Leana stood, silently watching the storm and the torrential downpour from the front window of Andrina's cottage. She glanced briefly over to the nearby mantelpiece, at the chiming, golden carriage clock which read 6pm. She knew that almost certainly the meeting between Ailee and Eliki would be underway by now, and she hoped more than anything that it was going okay, or at least as well as could be expected. Outside, the storm clouds had turned the sky almost as dark as night, although an occasional flash of lightning illuminated the garden momentarily. A street lamp a little further along the street from the end of the cottage's garden path lit up the road and buildings opposite. The pavement's cobbled stones gleamed with rain water, reflecting the image of an unfortunate wolf, who hurtled down the street hoping to find shelter from the downpour.

The rumble of thunder from the most recent bolt of lightning sounded oddly muffled, reverberating round the whole cottage. However, the clap of thunder which followed almost immediately more than made up for it, and Leana's ears went flat as the deafening crash seemed to shake the walls.

Andrina ambled in, having been busy in the kitchen tidying away the cups and plates from the recently finished meal. She leapt onto her settee, landing perfectly and curling up on a large blue cushion, as she gazed fondly over at Leana. "Looks like they weren't joking when they said we were due to have a whole bunch of storms and thumping great thunder things," Andrina told her.

Leana nodded, turning away from the window and joining her on the settee. "That's for sure, but something about it doesn't feel right. I wouldn't be surprised if..."

She was cut short by another massive clap of thunder and lost her chain of thought. Attempting to regain it proved to be pointless once Andrina snuggled up close to her, curling her tail round Leana's and purring. They lay there quietly for the next few minutes, with Leana spending the time lazily stroking Andrina's long, red hair, until another loud thunder clap was punctuated by all the lights in the cottage going off simultaneously, sending them into near-darkness.

"Oh great," Leana muttered, "There goes the power. That one evidently took out the main generators for this area." Outside, the lights in all the surrounding buildings had also blinked out, with the power gone for about half a mile around the cottage. The street lamps, powered by their magically charged crystals, remained on. After a short wait, as the two snowkittens had expected, the cottage's backup system started up, and in each of the various rooms, small lights activated, powered from smaller versions of the crystals used in the street lamps. These lights gave the room a much softer glow than the normal lights provided, and also gave out a slightly blue tint, which Leana found fairly soothing, and it reminded her of the night light she used to own as a child.

Although the downpour outside seemed, if anything, to be intensifying, the thunder appeared to be slowly but surely moving further away. Even as it did so, the strange feeling Leana had sensed from the storm earlier seemed to fade away quickly. She pondered briefly if the strange connection between herself, Eliki and Ailee, but especially with Jarret, meant she had been picking up his feelings. If that was the case, she thought with a slight amount of amusement, maybe Jarret had a fear of thunderstorms. Unlikely perhaps, but not impossible, and she wondered if there was any way of finding out for sure, as a means of gaining more teasing ammunition.

Andrina suddenly sat up, nearly bouncing her head into Leana's chin in the process. "You were going to tell me that story, remember?"

Leana looked quizzical. "Was I? Which story was that?"

Andrina replied, "The one about the barn. Remember when we saw it all off in the distance, and it was all tiny and small because there was so much perspective and stuff, and then you said all about how it was something you'd tell me about one day, but not while we could actually see it sitting there. And I can't see it. Not from here, 'cos there are a whole bunch of miles in the way. So you can tell me about it now in strictest confidence, and the barn will never know. Well, if you want to, that is."

Leana blinked a few times, trying to catch up with the stream of words that Andrina had spoken at an almost phenomenal rate, just about managing to get the gist of what she had said. "Okay, but why now in particular?"

"'Cos it's all dark and haunting and spooky out there, and those rumblies mean this is the perfect time when you think about it."

Leana smiled and shook her head. "And if you say so, it must be true. Okay... but I'm warning you now, this is not a happy story. Not by a long shot..."

