Blackfire: The Girl with the Diamond Key: The Books of Bairnmoor, Volume III

By James Daniel Eckblad

Blackfire: The Girl with the Diamond Key (Volume III of the trilogy) concludes the story of four unlikely teenagers who are summoned by a mysterious stranger to save another world being destroyed by evil. Elli Adams and her friends Beatriz, Jamie, and Alex must overcome challenges of blindness, self-confidence, and Down syndrome as they struggle together to fulfill their mysterious calling as Bairnmoor's last prophetic hope. Join them as they adventure through singing forests and stardust valleys full of mystical, glorious, and ferocious creatures, all of which test their resolve in the face of overwhelming adversity.

Eckblad's novel wrestles with the age-old questions of Good and Evil and the nature of the heroic life, even as it provides a fresh perspective on how we can have faith in the Good against every indication that Evil is prevailing―and how each of us can be immensely more than we seem to be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Nov 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781498240024

James Daniel Eckblad

James Daniel Eckblad has served as both a pastor and a trial attorney, with degrees in theology and law from Yale University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, respectively. His writings range from tales and short stories to short plays, and his papers and articles on law and theology have been included in various journals and symposia. Blackfire is his first published work of fiction. He lives and works in Chicago.

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Blackfire: The Girl with the Diamond Key

The Books of Bairnmoor, Volume III

James Daniel Eckblad

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For

Genevieve (Vivi) Kennedy Eckblad, my granddaughter

Table of Contents

Title Page

~introduction~

~one~

~two~

~three~

~four~

~five~

~six~

~seven~

~eight~

~nine~

~ten~

~eleven~

~twelve~

~thirteen~

~fourteen~

~fifteen~

~sixteen~

~seventeen~

~eighteen~

~nineteen~

~twenty~

~twenty-one~

~twenty-two~

~twenty-three~

~twenty-four~

~twenty-five~

~introduction~

Introduction to Volume III of the trilogy, including spoilers for Volumes I and II:

In Volume I the reader was introduced to four extremely challenged young teenagers—Elli, Beatríz, Alex, and Jamie—who in the basement of the Millerton library were summoned, by way of the ancient messenger Peterwinkle, to learn of their call—by someone no one has ever seen named the Good—to set out on a quest to save a world existing perpendicular to their own. With reluctant consent, given largely because the children were told that they alone could accomplish the mission—if accomplishable at all—these exceedingly unlikely heroes, variously disabled by facial disfigurement, verbal abuse, blindness, and Down syndrome, entered the world of Bairnmoor (land of children), striving to release from her imprisonment far away beyond The Mountains the child Queen, Taralina, and so save her world—as well as their own—from annihilation by the evil Nothingness of Sutante Bliss. Protesting—first to Peterwinkle and then to others on the journey—that they had less ability than virtually anyone else to undertake such a mission, the children nevertheless set out, trusting the call, and so discovered along the way the secret to how it is that virtually anyone can come to possess the capacities needed to attempt that which is otherwise impossible.

On their journey through Bairnmoor’s haunted forests and mysterious moors, towering mountains and magical valleys, the children encountered various creatures, some terrifying and evil, intent on destroying them, and so their mission, while others they encountered were awesome and good, fulfilling their own mysterious calling to assist the children. Early on the children encountered Hannah—a woman of advanced age not apparent from her stunningly youthful appearance—who gave them their initial instructions and warnings for the journey, as well as a giant millipede known as a Mortejos (pronounced mor-TAY-hoss) that tried to devour them. They also chanced upon a stick man called Thorn, who had just saved the oblivious children from certain death at the hands of Wolfmen and other vile creatures constituting Sutante’s vast army. In addition to Thorn, who swore to never leave the children, though soon forced to do so, the children were confronted in the singing Forest of Lament by the unicorn Childheart, who, with huge misgivings, would end up leading their mission party. They were astonished at one point by the sudden appearance of a Four-winged condor named Starnee, and a host of angels in the form of a squadron of flying toads. And then there was Kahner, an Unperson child belonging to the Den of Liars, whom the other children ended up both first trying to kill in self-defense and then healing and embracing as a valuable, though enigmatic—and finally treasonous—companion for the journey. But no encounter was as intense and unsettling, nor as notable and perplexing, if not more terrifying, than the encounter by all four children at different times with Blackfire—a white dragon whose apparently evil nature and significance in the cosmic scheme of things seemed inscrutable, if not disturbingly irrelevant.

