The Twins by Gary Alan Wassner Page A

manner. Both were dead. Trevor’s eyes were burned out of his sockets and his hair and beard were singed. His face was distorted and ruined. Safira lay under him, her eyes too were totally annihilated by the magic and her hands clutched a small piece of a branch, broken and charred.
    Cairn rushed to their sides, knowing only too well that there was nothing he could now do. The house was in ruins, uninhabitable, stinking of burnt flesh and evil. Pieces of the door lay shattered, splintered and ragged, all the windows were blown out, while glass and debris littered the ground everywhere. As he peered inside, he noticed that every drawer and cabinet had been riffled through and that everything in the house was torn apart as if the enemy was looking for something.
    “Whatever it was, I hope to the First that they did not find it!” he exclaimed consumed by anger and sadness.
    If only I had been here before, when they so desperately needed me, instead of playing games in the woods. I could have come to their aid. Perhaps I could have prevented this , Cairn thought.
    His regrets were too late now, and his concerns immediately turned to the boy and to Calyx. Tomas was clearly in more danger if he wandered outside of the protection of his tree, as Calyx was not afraid of magic and knew quite well how to defend himself against it. He could not leave his newly found friends in such a state, their memories desecrated by this depraved performance, chancing that Tomas would soon return to see what was going on and stumble upon this gruesome scene. He was safe with his tree for now, and Ormachon was surely wise to have kept him back and would continue to do so, Cairn assured himself as he proceeded to carefully lift and move Trevor off of Safira. The stench was awful, but Cairn was determined to provide these good people with a proper grave, if nothing else.
    Who could have done this? Why? He located a spade and began to dig a trench in front of the garden by the edge of the woods. He wondered if Calyx had caught up with the murderous lot, and he grieved deeply for the two friends he had only just met. He would bury them together, hand in hand, as he expected they would have preferred. Cairn had known them for such a short time, but he was now bound to them forever.
    The thought of the boy returned to his mind, realizing that Tomas was now in his charge. He could not help but feel that although everything had taken such a tragic and sad turn, some good would come out of it. Cairn was uncomfortable with that feeling, nonetheless, considering the circumstances, but it was only his conscience that was experiencing this discomfort, not his instincts. No matter how awful things were, it felt right somehow; not the deaths, not the loss, but the responsibility that he now assumed for Tomas. As he thought, he completed his grim task, laid the bodies side by side in the ground and began to cover them with the moist earth.
    He finished his job as quickly as possible, anxious to attend to the child, and a bit uneasy, standing here exposed as he was. When the job was done, he said a brief prayer over the grave and turned to go. Calyx would see to it that the magic users would not return and catch him unsuspecting. He would have time to defend himself, unlike Trevor and Safira. They obviously had no warning. Trevor had not even had time to remove his ax from the wood in which it lay embedded next to where the front door had been.
    Who would wish harm upon these good people? What secrets did they harbor; for surely they had done no evil in their lifetimes? What manner of being would want them dead?
    So many questions swarmed around Cairn’s brow, like bees around a waiting Queen, only to be frustrated by a lack of answers altogether. He knew so little of these people to whom he had become so intimately attached so quickly and so briefly. He would find out! In time he would determine who did this and why. But, no matter how pressing it seemed to him