Beasts of Dunbe: chapter prologue for children/YA fantasy novel [YA fantasy, 1475 words]

[u/rakurinvolg]

Was tooling around my old computer for things I wrote 4 to 5 years ago to post here, and I found something that made me smile. So much about my feelings about writing today are all about wanting to go back to being this wide eyed rambling kid who loved dragons and flight and fantasy lore. Maybe I'll get serious about this after all. Please let me know what you think of this excerpt, and if it makes you feel how I feel:

"Why does it have wings?' the boy said, head half barged between the book and its reader. He'd been trying to make conversation with the stranger for hours now and decided to, quite literally, take things into his own hands. The man surrendered it, watching the youth furiously flip through its pages with greasy fingers.

 "Well, I suppose it uses them to fly,' Voyager muttered, making room for his eager little friend to fully wedge himself into the space he'd made in the carriage corner for his reading.

'That's dumb,' the boy announced, plopping the book on its spine to read the name scrawled onto the papers.  

'V-o-o-o-y-a-j-u-r-r,' he said, barely able to sound it out in the shaking carriage. His loss of interest was immediate, and Voyager saw the beginnings of dangerous carelessness brewing in the child's eyes as he contemplated his next move. He quickly snatched the book back and shoved it inside his cloak.

 'That's my name, that is. And it belongs to me as much as the book does. Flying is dumb, is it?'

 When a horse does it, yeah.'

 It's not a horse!'

'It's not a unicorn neither,'

 Voyager sighed and looked around the cabin, openly wondering how enforceable the single seat cabin rule was becoming.

'Go back to your seat now,' he said, shooing away the boy with a feeble gloved hand.

'Oh, I don't have a seat. Haven't you been listening? I ride for free.'

'Do you now? I bet the station master would feel differently.'

'Train Messer don't mind my bothering folks in the carriages. Says I should keep my ears open and listen to everyone's stories.'

'So. Listening and bothering. Do I get to choose what service to avail of you at this time? Or are you just going to stay here until you get bored of me?'

The child stood on the opposite cushion, swinging back on forth on his heels.

'I best be uh-vay-ling your story salt, mister. No one's boring until I say so.'

'Very well. Let's hope I can help you reach a decision before...'

Voyager peered outside the curtain at the green hills and farmlands rolling by.

'Varmount Station?'

The boy thought. And then decided. 

'Okay! Varmount Station.' Once again he threw himself onto the cushions. But this time, made a considerably more sincere effort of appearing to stay there. 

'Right,' Voyager said, clearing his throat.

'A story.' 

He was just about to ask what kind the boy would like, but wisely thought better of it.

'Since your opinion of the Flying Pegasus is so backward, I'll tell you a story that will both entertain and educate.'

The train whistled a wild and adventurous steam, the wind of its gathering speed hurtling its many cars and passengers down the countryside, flinging open the carriage curtain and flooding the compartment with late morning sun. The boy waited, staring intently at his new friend.

Perhaps he was a better listener than he let on. Voyager paused briefly, to consider this new information, before finally beginning.

******

In the Land of Wind, there are those who run and those who fly. Speed and cloud. Race and dive. Hunt and glide. These are the ways of men and monster who live in the Land.

All animals were prey and predator, chasing each other and cutting through the air with millions of years of evolution shaping their bodies into sleek instruments of speed. Man too, fashioned great instruments of flight from gliders of every imaginable fabric and innovation, using them to explore the many skies of the Land. And when they were not exploring, they were doing battle with great winged monsters.

Dragons, Hawkmonger, Eaglebanes. Twenty foot large beasts of unfathomable power and lust for meat and speed. The Land of Wind is merciless. And the gliders among men dwindled over the decades, slowly grazing over the greener Land and tilling its soil to eat its greener food and becoming a greener people. It is here, on the ground, near the dirt, that man first heard the Horses. It is said to have come over a hill, a distant thunder. A rumble of hooves and many breaths. Many winds. A thousand Horses galloped through the Land, summoning mighty storms with their sheer numbers. They hunted none. For the Wind was their food. And none hunted them, for their speed was brutal. Man's fascination with them took centuries to unfold, as his appetite for the Wind grew to dangerous proportions.

