Thomasina’s Novel

Thomasina in Y9 is writing a novel and would love to share her work so far with you. Please read and send any comments to the author: 016326@tmac.uk.com

The Evening Star

Chapter One

The Hunt

 

Seven girls were
running through a forest. Clear dappled morning sunlight shone through the tree
branches, making dew drops glisten on spider webs and the orange autumnal
leaves on the ground seem almost the colour of gold. The leaves crunched
beneath the girls’ bare feet as they ran, the chilly breeze fluttering their
silver togas. They were chasing some rogue water nymphs that had been flooding
camper’s tents in the nearby meadow. This was not usually the nature of forest
and freshwater nymphs, who usually kept themselves to themselves and considered
human affairs far too trivial to bother with. Sometimes however, young nymphs
become a little mischievous, and although the girls, known as the huntresses,
deal mostly in more serious trips of the spirit world, they could not help but
become a little protective on their home turf.

Their chase
led them to a clearing, where the nymphs had barely any access to water, so
their life force was dwindling. They had strayed too far from their streams,
and this was decreasing their energy considerably. The huntresses caught up,
and surrounded the water girls, who started to beg them not to hurt them, and
that they were just having a bit of fun. A girl stepped forward from the
huntresses. She was not particularly tall or strong looking, but you could tell
just by looking at her that she was the leader. She radiated power and
knowledge, and although she looked as the rest, no older than 14, she had
crinkles around her eyes that suggested she was older than she appeared, as
were the rest of the girls. Her hair was black and streaked with blue the
colour of woad and her high cheekbones and composed gait gave her a haughty
appearance. Her huge golden eyes considered the nymphs, and she seemed to be
calculating what to do with them.

“Childish
games seem a little below water nymphs such as yourself. You may return to your
streams, but cause trouble again and we’ll take you to a city, where the only
running water is in the sewers.” said the blue- black haired girl, Arrow. The
nymphs looked terrified. The taller one with hair a little darker turquoise than
the other started to cry. “Please my lady, we meant nothing by it, please don’t
send us to the city!”

“I won’t, but
repeat you actions and I will take you right to the centre of Manchester and
leave you there!” replied Arrow, and the huntresses parted to allow the nymphs
to return to their streams. They looked relieved and ran quickly in fear of
Arrow changing her mind.

A tall
curvy girl with waist length wavy red hair swung her bow onto her back and
turned to her companions “Well I’m glad that’s over with, I’m starving. Can we
go back now Arrow, I left the pig on the spit and it should be done in a few
minutes.”

“And I’m sure we would all prefer to stay out here in the
freezing morning air than return and suffer your cooking Llewellyn!” said a
tall black girl with a round face and madly curly hair. This made the girls
laugh, for between them it was an undisputed fact that Llewellyn was the best
cook in Cumbria. Arrow smiled “Honestly Toya, you never cease complaining. You
want freezing?” she shook a tree branch just above the rest of the girls, and
they were showered in icy dew drops.

After much
laughing and shouting at Toya for getting them all soaked, they turned and walked
back the way they came. In a few minutes they reached a lakeside, surrounded by
hills and slopes of perfect green grass.

When they
approached the west shore of the lake, the girls put on a little spurt of
speed. They reached a small jetty leading out into the water, with a small
rowing boat tied to the wooden post with a piece of long rotting rope. The
girls walked to the end of the jetty, and starting with Arrow and finishing with
Toya they plunged straight into the depths of the icy water. They seemed not to
have noticed they were completely submerged in an icy lake, and if they did
they had grown so used to it that it no longer fazed them. They continued
walking along the lake bed, deeper and deeper into the water. Their hair
rippled with the slight waves, and small fish swam around them in schools.

When they
reached a sandbank almost directly in the centre of the lake they stood on top.
The water seemed to acknowledge their presence, for it started swirling and
churning around them. The water grew more and more turbulent, until they were
surrounded by a flurry of bubbles and sand and mud, blocking their vision of
the lake around them and indeed their view of each other. This lasted for a
while, about five minutes. They seemed to be travelling down, as though in a
elevator of water and algae and sand. When the murk died down, they were stood
in a cave. It had no lights, and yet was lit up brightly as if by daylight.

