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Blackfire: The Girl with the Diamond Key
The Books of Bairnmoor, Volume III
James Daniel Eckblad
For
Genevieve (“Vivi”) Kennedy Eckblad, my granddaughter
~introduction~
Introduction to Volume III of the trilogy, including spoilers for Volumes I and II:
In Volume I the reader was introduced to four extremely challenged young teenagers—Elli, Beatríz, Alex, and Jamie—who in the basement of the Millerton library were summoned, by way of the ancient messenger Peterwinkle, to learn of their “call”—by someone no one has ever seen named “the Good”—to set out on a quest to save a world existing perpendicular to their own. With reluctant consent, given largely because the children were told that they alone could accomplish the mission—if accomplishable at all—these exceedingly unlikely heroes, variously disabled by facial disfigurement, verbal abuse, blindness, and Down syndrome, entered the world of Bairnmoor (“land of children”), striving to release from her imprisonment far away beyond The Mountains the child Queen, Taralina, and so save her world—as well as their own—from annihilation by the evil Nothingness of Sutante Bliss. Protesting—first to Peterwinkle and then to others on the journey—that they had less ability than virtually anyone else to undertake such a mission, the children nevertheless set out, trusting “the call,” and so discovered along the way the secret to how it is that virtually anyone can come to possess the capacities needed to attempt that which is otherwise impossible.
On their journey through Bairnmoor’s haunted forests and mysterious moors, towering mountains and magical valleys, the children encountered various creatures, some terrifying and evil, intent on destroying them, and so their mission, while others they encountered were awesome and good, fulfilling their own mysterious “calling” to assist the children. Early on the children encountered Hannah—a woman of advanced age not apparent from her stunningly youthful appearance—who gave them their initial instructions and warnings for the journey, as well as a giant millipede known as a Mortejos (pronounced “mor-TAY-hoss”) that tried to devour them. They also chanced upon a stick man called Thorn, who had just saved the oblivious children from certain death at the hands of Wolfmen and other vile creatures constituting Sutante’s vast army. In addition to Thorn, who swore to never leave the children, though soon forced to do so, the children were confronted in the singing Forest of Lament by the unicorn Childheart, who, with huge misgivings, would end up leading their mission party. They were astonished at one point by the sudden appearance of a Four-winged condor named Starnee, and a “host of angels” in the form of a squadron of flying toads. And then there was Kahner, an Unperson child belonging to the Den of Liars, whom the other children ended up both first trying to kill in self-defense and then healing and embracing as a valuable, though enigmatic—and finally treasonous—companion for the journey. But no encounter was as intense and unsettling, nor as notable and perplexing, if not more terrifying, than the encounter by all four children at different times with Blackfire—a white dragon whose apparently evil nature and significance in the cosmic scheme of things seemed inscrutable, if not disturbingly irrelevant.
Toward the end of Volume I, leading up to the beginning of Volume II, Thorn and three of the children—Beatríz, Alex, and Jamie—survived an encounter with a vile Thrasher at the dead end of a long passageway in The Mountains, thanks to the timely arrival of the condor, Starnee. At this point, the children and Thorn noted the perplexing absence of Kahner, who only moments earlier had been with them in the passageway. The five questing companions then soon discovered at an open castle window high above the ground none other than Elli, whom Sutante Bliss’s daughter, Santanya, was holding captive. On escaping from the castle with the assistance once again of Starnee, Santanya dispatched troops to capture the children, Thorn, and the condor. However, forces loyal to Sutante, but inexplicably hostile to Santanya, also spied the children from their encampment at the dead Queen’s castle some distance away and sent out warriors to apprehend them, thereby engaging the two wicked sides in competitive battle. Although circumstances seemed grim for the children and company, Childheart arrived just in time to rescue Elli and Beatríz and, with Starnee’s help, deliver them to the stairwell in Taralina’s castle that would hopefully lead them down to the Queen’s tomb—where the girls would attempt to open the tomb door with their black key, and thus fulfill the most critical portion of the prophetic poem engraved on the tomb door:
At close of time the door be shut
Against the child within without;
The lock a seal against the death
Of nothingness about.
Through space and time a child shall come
To open this eternal door;
The Queen, released from imprisonment,
Will spread her life forevermore.
The child shall come with forces fierce:
Evil, legions of children to meet;
And with the sword of right and good
Adultish nothingness defeat.
From some dimension far beyond
The reach of our eternity;
The child shall come and open wide
This portal with a diamond key.
While Starnee and Childheart continued to battle enemy forces by the hundreds at the top of the castle stairs, the two girls descended the steps and entered the tomb hall. They immediately began to dash to the tomb door, only to be abruptly blocked by dozens of warriors bolting from their hiding places. Then, to the shock of the girls, Kahner stepped from among the warriors and tried to persuade Elli and Beatríz that, as their friend (who would, he said, explain everything later), he wanted to help them get into the tomb. Instead, Kahner tricked them. He stole the black key and tried to kill the girls, hitting Elli in the back with a spear that propelled her (and Beatríz whom Elli was shielding in her arms) into the locked tomb door. The impact of the girls’ bodies forced the door open, causing the girls to tumble into the tomb, apparently killed. Then, as if on its own, the door swung shut and locked. At that final moment in Volume I, it was unclear what had happened to those doing battle above ground: Alex and Jamie, Thorn, and of course Starnee and Childheart, who, where Volume II opened, had been doing battle at the top of the stairs, hoping against hope before their deaths to fight just long enough to allow the girls to get to the tomb with the diamond key.
Volume II opened with Starnee and Childheart about to be captured, likely tortured, and then certainly killed. But the two discovered themselves suddenly “winning the battle,” if not the war, by virtue of an earthquake that sent the terrified enemy warriors fleeing the battlefield that was shifting and opening beneath their feet. But there was really little for Starnee and Childheart to celebrate. For as the story soon unfolded, the reader learned that while all in the questing party had survived the battle, they had also become once again separated in pairs, with virtually no two aware of the survival and whereabouts of any of the others.
Early on, Childheart and Starnee discovered Thorn near death on the battlefield, but in an effort to attend to his needs, Childheart became became separated from both Starnee and Thorn, ending up instead with Kahner. Together Childheart and Kahner began a search for the bodies of the girls, the unicorn unaware of both Kahner’s treachery and his identity as Sutante Bliss’s son, yet knowing something was amiss. In their vain search for the girls, first inside the vast tomb and then later in a long, branching passageway, Kahner and Childheart hit a dead end in a subterranean foundry belonging to Sutante Bliss. While Kahner was captured attempting to flee the foundry through a utility tunnel, Childheart had already leaped into raging waters that ran through and out of the cavern—beneath some mountains; just as Childheart was about to drown, he was instantly transported out of the water and onto a path that would lead him to his old friends, the Cannotoad Angels, all of whom were seated, as if