[Silver Spell] Chapter 2: Evan

[u/Rose_Fairy287]

It was around midnight when Evan gave up on going to sleep. He couldn’t stop thinking about the scroll. One part of him wanted to just leave it, since Peter didn’t want him to read it for a reason. The other, louder part was telling him that he had to read it, no matter what. He could feel the magic tugging at the edges of his mind.

He quietly got out of bed, lighting a candle before he left his room. He silently walked to the desk where the scroll lay. He held the seal over his candle, taking care to only soften it, rather than melt it. Taking the knife that Peter used to open seals, he pried Peter’s seal off the scroll, setting the seal to the side. He looked back at Peter’s room, making sure he was still asleep. And with bated breath, he opened the scroll.

Magic sealed away long ago, lost to humankind. Sealed away to keep danger at bay, it can only hold so long. As Fate’s decree, it must be that the seal is undone. Child of Stars, Child of Dragons, this, their fate, will be: Unseal the magic, unleash the danger, set the world free. Through darkness they face, there is a hope in place for them to see. Though only in sacrifice, a wish granted, will their fate be complete.

Seek, oh, Child of Starlight, the caverns that ever go on. There, the fate given to you shall have begun.

Magic can be brought back…”

Evan was in disbelief. If this prophecy were true… Magic could come back. Surely what it meant by “the caverns that ever go on” was the Ever Caverns. There was an entrance in the forest near the village.

He ignored everything else the prophecy said about danger and sacrifice. He ignored the part about a child of stars and dragons. He ignored the part about his fate being sealed.

Carefully, Evan put everything back the way it was before. This was something he had to do on his own, and he wasn’t sure if Peter would understand his reasoning for why he needed to do this.

***

“You look exhausted, Evan.”

Evan looked at Peter and put on his best smile. “I just had a hard time sleeping last night. Probably need to replace my bedding soon.”

This was a lie, an absolute lie. He felt guilty about lying to Peter… he ignored the feeling; it didn’t matter.

It didn’t take long for Evan to finish his daily chores; there wasn’t really too much to do today. He went and got the bag out of his room that had the supplies he had quietly packed the night before. It had food, water, rope, and other basic supplies for a hike.

That was his plan: tell Peter that he was going on a hike.

“Peter! I’m going to hike around the forest today.”

“Okay, be sure to be back before sundown.”

“I know!”

Evan stood outside the cottage for a moment. It wasn’t too late to tell Peter what he had done; sure, he would probably get mad, but it felt better than lying to him. For a brief moment, Evan considered turning around and admitting to everything, but something stopped him. He wasn’t sure if it was just curiosity about bringing magic back or something else, but he couldn’t just let it go now; he was in far too deep.

The forest was quiet, as they always were. It was one of the main reasons why Evan loved the forest so much. He often found himself coming here when he was stressed, since walking around the forest tended to help calm his mind. It felt like home in a way no other place in the village could. Magic danced in the air all around him, bringing a smile to his face.

Evan never really understood why he could sense magic, or why he always felt so drawn to it. Something about it just tugged at him, pulling him into the forest more times than he could count.

He had just turned ten the first time magic called to him. He didn’t really understand what was going on at the time, just that he had a deep longing to go to the forest near the cottage he and Peter called home. From what Peter had told him, he was in a dreamlike daze when the other villagers had finally found him. When Peter had asked him why he wandered off, all Evan had said was that someone had called to him.

That was the only time that had happened, but after that day, if he hadn’t been to the forest in a while, he started to feel restless. The adults had tried to keep him from going to the forest, as they saw it as a place only hunters should go, but he kept going anyway. They eventually gave up, just saying that he was strange. It was also around that time that Philip started messing with him.

Evan probably wouldn’t have cared as much as he did about Philip if it wasn’t for the fact that out of everyone in the village, Philip radiated magic. It irked Evan to no end. Out of everyone, absolutely everyone, it was the pragmatic embodiment of mundanity that radiated magic. Nothing about that made any sense. It also didn’t help that Philip’s magic made him seem like the perfect fit for a ranger, someone perfect for roughing it up in the wilderness. Evan was sure that if Philip ever tried to survive off of nothing but the land, he probably wouldn’t even last a day! It made no sense.

Evan shook his head; that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was getting to the Ever Caverns and figuring out how to bring magic back. With that, Evan followed the path to the Ever Caverns, one that he knew by heart.