Casander darkbloom and t.., p.1
Casander Darkbloom and the Threads of Power, page 1
CHAPTER 1: An Act Against Nature
CHAPTER 2: Curious and Curiouser
CHAPTER 3: Welcome to Wayward
CHAPTER 4: The Master of All
CHAPTER 5: The Order Trials
CHAPTER 6: The Darkbloom Legacy
CHAPTER 7: The Abnormies
CHAPTER 8: Du Villaine and Snout
CHAPTER 9: The Balance Is Not the Equal
CHAPTER 10: The Last Deathmaker
CHAPTER 11: The Mint Exchange
CHAPTER 12: The Elementie Emporium
CHAPTER 13: A Wonderfully Wacky Waywardmas
CHAPTER 14: Things Best Left Forgotten
CHAPTER 15: The Mini Questial
CHAPTER 16: The Forbidden Scuffle
CHAPTER 17: The Abominable Archives
CHAPTER 18: Puggle the Nuggle
CHAPTER 19: Hiders and Seekers
CHAPTER 20: The Informant
CHAPTER 21: Warrior Bane
CHAPTER 22: Heroes
PARIS, FRANCE
IN THE BEGINNING, WHEN THE UNIVERSE WAS MERELY stardust and night, the world was woven from powerful threads of twilight and white.
Life and death. Good and evil. Dawn and dusk. That was the way things were at the origin of time, before the clocks started spinning, the years flew by, and the strength of these threads weakened as people evolved and spread across the world.
In some, the threads changed into different shades of colour – but in many people, they dulled, faded and lost their powers altogether.
It was this fact that Claudius Bane liked to remind himself of often, especially on nights like this. Nights that were unusual. Nights when the uneasy sense of something terrible was brewing in the air and he needed his courage the most. It brought him a great deal of comfort to remember that he was one of the special ones. Someone who had more magic, more stardust, more powerful threads still woven through his veins than most ordinary people around him.
A trait that marked him as different.
One that identified him as someone known as an Other.
A cold, brisk wind whipped against Claudius’s cheeks as he strode purposefully along the banks of the Seine. It was almost midnight; lamplight reflected off the river’s quivering water and most of Paris was asleep as the clocks approached the witching hour. Alone, he hugged his long, sweeping violet cloak tighter around his body, shivering. Yet it wasn’t just the freezing weather that chilled him to the bone.
It was what he had come here to do.
And who he had come to meet.
The summons had arrived yesterday at noon. Claudius hadn’t the faintest idea how a letter from the Normie world had even reached the Balance Lands in the first place. All he knew was that one moment, he had been sitting at his desk, grading students’ papers, and the next, a single, starched envelope was floating through his window, transported on an Airscaper mailman’s wind.
Upon first inspection, it looked as simple and innocent as any other letter – probably a disgruntled parent complaining that their unruly child had ended up in detention again. But the envelope’s black-and-white seal – a snow-white bird entangled mid-flight with a scrawny jet-black raven – instantly made his fingers tremble. It was the symbol of the Lifemakers and Deathmakers. The most powerful, dangerous and rarest kind of Others to exist.
Only a handful of words were scrawled across the page inside in thick, black ink:
Bring The Book of Skulls and Skin.
121a Rue de la Noir, Paris.
12 o’clock.
Or else I’ll tell them everything.
The sender hadn’t signed their name at the bottom.
They didn’t need to.
Claudius had only one secret he was willing to do anything to protect – and there was only one person who knew it.
The Book of Skulls and Skin felt like a weighted stone in his satchel now. It was an old tome. An ancient relic. Just having it in his possession – when nobody from the Grand Council knew it was missing – felt wrong. But bringing it into the mortal world … that was an act against nature.
Overhead, rain cracked the sky open and thunder roared in disapproval. With the Eiffel Tower at his back, Claudius eventually reached the address on the note and rapped on the apartment’s door three times.
It creaked open after the final knock.
“Who are you?” a small voice whispered from the other side.
A child.
This certainly wasn’t who Claudius had been expecting to meet.
He swallowed hard. “My name is Dr Claudius Bane,” he said, before clutching his bag protectively closer and taking a step back into the shadows. “Someone sent for me from Wayward School. I’m here to deliver a book, but I believe I may have the wrong address.”
The door swung open.
“No,” the boy standing inside replied determinedly. His ferocious amber eyes narrowed. “I summoned you here and you’re late.”
Words failed Claudius as he opened and closed his mouth like a gormless goldfish. The young boy staring back at him was merely ten or eleven years old. He was round-faced, but tall and lanky like a string bean, with soot-black hair. His eyes sparked like smokeless flames, causing Claudius to look away first.
Impossible.
He had expected to meet someone else – anyone else – but not this child. How had someone so young been smart and powerful enough to send a letter to the Balance Lands? What was this prodigy doing in the normal world? And, most worryingly of all, how did he know about The Book of Skulls and Skin?
Another uneasy feeling hummed in the air around Claudius now, thicker than before. Fear. He had seriously misjudged this encounter. The threads of power throbbed so violently within the boy before him that Claudius could feel them. Taste them. Smell them.
