Fantasy fiction with free sample chaptersThis is a world where history and myth are one...a world still marked by its oldest traces, left before there was day or night, before there was rain or weather...when whispering voices were the only wind. Thousands of years later, a boy from a remote island finds an ancient mystery that will one day drive him far across the sea.... |
THE NOONDAY SUN
Far away from any land your waking mind has known, at the edge of a dense dark forest on a tiny island lost in the waters of a vast ocean, a little house stands with its back nestled amongst the outer trees; and there, on a misty spring morning that might be long ago and might be yet to come, a woman is giving birth to a boy.
From out the deep well water is fetched and on it charms cast; and the naked child is bathed in the pure waters of an unknown spring. As he lies, cold and bleating, and wet in the morning sun, he is given name; and his body is dried and wrapped in garments of rough cloth; and his tears cease. Suddenly, the mist clears, and the sun rises straight overhead, and shines between the midday clouds; and in the utter still of noon, the light pierces the stuff of the sky; and through an open gap there streams unimpeded on his virgin skin the living sun. In time, the air settles and the light dims; the birds resume their songs, the cows bellow, and the day lives on, and passes at last into the ceaseless pattern of day and night; and when this day is lost in the mists of time and utterly forgotten, it will live on in that island; and when the isle itself has been forgotten in the vastness of the sea, the sea will remember, and it will sing the song of that lonely land on every shore in the world.
BOOK ONE: GIFT OF A STRANGER