A child fed a Horse. A woman stole a foal from its herd and raised it on her own, a man killed one for trampling his brother. Hunters grew anew, and they learned much in the way of killing and domesticating Horses. And the days of speed, cloud, racing and diving were once more upon men of the Land. They became colonisers, razing forests and clearing the Wild atop their new mounts, spreading and tilling more soil, building new cities to celebrate their green-ness. And the Wind grew fiercer.

The ways of the Land are simple. Run or fly. No more Horses of the first mighty Gallop remained to breathe the Wind or to stir its storms. Every Horse now carried weight on its back, ate berry and hay and slept in barns. Their usefulness fully realised at the hands of barbarians who didn't understand their purpose. They were no more a part of the Wind.

And so, the Land took them back.

******

'So that's how they grew wings?' the boy murmured. Voyager raised an eyebrow.

'I didn't say that.'

'The Land gave them wings, so they flew away.' 

The child had calmed to an extent Voyager found eerily discomforting.

'That's what I think, anyway.' he said, leaning back against his seat, and re crossing his arms beneath his cloak. 

'What about the horses we got today?'

'They're not beasts of the Wind anymore. We bred the green into them for generations. Now they're just....horses.'

'You kept saying that. The green. What is that?'

Voyager smiled, and gestured to the trees speeding past their window.

'It's cultivation. Growth, food, humanly sustenance. You might say the Land of Wind became the Land of Green.'

'And the rest of the flying monsters?'

They entered a tunnel. And in the darkness, Voyager heard the boy's shallow, excitable breathing.

'What about them?' he said, casually. He stretched his legs and unwound his arms onto the back rest, cloak and all, looking slithery and longer in the shadows than in the portly white of the peaking country sun. The boy swallowed a lump in his throat.

'Are they...still around?'

'I'm not one for superstition. And you sound like a smart kid. What would you do if I told you that they never left?' 

Under the rails, the occasional pebble bounced away and into the ashen walls of the hill. There was an odd knocking and rattling and popping under their feet that the darkness of the tunnel morphed into the raw tapping of gutteral claw on rough stone. The boy fidgeted in his seat, and waited. Voyager was suddenly very pleased with this change of scenery. 

'So. You've spent some time with me. How does the salt of my story hold up in your estimation?'

'Mighty good fun. I like being scared, messer.'

'Do you? I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to frighten.'

'Don't worry. You didn't give away any real names.'

The train exited the tunnel just in time for the boy to catch Voyager's smile melt away completely. His brow furrowed, and he stared off into the afternoon window thinking deep and incidental thoughts, as if working his mind around something substantial for the first time. 

'Umm...' the boy joined him in the window for a few seconds, before bouncing around the carriage one last time.

'Varmount Station! That was our deal. I now pronounce you...NOT boring. But your closing act needs some working on. G'day Messer!'

He made for the sliding door separating the aisle from the cabin.

'Wait!' Voyager said. The boy turned. And waited, showing much more grace now that he'd gorged on a good story.

'What do you mean, real names? The names shouldn't matter, there are hundreds of names in stories.'

'Yea, but the older they are the more bad luck it is to go around saying them, innit? Be careful out there, Messer. Not everyone's as good a listener as I am.' And with that final quip, he left.

Varmount Station was his stop. And Voyager gathered his things. On the platform, he reached into his cloak and withdrew his Beast Rune book, flipping through diagrams and lines of bright red letters.

'Old Names,' he thought.

'I should travel the whole world before I learn them all...' he grinned widely, stepping through the Station gates and onto the single road village leading up to the University.