Realfunghi Comics

Here’s the start of the fantasy novel that I’m working on. This is the first draft.

Chapter 1 – Marlen, the Boy

Prophecy is my affliction and dreams its rat bite. They all start with me in a fog as voices from the future call my name in their ragged breath “Marlen, Marlen, Marlen”. I curse my name, but I know that any other name would be as foul and my parents are not to blame. They’re Perdras, making me one too. The Perdra are what people call us now, those born with a bit of magic in their body. It’s an old way of saying “the cast off” and it’s been that way since the defeat of the Red Order a century or so ago. During the Red Order’s terrible reign, those with magic (aligned with the Order or no) were called Lasache or Macelin. Just different ways to say evil. I’m too young to have lived through any of that. Really, anyone alive now is too young to have lived it. They existed so long ago that we’ve all learned about it through stories that our memere’s and pepere’s heard from their mem’s and pep’s. Before the Red Order, when magic was common and studied, like alchemy, we were known as Augures, thought to be divinely touched by the true god Zulad before the Red Order ruined it and cast a pall on all big or small magic folks.

My mère, Gaëlle Pellerin, is a water diviner by birth and washerwoman by trade. Her magic makes her life much easier as the rains and rivers can move to her whims and, for a bit of silver, farmers seek her out to help find them wells and springs. My father, Garon, wherever he may be, living or dead, was a raker. Rakers are bloodhounds for magic, able to sus out the locations of enchanted items. Had the magic colleges still existed, he could have made a pretty living fetching charmed artifacts for wizards and sorceresses, instead he made his daily bread as a cordwainer. I began my apprenticeship under him after my twelfth birthday, but it ended as soon as my fourteenth when he disappeared. He had taken a little job for a little bit of time up North to find a pendant blessed with something or other and never came back.

We are Perdras by blood, but by the land we live on we are Kodans of the Empire of Koda under the wise rule of Empress Nor XLV. We are far from her Majesty’s ancestral lands over on the continent of Antrum. My mère and I live in a cottage just outside the village of Bucktoo on the southern edge of the island of Ertra, west of Antrum, with the Sea of Gozal’s unloving waters between us. If this island has ever been its own place and not under the thumb of empire or kingdom, I don’t know. I’ve only been to the town of Shedac, a half day’s ride north of Bucktoo but even in the little barony of my young mind the world feels older than the Empire.

As a Raker, my father felt the pull of magic in the tip of his nose. I also felt that pull, but I wish it were clearer. If a Raker feels the pull of magic in their body and I feel the pull in my dreams, what does that make me? This past night the pull felt terrible. These dreams sit in my waking mind as a poetic oddity:

Marlen, Marlen, Marlen,

See the tree where they hung three,

Hear the water going out to sea,

See the red,

See the dead,

See the void,

There’s no head.

To see the tree and hear the water can only mean one place. So here I am in the Montune Forest, where yesterday’s rain still fell from the trees as dew, and I make my way through its woods to the Levar River. I dragged my best friends, Ina and Jerrad, along for an adventure. Shafts of sunlight pierced the body of mist in the Montune Forest as spring was overtaking winter. The ground sprung back against our feet, giving up trickles of water that it can’t swallow. Today was a day to be outside. The day’s beauty was enough to bring me out here to the Montune and surround myself in the green, yellow and red of the woods. Here every tree is an ochre sentinel on guard against the march of time, where one felled oak can heat our homes for a year and no fire can take it against its nearly never-ending rain. Life in Bucktoo is built on the back of the Montune where its lumber and peat rich fens are fed east to the Empire.

I didn’t need much reason to forget my chores, but the pull of magic is what called me to one peculiar place in these woods.

---

This is the first draft of the first chapter of the first novel that I’m writing. A lot of firsts. But if I’m being honest it’s really my 3rd or 4th kick at the can. I had re-written this chapter several times in different ways. First it was from the perspective of the villain and then the third person perspective of Marlen’s parents and then a parent’s journal entry. I decided that this book will be entirely in first person perspective but each chapters narrator will be primarily Marlen, Jerrad or Ina and sometimes another character. My main goal will be to offer shifting perspectives of the characters experiencing the same events and how they view the villains, their friends and themselves.

Chapter 1 starts with Marlen as I think he’s a good introduction to the world of the Perdras and how their powers can be either a boon or a burden. He also starts with the most internal conflict as he believes that his father abandoned him and his mother and the development of his prophetic dreams cause him physical pain that matches his emotional pain.

While the novel is fantasy it deals with abuses of authority and tradition, as well as the twisting of history, and how it can damage the most vulnerable in society, how it effects children and their families. Royalty won’t factor much in this story since matters of the King or Empress’ Court will not save these people. It’s about the commoners saving themselves as their power is greater than the Crown or the Wizard’s staff.