Toward the end of Volume I, leading up to the beginning of Volume II, Thorn and three of the children—Beatríz, Alex, and Jamie—survived an encounter with a vile Thrasher at the dead end of a long passageway in The Mountains, thanks to the timely arrival of the condor, Starnee. At this point, the children and Thorn noted the perplexing absence of Kahner, who only moments earlier had been with them in the passageway. The five questing companions then soon discovered at an open castle window high above the ground none other than Elli, whom Sutante Bliss’s daughter, Santanya, was holding captive. On escaping from the castle with the assistance once again of Starnee, Santanya dispatched troops to capture the children, Thorn, and the condor. However, forces loyal to Sutante, but inexplicably hostile to Santanya, also spied the children from their encampment at the dead Queen’s castle some distance away and sent out warriors to apprehend them, thereby engaging the two wicked sides in competitive battle. Although circumstances seemed grim for the children and company, Childheart arrived just in time to rescue Elli and Beatríz and, with Starnee’s help, deliver them to the stairwell in Taralina’s castle that would hopefully lead them down to the Queen’s tomb—where the girls would attempt to open the tomb door with their black key, and thus fulfill the most critical portion of the prophetic poem engraved on the tomb door:

At close of time the door be shut

Against the child within without;

The lock a seal against the death

Of nothingness about.

Through space and time a child shall come

To open this eternal door;

The Queen, released from imprisonment,

Will spread her life forevermore.

The child shall come with forces fierce:

Evil, legions of children to meet;

And with the sword of right and good

Adultish nothingness defeat.

From some dimension far beyond

The reach of our eternity;

The child shall come and open wide

This portal with a diamond key.

While Starnee and Childheart continued to battle enemy forces by the hundreds at the top of the castle stairs, the two girls descended the steps and entered the tomb hall. They immediately began to dash to the tomb door, only to be abruptly blocked by dozens of warriors bolting from their hiding places. Then, to the shock of the girls, Kahner stepped from among the warriors and tried to persuade Elli and Beatríz that, as their friend (who would, he said, explain everything later), he wanted to help them get into the tomb. Instead, Kahner tricked them. He stole the black key and tried to kill the girls, hitting Elli in the back with a spear that propelled her (and Beatríz whom Elli was shielding in her arms) into the locked tomb door. The impact of the girls’ bodies forced the door open, causing the girls to tumble into the tomb, apparently killed. Then, as if on its own, the door swung shut and locked. At that final moment in Volume I, it was unclear what had happened to those doing battle above ground: Alex and Jamie, Thorn, and of course Starnee and Childheart, who, where Volume II opened, had been doing battle at the top of the stairs, hoping against hope before their deaths to fight just long enough to allow the girls to get to the tomb with the diamond key.

Volume II opened with Starnee and Childheart about to be captured, likely tortured, and then certainly killed. But the two discovered themselves suddenly winning the battle, if not the war, by virtue of an earthquake that sent the terrified enemy warriors fleeing the battlefield that was shifting and opening beneath their feet. But there was really little for Starnee and Childheart to celebrate. For as the story soon unfolded, the reader learned that while all in the questing party had survived the battle, they had also become once again separated in pairs, with virtually no two aware of the survival and whereabouts of any of the others.

Early on, Childheart and Starnee discovered Thorn near death on the battlefield, but in an effort to attend to his needs, Childheart became became separated from both Starnee and Thorn, ending up instead with Kahner. Together Childheart and Kahner began a search for the bodies of the girls, the unicorn unaware of both Kahner’s treachery and his identity as Sutante Bliss’s son, yet knowing something was amiss. In their vain search for the girls, first inside the vast tomb and then later in a long, branching passageway, Kahner and Childheart hit a dead end in a subterranean foundry belonging to Sutante Bliss. While Kahner was captured attempting to flee the foundry through a utility tunnel, Childheart had already leaped into raging waters that ran through and out of the cavern—beneath some mountains; just as Childheart was about to drown, he was instantly transported out of the water and onto a path that would lead him to his old friends, the Cannotoad Angels, all of whom were seated, as if blithely, atop a fjord overlooking The Sally Forth Seas, located at the northernmost point of land in Bairnmoor. After an intense conversation with Butterfly that left the two friends somewhat estranged, Childheart departed for Sutante’s fortress situated far to the south.

FOR CHILDHEART AND KAHNER, VOLUME II ENDS with the unicorn traversing, successively, barren knolls, a vast desert, an expansive marsh, and a broad river of rapids. He manages to jump the rapids; then, in his exhaustion, he falls asleep, only to be harshly awakened by choking smoke. Kahner has at this point quite disappeared, his whereabouts and condition unknown, even to the reader.

Throughout Volume II, while searching for the boys, Thorn and Starnee had been pursued relentlessly by a flock of falcons determined to kill them. After managing to evade the falcons successfully a number of times, the Dactyl and condor were about to be dealt a lethal blow above a small lake in The Mountains, when, once again, approaching the end of Volume II, Thorn and Starnee escaped the falcons by diving into, and then floating on, a tributary running east through The Mountains that was too narrow for a falcon attack.

