Excerpt: Changeling

Waking up felt like crawling out of an endless dark spelunk, whose gaping mouth below him promised a dark torment if he should stumble and fall.
But he gritted his teeth and managed to struggle his way back to full consciousness. As he opened his eyes, he was grateful for the tiny rays of morning sunlight poking through the leafy forest canopy overhead.
The night was finally over.
He couldn’t remember his dreams, but from the soreness in his muscles and his dry gritty eyes he knew he had been trashing and crying again, held in the throes of vaguely familiar nightmares.
There was something else too, something that had seemed very important in the dream. A sense of foreboding…
Merrick shot up straight, sending his travel blanket flying a few feet away.
The blanket squawked indignantly and started to move frantically, finally falling away to reveal a very miffed falcon who tried to send the young man a dead glare while at the same time smoothing its ruffled feathers with its razor-sharp beak.
Merrick paid no heed to the angry animal, his senses focussed beyond the forest clearing he had chosen as their camping spot for the night.
The falcon temporarily forgot the humiliation he had been subjected to and flew up in a rush of powerful strokes, to soar beneath the trees in search for whatever danger his master was expecting.
But its sharp eyes and ears, far superior to even the best of human scouts, could detect nothing out of the ordinary.
Merrick’s couldn’t either, but the sense of foreboding was becoming stronger with every passing second. He drew his sword from the scabbard where it had rested beside him and rose to his feet in one swift movement.
Though it was still fairly dark, the morning sun had managed to lighten even these dense parts of the forest enough for even a human to spot a rabbit from 1000 feet away.
Trouble is, Merrick thought wryly to himself, he was fairly sure he wasn’t looking for a rabbit approaching.
Then, with a jolt, he realised he couldn’t hear anything. There were no birds singing their morning serenades, no small animals scurrying about in the trees or the forest’s undergrowth, not even the rustling of leaves in the wind. Not a single sound permeated the eerie silence of the wood.
The sense of foreboding became almost overwhelming. Even Aleda, his falcon companion, seemed to sense it, for the animal alighted quietly on Merrick’s shoulder and started to nibble his ear in what Merrick knew to be a worried gesture.
He lifted his right hand to stroke her reassuringly, but his left hand retained its death grip on the sword.
The next moment, an unnatural darkness fell over the forest, swept down upon them like a frightening impenetrable blanket of night , and in its wake came the creature the dreams had warned him about...