When he needed to think, Aidan often went to the basement to work on his latest art project. And after his last vision, he needed to think plenty. He looked up at the canvas. I should have finished this days ago. But he hadn’t finished it.
Aidan frowned and then squeezed the tube of red acrylic paint until a small crimson pool formed in the bottom of his cup. Too much red, he thought. Just a drop would have been enough for the eyes.
He daubed his fine brush in the paint, lifted it slowly to the canvas, and stopped. I don’t want his eyes to be red. I want them to be blue! Aidan put the paintbrush down and rubbed his temples. How am I ever going to get Robby to understand, if I can’t talk to him?
Aidan shook his head and absently scanned the basement. Funny, he thought. It all started down here with the scrolls. He looked over toward the alcove beneath the stairs, now crammed full of cardboard boxes he and his dad had moved to make room for Aidan’s art studio. Aidan shook his head and laughed quietly.
He glanced around the room at his finished paintings, all illuminated by the conical track lights he and his father had installed. The five paintings were a kind of visual history of Aidan’s adventures—the Castle of Alleble, Grimwalk, Falon’s Labyrinth, the Black Crescent, and the Glimpses of Paragor.
On the first canvas sprawled the Castle of Alleble and its vast courtyard, where Captain Valithor, the Sentinel and chief knight of Alleble, had trained an inexperienced and timid Aidan, turning him into a brave warrior and eventually a hero. “Stir your stumps, Aidan, thou lumpish tardy-gaited puttock!!” Aidan grinned, remembering the tongue-lashings the Captain used to give him. It had scared Aidan half to death at first, but it really did toughen him up. Aidan had much to thank his Captain for.
Valithor had sacrificed his own mighty life for Aidan. It was a sacrifice that still hit home in many ways, for Captain Valithor was the Glimpse of Aidan’s grandfather. His death in The Realm had also meant Grampin’s death on earth. Aidan often wished that he could have spoken to Grampin one last time before he died. There was still so much more Aidan yearned to know about The Realm—and about the visions. Captain Valithor had seemed to know something . . . had Grampin known it too?
The next painting was all stormy grays and wintry whites, depicting the cold and desolate Grimwalk. Paragor, the dark ruler of that inhospitable region, had conjured forth a devastating storm to waylay Aidan and his team of knights from Alleble. There, Aidan had saved the life of Gwenne, his closest Glimpse friend, and received a kiss on the cheek for his troubles. Not a bad deal, Aidan thought with a warm smile. He wondered what Gwenne had been doing in The Realm since he left. Probably out on an adventure—some mission for King Eliam, no doubt. He wondered if she thought of him as much as he thought of her. If only I could . . . but he shook the thought away. Aidan knew there was no going back . . . not until the end.
The next painting was of the subterranean maze known as Falon’s Labyrinth. It was there that Aidan encountered a serpentine creature more fearsome than anything that lurked in his darkest nightmares. But in that fateful meeting, Aidan did not perish. Instead, he gained a powerful ally.
The last of Aidan’s finished paintings was a panoramic view of the Black Crescent. It was there, under the inspiration of King Eliam, that Aidan had pulled off a victory so startling that it earned him the title Knight of the Dawn and saw his name added to a very select list of Alleble’s heroes. Aidan ran his fingers across the long raised scar on his right forearm. The scar was a very real reminder of his adventures, but to Aidan’s continuing frustration, his mother refused to believe that the sharp blade of a sword had caused that wound. Aidan wondered what it would take to convince her that King Eliam, The Scrolls of Alleble, The Realm, and her decision to believe were all very real. So real in fact that they were a matter of life and death.
And that brought Aidan back to the canvas in front of him. It was a scene from The Realm like the others, but not a place he had been personally. It had come from another one of his visions—the visions that came in dreams or when he traveled between earth and The Realm, like tonight with the lightning. Some of the visions had been foretelling, but not all had come true yet. There was one vision that Aidan desperately hoped would never come to pass. In this vision, there was a cavernous hall, lit from above by a flaming chandelier. Beneath it, raising goblets as if in victory, were soldiers dressed in the dark armor of Paragory. Some of the Glimpse warriors had eyes that glinted green, the color of the undecided. Most of them had eyes that glinted red, a sign of service to Paragor. One of these red-eyed knights, Aidan recognized all too well. It was the Glimpse of Robby, his best friend from Maryland.
Aidan picked up the paintbrush, and instead of giving red eyes to the painted version of his friend, he dipped the brush into a clear cup of water and watched the color bleed away to nothing. If there is a way to reach Robby, he thought, then King Eliam will show me.
SLAM!! Aidan jumped, almost knocking over the stool and all his paints. Heavy footfalls bounded down the stairs, and there, looking breathless and feverishly excited, was Aidan’s dad.
“Aidan!” he said. “I’m glad you’re still awake. You’ve got to come see what I’ve found!”
“What?!”
“Well, I was boxing up some of Grampin’s stuff in his old study, and I got this weird feeling I was being watched. When I looked up, one of the books on Grampin’s bookshelves was sticking out.”
Aidan smiled, but shrugged.
“Aidan, it was Grampin’s diary. Inside, there’s a note for you.”