They felt like cold, lifeless fingers drawing lines up and down his spine. Like grave dirt on his tongue and the stale scent of something no longer living.
Deathmaker.
That was the Order of Others this boy belonged to.
“Come in,” said the boy sternly, stepping aside so Claudius could pass.
Still shaken, Claudius silently obliged.
The apartment was furnished in a simple fashion. There was a plain brown table surrounded by plain brown chairs. Flaky teal wallpaper overlooked two rickety beds tucked away in a corner, one of which cradled a frail-looking woman with her head turned to the wall. Raspy breaths rattled through her ribcage as Claudius and the boy approached. Her skin was as white as chalk, her hair as fine as silk, and she wore a holey nightgown which had been eaten away by moths. For a second, a flicker of familiarity tickled Claudius’s skin, but he had never met anyone so weak and sickly in his life.
“Don’t worry, Mama,” the boy said, snatching The Book of Skulls and Skin from Claudius’s bag before Claudius could stop him. He knelt beside his mother and placed the book in her lap. “I’ll make you better. This will all be over soon.”
“Aeurdan,” the woman croaked, reaching out for her son.
The boy took her hand and opened the book. When Claudius saw which page he had landed on, he leapt forward:
Blood rituals and power binding.
“What are you doing?” cried Claudius.
He never got an answer.
With a quick flick of his hand, the boy sent Claudius Bane flying across the room. Claudius didn’t even have time to shout before he collided against the far brick wall with a sickening crunch. Helplessly, he watched as the young boy plucked a sewing needle from his mother’s pocket, before first pricking her finger and then his own.
“NO!”
But it was too late. The boy had already closed his eyes and begun muttering the incantation.
Suddenly, the woman started to scream.
An impossible wind rose from nowhere and ripped through the apartment. The woman’s pasty skin began to flake apart, turning to dust and disappearing into thin air. Her whole body shrank until her clothes hung and flapped like fabric on a laundry line, her eyes flashing milky white as she gripped her son’s hand harder, trying to tell him that something was wrong. Very wrong.
When the young boy opened his own eyes, they were filled with terror.
“Mama!” he howled.
“Look what you’ve done!” shouted Claudius. He climbed stiffly to his feet and rushed towards them, but by the time he got there, the woman had vanished. A gossamer trace of dust was all that was left behind.
“Mama! Mama!” the boy wailed, clawing at the place where she had been.
The wind dissipated as quickly as it had come. Tears streamed down the boy’s face as Claudius spun around, searching for The Book of Skulls and Skin. What had he done? How had this happened?
His eyes finally fell on the tome, tossed under the other bed, at the same time the boy saw it. Together, they rushed towards it. Claudius’s hands wrapped around the book’s leather first – until he was swiftly dragged backwards by a small pair of hands around his ankles. Claudius kicked out at the boy. The boy recoiled and screamed. Then, with one more flick of his hand, the boy catapulted Claudius Bane to the other side of the room with a mighty, invisible force.
This time when Claudius hit the wall, everything went black.
LONDON, ENGLAND SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER
CURIOUS MRS CRANE’S SHOP OF EVEN CURIOUSER Curiosities was the most special shop in all of London, though few people knew the real reason why. Behind its multicolour
For there slept a young boy with the most extraordinary story, though he had no memory of anything at all.
For Casander, every day was a new day. A scrubbed slate. A blessing and a curse which meant that each day could never be anything like the last.
He could remember the basic things, like his name, Casander, and his age, twelve, but everything else that happened to him slipped from his mind, like mist through open fingers, overnight.
Each morning, he would wake up, rub the sleepy-dust from his eyes and stretch out his legs – with no memory of what he had done the day before or whom he had seen the day before that. Casander didn’t know how he had wound up sleeping outside the shop. Or if he had a home elsewhere, with parents who were missing him. It wasn’t like he had anyone who could help him figure it out, either.
Most of the customers who trickled in and out of the shop thought it was such an odd place that they rarely came back. The only people who took particular notice of Casander were the shop’s owner, Will, and the little raven-haired girl who occasionally helped him stack the shelves. Neither thought it was polite to pry and stick their noses into someone else’s business, so they simply kept a watchful eye on Casander from a distance. He didn’t bother them, and they didn’t bother him.
Until the incident with the bird happened.
And then the mysterious boy outside became very hard to ignore.
It all began on a wet, miserable Tuesday.
Casander didn’t know much about himself, but he knew that he had always hated Tuesdays. Tuesdays were the nothing days. Not like dreaded Mondays, with the slog of a long week ahead, or Wednesdays, with their happy dance feeling when half of the week was already done. In fact, the only good thing about Tuesdays was that Crane’s Curiosities was usually quiet, meaning there were fewer snooty stares from customers and Cas didn’t get a headache every time the bell above the door tinkled when somebody entered or left.
On this particular Tuesday, it was raining cats and dogs.
Perhaps if Cas had been able to remember something – anything – then this would’ve been the first sign that something was going to be different about this day.
