Excerpt: The GateKeeper's Secret

It was a very strange forest. Jaidon wondered how far underground they were, and how such a thing managed to exist. Alvera had tried to take him to the waterfall but they had gotten lost. So lost that it seemed impossible they would even find their way back.
Now they wandered through a forest of blue crystal. The strangely formed stalagmites branched out like trees and glowed, giving an eerie light to the cavern. The ‘trees’ were extremely thin and delicate and the ground was littered with pieces of fallen branches.
Jaidon was visibly thinner and he could feel himself slipping away. He could not eat. His provisions had supported Alvera so far but soon they would be gone. At this level there was no food and nothing that could pass as food. There was only rock and the strange crystal forest.
“Is there no end to it?” Alvera cried in exasperation,
“How should I know?” Jaidon retorted, and his voice sounded like it came form a great distance. “I’ve never been down here, I never wanted to be down here, I hope I never have to come here again. I came to the cavern because I thought it could do something, not just to wander around in a strange blue forest.”
He went on but Alvera ignored him. The more her son ranted the easier it became to ignore him. He had made his decision freely but he was very bitter about it. So it was with all wraiths she knew. She had heard them on dark nights on the mountainside, bewailing what they had lost. It was a tedious existence, unable to live, unable to die…
Her reverie was interrupted by a low sound that shivered through the forest like the first notes of a song. Even Jaidon stopped dead in his tracks and listened. There was another note, high and quavering that died away. Jaidon brushed his hand down one of the trees and felt it vibrating.
“They’re singing.” He whispered, awestruck, “They’re singing.”
Alvera stopped and listened as the strange melody grew and swelled, echoing through the cavern like an ancient lament, sorrow beyond human memory, filled with intricate harmonies human hears could not comprehend. Alvera’s face was wet with tears, yet she scarcely realized she was crying. Jaidon stood silent like one turned to stone and the music swept around them, enveloping them, caressing them. Alvera sank to her knees on the stone floor, sobbing uncontrollably, letting the music consume her fear, setting free all the grief she’d held at bay for so long. She wept for her lost husband, for Jaidon, for Mya and Rolf, for all she knew and lost. Still the music went on, a dark presence that would not let go. The entire crystal forest joined in that ethereal song, the lights fading and pulsing with the notes.
How long it lasted no one can say. Perhaps it was an hour; perhaps it was years. As the last notes died away Jaidon let out a cry, a last bewildered protest as the hand that had rested on the branches slipped through them.
Alvera started and looked for her son but saw little more than a brief darkening of the light where he passed. There was nothing left of Jaidon of Mount Avar save his voice; and voice that bewailed, over and over again, what he had lost.