FOR THORN AND STARNEE, VOLUMI II ENDS with the Dactyl and condor exiting both the tributary and The Mountains on the back of a waterfall that would have sent them crashing to their deaths on the rocks below, but for Starnee’s ability to spread four wings and fly away. Soaring above a vast marsh located more than a thousand feet below them, the condor and Dactyl spy in the distance about a mile to the north a grove of trees and a river running through it west to east, also ending in a waterfall. Presuming the boys had likely jumped into this river near Taralina’s castle to initially escape enemy warriors, it now appears that Alex and Jamie have plunged to their deaths over the falls. Exhausted and hungry, as well as immensely disheartened, Starnee and Thorn land among the trees for cover. There they eat, decide their next course of action, including a search for their friends’ bodies, and then sleep—or, in the case of Starnee, half sleep, with one eye open.

Much earlier in Volume II, Alex and Jamie, having indeed jumped into the river as their only means of escape from Santanya’s warriors, were about to be pulled over a waterfall to their deaths, when they were saved just in time by the giant bumblebee, Simply Bee, and transported in the bee’s pollen baskets to Simply’s hive in Sanctuary, located far to the northeast. Throughout Volume II the boys became better acquainted with Simply Bee as a precursor to joining Elli and Beatríz who (the boys learned from Simply) with the assistance of the ground grub, Aneht, are to lead an impossible assault against Sutante Bliss back at the Queen’s tomb, but (unknown to the boys) only by way of the girls first assailing Sutante’s impenetrable fortress located beyond the vile land of the shifting moors called the OOeegaltabog.

FOR ALEX AND JAMIE, VOLUME II ENDS with the boys, transported by Simply Bee, about to be reunited with Beatríz and Elli at the appointed place, only to discover that both the ground grub and the girls are missing. An invasion of Sanctuary by forces belonging to Sutante Bliss is now underway, with various creatures of battle climbing out of the OOeegaltabog and overwhelming the land that until this moment was the only place remaining in all of Bairnmoor that stood between Bairnmoor and its annihilation. As Simply and the boys witness the invasion from a hidden place in the trees, they are all but bereft of hope, wondering what they can now do that will prove to be anything more than futile.

At the very beginning of Volume II, the reader learned that Elli and Beatríz had not been killed by the direct strike of the spear in Elli’s back that had propelled the girls into the dead Queen’s tomb, Elli’s knife stowed behind her in the waist of her skirt having absorbed the brunt of the hit. Discovering no body—but only the empty clothes—of the Queen atop the stone bier, the girls began a determined search for a way out of the pitch black tomb. After some hours of walking hand in hand down a long tunnel away from the front of the tomb, Elli and Beatríz encountered a giant ground grub named Aneht who rescued them from the tomb and brought them to the land of Sanctuary, the only place remaining in the whole of Bairnmoor that had not been invaded by Sutante Bliss. Throughout the course of Volume II Aneht has been preparing the girls for war against Sutante Bliss in the most unusual of ways: by engaging them in Socratic dialogue that occurs in various places. In one moment they are conversing outside Mud Mansion, only to find themselves a moment later talking in the stars.

Toward the end of Volume II, the two girls, their preparation for war having been concluded, found themselves stationed atop Glannabar, the sawed-off trunk of an enormous tree that is covered by a dome of invisible silk threads. From there the girls were shortly to enter—under the careful instructions of Aneht, but nevertheless all alone—the terrifyingly evil OOeegaltabog as their only way back to the tomb that would constitute their only chance to attack and defeat Sutante Bliss. As the girls and Aneht awaited the arrival of someone named Sara, who was going to lower the girls into the OOeegaltabog, Aneht suddenly realized that she had forgotten the girls’ knapsacks filled with all the necessary provisions. She abruptly departed to retrieve the knapsacks, leaving the girls alone atop Glannabar, but assuring them that she would return shortly.

While Aneht was away, the girls were attacked by a flock of falcons; the birds could not reach Elli and Beatríz, however, because of the protective glass bubble covering Glannabar. Shortly thereafter, a giant white spider climbed atop Glannabar’s invisible dome and reached down between the silk threads toward the girls, who in terror crouched low, awaiting their demise. But when the spider began to speak, Elli and Beatríz quickly realized that the spider was none other than the Sara Aneht had been waiting for.

FOR ELLI AND BEATRÍZ, VOLUME II ENDS with the two girls and Sara witnessing to their horror a flock of falcons dropping the limp body of Aneht into the middle of the OOeegaltabog. Sara then departs swiftly to obtain the provisions the girls will require during the next phase of their journey. As soon as Sara returns with the knapsacks, she carries Elli and Beatríz in urgent haste to the northern edge of Sanctuary and lowers them on black silk threads into the OOeegaltabog. Aided solely by the light of Aneht’s lantern, the Darknessfinder, Elli and Beatríz must pass through the OOeegaltabog to reach the fortress belonging to Sutante Bliss and so, inscrutably, the only way back to the Queen’s tomb. Shortly after entering the OOeegaltabog, Elli suddenly disappears into the murk of the bog, screaming for Beatríz, who cannot see her.

