Prologue

Prologue

            Death is only the beginning of something else for someone like Jeff Mandon. It is a rarity of a life unfulfilled as he suffers, by his own rage, bound without a body as his dreams are endless nightmares. The world cries out to him, but he cannot grasp it as it sifts like sand between his fingers. His screams echo as he tries to search for the boy, EJ, he left behind as he watched him become a man. Now burdened with suffering, not there to help or guide him through life to relieve his suffering or perhaps change his destiny, he cries out. “EJ, forgive me.”

            The words seemed hollow as they left his trembling, cold lips. “EJ, where are you? What have I done?” His mouth tasted of iron as the blood fell upon his dead lips. Jeff could still smell the discharge of gunpowder, and after the light dimmed from his eyes, he lay dead on the rich blue carpet of his room. Jeff was almost nineteen. His face still held the innocence of a young boy with blond hair, which seemed white when the sun fell upon it. He was seven feet tall and barely cast a shadow in the world at the time.

            He had just received his LDS mission call when he graduated that following year as a high school basketball star. His parents, who held a prominent position in their church, were so proud. What more could they want than to have Jeff follow in his father’s footsteps? Jeff would stand by their side after two years when he returned from his mission, basking in the glory and power while others kneeled before them like dogs begging for scraps at the table.

            They couldn’t wait for him to join their crusade, helping Morgan rule this world and many others beyond the realm of Time. Instead, old men followed a puppet president entrenched in Washington, daring to lead Congress. No. They need a better man to rule them, who could set aside petty arguments. As Jeff’s mother held his cold hand as he lay in a blue silver casket, she would call him her blue-eyed baby boy. She mumbled. “That strong chin makes him look so much like his father. “Oh, why, Jeff, why? You could have had it all.”

            He tried to comfort her, but the living could not hear the dead. “Mother, it was Morgan. Your colleague, your friend,” but it was no use. The darkness, now cold against his skin, as he tried to move but was bound by some unseen force. He heard laughter all around him, the sound of Morgan’s voice.

            “At last, it is over, and you have lost. How dare you go against our plans? The boy will be mine! And the White Solon will never rise.”

            The words still echoed as the darkness receded, and he could move freely. Jeff sat up, shaking the last thoughts as he glanced around, seeing his body fade like a bad dream. Yet it was not a dream, for he remembers it clearly to the smallest detail. Jeff remembered Morgan walking into his bedroom uninvited placed the rifle into his hands. He could still feel the cold, hardened steel pressed against his head and his finger tightening around the trigger. Jeff turned to ask why. But it was too late as he watched the knob on the door turn and the door open and saw EJ’s surprised young face for the last Time.

            Jeff tried to shake the images from his mind for the hundredth time, but they always left him cold, like the graveyard where his bones lay after all these years. He looked up from his book to find Bowden staring at him. His cool blue eyes and raven black hair hung loosely over his broad shoulders.

            He was not a big man, an average height of six feet even, with high cheekbones and smooth lips that smiled occasionally. People knew him as a prankster in his younger years, but now he is a simple librarian of ancient languages and runes. He had been his mentor and teacher for thirty years and still looked like a man not a day over three hundred in wizard years. It had become his duty to find the missing link that links the boy to the Dark Prince and the White Solon and the whereabouts of the missing boy EJ as he searches the hidden libraries beyond the looking glass.

            Jeff’s anger and rage seemed to linger beyond the veil of Time as he looked for his charge, EJ Stuart. For some reason, he had lost him in the world in which he lives. And it did not help to know that his charge was in danger of losing his life if he could not find him or the connection. According to his good friend Derrick, a member of Death in charge of the human world, the boy lived in and used to live in before he became EJ’s guardian. Jeff growled impatiently. “EJ, where are you? Morgan, what have you done?” Jeff said, slamming another old history book closed loud enough to anger his mentor and close friend, Bowden, as he watched his notes slip to the floor in a messy heap.

