Beltane



  THE THEA HARTSONG CHRONICLES - BOOK ONE

  BELTANE

  Thea Hartsong

  © Copyright Thea Hartsong 2013.

  For B, D, M, & T with love always.

  Chapter 1 A beginning.

  One thing was obvious. Something had gone horribly wrong.

  The acrid smell of burned-out electrical circuitry hung in the air as the man struggled to sit up. His ears were ringing, his head spinning, and he felt sure that he was going to be sick. Trying to force his eyes to open was a big mistake; it only made the feeling of nausea worse, and scared him half to death because instead of the moonlit forest glade all he could see was a patch of flickering white light.

  After a few terrible moments when he felt certain he’d never being able to see again, he slowly began to be able to make out some blurred shapes, and eventually to see what had happened to the camp site. It was a complete disaster area.

  The tent looked as though it had been torn to bits by some sort of tropical hurricane, though that was hardly likely on a gentle English spring evening without even a breath of wind. Pieces of canvas were strewn across the clearing, and one of the tent poles was impaled in the trunk of a tree. Two guy ropes hung loosely from it, and a single tent peg dangled almost comically swinging to and fro about six feet above the ground.

  Shifting slowly onto his knees, he found himself struggling to remember what he was supposed to be doing here in the middle of the forest so late at night. Wasn’t he meant to be filming something? If so, where was the camera?

  When he eventually found it, at the edge of the still, dark, pool of water in the center of the glade, it looked as though it had melted. Its tripod was twisted sideways about forty- five degrees, and the video tape lay strewn across the ground in tangled knots like the entrails of some great beast.

  Whatever had happened, whatever he’d been trying to film, there would be no record of it now. He stood for a moment staring out into the night uncertain what to do next. Then something caught his eye, something that changed everything. A tiny red recording light was blinking at him from the other side of the pool.

  He was just about to set off towards it when a bubbling sound from the water in front of him made him stop in his tracks. He looked down; a broad ripple was moving swiftly outwards from the center of the pool towards the shore.

  There was something there…in the water… a soft golden colored glow, deep down beneath the surface began spreading rapidly until it filled the pool completely making it glisten, and gleam, as if the whole thing were filled with liquid gold.

  He only put his hands in front of his eyes for a moment to protect them against the sudden glare, but when he opened them again he could barely believe what he was seeing.

  The forest glade had been deserted before, but now the figure of a tall man, whose face seemed strangely familiar, stood solidly in the middle of the clearing. His sandy-colored shoulder- length hair was soaking wet and lay plastered to his skull in strands, and his drenched clothes dripped water onto the dry earth in a steady trickle. But it was what he carried nestled in his arms so tenderly that was so strange, so surprising… and so out of place.

  Wrapped in what looked like a tangle of pond-weed, its hands clenched in tight fists, was a tiny newborn baby.