Too fearful to rise and light a candle, the boy pushed aside the curtains and peered out the window, looking for the only other light to be seen during these long-ago nights—the Moon. It was there, full and bright.

At that moment a young moonbeam shot down from the sky and through the window. Like all beams, it had a mission: Protect the children. The moonbeam glowed its very hardest, which seemed to comfort the two.One, then the other, breathed a sleepy sigh and lay back down. In a few moments they were once again asleep. The moonbeam scanned the room. All was safe. There was nothing there but shadows. But the beam sensed something beyond the room, beyond the cabin. Something, somewhere, wasn’t right. The beam ricocheted off the small glass mirror above the children’s chest of drawers and out the window.

It flashed through the village, then into the surrounding forest of pine and hemlock, flickering from icicle to icicle. Startling bats and surprising owls, it followed the old snow-covered Indian trail to the darkest part of the deep woods—a place the settlers feared and rarely ventured. Like a searchlight, the beam shot out into the darkness until it found a cave.

So Ombric conjured a second ring of defense—a great black bear, the largest in all the Russias, whose courage and devotion were unquestioned. The bear would patrol to protect the village from anyone who might cause harm.

Then, on the outer rim, Ombric planted a third ring—majestic oaks, the largest in the world, whose huge roots could rise up and block the advance of any who tried to enter with evil intent. Ombric had to search through seven of his most ancient journals to find just the right enchantment to accomplish that feat!

And in case that was not enough to keep the intruders away, Ombric conjured up one more thing: a ghostly temptress with a beguiling smile. Adorned with what seemed like glittering gems, his Spirit of the Forest could lure visitors of an unkind or ignoble disposition to a particularly useful doom, turning them into stone, cursed forever to be a part of the village’s defenses.

And so the hunt began. The Lunanoffs knew that Pitch would come for them. They had constructed a remarkable craft called the Moon Clipper that was not only the swiftest ship in the galaxies but, with the flick of a switch, could transform itself into a Moon. The Lunanoffs were at full sail toward a distant galaxy with their stalwart crew of Moonbots.

Nicholas Saint North and the Battle of the Nightmare King Chapter 5

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His boyhood was spent in the wilds, aware of himself only as both predator and prey. There are skills that develop when one grows up forgotten and wild: keen eyes, light steps, impossible quickness. These skills would become North’s native tongue—that and a preternatural sense of where danger lies. As a boy, he fled from that feeling, but as he grew older he pursued it.

Nicholas Saint North and the Battle of the Nightmare King Chapter 6

He worked with gusto, and regularly overstepped his new abilities without properly thinking things through. When creating a ball that would never stop bouncing, he added too much bounce. After the ball hit the ground, it rocketed up to the sky with such force that it could easily have traveled to Mars.

In another experiment he tried to make a young cat stay forever kitten-size. First, he accidentally shrunk the animal to the size of a microbe, then overcompensated. A regular-sized kitten is cute, but one that is twelve feet tall is a problem. The cat tried to eat Petrov and the bear repeatedly, even after being returned to a normal size.

This was all a welcome diversion for the village, a chance to laugh again. But North was not the type to take setbacks in stride. He fumed for days whenever things didn’t go as he’d intended. Sometimes these angry moods would cause small catastrophes. Furniture would burst into flames, or very small thunderclouds (usually no bigger than a pillow) would follow North around until he calmed.

There lived one of the last great wizards, Ombric Shalazar, and that morning, he was in deep discussion with a number of nocturnal insects, specifically a Lunar Moth, several fireflies, and a glowworm. This was not unusual.

Ombric could speak several thousand languages. He was fluent in the dialects of all manner of bugs, birds, and beasts; he could even speak hippopotamus. As he switched from Lunar Moth to firefly, a group of village children, early for school, hovered nearby. Many of them had just begun to learn some of the easier insect languages (ant, worm, snail), and though moth and firefly were difficult (glowworm, even more so), they could tell from the tone of the conversation that something was very wrong indeed.

Nicholas Saint North and the Battle of the Nightmare King Chapter 2

Something dark flashed past the boy and into the children’s room. Suddenly, two Fearlings hovered and twisted in midair above the sleeping brother and sister who turned restlessly, clutching at their quilts. Instinctually, the spectral boy leaped off the windowsill and snatched a broken tree branch from the ground, attaching the diamond dagger to its end. He aimed his gleaming weapon at the window.

The Fearlings shrunk back from the light, but they did not disappear. So, for the second time that evening, the moonbeam glowed with all its might. The brightness was now too much for the Fearlings. With a low moan, they twined and curled, then vanished, as if they had never been there at all.

Nicholas Saint North and the Battle of the Nightmare King Chapter 1