 

* * * *

            In the distance, Morgan stood against a tree near an untended graveyard that only the ghost haunts these days. It has been centuries since it has seen an actual person and even longer since Morgan visited this particular graveyard. For in it, the buried bones of both his parents, Glen, and Melee Tremens. The thoughts of his father still anger him. Hess, his master, was right after all. He needed to die. But even his brothers, Orayon and Daygan, have vacant tombs that still elude him after all these years. Yet this was not the reason he was here. Morgan was not here to pay his respects to the dead as they whispered among the graves.

            No, he was here to obtain a contract from a young man named Jim Stuart. The boy’s soon to be a father, according to geological recorders of this Time period. Morgan carefully sifted through the pages and notes regarding the place and time Jim would be most vulnerable and willing to give anything to spare his own life.

            So, he meditates in a large circle that he had drawn moments ago with black magic, using the bones of the dead taken from this graveyard and grounded them into a fine powder. The bones Morgan used had to come from his father and his mother. He licked his lips, remembering the very night he sacrificed his mother’s very body and soul upon the black altar centuries ago. The screams still echo in those halls, her warm blood upon his lips as he hungered for power and the glory all those many years ago. Leading to this very moment in Time.

            Morgan dipped his fingers into the chalice as he drew the remaining runes that would transport him to the place and time indicated in his notes. The air shimmered as he spoke the words. “Ner’na fortune’a say’na sin’ grayden.” The world around him seemed to dissolve and remake itself. Morgan now stood on a high mountain where things that looked like moving metal, known as cars, seemed to move on solid black ground. With a glance at his watch, he confirms (that) it is the correct location. With his heightened vision, he waits for the moment when Jim Stuart will be his to control.

            The time is 3 p.m. as a truck and its passengers descend the mountain road. Jim sat back against the back of the truck on his way home, tired after a long day digging trenches for a new sewer pipe in Spanish Fork Canyon. He just closed his eyes to rest when he felt the truck swerve off the road as the strong, cold wind seemed to pick the truck up and push it over the edge. He thought he heard laughter in the wind, but who would be laughing? The truck hit a large boulder on the right side, sending him and the two men out of the truck. He and the truck rolled down the steep embankment before it burst into flames. Again, the laughter grew around him.

            Jim screamed in pain as the back axle of the truck slammed on top of him, pinning his legs. He screamed for help, but there was nobody around him except the one man that seemed dead not more than a few feet from him. The thoughts were of his life, his young life still unfilled now detained because of the Korean War, which he will leave for in few short months, and of his wife, Linda, flashed in his mind.

            They had only been married a year ago next Tuesday. At least he thinks it was Tuesday; it could have been Friday. “Hell. How is a man supposed to keep dates in his head? I haven’t even bought her a gift yet. The pain is unbearable.” Jim knew the pain would soon end. He could feel his body growing cold and his eyes wanting to close. Yet Jim kept them open, not letting the world leave him behind. Time seemed to pass slowly before he heard voices above him, a man screaming his name as he gripped his arm. It was no use.

            He was so tired; he just wanted to rest as the voice kept screaming his name. “Jim, stay with me. Can you hear me?” The voice seemed hollow as he tried to answer, but his lips would not move. Another voice seemed to reach into his mind. A strange foreboding came over him. It seemed cold yet distant. “I think he’s dead, sir,” the man said.

            Jim wanted to yell. “No. I am still here,” but he could not seem to get his mouth to move. He thought he heard strange words that sounded more like gibberish more than anything; there was a ringing in his ears, so he could not be sure. 

            Jim was the father of the boy, Eric, who everyone called EJ, the boy destined to be the Dark Prince according to the prophecies, and why Morgan was here in the first place now that Jeff was dead. The White Solon was no longer the person who could ruin everything he had spent a lifetime in the making. Jim was shorter than most men, being only five feet or a little under.

Women didn't consider Jim handsome, and he didn't have the body of a bodybuilder. His mother, Betty, EJ’s grandmother, had said he wasn’t always this way; in fact, he was the kindest boy she knew, but something happened soon after his father died and got worse when he came home after the Vietnam War.