Nearly two hundred and fifty years ago, even before the very first traces of the Elysia, Phoenixbrook faced a terrifying invasion from a race known as the Eraskites. A formidable war-like race from the depths of the far away country, Einar, they had picked a fight with the country of Aredria for long since forgotten (and complex) political reasons. It had been 'child's play' for the massed armies of the Eraskites to make their way into Aredria and through some of the smaller towns and villages, but their real aim of course was Phoenixbrook. Gaining control of Aredria's flagship city would have been as good as claiming control of the entire country.

The Eraskites were warriors. They were also far from stupid. It was their clever, three pronged attack on the city entrances which left all but the tower of the southern gate completely destroyed. Once they had gained access to the city, they must have been completely convinced that the prize was theirs.

They hadn't bargained with the fact that Phoenixbrook was designed and built with the help of the most powerful snowkitten magic available at that time. And a considerable amount of that magic had been instilled into the very heart of the city. In addition, the site that the city had intentionally been built on had long since been home to supernatural powers, known to have existed there since long before anyone inhabited the land. It meant that although it perhaps seemed a bizarre thought to imagine, and indeed an unnerving thought, the city had the ability, up to a point, to defend itself and its inhabitants.

Nobody knows exactly what happened, and probably never will. The best that any research, even recently, had been able to come up with was that Phoenixbrook had moved the entire army of Eraskites out of sync with the rest of time, by the tiniest imaginable fraction of a second. If indeed that was what had happened, then they would have become like ghosts - able to see Phoenixbrook and its people, but unable to be seen or heard, or to physically interact in any way with their surroundings. To all intents and purposes, they appeared to suddenly cease to exist, though for a time, people in Phoenixbrook reported sightings of strange shadows that moved from one street to another, and unexplained, haunting whispering from a few of the central areas of the city.

Among the cursed Eraskites had been an extremely powerful sorceress known as Kijktrin. As mentioned before, they were no fools. A large part of their success in battle had been due to the way they supplemented their fighting skills with the use of dark magic. Nobody can ever know for sure, but it seems likely that after several years of wandering as ghosts, the sorceress made an ill-advised attempt to use her power, hoping to create a spell that would return herself and the other Eraskites to their correct time.

Except that something went horrifically wrong. It could have been anything. Maybe Kijktrin made a catastrophic error in her spell. Maybe being trapped in the wrong time had a major part to play in what happened. Maybe the city, in order to create such a powerful curse, had been forced to 'borrow' more power from somewhere altogether more sinister, and that had been a factor. It could have been any or all of these things. Whatever the case, once the sorceress unleashed her spell, the 'spirits' of the Eraskites were merged and entangled into a single entity. A seething, spectral cloud of twisted thoughts and emotions - predominantly rage - mixed with total madness, and as the entity began to form, something else unknown and demonic from the depths of the planet hitched a ride. The resulting maelstrom was evil beyond anything anyone could ever have imagined, existing purely to despise and destroy, and it was determined to obliterate the city that spawned it, in revenge for what it had become.

Ancestors of the Sharinda snowkitten clan acted quickly, using their combined powers to drive the creature away from the city. Their original intentions had been to force it into the ocean, sealing it there out of harms way. The problem lay in the fact that the ocean was many miles away. The creature raged and tore at its magical bonds that they had secured it with, and they knew they would almost certainly never make it that far.

Once they reached the old, abandoned farm north of Phoenixbrook, the creature forced itself free of its bonds, but the snowkittens, with no other choice, used a powerful sealing spell to merge the creature into every atom of the building, trapping it there for all eternity, before they fled the area as rapidly as possible.

Andrina shuddered visibly. "That's horrible. That is just terrifying! And... it's true?"

Leana held her close. "I don't know how much of it is true. Some of it is guesswork built up from whatever research Aredrian scientists have been able to do over the years. Some of it may well have stemmed from local gossip. But I think a good proportion of it may be true, and we do know for a certainty that there is something evil within that farm and the surrounding area. We've seen and heard enough over the years to have no doubts about that."

