BLACK WELLS: ALL OUR STRANGE GLORY - A WORK IN PROGRESS

Read the cold open from BLACK WELLS - BOOK 4.

The Astolat Mountain Range stands supreme. From base to pinnacle, blue stone to snowy gleam, the mountain rises. A dark prince with a height subordinate to the greater summits the world over but whose preeminence and undeniable majesty are found within. Steeper than its rockface, wider than any time-cloven fissure, the Astolats hoard a history hidden a hundred years and more. And from the heart of the mountain which hides so many secrets, flows the headwaters of the Cam River. The seasons change the river’s color. 

In the spring it is bright and clear and blue, white-capped where it shallows and bends. In the summer its banks swell with snowmelt, browning the river in the daylight and reddening it when the exhausted sun rests its shoulders upon the mountain tops. In autumn, the river purples all through the season, turning to coal when cloudless night sets the stars and the harvest moon upon the face of the waters. And when the snows and ice come flying on their fronts the Cam frosts white to transform itself into a silver ribbon never to be tied, tracing down the mountain, into the Starlight Valley.

The valley changes with the seasons too. In spring it is green and yellow and red with grass, sunflower, poppy. Later come bluebells, sugarbowl, blue-eyed mary. Lucky late-summer hikers and trail riders will sometimes happen upon fields of purple and pink where dark-throated shooting stars peep over creeping phlox that hide a single, time-weathered grave marker no longer bearing a name. For like the princely mountain and the city within its vast shadow, the flower-veiled valley hides its own secrets. Mysteries that have flown down from the mountain, surviving all seasons and churning waters, encircling Black Wells. All this grandeur, every inch of heart-wrenching beauty from topmost spire to shimmering eddies are the skin-deep trap hoping to steal, imprison, and put into bondage all our strange glory.