Free The Herald of Autumn (Echoes of the Untold Age Book 1) by JM Guillen

to know what the Hunter would do, Old Man?”
    He let out a long sigh. “Because,
Tommy, I’m not expectin’ him to hunt one of the wraiths. I wouldn’t cry your
Name for somethin’ so small.” He grinned, fiercely.
    “Tell me.”
    A long pause. “I know where they’re
comin’ from. I know what’s spawnin’ the things.”
    My eyes must have been the size of
dinner plates. “Something spawns them?”
    “Everything comes from somewhere,
Tommy. The story of me tracking the thing is long and long, but I can make it
easy.” He sipped his cider. “It’s here, in these woods. It seethes with
darkness and cold. It births the things in a cave, north a’ here. They pour
from it like serpents. Dozens and dozens of the empty shadows. I seen it.”
    I gaped at him, stunned.
    I had defeated one of the hollow
creatures but only just. Coyote had fled from one because it was too strong.
    Whatever birthed them must be truly
monstrous.
    He nodded when he saw the look on my
face. “Choice is simple, Tommy. Kill it or don’t. If’n yeh don’t, then it’ll
just birth more of ’em.” He shrugged. “If’n yeh hunt it alone, I can’t say
yeh’ll come back.”
    “I scarcely killed the one shadow.
Whatever births them must be…” My voice trailed off as I looked at him.
    This was hopeless.
    He sipped his cider. “But if’n yeh
call the Hunter, I think he’ll seek it. If’n he don’t, it’ll still be fine. The
beast is a hungry one.” He gave me a look. “It’ll seek to find the Hunter.”
    I sat back, speechless.
    He knew me. He had known before he
even called.
    The hunt was my nature. In the end, I
had little choice.
    “Yeh think that yer Untold Age is
somethin’ that’s comin’.” He took another sip, and the firelight danced across
his face. “I’m tellin’ yeh, it’s here.” He leaned toward me, his eyes like
steel.
    “It’s here, and these things are the
spirits of the end.”
    My hand trembling, I grasped my mug.
I sipped at Coyote’s cider, my thoughts a storm.
    Firelight flickered warmth across my
face.
    May we meet on far shores.

 
12
     
    Time drifted, and we sat in silence.
The firelight wove shadows across our faces, and I gazed into the dancing
flames. Inwardly, I hoped to see some omen, some path that did not end in
death.
    I should have known better.
    Autumn had its own special kind of
horror, a sense of certain darkness that grew with every setting sun. The
inevitability of darkness and night stalked in its wake.
    If one were to listen on a moonless
night, one might hear the truth, the whispering murmurs of death in the autumn
sky. The sun still casted warmth, but slowly, the leaves dropped. Birds fled
for warmer lands, and animals began to dig deep, seeking warmth and sleep.
There, they dreamed until the world bloomed again.
    In winter, death came. The world
slept in quiet, peace. In the autumn, however, one can literally feel the
horror of summer’s warmth, its life, slipping away.
    Once, even the human-born knew the
secret turnings of the world. Long before my kind began to wane, the mortal
kith protected themselves from the oncoming darkness with story and song, spell
and steel. Even today, lost and confused in their towers of glass, part of them
remembered this fear. Out there, in the vast beyond, a cold darkness stalked
them with a hunger that could never be sated.
    It was no coincidence that harvest
festivals often made for frightening affairs with straw men and stories of
ghosts and woe. Hallow’s tales tended dark for a good reason. As the days
shortened, death stalked the world. Its chill grasp touched everything in
nature, and slowly, the world itself fell to winter’s grasp.
    This was my nature as the Herald of
the world’s dying.
    Of course Coyote well knew all of
this. He knew I had seen more than my share of dark mysteries. I always found
the twisted things that lived in the cracks between places. Wherever I went
strange things lurked at the edges, unseen by men.