Hello Subscribers!

I am starting to hit my stride again with writing. Slow going, but better. Progress not-withstanding, I am a terrible procrastinator and decided to design my own font (I mean, come on!) to use for chapter titles in my current draft. It looks pretty cool though!

I'll do anything but *write*, won't I

A sample chapter from my WIP

My brother and I learned to run, to fly, before we learned to speak. When our parents taught us human words, I teased him and called him Tapir, and he teased me and called me Little Dark Beast. We did not hate each other then. No-one taught us that.

We lived above a cove beside the ocean on the island’s northern horn. The water there is full of fish and very, very cold. Every night I ran inland, pattering through the stream beds rich with clay, right into what I thought of as the very heart of Legend, a jungle so thick it moved like liquid and you had to be liquid with it. My brother followed me, partly to guard me and partly because he thought I had secrets. But I didn’t. My head was empty then. I remember being so happy, running on my own but knowing Tapir was not far behind. He was strong and fast, and I was durable and agile. That was how we divided ourselves in two, back then, because in most other ways we were exactly the same. We were wild, even for children of Legend. Anyone who dared complain about us to our mother would get summarily dismissed in natural language, which in my mother’s case involved a chuffing growl and black-dilated pupils followed by a courteous yet toothsome invitation to a duel. A general protocol soon developed in which her parenting was never to be questioned.

My father was the least like us. He loved the cold water and the sunlight best. But he lived most of his life on land, and he lived it mostly at night, guarding us, guarding Legend, attending to the island’s interests and security at my mother’s side. In the mornings, after he had settled us all to bed, he dove and fished and prepared food for when we woke and then lay down with us, wound his body around us as we slept. It is normal for Legenders, and not strange at all, to sleep together naked with your family in a big pile of each other’s hair and warm bare skin, feathers, scales, as the case may be. When the hottest part of the day was over, we would wake naturally, and our mother would stretch out her body beneath us and conjure us all into wakefulness with stories of our island, of the world, of its histories including all its peoples and its many kings and queens. She had beautiful golden hair on her throat and down her chest and that is my main visual memory of her, my ear on her shoulder, my hand resting on her neck to feel the music of her voice, a sleep-encrusted view of the spot beneath the corner of her jaw where the hair grew in a swirl. Tapir has a similar memory, I like to think, of her other side, of the various details there. I like to think he keeps the other half of the puzzle of our mother.

I remember her words most clearly, because I felt them as well as heard them. “Two hundred years ago,” was the beginning of a story she told often, where “a terrible plague sprang up in the grassy heart of Summer and came down the great river, festered in the cracks of Kata-Obari, set sail from there on boats, through the many channels of the Delta and out into the world. The King of Legend at the time, the Monkey-Eating Eagle King, forbade all foreign boats from landing on our shores. But the world had designs on our island, on her treasures, on her gold, on her rich volcanic reefs blistering with pearls. The Sun Queen was an artless tyrant, and the Nickel Emperor was a conniving despot, and they hated each other, and they each sought to leverage the powers of Legend for themselves. So, both Summer and Treasure paid the King of Legend lip service, but sent boats anyway, pirates to fish pearls from our waters, infiltrators to poach our groves, our nests, our homes of the treasures they could get nowhere else on earth. So, our people were robbed, first by the thieves and then by the plague that they brought with them. The Monkey-Eating Eagle King repaid them with carnage but he, too, ended up losing his most beloved. His daughter, and then his woman—his daughter’s mother—a beautiful tiger soldier. In an electric storm of grief he ran, he flew, to Parri Bā, because, he said, he would bring death home to Summer, first.”

Tapir always asked to hear the version of the story where the King of Legend took his army with him, a host of eagle-hawks and jungle cats who fell upon the city like a shower of marigolds. I liked the version where the King went rogue and doled out all the murder by himself. Neither version was particularly realistic, but we argued about it afterwards as we ran and played in the absolute dark amongst the laurel trunks and pitcher plants. “The numbers do not add up,” I would say. “Three thousand soldiers is too many, even for those days. It would have left the island undefended.” Tapir would reply, “A King of Legend would not act alone, Little Dark Beast. Not if he was right.”

Our mother always told us multiple versions of the same story, so that way we would teach each other these lessons and free her up for other things, such as having private evening breakfasts with our father, followed by—I assume—as much love-making as their duties would allow time for, because until I left the island I never saw two people as addicted to each other as they were.

Tapir and I would stay out all night wrestling, running, fighting other children and goading them into silly dares such as, I dare you to eat this or I dare you to run up there and jump off that. I dare you to fall in one form and shift before you die. We would settle arguments between us by racing up the tallest meranti tree we could find, a slender bridge into the stars, and if Tapir was right, he was fastest to the top. And if I was right, he let me get there first. We would sit together at the top of the tree, swaying on the thinnest branch that could support our human bodies.

I said, “What will we do, brother, when we need to settle things like grown-ups?”

He said, “We will need to find a taller tree.”

...end of Chapter 8!

Thank you for reading!