            Morgan waved the man away, pretending to take his pulse. “Sir, I think your friends are dead. Check the rest; they might still be alive and need your help.” Not that he really cared. He had what he came for, as he tried to smile to reassure the man standing over him. Morgan bent down, placed his hand on Jim’s shoulder, and let a little of his power to heal him just enough to awaken him and dull the pain. He staggered for a moment of its loss as he watched Jim’s eyes flutter open. “Oh, good, I see you are among the living, Jim. Try not to move,” he said. “Playing the ‘Good Samaritan’ is really taxing.” He growled under his breath, but he needed that man’s soul. It seemed like hours before the ambulance and rescue workers arrived. 

            Morgan took his place among the EMTs, helped them carry Jim up the hill, and slid in next to him as they closed the door. According to the records in the future archives, he knew Jim would have survived the crash. Despite his help, Jim would have lived with a slight limp in his right leg, not bad enough to release him from the draft of another petty war. Still, he needed Jim to realize the opposite if he was going to take his soul, and Morgan needed his firstborn son to stand by him before he could rule the world and the worlds beyond Time.

            He hated to dispose of Jeff, but he could not stand the interference of his plans taking shape and making sure that Jeff could not become the White Solon with the help of The Council of Light, for in the book of Time and in all the prophesy he had read, it stated that White Solon was the only person who could stop him from becoming lord and king of all the worlds here and beyond the stars, most of all become a God which was his main goal. Jeff needed to be removed before his true power awakened, and with his constant interference stopped for good for his plan of total domination, things could go as planned.

            All he needed was the boy, Jim’s firstborn, to take his place by his side as the Dark Prince. The one that could lead him to the prize and the only one that could gather the Five Keys of Destiney to open the door of prophecy that would give him the power of the Gods to rule. “Yes, the prize and the power will be mine as they should be, as promised all those centuries ago by my master Hess.”

            As they rode, Morgan pretended to monitor the equipment and Jim as he reached inside his mind and moved his lips as if he was talking to him. Before long, he had what he came for as Morgan placed Jim’s bloody thumb on the document as they entered the Payson Hospital and placing Jim into a deep sleep and vanished back to his realm to wait until the boy prince was born, so he could guide him. He hated the fact he couldn’t interfere with Time and free will. Not even the gods above had that kind of power, but he could move people and influence them to a certain point. Even then, if someone caught him, there would be consequences, but he had no intention of being caught. He smiled as he remembered how each person who has tried to stop him had died by his own hands. More so the idiots that belong to The Council of Light, which he intends to destroy once and for all, checking them off his list one at a time until there would be no one left to resist him, just like his father, Glen, his mother, Melee, and soon his two brothers, Orayon and Daygan.

            Jim’s head hurt from all the minor details of the EMT who rode with him to the hospital. Something about his son being chosen to be a Dark Prince. “Please. That can’t be right. I don’t even have a son.” He knew of no Queens or Kings in his family tree, but it still left him cold just thinking about it. “What a strange man. I really must have been out of it to believe this nonsense,” he mumbled as he turned to the nurse. “Is my wife here yet? If so―tell her―I am sorry.”

            Jim slipped back into a deep, cold sleep; something seemed to be wrong and broken inside as if he was missing a part of something important. Linda held his hand, asking him. “Sorry for what, Jim? Jim?” With no response, she watched his eyes close. She thought she heard laughter in the room, but no one but Linda was there. “Strange?” The nurse came in, handing Jim’s personal items. Car keys, his wallet, and scuffed-up shoes with a letter stuffed inside. Her eyes widened as she noticed it was a government letter. Linda’s hands shook as she reopened the letter. Inside was a draft notice for her husband to be transferred to the American Air Force base in Salt Lake City, Utah. Dated February 21st, 1966.

            Tears stung her eyes as she looked at Jim sleeping in the hospital bed. She could not bear the thought of losing him in North Korea. She hadn’t even told him she was pregnant and had planned to go on their first wedding anniversary next Wednesday. “Please, Jim, please don’t leave me.” She cried, holding his hand.

Reviews

[Kita Capri]

Excellent prologue! Your descriptions helped me envision the scenes more vividly. Well done!