched my teeth.

I dashed outside, prepared to run the thirty miles to my friend’s house. I wasn’t old enough to drive, and besides, everybody was gone.

But my bare foot never hit the grass.

A lightning bolt crashed from the clear blue sky, wrapping its long finger about my waist and ripping me up. I screamed as it charred through my shirt and burned my skin. I heard laughing as I was ripped from my world and into another.

The laughing thundered about me, loud and evil, black, heartless eyes stared at me through a bruised sky. I screamed again as the lightning threw me into the air. I slammed into hard dirt and tumbled down, always down, over barren rock and scree.

I finally came to a stop. I was afraid to move, afraid to breath, but at least conscious--for the moment. The laughter faded away, and still I didn’t move. I forced myself to breath deeply, gasping as pain lanced through my back. My head spun and blood dripped onto my brow as my memory went black.

The first thing I remember was the pounding in my head. I opened my eyes.

“I’m alive!” I squeaked shakily. I couldn’t even see scars! “Where am I?”

“Knoff,” a voice said.

I was in a strangely shaped room, made completely of knarled darkwood that seemed alive.

“Look at the candles, child,” the woman said quietly. I don’t know why I did, I just--did.

Purple and blue flames danced in front of my eyes, spinning and whirling to form a picture. In front of me I saw Jade chained in a dark stone chamber, tears glinting behind her glasses, and the black eyes of the Necromancer who had taken us from our homes. Purple lightning crashed out of the flames, reaching...

“The candles have spoken!” And the picture was gone. I looked back. Pointed ears and long black hair with incredible amethyst eyes are what I saw.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I am Lady Aurelia. And I must help you save the other and our world from Hallgatheer.”

There were a thousand sensible things I could say.

“Me?!”

I thought of Jade suddenly. Had one of our stories revealed something we shouldn’t know?

Aurelia smiled. The beautiful candle flames sped toward us, spinning around us in a furious spiral that closed out everything else. A purple flash-and I stood in a rocky valley, Aurelia beside me. Flash!-and we were at the top. We both looked up at a castle-a fortress of black Obsidian. Black walls towered above in dark skies that showed no sun.

“We’re not going in there…are we?” Aurelia nodded solemnly. “I was afraid of that.”

A black drawbridge crashed down and--wouldn’tcha know it?--black reptilian beasts thundered across it.

“Get past them. Hurry!” Purple flames danced in front of us, and I knew she would be safe.

Probably.

Suddenly I pitied the beasts.

I ran. Fast. Behind me I heard the crashing sound of a fireball and the creatures’ wailing. I winced.

In a flash of black flame, a dark shadow fell over me. I looked toward the end of the bridge-and realized, suddenly, why I was here. I was supposed to fight the man at the end of the bridge(Hallgatheer, Necromancer of Knoff)and save my best friend from the fate he planned for her(which I’d rather not know).

“LET HER GO!!!” I roared, fully intending to scare him to death with the sound of my voice. He didn’t, unfortunately, keel over dead.

He did wince a little.

He laughed evilly, Obsidian scepter in hand, small lightnings dancing across the crystal globe it held.

I glanced inside…Jade! My eyes flashed with righteous fury, and my fists clenched.

Me, a 5’4” fifteen-year-old girl who’d never even picked a fight was gonna take on a Necromancer. I was NUTS.

I stalked toward him, hell-bent to ring his filthy green neck.

A wall of black flames rose between me and him, but I charged through it. Straight through it!

He reached for my throat.

I stomped on his foot.

My jaw dropped.

“NOOOOOOOO!!” he wailed, charring and burning in his own black flames, his beasts with him, all screaming.

Aurelia looked at me.

“Huh…never would have thought of that.”

Suddenly Jade was beside me, and we were flung back. The sickening sensation of falling ended as we both hit the ground.

I looked around. I was in my room. For a second I thought it’d been a nightmare, but the phone across the room and my best friend beside me said otherwise.

“Ouch,” she groaned.

“Ouch,” I agreed.

She looked at me.

I looked at her.

“Wow!”

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