literature

Before the Real Story Begins

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Literature Text

BEFORE THE REAL STORY BEGINS


Once upon a time there was a boy.

He looked like an ordinary boy.  He talked and walked like an ordinary boy.  He went fishing with his father and chopped wood in the evening just as other boys did.  His yellow hair was not unheard of, and his grey eyes not impossible for a boy to have.

One day the boy and his father left the little house in the woods, where he thought they had always lived, and always would.  They walked a long time, until they passed out of the woods, and came to a place where the trees were far apart, and a smell of salt was in the air, and the boy could see the great grey sea filling the horizon.  They came to a village, and found a little house close to it, on the top of a hill.  Its windows were dark, and no smoke came from the chimney on the roof.  The boy’s father put a few coins in the hand of a man who stood nearby, and they went inside, and lit a fire, and it was home.

The boy came to forget the woods and the house they had left, and ran and played with the boys of the village, who laughed at his yellow hair and grey eyes.  The boys asked him why he didn’t have a mother, and he said she had gone away.  They asked why she went away, and all he could say was that she had needed to, because his father said so.  And somehow, he know it was true, for he knew that his father still loved his mother, who had golden hair too, and his mother loved both of them, though she could not be with them.  So the boys whispered behind his back for a while, and then, when they saw that there really wasn’t anything really odd about him, even though they all had brown hair and brown eyes, and his hair gleamed like gold in the sunlight, and though he had no mother, they went running in the grass again, playing the games that all boys do.  And he ran and played just as they did, and he was happy.

Once the boy had a dog, and the dog ran with him when he played, and stood by him at dusk when he learned to chop wood, and chased the chips that flew from the axe, and the hollow behind the hill rang with the sound of the falling axe and the dog’s baying.
And when the dog grew old and died, somehow the boy knew before he saw for himself, before he met the look in his father’s eyes, he knew; there was an emptiness in his heart that he recognized.  Something he loved was gone forever.  So he went down to the seashore alone and wept until his eyes were dry, and then returned to the little house, and wept no more, though the empty feeling was still there.

Even so, the boy was happy.  He ran and played with the other boys, as the years passed and they grew taller together, and chased the girls who ran laughing through the long grass of summer.  His father took him fishing at night, and soon he began to go alone, and he would gaze at the stars and sing softly to hear the sound echo over the water, while the net hung limp at the little boat’s side.  He brought the fish back in the morning, and slept smiling in the warm sunlight.  He was happy.

Until the war came again.

It wasn’t a new war.  It had been a part of life since long before the boy was born, long before he and his father came to the little village beside the sea.
So the father had to leave.  He pulled a sword from under the bed, and by the light of the fireplace, late at night, he cleaned it until it gleamed like water.  He took a rust-stained tunic and a pair of rough boots from a trunk in the corner.  He baked bread, and put it in a sack with a few apples and a waterskin, and the clothes, and a blanket.  A stone and a little flask of oil joined them, to make the sword gleam wherever he might be.
The next morning the father rose early, and tossed a grey cloak around his shoulders, and embraced his son.  He held him long, and blue eyes looked down to meet grey for a moment, searching, grasping, then saying farewell, and falling.  The father turned, and left the house, and mounted the horse he had bought the day before, and rode away down the hill.

The boy stood there alone in the misty dawn, as the salty sea air mingled with his salty tears.

And the boy waited.  The war would not be long, he said to himself.  Any day, his father would come home, and he’d see the familiar dark figure come up the hill as the light of the sunset faded away over the sea.

The boy grew, and people said he was a man, though he didn’t feel any different, and his cheek still held the bareness of youth.  Winters passed, and warm summers, coming and going like the tide.  The boy who was called a man fished at night, and the women of his village bought them in the mornings, and looked him over and clicked their tongues, and said he should be marrying soon.

