Untamed - A. G. Howard Page 0,18
in one of the distant reflections—a silhouette of something inhuman. He turns on his heel to find such distortions in each plane of silver-backed glass. With just the blink of an eye, the shadows resolve to clarity and a strange, terrifying world opens up. Large, ugly birds with two sets of wings, lumbering along an ashy terrain in lieu of flying. Crimson bats twice the size of condors swooping overhead, capturing anything brave enough to share the flaming sky with their long, fanged tongues. He starts to back away, but terror evolves into fascination, and lures him closer as some smaller creatures—puppylike beings, colored and shaped liked snowflakes—drift across the lands. They turn themselves inside out, their innards a ball of snapping teeth that devours anything in its path. Blood splashes everywhere as they feast on the four-winged birds. David winces, half expecting to get splattered by the warm and coppery spray, but the massacre is contained within the reflections. Fear and revulsion clench his throat, but he watches one instant longer, as the smallest creature of all, shaped like a butterfly with a scorpion’s tail, flutters down—an elegant angel of death—and turns all the bloody, snarling balls of teeth to statues of stone.
In a dazed euphoria, David winds his way out of the maze and relays all the death he’s seen. The knights converse among one another, then turn to his father.
“This is unprecedented: your second son to have the sight,” the white-bearded knight says. “He sees the weak points in the barrier between the nether-realm and the human world even more clearly than his brother. You know what this means, Gregor.”
David’s father nods. He looks both sad and proud as he pats David’s head. David isn’t sure what to feel. But one thing he does know: He’s no longer considered a child. He’s a warrior, and will be trained as one.
His father packs his bags, they kiss his sobbing mother and sisters one last time, and then it’s off to live with his uncles and cousins in Oxford, England, at Humphrey’s Inn. David’s searing grief over saying good-bye to his family and old life is stanched only when his older brother, Bernie, comes to greet them at the door.
The scene shakes and shivers as we pass through several months of lessons: studying AnyElsewhere, the looking-glass world where Wonderland’s exiles are banished. He learns it’s connected to Wonderland by the tulgey wood and to the human realm by infinity mirrors, and that a dome of iron surrounds the prison, warping any incarcerated netherlings into grotesque creatures should they try to use their magic while inside.
During his training, David buries himself in studies of the mutated creatures to earn the honor to be a part of the special faction of knights who guards the two gateways—the one from the human realm and the one into Wonderland. But the violent and gruesome subject matter saturates his nightmares and dreams with vivid and bizarre imagery. Still, he advances, taking self-defense classes and redefining his language—learning how to wield the mind as armor when riddles are the weapon.
The shifting scenes of David’s life pause at Hubert’s restaurant as his feet skate through ash in the fighting pit while diners watch him learn to fence from above. I feel Thomas’s . . . David’s . . . heart rate climb, feel his eagerness to make his father proud, his competitiveness toward his brother and cousins, and a self-conscious awareness as all eyes fix on him—the youngest and newest candidate. But in time he learns to block everything out but the game. He becomes confident, graceful, and adept, betters all of his opponents—including his own father—and by his ninth birthday, he’s ready for his first sojourn to AnyElsewhere, to experience the secrets inside firsthand. Most of the boys are taken in at age thirteen, but he merits an earlier initiation, for not only has he learned to defend himself, but he also has the daring, wisdom, and acumen of someone five years his senior.
A vivid rainbow smears the screen as the memory tilts and turns on David’s ride within an ashy white wind tunnel shaped like a tornado. The funnels provide safe transportation across the prison world for the knights, since they’re the only ones with the magical medallions that control the winds. Gusts rip through David’s hair and clothes as he’s carried along with his uncle William to the Wonderland gate, where David will be taught the secrets of his guardian status. Triggered by