Publication date: November 10th, 2020
Published by: FyreSyde Publishing
Synopsis:
In an ancient place, in an ancient time...
King Athan vanishes at sea. His children, prince Thalos and princess Thara, drift apart with age, their kingdom falling into ruin. Thalos stubbornly clings to the past; Thara, resentful of her father, looks to the future. In the wake of this decline, a beautiful enchantress usurps the throne from the estranged siblings. She exiles Thalos to the edge of the world and slowly enslaves Thara's mind.
In his exile, Thalos finds another castaway--an old comrade of his father. Together they begin a voyage in search of the lost king. Thara, meanwhile, resists the new queen's coercive spells and finds a resistance of creatures still loyal to her father.
With a vast world of enchanted islands and beings between them, Thalos and Thara struggle to restore their family and rekindle the hope of the true king's return.
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Excerpt
But when Thalos realized that he could open his eyes again, he found that unimaginably delightful smells, colors, and sounds surrounded him. He was back through the Doorway in the Sea again, (or so it seemed) at the place of the running water and soft, green grass and azure sky. In the distance were the hills, and further off, the white-peaked mountains from which came the music of far off human choirs--or were they birds? Or waterfalls? All of them at once, maybe.
Gone was his death-wound, gone was his body--he felt sort of transparent and airy and refreshed. From his neck down, everything was like a white, glowing sheen where once his body had been.
Then he saw the old man, the Spirit, again--smiling as if he had just been told the best joke in the world.
"That," said the Spirit helped Thalos to his feet, "as they say in Antaranis, was a good death!"
Thalos laughed as well. "What do you mean?"
"You brought your father back! It was all exactly as you read in the book."
It hit Thalos all at once, then. The pages of the old book found on Sailis. He remembered being able to read it the last time he was here. Now that he was back, everything made sense again, and the words flowed back into his mind. On the other side of the doorway, the memory of what he read in the book had become hazy, like a dream; but here, the memories were sharp and clear.
"Why do I look different?" asked Thalos. "My body, I mean."
"You cannot yet dwell here in fullness," said the Spirit. "To stay here is to be made new. Everything in this place is also what you would find in the world--but renewed. You are only beyond the doorway, but not beyond the hills. Were you to attempt to go over those hills, you would not be able to ascend them. You would have to be made new, and to be made new, your old self must die--for good."
"Then, I am not dead?"
"Well, yes--but no."
"What's over there?" asked Thalos, his eyes dancing with wonder as he looked wistfully at the hills, craning his neck and standing up on his toes as if that could lift his gaze above the hills.
"Everything you ever longed for--and more."
"Men and poets speak of such a time as this, an eternal spring when all that was dead and broken would be renewed. But that can only occur in the future."
"Haha! Time--I always forget time!" said the Spirit, snapping his fingers. "This is what you would call 'the future.' Right now, here. It is also the past and present, however. It is all at once. There is no time here; this place is beyond time. It just is."
"The book was enchanted," said Thalos, "and told me that only my willing death--while I still believed in my father--could reverse the spell. I was slain, and yet you say that I am not dead. How?"
"Remember?"
Then it hit Thalos again. "The waters of the well! The waters my father showed me during my exile. In the 'future' as we know it on the other side, my family and friends will give me water from the well of life and bring me back to life."
"Precisely."
"Amazing," said Thalos. "If Ruan and I had never been exiled there, he would never have discovered the remedy to bring me back to life."
"All things are seen now in relation to other events. Think of he who first fashioned that well--he never saw the fruits of his labor. Think of yourself. You were exiled and felt that your life was futile. You nearly lost hope, but had you not been exiled, you would not have had the means to save both your father and yourself. That is why the greatest magic in the world is hope, and the most enchanted things are mundane, because anything--a bit of water, a dark time, a simple friend even or an idle word--all have purpose, though you may not ever see it. Or you may see it in a year, or ten, or twenty. Hope is immortal. Though at times it may appear dead, it is only waiting to be resurrected again."
Thalos shook his head, speechless for a moment. "I never realized that so much good could come out of so much evil."
Along with creating his own mythological backdrop for his stories, Frazier is an amateur calligrapher, map-maker, and artist. He is currently working on his master's in Medieval Literature at the University of North Texas.
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