The Sheep Who Leaped from Sleep

The door of the diner burst open and the frenzied man who burst in with it cried, “It’s raining sheep!”

Just as he spoke, two diners in the diner heard a gentle rustling crash in the hedges just outside the windows next to their booth. They stared through the glass. The startled black head of a sheep stared back at them.

People rushed to the windows. Some rushed past the man at the door.

Outside the sky was covered in banks of fluffy white clouds that were breaking off and dropping to the ground. But they weren’t clouds. They were sheep. Dozens of sheep. Falling from the sky.

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Castle, Cave, or Cloud

She remembered darkness. And she remembered her name. That was all.

Spark zoomed into a heap of advancing clouds, grinning and gasping at the sensations of cold and wet, reaching out to touch what could not quite be grasped. She emerged on the other side, and spotted a colossal formation of rock and stone with three spires so high they topped the clouds. A mountain!

Maybe there, she thought.

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Anomaly Valley

The grass is purple in that valley.  And the sky is green.  That’s how you will know that you have reached the entrance to the vault.

I never really expected those words from an ancient myth to guide me on this failed expedition.  And it was failed because even if I found the vault, even if I managed to enter it and lay my eyes on what lay within, I would never find my way out again.

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The Rainheralds

Ryne reached his hand up to scratch his cheek, then caught himself and resisted. He hadn’t had time to shave before heading out that morning on the seven-hour drive up to the man’s estate. He glanced around the display room. The man he was meeting was a private collector of artifacts. And Ryne was waiting in what appeared to be a preparation room of sorts. The man had the skeletal head of some dinosaur lying on the ground on a plastic sheet. On the same sheet were some tools like brushes and something that looked like the tool dentists use to scrape tartar off teeth. On a nearby wooden work bench was one of the original prop ray guns used in that popular 70’s science fiction adventure show that Ryne used to watch with his grandfather when he was a kid. He wondered what his grandfather would make of the place. Gramps never did approve of private collectors. As a young man, Ryne’s grandfather had come across some rare artifacts while on holiday. He could have legally kept them and sold them, but he chose to donate them to a local museum.

He had instilled in Ryne a love of museums and old artifacts, a respect for the past and those who came before. Ryne ignored the items in the work room. He had come for a rarer treasure. A myth come to life. That was his specialty. It was his passion. It was his life’s work. And in this particular case, he had another reason for wanting the artifact he sought. For he had a promise to keep. He’d been seeking the artifact for almost five years. The Shield of the Rainheralds.

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