Shadowlands Chapter 1

Music by: Martin Nethercutt

© 2013 Ruth McCartney Music Publishing

Featuring Katja Rieckermann on Saxophone.

Location notes: Daybreak

The top of the mountain.

People crawling out of tents. Smoldering ashes, fading campfires.

There I was on top of a mountain.

The air felt damp and cold. A grey curtain of fog that wasn’t lifting.

It was before sunrise, but somehow I could feel that there was no sun coming.

All I could see through the driving snow was slivers of Mountain peaks around me.

Surprisingly…SOMEWHERE, someone was playing the saxophone.

The sound echoed through the canyons like a clarion call to action.

But an action to do what? My mind drifted again as I pulled my woolen blanket tighter around me.

The one thing that didn’t register with me at first, was that there was no sound coming from the other people scattered around me. Even the small groups that had gathered around the fires weren’t showing much life or emotion.

No laughter, not even a mumble from the crowd.

It seemed like they were all in a daze.

The party was over. I had joined the ‘Light Workers’ for a spiritual awakening retreat and the light that had been summoned had never come.

The others were still in their tents and smoldering ashes of campfires weren’t lightening my mood. It was over. Light, the last thing that could guide us through this terrible time had been extinguished. Hope lost.

I couldn’t help but to think back to the time when life had been care free, worth living, worth fighting for, but now everything seemed strange and foreboding.

All gone now, faded, due to the Pandemic.

This must be ’Shadowlands’, I thought. I stood and scanned the surrounding area. it all seemed so surreal. ‘If only I was high, this would have made more sense’, but I wasn’t, those days were behind me, I was clear as a bell. This was a new world, something out of a doomsday scenario that a mad genius had created. Few were left to hold on to that tiny fragment of hope that this would change soon, and that we would wake up to a new dawn. Hope springs eternal…

But before I could dive deeper into regret and depression, from somewhere over the ridges a sound was approaching. there was a sudden noise in the air.

The sound of helicopters. Everyone stood frozen in silence. ‘Watchers’

I didn’t wait, I started running down the mountain towards the trees below, instinctively knowing that the trees would cover me, give me a chance…

‘But the helos have thermal, they’ll find me’.I reasoned.

I reached the woods and I steadied myself.

There was a path through the forest.

I heard church bells in the distance…

I picked up the pace and started running towards the village…