Fiction and Fantasy

This is the prologue for the sprawling fantasy Mystic Searches, which has also been adapted as a comic and video game. A dramatic reading of this can be found here.

Twilight swallowed the last light of day, and for those with an ear for it, the licentious orchestra of night introduced a somber overture.  

And arguably, there were none more attuned than Julian.  He sat with his legs crossed, comfortably cradled by the gnarled roots of an aging ruhkwood.  The phosphorescent fungus at his feet wired around the stones and slowly rolled through various shades of hypnotic blues and surreal violets.  Embers of stars dropped from the darkening sky in the form of fireflies, which danced in erratic patterns through the tops of the trees, finally coming to rest in the thick grasses.  Through the shadows, he saw curious eyes of a nocturnal pride of wild hoad.  This was his audience.  The trees, the fungus, the fireflies and the forest beasts.  They all congregated, transfixed by the sullen sound of his lute.  

In the fantastical Myrinda, where even children could command the supernatural, his communion with the song of the world was the one trait that separated him from the mundane.  Unfortunately, in a world of magic and wonder, this musical ability had no more significant practical application than it had in his prosaic former life as a vagabond minstrel.  Even though he’d left the ordinary world behind almost two years prior, he still hadn’t realized the potential suggested by Mystic Paen’s recruitment.  And so, this nightly ritual was a frivolity.  It was a place to quell the recurring insecurities.  And after days like the one he was retiring, when his ineptitudes pushed forward his worst sense inadequacy, he overcompensated in volume of relish for such frivolous things.  

Yes, he should be engaged in study.  In practice.  In the exploration of lore, or locked in meditative introspection.  But his handicaps of normalcy only made him more obstinate, and more prone to seek this sort of escape, compounding the issue.  It was certainly a defiant compulsion.  The further he trailed his contemporaries, the more determined he became in reveling in this inconsequential, personal ritual.  So while the other hand picked students of Mystic Paen were learning to divine the stars and conjure illusions and commune with the dead (diversified with intent, Paen would assert, in the name of preserving the world’s order), Julian plucked at ruvani hair drawn across a hollowed out chunk of wood for his own amusement.

Well, his and the wild hoads’, anyway.

Perhaps the self deprecating was unfair.  He was not merely a musician.  An ordinary skill such as that, even at mastery level, was not a sufficient requisite for piquing the interest of the Mystics.  Only in the rarest cases was even the existence of Myrinda  exposed to those in the normal world, let alone a path to it availed.  There needed to exist something extraordinary.  Something supernatural.  Some innate ability to glimpse or reach beyond the fabric of the corporeal.  Mystic Paen had recruited him because he was convinced that Julian’s musical aptitude was evidence of this.  

It’s not a thing Julian had ever considered growing up.  This extraordinary capacity had never been measured.  The only metric for comparison back in the mundane world was in arbitrary comparisons to the skills of other musicians, or in the ability to captivate an audience.  But here, in Myrinda, he had come to realize that his faculty was not really musical in nature at all.  It was not recitation, nor was it creation.  He was nether deliberately writing nor was he recalling the notes.  It was something supernatural.

For example, in this moment the night sang to him in the manner that a subconscious idea speaks to intent.  And his performance was congruent to the song in the way that an action represents the impetus defined by the subconscious idea.  And just like with an idea rolled over and iterated and morphed by the conscious mind, he could pull and tug at the song, his will nudging the nature of the world around him.  When too much of his will was imposed, the night would break its connection.  And while it was true that nature did not like to be led, it was often amenable to his polite, courting gesture and an occasional lascivious dance.

In the glen at the mouth of the Borrowood, the skeletons of scattered architectural remains evidenced a valiant yet futile battle between a once proud civilization and the nature with which he now communed.  Here, among the mossy ruins that were a threshold to the enchanted forest beyond, the song of the world was clearest of anywhere he knew.  And at this particular hour, when the sky was one degree shy of night, he consistently found the most engaging arrangement.  Almost nightly, while his peers were poring over old tomes, he could be found here, doing this.  Playing music for the forest.  Or more aptly, accompanying the music of life.  

