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eBook Category: Fantasy
eBook Description: Angel-like creators made the universe and put it in an egg-sized stone. Then they cast the stone into the universe they'd created--a paradox. But something went wrong. The fabric of creation is unraveling. The stone's guardians have become weak over the millennia but they hatch a desperate and dangerous plot to save the universe. Thomas Cain, a giant man with the heart and mind of a child, finds the stone. In Wyoming's Wind River Mountains, in the mid-21st Century of a decaying America, the stone gives Thomas wonderful powers and horrific urges. Thomas befriends an old Indian shaman who understands visions. The pair must unravel the stone's mystic powers to save a dying human race, and they have little time. Sheriff Pete Cain, Thomas' own brother, is hunting Thomas--for murder.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: 1996
Fictionwise Release Date: April 2007

4 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [229 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [200 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [207 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [651 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [230 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [211 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [256 KB] , hiebook (KML) [551 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [248 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [190 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [237 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [265 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [328 KB]
Words: 69775
Reading time: 199-279 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

Thomas huddled in the eagle's nest atop the tree people called the Old Man and watched, scared, as a little boy ran toward him up the mountain meadow.

A flock of redwing blackbirds fluttered by in the pale, cloudless Wyoming sky. A small herd of mule deer wagged their Mickey Mouse ears and sprang for the woods to the east, startled by the running figure far to the south. Otherwise, the meadow was empty in the morning quiet.

"Oh, gosh," Thomas said.

The sight of the boy, alone, running, still far away, scared Thomas, but he frowned, not sure 'scared' was the right way to feel. He scootched back in the bowl of the nest, legs folded awkwardly in the cramped space.

One of his bootlaces had come undone and he bent to retie it, brow furrowed in concentration. He remembered the first time he'd tied his own shoes, how proud Pete had been. He smiled at the memory.

Now, he recalled the time he'd discovered other words to describe being scared. He'd been walking with Pete, checking fence, and a jackrabbit had bolted through the high grass in front of them.

"Guess we scared him," Thomas had said.

"Not scared," Pete said. "Startled."

The words fascinated Thomas and he pestered Pete about it.

"What's the difference--"

"I can't explain it, dammit," Pete said. He sighed and shook his head. Pete tried to be patient when he explained things to Thomas, but he didn't always succeed.

"Startled," Thomas said, "not scared. Yeah." He smiled, pleased that he'd figured it out without Pete's help.

He couldn't wait to tell Pete that he'd figured it out by himself. For a moment, that made him happy. Then he remembered where he sat and that he'd borrowed Pete's new binoculars without asking, and if he told Pete that he'd figured out the difference between 'scared' and 'startled,' he might have to tell him he was in the meadow when he figured it out. Then he might have to tell about the binoculars and Pete might get mad.

It always made Thomas sad when Pete got mad at him.

No, better to try to remember the plan--return the binoculars before Pete got back from town, wait for a better time to think about the difference between 'scared' and 'startled.'

A little boy ran toward him in the meadow.

"Oh, gosh," Thomas said.

He sat up and looked over the nest rim, squinting. The sun had just cleared the Wind River Mountains to the southeast, the jagged peaks snowless in the late August heat. The Winds had seen little rain since early May. Little snow had fallen last winter, even at higher elevations, though it had been cold. The winter before that had been just as dry.

The boy, coming up the narrow meadow from the south, cast a long bobbing shadow across the dusty sage. He was still far away, more than a half mile, but even without the binoculars, Thomas saw the boy's short legs pump up and down in quick, erratic rhythm, little arms flapping wide to balance his ragged stride between the clumps of stiff gray-green sage and rabbit brush that dappled the meadow floor. Forest bordered the meadow on its east and west flanks, fir with patches of aspen. Few trees grew in the meadow itself.

Dust hung in the air behind the boy, marking his trail.

"Gonna be a hot one." He tried to not think of the little boy, but it didn't work.

The bushes came up to the boy's stomach. Thomas knew those bushes came up to his thighs.

The boy must be new; otherwise he'd use the trail, making better time. The hiking trail at the east edge of the meadow used to run along a creek bed, gone dry four years ago. The boy wasn't a squatter, or he wouldn't be in the meadow at all, and he wouldn't run. He'd sneak through the trees, on the lookout for Forest Service patrols or militia. Not a poacher--no gun. He wasn't hiding in the woods and he wasn't on the trail. Instead, he struggled through the brush in the meadow's center.

Thomas shook his head and gave up. It was impossible to not think about the little boy.

He seemed to be trying to put distance between himself and the McDonnell ranch as fast as his legs could carry him.

"Worried," Thomas said. Another big word, but a good one to describe how he felt.

A magpie called as it rose from a chokecherry thicket.

Thomas brought the binoculars out of his backpack with grave reverence. They'd help him see his mountain meadow as he'd never seen it before from his airy perch, and he tasted his eagerness, a thirst in the back of his throat, an eagerness that prompted him to violate one of Pete's rules. "Don't take things without asking," Pete had said often, meaning not only other peoples' things, but Pete's.

Thomas couldn't remember all the rules. There were so many.

He had looked through binoculars once before and the images had thrilled him into a fit of sudden and uncontrolled laughter. He'd gotten so excited he'd wet his pants, somebody'd laughed, and Pete got embarrassed. So when Pete drove to town in the electric before sunup, Thomas forgot the rule, or convinced himself that he wouldn't remember later anyway. He put the binoculars in his backpack and, after chores, walked--ran--east, to the meadow, to his sanctuary high above the ranch, to the abandoned eagle's nest he'd taken as his own ten years ago.

When he'd first seen the meadow, it had been on a horseback trip--his first time on a horse--with Pete, Uncle Ted and Aunt Nida. That was during a vacation years before Ted and Nida died and willed the ranch to Pete, back when he and Pete lived in L.A.

They'd climbed the winding trail up the west face of the ridge, through the thick canopy of firs in the morning quiet. As they mounted higher and higher up the steep ridge, Thomas drank in the forest's spicy scent in each breath. He gazed gap-jawed at the narrow shafts of sunlight that penetrated the thick forest, at each shuddery branch, scuttling squirrel or jay, at each crack in the granite boulders along the trail. The muffled thump of the horses' hooves on the well-worn trail echoed in the cathedral stillness, and they whispered when they spoke at all.

Rapt, Thomas had said nothing.

Then they rounded a hill, the trail flattened, they passed a screen of aspen and underbrush, and abruptly entered the meadow.

"Eight Mile Meadow, they call it," Uncle Ted had said. "Used to be greener. Glacier made it a couple thousand years ago. Gone to pot now. Turning to desert. Worse every year."

It spread before them, a swatch of spotty grass and sage cut neatly between two walls of trees, running north to south, narrow and straight, no more than a few hundred yards wide. The distant valley floor could be seen to the south. To the north, the meadow petered out in hilly country amidst a clutter of granite shards, boulders, and the fringe of deeper forest.

To the east, the Wind River Mountains jabbed the sky in rocky splendor. It hadn't been hazy then, Thomas remembered.

In the meadow center, the Old Man stood alone, a wooden sword stuck in the ground.