The Porter and the Stone of Andor

Julian found a magic stone, but he did not realize it at the time because, of course, it looked just like any other stone. It was a small, flat, and smooth oval about half the size of Julian’s six-year-old fist, and had a black stripe down the middle on both sides, dividing the stone into two nearly equal hemispheres. After flipping it over in his hand several times closely inspecting it, Julian smiled and put the stone in his pocket, along with the other rocks he had found in the dried-up creek bed: the one shaped like a heart, the dark blue one, and the one that looked like a quarter made out of granite.

* * *

Somewhere deep in the woods, miles away from Julian, something stirred. The birds flew off from their perches high in the trees, some abandoning their nests. A rabbit froze for a moment and scurried off into the underbrush. Two squirrels stopped their chattering and fled. In a circle seven feet across worms struggled to evacuate the ground.

As if time had been sped up, the grass on this spot began to wither and turn brown. The ground dried up and turned dusty grey. A tree standing halfway inside the circle began to turn black from the trunk up. Its mid-summer green leaves quickly turned autumn red and brittle and fell off their branches.

Something evil was awake.

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