Andrina, in a rare feat, was quiet for a while before she said, "And it was your ancestors - the Sharinda clan - who trapped it in there. No wonder you and Eliki were so worried about going anywhere near the place..."

Leana nodded. "That's putting it mildly. No snowkitten, or anyone else for that matter, dares go near the place. The creature can never leave the farm, and if the building is destroyed or just falls apart, it'll remain trapped in the ground. But that doesn't mean it's harmless. It has influence and power within the entire area of the farm, and a considerable distance around it. Remember those strange spiky plants we saw in the field about a mile from the farm? This is just a hunch but I'd say there is a connection between those and that farmhouse. There are very similar, evil looking plants all over the land directly round the farm itself. So you can get an idea of just how far-reaching it is, potentially."

Leana deliberately didn't tell Andrina of her other concerns - that there was a strong possibility that the creature's range of influence was, very gradually, spreading. Five years ago, the evil looking plants hadn't been seen anywhere else except around the barn, and there were other, more subtle signs. All in all, it was far from encouraging.

Another sudden burst of thunder made the two girls jump, marking the return of the storm, and preceding another deluge of heavy, or more accurately heavier, rain. Dimly in the distance, they heard someone sprinting along the cobbled pathways.

"Sheesh," Andrina muttered, "I bet not even the Skiryks would be out in weather like this." She paused for a moment. "That's a thought though. How does that haunted farmyard tie in with the Skiryks? You said they always seem to appear from there at the start of their journey to Phoenixbrook."

Leana scratched behind Andrina's ear gently, hearing a satisfied purr in return. "Well, that's the problem. I'm not really sure what the connection is. You've heard the Skiryks described sometimes as 'the lost children?' Well, nobody seems entirely sure where that name came from. But a good few years ago when I was still at college, and Jarret was in one of his very rare chatty moods, he told me of an old story he'd been researching which mentioned the origins of the name. He was very vague about it all, as usual. A case of 'I know something you don't know.' But in essence, it boiled down to the Skiryks resulting from the atrocities of the original Elysia attacks two hundred years ago. A lot of snowkitten children died back then. Maybe their spirits were meant to go to that sacred clearing we showed you, to be in peace and join the spirits of the other snowkitten ancestors. I really don't know. But maybe they became lost along the way, and never made it."

"Hence the name," Andrina said, looking wide-eyed. "And if they didn't make it as far as the clearing, perhaps that thing in the farmhouse drew them in or somehow captured them."

Leana nodded sadly. "And they became the Skiryks. Something that seems evil and extremely powerful, which kind of suggests the forces from that farmhouse hijacked the lost spirits and twisted them into something else. It also seems noticeable that they always head for Phoenixbrook, every single time. Maybe whatever is left of the original selves from those spirits is trying to get back to where they used to live, however briefly. Either that or it's the creature's way of reaching out further than it normally can, as a way of striking back at Phoenixbrook and us, and finding out whatever information it can about the place. I don't know... It's all so vague, but so much of it does seem to tie together."

Andrina looked over to the window, almost as if she expected to see someone looking in. "And if it is all true, if that's where the Skiryks really do originate from, it's something else we have the Elysia to thank for."

In an impressive piece of timing, her words were followed instantly by an enormous blast of thunder. This time it was Leana's turn to shudder.

In sheer idleness, Andrina reached across to a little wooden table at the side of the settee, where she found her remote control, aiming it towards the window and pressing the relevant button to close the curtains. When nothing happened, she murmured, "Oh fudge buckets, I forgot that wouldn't work while the power was off." She clambered awkwardly to her feet, taking a quick peer at her saturated garden and bedding plants, and the ink-black clouds that covered the entire sky. The snowkitten flung the thick blue curtains together, blocking out the view, and then turned to look at Leana.

"And now, Ms Kitty, after that bleak discussion, I think we both need cheering up." Leana caught sight of the sly look in her eyes, and realised with a smile, just what she had in mind.

"So that's the real reason you closed the curtains..."