Blackfire: The Girl with the Diamond Key

The Books of Bairnmoor, Volume III

Copyright © 2017 James Daniel Eckblad. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199

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8

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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-1632-7

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-4003-1

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-4002-4

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

December 5, 2017

~one~

Childheart sprang to his feet, coughing, choking on smoke that had engulfed him and was filling his lungs and stinging his eyes. The smoke was so dense that it blotted out the light from the sky, rendering Childheart incapable of seeing anything whatsoever, including most urgently any place providing a way of escape. And he knew he couldn’t last long; so any way out of the smoke, of necessity, would have to be nearby.

Childheart’s thoughts turned to the river—toward which he was already dashing, heading in the direction of its sound. Within seconds, the unicorn, galloping with utter abandon, tumbled harshly into the surf, his left hind leg striking a submerged rock as he plunged beneath the roiling waves, and was pulled by fierce currents swiftly downstream to the east.

Childheart knew that struggling against the currents would only waste oxygen. Moreover, he saw no light penetrating the water from above, and so concluded that surfacing for air at this point, despite his dire need, would simply deliver him to the same smoke he sprang into the water to escape. He wondered: would there be the lights of Fire Eyes to save him this time?

But Childheart had only just begun to search for lights as he continued to tumble and spin about in the undertows, fearful of some fatal collision with another submerged boulder, when with a jolt he felt himself lifted by a surge and launched out of the water. He landed hard against the ground, in a depression-like trough that was nearly ten feet beneath the smoke that continued to blanket the ground. And there was also some dim light, just barely seeping through the smoke, but enough for Childheart to see—to see the trough below and the smoke above, and so, with happy relief, to see the smokeless space where he lay.

The unicorn lay where he landed, breathing in air that was friendly to his lungs, and gathering his wits. Right away, Childheart sensed, in the darkness both ahead and behind, that the trough continued on some sort of course. Accordingly, he drew in several more breaths and then stood, his head just inches beneath the hovering layer of smoke, and at once began to step cautiously in the direction he was already facing, which seemed to be away from the river.

As he walked with probing tentativeness along the bottom of the depression, which was about six feet across, Childheart noticed: first, that he was working his way up hill, if ever so slightly; and, second, that there were deep wheel ruts in the hard-packed earth, suggesting a lengthy history of cart transport. How recently the carts had traveled along the route, however, Childheart could not determine. But it wasn’t as if Childheart had any inclination to allow wariness to dictate his movements. Proceeding on the present course, albeit with caution because of the darkness that veiled from sight whatever was twenty feet in front of him, was his only reasonable option, regardless of what lay ahead.

It wasn’t long before the smoke began to thin and Childheart was able to see well enough up the path to be able to trot, if not to gallop, if he so chose. But he still had no idea what existed just outside the trough—including anything that might be unfriendly—and reminded himself that any pace other than a slow walk would surely alert anything nearby to his presence.

On he walked up the path, gaining strength as he continued. Out of immediate danger, and aware of nothing imminent, Childheart now had the slight luxury of considering a pause on his journey to ponder his friends’ whereabouts. But Childheart continued walking up the path, pausing only in his mind.

He had every reason to believe that Kahner yet lived, if only still ensconced inside the industrial cavern or otherwise alive in the grip of capture. He was optimistic that Starnee and Thorn were still alive, there being no evidence that they were forcibly removed from Taralina’s compound during his brief absence while exploring the castle’s interior. He was optimistic, albeit less so, that Elli and Beatríz were still alive, since Kahner and he had not discovered them anywhere inside the tomb—or along the tunnel leading away from the Queen’s bier—and there being no evidence of any injury to the girls or of their deaths.

Childheart was not at all optimistic that the two boys were still alive, his last sighting of Alex and Jamie being the enemy closing in on them in fierce battle on the field between the two castles. And yet, he fleetingly reflected, as the smoke was fast dissipating before him, there seemed to him to be an inexorability to the story that their collective lives were unfolding that left him vaguely hopeful—as if the story itself was somehow in control, and the only determinative question was how the story would choose to end itself. But it was only a sense, and perhaps only wishful thinking, and not something that he at all could understand—and, therefore, not something he at all could believe. Still, even the merest sense of a controlling story was welcome, if only because it necessarily suggested a storyteller and an imagination, as well as a story with some direction, if not teleology, and because this sense, by being a sense, was (happily) unassailable by