They had hammocks in the corners for each
girl, a roaring fire with a pig on spit turning on its own. A huge circular oak
table sat in the middle of the cave. The table was surrounded by seven
mismatched chairs that almost looked as if they were an illusion. They seemed
to change shade, and blur slightly.

Llewellyn
and a skinny Native American girl with a tribal headdress, war paint and long
plaits called Takchawee headed straight over to the pig. Takchawee tried to
lift the pig but after much red faced struggling had to ask for help. “Annwyn
please can I have some help? This was one fat pig. No wonder it was so easy to
catch.”

A tall girl
with orange eyes the colour of autumn leaves, and short spiky leaf green hair
stood up. Her skin was nut brown, and her ears were long and pointed, with a
significant number of piercings in each one. She walked over to help Takchawee,
and lifted the huge sow from the spit with one hand. She took it and placed it
on the carving rock, a huge slab of rock with a flat surface. It had another
rock next to it that was the same size and shape, but was bloodstained and
chipped.

“Thanks so
much Ann, I would never have lifted that thing.” said Takchawee with a grin.
Annwyn laughed and poked Takchawee in the stomach gently, just where she knew
it tickled. “Don’t worry; you could never have lifted it with your tiny human
muscles!”

“In comparison
to a tree nymph, who could pull a plough with an index finger?” giggled
Takchawee. Llewellyn came over with a carving knife in hand and Annwyn jumped
out of the way immediately. “What?” asked Llewellyn. “Oh, nothing”, replied
Annwyn with a wink at Takchawee, “Just thought after over a thousand years you
might finally have gotten sick of me!”

“Ha ha, hilarious
I’m sure. You know as well as I do that I couldn’t kill you if I wanted to, and
believe me sometimes the offer is tempting.”

“Yes I know,
either die in battle or break the vows yadayadaya. Being a Huntress of Artemis
is no picnic. Except when we do have picnics in summer. Then it’s a picnic.” said
Annwyn, making Takchawee giggle. Llewellyn just rolled her eyes at them and
turned back to cutting the meat.

Annwyn and
Takchawee both walked and sat down at the table. Each chair surrounding the
table was different, and each girl had their separate chair that related to
them. Annwyn was seated between Takchawee and Llewellyn, on a chair that was a
little lower than the others, and had a strange wooden back. On closer
inspection however, the chair was visibly constructed of vines.

All the
girls were sat around the table, and at the centre was the pig, to be carved to
how much each girl wanted. Arrow stood. All the girls ceased their
conversations and turned to listen respectfully. Arrows chair was different
from the others. It was made of a shiny, silver white metal, and had many
symbols carved into the back, with a central moon at the top. It seemed to have
an aura of its own, for it seemed to glow as if with moonlight.
“Ladies, we sit for another meal, courtesy of Llewellyn. I have an
announcement to make, and it may prove to some of you rather worrying. Iona has
had a vision.” This was greeted by a collective gasp from the girls. Iona was
the youngest, having only been recruited in 1845, and had only ever had one
other vision, and that caused mass death and destruction. Iona stood. She had a
short spiky layered bob and a thick side fringe. Her hair was light brown, and
was streaked with blue dye, from when she was catalogued in the workhouse as a
child.

“I saw
darkness. And two women, stood as sisters of the night, united through hatred
and revenge. The dark is rising again, as it has before. And I saw a cat. Sly
and seductive, drawing unwitting people to the dark side.” Iona gulped and
continued, “Two sides will form, good and bad. Good led by a dark angel, an
orphaned goddess, and her sisters of the moon. I reckon that’s us.  And bad, well I didn’t catch much, but I know
she has met four of us before. And, she has red hair, and cats eyes.”

