The stone that wouldn't keep still
Lucky's Chronicles are fictional stories set in the world of iLuckyStones.
In the Field, stones keep still. It's their nature. They settle wherever they land, soak up the sun, gather dust and wait. They wait for the water to pass, for the wind to pass, for time to pass.
Not Lucky.
Lucky was an orange stone, smooth as a sweet, with two huge eyes that just wouldn't stay shut. From the very first day it had asked a question nobody in the Field had ever asked: «What if I moved?»
The old stones had sighed. «Stones don't move, Lucky. Drops do.»
And it was true. Above the Field, every day, the drops flew. The yellow ones were sweet: brush against one and you felt a little lighter, a little luckier. But drops had a flaw. If they stayed alone too long, their mood changed. They turned pink. And pink drops, when they touched you, took away a little piece of your courage.
Lucky had been watching them for days. It had noticed something: yellow drops didn't turn pink straight away. There was a moment, a tiny moment, when they were still sweet but had already begun to change.
«If I get there first,» Lucky thought, «I'll catch it while it's still yellow.»
So, one morning, Lucky rolled.
It was clumsy. It was slow. It bumped into a pebble and said sorry. But it got under a yellow drop a moment before it turned pink, and the drop settled on its head like a hat of light.
Twenty-five, Lucky counted. It didn't know why, but every drop had a number, and that number stayed inside it.
It caught another one. And another. It learned to look at the colour before the movement, to dodge the pink ones with a half turn, not to chase everything but to choose. When it reached two thousand, the Field trembled ever so slightly, like when someone opens a door in another room.
In front of it, in the air, glowing words appeared:
Not tomorrow: today is the moment.
The old stones said nothing. But one of them, the oldest, opened an eye for the first time in a hundred years. Just to see where that orange stone that wouldn't keep still was going.
To be continued in the next episode.
Try level 1 yourself: two thousand points, and the Field opens up.