Then one night, as the boy was leaving the little house to go down to his boat, he saw a figure far off, coming toward the little village, barely visible in the fading sunset, riding a horse that plodded slowly.  The boy waited, but the figure stopped in the village, and did not come up the hill, and the boy only realized when the figure had disappeared inside the little inn that he was holding his breath, and a salty taste ran down his face and into his mouth.
He turned away, and blinked his stinging eyes, and walked down the other side of the hill, down to the sea.

When he brought his fish to the village the next morning, the wives who came to buy them were quiet, and looked at the ground instead of at him.  He asked them what was wrong, but they only shook their heads, and told him to go to the inn, and went away.
The boy went to the inn, and saw the horse tethered outside, and entered the dark, and walked into the smoky room where a weather-beaten man sat at a table near the fire, though it was not cold.
The man looked up.  “So do you already know, or have to come to hear?”
The boy answered, “To hear.”
The man said, “I do not know you, and you are too young to remember me, nor need you, for I will not stay; there is nothing now here for me.  I am the last of the company of men from this place, who departed years ago to fight under Arigthûn.”
“Arigthûn?”
“The boy king.  Though now he is hardly a boy, but like you, a man without knowing it yet.”
The boy did not speak what was in his mind.  His father.  “You are the last?”  The boy’s voice shook, just a little.
“Yes.”
The boy nodded.

Then he went home.  He lay on his bed, and waited for the empty feeling to come, the feeling that would tell him his father was gone, that he was finally truly alone.
It didn’t come.  No.  His father was alive.  Somehow, just as he knew he would feel it if his father were dead, he knew he still lived.
The boy arose.  Today, he would not sleep.  He pulled the blanket from his bed, and laid it on the rough floor.  He gathered food, and clothes, and what few coins he had, and put them on the blanket, and rolled it up, and tied it together with rope from his fishnet.  He pulled up a plank from the floor, and took a ring from a little box he found there; silver, with a green stone the gleamed in the growing morning light.  He put it on his finger, and stood, and picked up the bundled blanket, and went out the door, and closed it.
As he walked down the hill, he turned, and looked back at the little house.  The chimney was smokeless, and the windows were dark and empty, as if he had never been there.

The boy looked ahead, and saw the figure of the man on the horse, riding away from the village, cutting a line in the seafog not yet burned away by the heat of day.
He ran.
He reached the man, panting, gasping for breath, and the man stopped his horse, and looked down at the boy.
“I am coming with you,” the boy said.  “There is nothing left for me here.”
“What do you mean?” asked the man.
“I want to find my father.  I know he is alive.”
The man looked into the boy’s eyes for a moment, then nodded.  “Very well.  You may come with me.”  He smiled.  “You’ll need a horse.  You can’t walk all the way to war, you know.  But we’ll get one in the next town.  What is your name?”
“Lagaroth.”

And so they set out, and they left the sea behind them, and faced the journey ahead.
I REALLY shouldn’t be uploading this. I should REALLY be doing my homework that’s due tomorrow, especially since it’s after 2 am and I also need to go to bed. But I have decided this is going to bother me until I do it, so I have to in order to get anything *else* done.

Anyway. I wrote this several years ago, but I still rather like it. It’s a ‘prologue’ of sorts to a story I’ve had in the back of my brain for the past…. oh, maybe seven years or so. The actual story takes place one or two years after the end of this piece. It’s deliberately written in a sing-songy, fairy-story style, so don’t go thinking all my fiction has this sort of ‘sound’ to it. No, most of it is worse, actually.

Depending on the response I get to this, I might upload more. We’ll see. I’ve been meaning to do the ‘character profile’ meme in my journal for some of my characters for ages, in any case. Oh, and not that it's good enough for anyone to want to steal it, but... copyright to MEEEE. It is my baby.
Shutting up now.
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© 2006 - 2024 kayshasiemens
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TVchick08's avatar
Oh my gosh! You're soooo amazing! I luv to write, but my stories are terribl compared to yours. You put so much feeling behind it all and still leave that lingering sense of wonder.