And he playfully articulated the motif of the night air, the spray of the small waterfall that splashed mist at his back, the blood red petals of the night blooming rustler.  In response, the breeze blew, the spray warmed, the rustler opened and stretched towards the sky.  The glow of the phosphorescent fungus strengthened and pulsed.  One of the younger hoads chortled in approval.  It was serene.

But there was a strange undertone that challenged that complacent serenity.  And in response, he could find no counterpoint that wasn’t illogical or dissonant.  Julian’s meditative state fizzled, as he made a conscious effort to wrangle the melody.  

The dissonant tone was not only displeasing, it carried with it an anxiety that fought to lead this interplay.  Welling up from his toes and ascending into his stomach, an awareness of wrongness bubbled and churned, and stabbed like shards of glass at the inside of his abdomen.  

The alpha in the pride of hoads snorted, an aggressive reaction to the palpable change.  Something was wrong.  The change of tonality reverberating from the body of his lute was a representation of the wrongness.  At the same time, in the most abstract way, it revealed a hint of something sour on the wind.  Fireflies darkened in a growing radius around him.  They disappeared, never to illuminate again.  But maybe most troubling was the rustler.  Its petals folded and it recoiled in a failed protective reflex.  The vibrant, bulbous red withered to a charred black.

Had Julian’s ineptitude caused this?  His worry?  His sense of inadequacy?  Had he accidentally slipped and introduced a dissonant motif, leading the melody of this night to a cacophonous counterpoint?  Had he carelessly corrupted the song of the world?  It was hard for him to believe that his influence could be so pronounced.  His mere finger plucks should not have been so capable.

His doubt found its way to his fingers.  An atonal vibrato pushed a nefarious quiver through the glen.  The agitated hoads yelped and fled into the forest.  The wind threw up a stinging sand into his face, and heavy leaves fell from the canopy, curling dry, and then dissolving into an ashen dust.  The melody manifesting from his own hands was not only acrid.  It was malignant.

Something had violated his place of reprieve.  Something dangerous and malicious.  The anxiety and doubt evolved into fear and guilt, which only served as an amplifier.  The delicate dance had been interrupted by a violent partner.  He could not escape the influence.  He could not stop his fingers from strumming, nor could he get ahead of the movement’s morose gravity.  They were in lock step, tangled up in each other, and careening off the proper path in a malevolent direction.  And as it warped his song, and as it polluted this place, it profaned his thoughts until they were no longer recognizable as his own.  He was possessed.  His body now existed as little more than a mechanical feedback vehicle to help this force grow, while his mind was trapped inside with sharp awareness but with no control.  

A focus point became evident.  Ahead of him in the brush, the undefined shape of a thing grew closer.  The thing was a vacuum for the life in The Borrowood.  The paranormal black fissure pushed through the lower branches.  The spectral thing affected the physical space with malice and intent.  It trapped the light, and every living thing drew away with violent desperation.  Most things tethered to the ground were enveloped by the approaching apparition as it lurched towards him with ravenous desire.  It co-opted his communion with the forest to serve its mysterious and nefarious ends.  Could the thing envelop him too?

For every beautiful thing in the world, there is a proportional horror.  This was a staple deduction of Mystic Paen’s teachings on the element of Order, for which the aging wizard was the sitting custodian.  This specter was an example of such horror, invading this place of serenity.

A moment of clarity revealed that this was death manifest, empowered and intensified by the very particular ability that Julian possessed.  The careless folly of his frivolous escapism had not only played to the living night, but had also become nourishment for a foreign invader.  A psychic parasite.  One charged by and radiating death.

Julian closed his eyes and drifted to a state of fluid focus.  He let his mind deconstruct the complex sonic threads, untangling the mess and finding familiar motifs.  He doubled them, tripled them, played their octave.  He found consonant supporting harmonies, and he insisted his performance on the night itself.  

An accidental dissonance struck.  He countered by resolving it.  His fingers plucked arpeggiated patterns, overwhelming an unwelcome drone with ornate flair.  And rather than combat the stuttering syncopation, he leaned into it, turning unpredictable tempos into a regular polyrhythmic texture which turned chaos into recursive resolution of anticipation.

His hands were sweating, challenging his grip on his instrument.  His fingers were aching, bending and contorting to inhuman configurations.  The Borrowood was fighting back against the invader, and Julian was its selected weapon.  

