First Appearance (Chapter 1)

The first thing that sticks in my mind from that day was when Stephen Palmer, a guy in the next year up from me, called out, "Hey, look at that. It's like a piece fell off the sun."

We'd all looked upwards, squinting from the chill of the Arctic wind. The pale disc of the sun hung low in the sky above the desert of tundra ahead of us; a cold white disc shining weakly through the steely grey cloud. I saw, and a chill unrelated to the iciness of the air as I did so, that the sun wasn't circular: it was as if one side of it had been damaged.

Another boy, nearer to me, had laughed and said, "Yeah. It's like someone took a bite out of it."

But the notch was too small for that; too small even to be a nibble. A tiny part of the circumference was indented, that was all. Like a saucer that had been knocked and had chipped on one side.

Mr Vaughan, our teacher and the leader of our group, came walking towards us, wondering why we'd stopped; why we hadn't been keeping up with him. He turned to look at the sky, to see what we were looking at.

He stared at it for a few seconds, shielding his eyes as the sun intermittently broke through the clouds that rose like smoke across it. Then he turned back to face us, grinning and with an expression full of delight.

Palmer said, "It's an eclipse, right?"

Vaughan nodded, "Yeah..." but then his smiled faded and his eyes lost their sparkle. He seemed to have remembered something significant.

He looked back up at it and muttered, "Except there's more to it than that... if I'm getting the date and time right..." He was speaking more to himself than to us. His voice was faint and distracted.

Someone asked, "What do you mean, 'there's more to it than that'?"

He looked around at the eight of us, standing around him like we were his disciples, and seemed to remember where he was; who he was talking to.

He smiled. "I used to be into eclipses. Years ago."

He was a young guy; barely in his mid-twenties. He hadn't been alive long enough to have been into something years ago.

"I think we're seeing the first eclipse of a saros cycle. We're pretty lucky... it's kind of a rare event... at least it's rare for a group of people to be around to see it."

I didn't know what he meant and looked back up at the pale, ashen disc of the sun, trying to see something that made it special. The piece missing from its edge was getting smaller. The eclipse was all but over. If this was special I figured we must have missed the special part.

He went on, "We just happen to be at exactly the right place to see it. And the date rings vague bells... when I was about eighteen I'd have given just about anything to see what we're looking at..."

John Franklin said, "But it's over. There wasn't anything to see."

Vaughan laughed. "Yeah. But it's just being born... this is just the beginning..."

Most of us looked up again, wondering if maybe there was more to come. Fireworks shooting out from it or something.

But Vaughan explained, "That's the point. In eighteen years time, the shadow of this eclipse will be back. Part of the same cycle. A few thousand miles south east of here but still within the Arctic Circle. That time a little more of the moon will cover the sun and it'll last a few seconds longer."

Anderson muttered, "Ooh wow. Book me in to see that one, sir." Vaughan ignored him except for a slight smirk. He tended to ignore most of the crap Anderson came out with.

Vaughan went on, "And then in another eighteen years, somewhere in Siberia maybe, it'll be back again. And then, in another eighteen, it'll reappear in Alaska. And it'll visit our planet every eighteen years, drifting slowly southwards across the surface and getting longer and longer and with more and more of the sun getting covered by the moon.

"In a few hundred years, when it's as far south as London and New York, if they still exist, the moon will eat so much from the sun that only a thin arc of light remain will in the sky. And then, eighteen years later, the eclipse will become total for just a few brief seconds."

We stared up at the sun, its white watery disc moving through the clouds like it was sailing on them, watching as the last speck of the moon's silhouette moved away from it. Watching the sun become whole again.

"It'll continue moving southward," he continued, "returning every eighteen years a few thousand miles east of its last visit, becoming more and more spectacular as it matures. By the twenty-eighth century the brief eclipse you just saw will have developed to a total time of three of hours, with seven or eight minutes of darkness at its climax. To the people watching it in as it moves across Africa or South America - or even if seen only by fish, whales and birds as it sweeps across the Indian Ocean or Pacific - it will be magnificent."

The wind whistled around us, freezing our ears and making our noses turn pink, as we stared up at the sun's disc, listening to him. For a guy more used to teaching fifth-form Physics, he had a captivating way with words.

"And today is its birth date. Pity we didn't pack a bottle of champagne."

When it became obvious that Vaughan had said all he was going to, our eyes moved from the sun back to him. I could tell he was grinning even though the after-image of the sun's disc made a dark purple ball hover in front of his face.

I looked around: at the wind making waves through the rough mossy plants on the endless plain and at the leaden clouds above us, moving as one sheet like they were frozen together. What a bleak place in which to be born!

We set off again, walking north-eastwards towards our next intended camp and our third night away from civilisation.

Throughout the afternoon, as we walked across the flat, desolate tundra, my mind kept returning to the eclipse, unable to let it go.