The Chronicles of Jonathon Postlethwaite: The Seed of Corruption Read Online Free Page A

travel as the Great Gate demanded. His volunteer High Hats never returned. Again and again ignorant and newly  recruited volunteers, armed  with  stopwatches  and  plied  with the promise of incentives, trooped eagerly into the undulating  orifice  never  to  be  seen again.
                                Eventually, after much trial and error and a terrible drain on Flax's human resources, one volunteer returned unharmed and still relatively sane. One pace every two seconds had allowed this man to pass through to the other side of the 'door' without any major ill effects.
                                Flax celebrated, hugging his bemused, but terrified High Hats and shrieking unintelligibly. Now all he required was an answer to what lay behind this 'door'. The successful traveller held out his hands to an attentive Flax, displaying his blackened fingers.
    “A  great  coldness  lies  beyond  and  a  great  blinding whiteness too, no man could ever live there for long." the survivor informed Flax through black, frost bitten lips.
                                Flax was angered that he had been again foiled by circumstances. The `door' opened into certain death! From his High Hats' meticulous records Flax knew that this portal would remain open for perhaps another twenty hours before it gradually began to close until only a thin and inaccessible crescent remained.
                                Donning              warm              clothing              and                            armed              with                            a stopwatch,              Flax                            decided              to              see              for              himself              the inhospitable, white and cold world beyond this particular dimension door. Once inside the door, Silus found  himself in a swirling, shifting, rainbow coloured tunnel  of light that wormed its way  through  the  fabric           of  space  and  time  from  one  dimension to another.
    Flax nervously paced and counted out the seconds. "One AND two AND one AND two AND...."
                                Flax felt his body tingle slightly as he moved slowly along the tunnel. After several nervous minutes, counting out the seconds with a loud and savage accuracy, the coloured light faded and he found himself in a tunnel of blue-white ice. His breath frosted and billowed out into the bright whiteness of the tunnel. It was indeed cold he thought. The High Hat leader moved cautiously forward to where the tunnel opened into the vast empty spaces ice and snow beyond, devoid of anything at all except the viscous wind sculpted and curious monuments to itself in the snowdrifts and on the ice mountains.
                                Flax stared out into the bleak and forbidding arctic wastes which seemed to stretch out to infinity. This was not it, there was nothing that he needed  here.  He knew what he was looking for – a city  or  maybe a town; a place to seek what he needed, a place to prepare his High Hats and then return to Dubh to lead them against the Tans and then the Tallmen themselves.
                                Silus   Flax   despised    the    Tans'    dominance of  Dubh.  Although  he  took  from  them  it   was never enough,  he  desired  something  which  they could never give him. They had power and endured him, so long as he was useful. Eventually he would outgrow his usefulness to them, he knew, and then they would find someone else to fill their needs.