All of the
girls turned to look at Arrow. A dark haired girl with a silver circlet, white
skin and purple eyes stood. Iona sat back down, with a look of foreboding and
fear, and the dark haired girl started to speak in a low, sad voice that had a
strong Welsh accent. “Iona has prophesised before, but we mustn’t jump to the
conclusion that this will be as catastrophic. It could be a small dispute for
all we know.”

Annwyn
looked at Hesper like she had just punched her mother. “Are you out of your
mind? Small dispute? Have you forgotten what she predicted last time? I don’t
call the death of six million innocent Jewish people a small dispute, I call it
genocide.” Iona looked at them both stood on the defensive, both with shoulders
squared, and saw a fight coming. “Listen to me both of you, stop! You think I
like seeing the future and not being allowed to change it? No, but I get on
with it. But this isn’t a human affair. And it concerns us. So we have to
figure out what to do. Who is she Arrow? The red haired woman?”

Arrow
looked worried. She turned to look at Llewellyn. Llewellyn glass stool looked different.
What had before been perfect clear glass now seemed to be filled with black
smoke. She was scared. “I do know who she is, but I won’t tell you, because it
will just scare you. Now, we eat.” Arrow hacked a large chunk off the pigs’
rear and started tearing at it with her teeth, and the others followed suit.
When left to their own devices, girls are very messy eaters.

When the
pig was reduced to bones, the girls retired to their hammocks. By now it was
only lunchtime in the world above, but the huntresses had been out all night.
In ten minutes everyone was asleep except one girl. Iona was lying in her
hammock looking at the rocky ceiling. Her mind was spinning. Last time she saw
the bloody Holocaust, what would happen this time? She had a secret. There was
a bit of the prophecy she hadn’t told her sisters. She knew that someone was
going to betray them. One of the sisters was the other woman she had seen. But
she didn’t know who. Her sight had turned her against the only family she had ever
known. And that was why it was a curse.

She
stayed looking at the ceiling, and just for a moment, she thought she had seen
a shooting star fly across the dark stone. She shook her head and turned over,
trying to sleep. She knew that the woman with the red hair would be the one
they would fight in the end. She didn’t know who she was though, and that
troubled her. She knew that Arrow had met her before, and Arrow never talked
about her past.

She
thought about her past. The workhouse. Fighting to stay alive, having to look
after 34 orphan children and having to eat strips of meat peeled from bones.
Hell. What was coming would challenge her friends, sisters, and the people who
saved her from that. She touched her bronze knives with her fingers. Then
suddenly, she saw something. The woman with red hair, changing into a black
snake, and slithering up a tree. She knew that whoever was coming, whatever she
was. She was the fall of man.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Two

The Dark Side

 

Lilith was
restless. Her red hair fell down her back, streaked with black, and she was
fiddling with it agitatedly. The gold forehead crown she wore was glimmering in
the low light, and her black floor length dress swept behind her as she paced.
She seemed to be in an office of some sort. A large map of England was stuck to
the wall. Push pins were stuck in various spots of the map, mostly in either
historic areas or deep wilderness. The pins were highlighting the colonies of
supernatural beings in England, colour coded depending on species. Yellow for faeries
and elves, green for tree nymphs, dryads and elven women and blue for water
nymphs, naiads and water monsters. There were only three purple pins,
symbolising witch covens. Lilith walked over and studied the map, looking at
the purple pins. She sighed to herself. She remembered when purple pins would
have covered the whole map. Now witches were rarer than prophetesses. She
turned from the map, unable to look anymore, thinking of the days when the map
would have been covered entirely in push pins. Now there was less than fifty
push pins in use. She intended to change that soon enough.

That was
her grand plan. To regain the land lost to her people in the days of the witch
hunts. History failed to report the atrocities committed, how humans started
forest fires in the dryad and tree nymph woods, how the nymphs and spirits ran
while their trees, their sources of life, burnt and died. How they crushed
faeries in thumbscrews, and filled the elven women’s hollow backs with soil.
How they burnt millions of innocent, unsullied young women, mere girls, for
being different, for their gifts, and their magic.

Lilith
would bring back the old days, when magic could roam free of fear, and not have
to hide from the persecutors. She had to watch the burnings happen, and now she
would get revenge for every drop of blood, and sap, spilled. Every drop.

