Elements' Eyes (Book 1: Going-Through)

A Surprise 2.4

"Keeernaaah!" her mother suddenly called out in her drowsy memories. Keernah shuddered and stirred with her eyes still closed. It hadn't been like this: actually, she and the boy played and walked together until dark. Only then their parents started to expect them back and called out and looked for them, and...

A cool wind blew into her face and seemed to try and raise her eyelashes. Keernah realized, to her great disappointment, that she was sitting on a cliff. The seawaves were monotonously splashing in front of her, and her parents were walking nearby and noticed where she was.

Keernah, too, was a bit surprised to find herself there. It took her a good minute to recall vaguely that she'd got to the place to think about her friend, and then she probably fell asleep.

But she apparently kept thinking of him even then. Her hand felt warm inside. Keernah slowly unclenched her fingers, suspecting there was something alive beneath them. The dark stone she'd found was wet and dully glowing in scattered light.

"Keernah! Get down immediately!" insisted her mother from the shore below.

But Keernah wouldn't hurry up. She scrutinized the stone thoughtfully and decided she did not want to skip it. The whole idea, all of a sudden, lost all the charm for her. Keernah slowly climbed off the cliff and silently walked past her exasperated parents. She was going to hide the stone in their car, because she was seldom allowed to take street things home and wouldn't run the risk of losing her special find.

In the upper part of the stone she discovered a tiny natural hole – it was so conveniently situated that the stone could be almost perfectly balanced if being hung on a thread. Keernah waited till her parents forgot what she had been doing on the beach and asked if they could give her a very thin but strong thread. It was necessary then to tell them why, so she had to show them the stone, explaining it was a keepsake from a friend.

The parents didn't look like they believed Keernah, but they promised to get a thread for her anyway. Mom stared critically at the stone and asked if Keernah's friend really hadn't had anything smaller and lighter to give. The girl started to feel insulted, but her father noted that a big pendant could be used as a self-defence weapon. Mom instantly changed her mind about the size of the stone, and Keernah suddenly thought that each of her parents was right to some extent. Her friend had had actually given her too much to forget or to bear lightly his absence in her life. Also, had he turned into a stone, he would have tried to protect her even then Keernah could not doubt it. She well remembered the boy drive off the angry dogs that would nearly break off their leashes when she went past them. They barked and growled like mad, getting froth at the mouth, but only when they saw her together with the boy. When – seldom at the time – she walked alone or with her parents, no village dog paid attention to her.

At the same time, the dogs reluctantly became quieter and sat still after he said to them a few strict words or made some gestures. He was not surprised at their hatred for Keernah, though.

"These beasts are jealous," he used to tell her, "They think I have to play only with them."

Keernah actually realized he hadn't turned into a stone, but she still felt there was a small part of him there: she recalled him too clearly when holding the thing in her hand for him to not leave a trace of himself in the stone. The trace was better than nothing anyway. It didn't really matter to Keernah that her parents suspected she'd found the stone somewhere rather than got a gift from a friend. After all, they could only see the outside of the stone while she knew what it was inside.

However, the pendant had never once been tested as a weapon over the next decade of Keernah's life. Sometimes, she did think about using it for self-defense but always thought better of it.