Not that it was literally raining cats and dogs, of course – that would have been a worrying sign to ignore – but that Crane’s Curiosities was filled to the brim with people. Usually on rainy days like this, the howling weather deterred people from venturing to the shop. They preferred to stay cosied up at home or wait out the storm in the nearby Natural History Museum. But instead, something was propelling people into the shop in droves.
Trinkets and titbits were flying off the crooked shelves in a frenzy. People seemed to be buying just about anything and everything to avoid going back out into the drizzle. As the shop’s owner, Will should’ve been delighted. But every time a customer came or went, the open door revealed Cas shivering outside.
By late afternoon, the guilt became too much.
“Hold the till,” Will finally sighed, turning to the girl who helped him and heading towards the door.
Even before he had pushed it open, Will was already having doubts. He’d had a funny feeling about the mysterious boy from the first time he saw him, though he couldn’t remember exactly how long ago that was. Will had only caught glimpses of him at first; a flash of a dark silhouette or unusual-coloured eyes peering through the windows. The boy had been popping up randomly here and there throughout the summer, but Will had caught him snoozing outside almost every day recently. It was practically like he had become part of the shop. Luckily, the boy always showed up when Will’s assistant was around, so the raven-haired girl could make sure he wasn’t causing trouble.
But Will couldn’t very well let the poor boy sit out there like a scolded puppy now.
“Look, kid,” said Will, holding open the door. “I don’t know who you are or where you’re from, but you’ve been lurking around long enough that you’ve basically become my responsibility. You’ll freeze to death in this rain, so come inside quickly before I change my mind.”
For a long moment the shopkeeper and the boy simply stared at one another. Whereas Will was about as ordinary-looking as an ordinary person could be – brown hair, a wonky nose and a small smudge of dirt on one of his dimples being the most interesting thing about him – Cas was the opposite. He was a scrawny runt of a boy, with dark, curly hair and grey eyes, which had little flecks of violet in them. He was slightly knock-kneed too, since he was very leggy for his age. His gangly legs were swamped by a pair of ratty jeans, and he always wore mismatched trainers. Today one was bright orange; the other was polka dot green.
“Thanks,” said Cas brightly, smiling a too-wide smile that he hadn’t quite grown into yet. “But forget about freezing in this weather; I’ll probably end up swimming in it first.”
The lashing rain was so bad that Cas had considered the idea of using the street as a slip ’n’ slide, but he figured this probably wasn’t the time to mention that.
“W-welcome to Crane’s,” stammered Will, his eyebrows shooting up into his hairline upon hearing the boy speak for the first time. “What did you say your name was again?”
“I didn’t,” replied Cas. “I’m—”
But just as he moved to shake Will’s outstretched hand, the second sign of something different happened.
Casander lost control of his arm.
The thrashing motion came on out of nowhere. One minute, Cas was holding his hand out in greeting, and the next, he had lost all control other than what general direction he wanted to poke it in. The energy that seized his limb was almost indescribable, yet at the same time, Cas had a feeling that this wasn’t the first time this had happened. It felt like his body was being gripped by an invisible force. Tingling, sparking energy shot up and down his arm, slowly spreading to his leg too, as if something were stuck inside him and desperately trying to burst out.
Behind the counter, Will’s assistant looked up. The girl observed him with an interested but unsurprised expression, as if this had happened many times before.
“I’m – I—” Cas began to say again, but then just as quickly as the tingling energy had come, it disappeared. He had full control over his limbs once more. “I’ll only be in here a minute or two,” he muttered quickly, “to get out of the cold.”
Before Will could ask what was wrong or offer help, Cas rushed into the shop. He briefly met the gaze of the girl at the counter, before promptly looking away.
Embarrassment and confusion swelled in Cas’s stomach like a gnawing monster with tentacles, as he weaved his way between display cases and tables. He passed twisted staffs, exotic plants and jewellery made from the scales of some great beast, but none of them intrigued him. Spotting a quiet corner by a bunch of creepy taxidermized animals, Cas crouched behind a shelf. He pressed his forehead against the misty shop window. Leftover sparks of energy still made his arm twitch – but even though he didn’t understand it, for some reason he wasn’t afraid of it either. The feeling was like an old friend saying hello again. Whatever it was – whatever had happened to him – had clearly been a part of him for a long time.
Why did it have to happen in front of those people, though? thought Cas.
He could deal with being out of the ordinary – he was an impossibly forgetful nobody boy who slept outside a curiosity shop, after all. But if the shopkeeper and the girl didn’t think he was a freak before, they certainly must now.
He sighed. “At least you don’t have to worry about being a weirdo,” he muttered to a stuffed raven on the shelf. “Your last dilemma was probably whether to have worms or bread scraps for breakfast.”
It might have been a trick of the light, but Cas could’ve sworn he saw the bird blink in reply.
Shaking his head, Cas reached out to stroke the raven’s cool feathers, trying to ignore the uncomfortable feeling still swirling in his belly. He needed a distraction. As it happened, two loud women were gossiping away like geese on the other side of the shelf.