She
turned and walked to the window. Rain poured down, the sky was grey. She opened
the window and stuck her head out. When she looked down, she saw herself being
stared at by some male chav, in ridiculous jeans practically round his knees.
He yelled something up to her about her being a ‘fit bird’. She smiled at him
evilly. The knuckle-dragging Neanderthal would feel something, she thought to
herself. When he had ceased looking at her with his tongue lolling out of his
mouth, and walked round the corner, she shut her eyes and whispered some words.
A scream carried up to the window from just around the corner, blood starting
to mingle with the rainwater and running down the street into the drains. She
smiled and shut the window. Job done.

Lilith
walked over and sat at her desk. She reached for a quill, and dipped it in a small
ink well in the desk. The desk was very old, and was made of a dark wood,
almost black. It had a small drawer underneath, filled with parchment and a
book. The book was so yellowed it was almost brown, and it was written in a
strange writing, like illuminated script. It was bound by old rotting string,
and was charred around the edges. On the front it said ‘Maleus Malleficarum’.
This was the original.

She
took a roll of parchment, and began to write in a long, sweeping hand. ‘To my
sweet sister, we have set a date. On the 1st of January we give
Britain back to its owners. The humans will fall, and we will take the world by
force, and give it back to our fellows. Reply soon, with more information. The
huntresses will try to stop me, but they must fail. You must ensure that.
Lilith.’

She
stood, and shut her eyes. Her body twisted, and morphed, growing short black
hair all over, and her red hair retracted back into her head. Her limbs twisted
and shortened until she was on all fours. Her skull changed shape and her
teeth, already sharp, grew huge canines like a sabre tooth tiger. Suddenly, the
skin on her back stretched, growing extra bones, and widening until she had
huge bat wings.
Lilith stood and stretched her legs. But Lilith was no longer there.
Instead there was a huge black winged cat, with sabre teeth and a red diamond
patch on her forehead. It reared on its hind legs and let out a sound, a
combination of a scream, a howl and a roar; a sound of both pain and vengeance,
a battle cry.

She
picked up the letter with one of her front paws, strode out of the door of the
small office, and out into a stone corridor. She reached the back doors and
walked out into a small courtyard. There she took off, into the grey stormy
sky.

Lilith
soared out above London, seeing the world from up high. She could see all the
humans, going about their daily lives, like they weren’t criminals, and
murderers, every one of them. They couldn’t be trusted. She swooped to the side
and began to beat her wings harder and faster. She had a long way to go, and
her journey would take her close to the huntresses. For her, this was
dangerous.

Two
hours of flight later, Lilith touched down in a forest. The trees were old and
tall, and had large leaves. She changed back into human form, and wrapped the
parchment around a branch. Then, she hid behind a particularly wide tree trunk
and waited. A girl, wearing a hooded cloak that covered her face came to the
spot Lilith had just been.

She
unfurled the parchment from the tree branch and hid it beneath her cloak. She
then looked around and caught a glimpse of red from behind the tree. “Lilith, I
know you are there. I will return the same time tomorrow with more news.”

She
then turned away and fled back into the forest in the direction she came,
leaving Lilith to transform back into her cat form, and take to the sky again,
to return to London. This leaving one detail unsaid.

The
girl in the hooded cloak had spoken in a Welsh accent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

11 thoughts on “Thomasina’s Novel

    • Thomasina has a real gift for writing! I hope we can put the other chapters up here when she gets them finished. This is an amazing gothic fantasy novel and I can’t wait to read what happens next. Ms Cook (Thomasina’s English Teacher)

  1. Wow! This is impressive! The description is superb and you set the scenes beautifully. Keep writing; I can’t wait to read the rest!

  2. wow tommy your book is amazing i think you will be a great author when your older or painter or another one of your amazing talents.

  3. Go Tomi!Your a great writer!!! I never knew you had it in you. So when you become like a famous auther don’t forget me!!x

Leave a Reply to Ellen Lythgoe Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *