(Adventure Adrian and the Kings) The Herald Quest

ONE

The crackling yellow light burned brightly through the darkness. It was too far away for me to make sense of but seemed to move ever closer with each nightmarish second that passed. As the glow grew brighter, the sound of the gushing storm raged louder in my mind like a powerful jet engine about to fire.

 Suddenly there was a bright flash and a rumbling roll of thunder. The violent winds swirled through the air and felt like they were almost upon me. It was as if the raging storm began to call out my name over and over again.

Adrian…. Adrian…Adrian…

“Adrian!” my Aunt Edna bellowed from the bottom of the stairs. My eyes snapped open and I sprung upright in my bed. Waking up in a cold sweat is never particularly nice. But I shook my head and put my bad dream down to the amount of fizzy pop I’d chugged before bed. E-numbers really are bad for you.

I rubbed my eyes and squinted towards the alarm clock on my bedside table. With my sight still fuzzy from a disturbed sleep, I tried to make out the little digital numbers on the electronic display. It was 8.27 am and I was late for school…again!

“Oh no. Not today,” I cursed to myself before hopping out of bed and stumbling frantically around my bedroom. I quickly found my jeans in a crumpled heap on the floor and struggled to squeeze on my white plimsolls. There was no time for laces this morning because I had somewhere really important to be and I wasn’t going to miss it for the world.

Luckily, I was still wearing my favourite red t-shirt from the day before, even though it was a little creased from a heavy night’s sleep. But it would have to do for now. There was no time for freshly ironed clothes…not this morning.

I grabbed my half packed rucksack from off the post at the bottom of the bed, bolted downstairs and raced towards the front door. But just as I passed the dining room door, my Aunt Edna called me back.

“Adrian!” she cried again. “Come here a minute lad.”

I slowly backed up and peered around the doorframe to see Aunt Edna sitting patiently at the small dining table in the centre of the room. She waved me forward with a beaming smile and so I wandered over towards her and took a seat. 

My Aunt was officially the best. A short middle-aged woman with a slight hunched back and bobbed curly brown hair. She always wore hippy style clothes and a pair of large, red glasses with lenses so thick that they magnified each pupil to the size of two walnuts.

It was fair to say that she was eccentric too. To those who didn’t really know her, she was the crazy lady down the end of the road but to me she was just my kind and generous Auntie.

You see I’d lived with Aunt Edna for as long as I could remember. I’d moved to her terrace house when I was about four years old. From what little she’d told me about my past, I knew my parents had both died when I was just a toddler and to be honest I can’t really remember much about them at all.

Rather than see me put into some horrible orphanage, my Aunt Edna decided to take me in as her own flesh and blood. But I must admit I was too young to remember much about that either. I don’t even have any pictures of my folks to remind me of them.

My Aunt’s place is quaint. Her house smells kind of like an old antique store and sits in a small cul-de-sac, just off a busy high street in the middle of central London. And I was fine with the way things were. Just my Aunt and me.

The thing is, I don’t really trust many other people anyway and I have real trouble making friends of any kind. It’s not that I’m unpopular because I’m a geek or strange in some way. It’s just that I find it pretty hard to rely on other people since my parents passed away. But Aunt Edna had taken good care of me up to this point and had never let me down.