Ashdyuha

prologue
LEBANON , TENNESSEE , 1995 The Tennessee night was screaming. Eric Powell ran clumsily through the tall grass behind his grandparents’ house. He stumbled down the sloping embankment toward the thick patch of swampy woods beyond, hands pressed firmly against his ears. “I’m not listening,” he said through gritted teeth, on the verge of tears. “Stop it. Please! Shut up.” The sounds were deafening, and he wanted nothing more than to escape them. But where? The voices were coming from all around. Eric ran deeper and deeper into the woods. He ran until his lungs felt as if they were on fire, and the beating of his heart was almost loud enough to drown out the sinister warnings from the surrounding darkness. Almost. Beneath a weeping willow that had once been a favorite place to escape the stress of teenage life, he stopped to catch his breath. Warily he moved his hands away from his ears and was bombarded with the cacophonous message of the night. “Danger,” warned a tiny, high-pitched squeak from the shadows by the small creek that snaked through the dark wood. “Danger. Danger. Danger.” “They come,” croaked another. “They come.” “Hide yourself,” something squawked from within the drooping branches of the willow before taking flight in fear. “Before it is too late,” it said as it flew away.

There were others out there in the night, thousands of others all speaking in tongues and cautioning him of the same thing. Something was coming, something bad. Eric fell back against the tree trying to focus, and his mind flashed back to when he first began to hear the warnings. It had been June 25, of that he was certain. The memory was vividly fresh, for it had been only two months ago and it was not easy to forget one’s eighteenth birthday—or the day you begin to lose your mind. Before that, he heard the world just like any other. The croaking of frogs down by the pond, the angry buzz of a trapped yellow jacket as it threw itself against the screens on the side