He opened his eyes as the foreign melodies began to conform.  Visibly, the dark specter dissipated into the night’s mist.  And what remained was the theme’s obvious converse.

If it could be spoken, it would say that for every horror in the world, there is also proportional beauty.  

Her pale skin virtually glowed in the light of the moon that spilled through the canopy.  Her blue dress suggested the aristocracy of the capital city Iohai, while its frays implied youthful rebellion.  Violet strands traced through her black hair, which shaped a face broken from tears.  Her uneven sobs conducted the last of the arrhythmic drifts, while strained whimpers defined the last of the fleeting atonal grace notes.

Julian realized he was holding his breath.  Perhaps the night was as well.  They seemed to exhale in tandem.  She breathed in the warm night breeze, and he found himself hoping that she was breathing him.  The glen at the base of The Borrowood had diffused whatever dark thing she had brought with her.  His song had forced it into submission.  The moment of peace was shared, both of them soothed by the same embrace.  Both cradled by the return of the song of the night.  Of life.

She didn’t see him, and for that he was grateful.  Whatever enchantment that had befallen her had obviously muted her senses.  She was just now recovering, and pushing past the grim fog, both literally and figuratively.  

He was so hypnotized by her sudden, strenuous, and ultimately inspired appearance into his special place that his own fogged senses almost didn’t pick up on the barking, domesticated feist now yapping at her ankles.  It wasn’t aggression, it was relief.  The creature’s tail waved with exuberance as it hopped and danced around her.

Defeated, she collapsed to the ground and ran her hand through its reddish short haired coat, taking a moment to rub behind one of its triangular ears.  It accepted the affection with a lapping tongue, which caused a single, weak chuckle to pierce her exhaustion.  She whispered to the feist, inaudible to Julian from the distance.  But it was with care.  It was gratitude.  It was absolute love.  It felt the antitheses of what had previously occupied her shape and place.  And in a way he was certain she would not be able to perceive, the song of the night reacted in favor.

But to his astonishment, she did perceive it.  At least to some degree.  She reacted to the abstract sensation, as the legato motif of moonlight off of the glassy water resumed in a triumphant crescendo.  Her reaction was to stand in awe.  She let the straps of the dress slide off of her shoulders as she stepped towards the water.  It fell completely as her toes dipped into the cool spring.  The incandescent mosses on the rocks behind her conspired against his adolescent curiosity, hiding the details of her body in silhouette as she waded in up to her waist, bathing in the song of life inherent in this place.

Suddenly, he worried that his voyeuristic instinct had become the violation.  He turned away.  Under the shift of his weight, a dry twig snapped.  The ears of the feist perked up, and then darted back.  The creature hunched and growled, its glowing eyes scanning his general direction.  That only caused Julian to panic and pivot again.

There was the sound of a splash coupled with a surprised gasp.  Julian turned reflexively.  He and the strange girl in the water caught eyes for the briefest of moments.  Born out of that small moment was a new melody.  It was wonderlust.  It was vulnerability.  It was new and unanticipated.  Most notably, though, is that it was logically cadential, but with seemingly infinite anticipation.

This melody did not belong to the Borrowood, nor the glen.  It did not belong to the world, nor to any of the supernatural provinces of Myrinda.  It was not life or death.  This intriguing young melody was the opening line to the sonata of a very particular set of lives, incited by a single shared gaze, now belonging exclusively to Julian and the girl in the lake.  

In that moment, with no quantifiable reason, he found this to be irrefutable evidence that this was the most intimate moment he had ever shared with another person.

The girl in the lake dove behind one of the moss-covered, arcane structures that jutted out from the water, and her protective feist joined her.  Julian began towards her, and in mid stride, realized the context and implied potential aggression of his accidental voyeurism.  Embarrassed, he did not try to follow her.  Instead, he retreated back through the woods towards the Celestial Observatory.  Back to the teachings of Master Paen.  Back to his peers.  Back to his insecurities.

As the licentious orchestra of the night faded into subconscious awareness, the developing young melody integrated into its song.  It refused to quiet in his mind.  It was this night’s assurance that it hadn’t been a disconnected pattern.  It was, instead, a newly introduced theme that would pervade his attention.  

It was this night’s sly promise that there would be other nights for the new melody to be thoroughly explored.