Chapter 20 Excerpt

Hey everyone! It has been a little bit of time since I have made a blog post, but I have been writing as much as I can with a busy few weeks. I wanted to share an excerpt from chapter 20 for you all. This is a sample of my unedited work so you can see what it's like before it goes through revisions.

EXCERPT:

The land around him sat black as night.

It looked like the same place he had been to in his first dream in Waelston. Where he had seen the man calling down fire from heaven and burning the people around him to ash. But there was nothing left. It was simply a field of blackness. The soil was dark. No grass or trees showed themselves for miles.

Leif looked to his side. The sea stretched far away. Was this the Western Sea? Or perhaps it was the Eastern Sea, and he was somewhere else across the ocean. Adel Antar? Hithi’an? Leif did not know.

He turned his head and was not surprised to see the Old Man again. The red-cloaked man from his previous dreams. He had first met him in the desert, what he thought had been the Ra-menka. Then he had met him on the dreary, fog-shrouded beach where an eternal night pervaded the skies. Now, he met him in this burned land. Cliffs made the ground before the sea drop out of sight.

“What happened here?” Leif asked. The Old Man did not look towards him and did not answer, but instead, stared out across the rolling waves beyond. “The last I saw of this place, there was a man calling down fire.”

Still, silence. Leif let an agitated breath escape from his nose. Did he need to ask the right question for the man to respond? Or were the questions he asked in no need of an answer? Leif kneeled down upon the burned soil, reaching down to grab a handful and let it slip gently through his fingers.

“Who did this?” he asked quietly, staring at the dust falling to the ground. He was surprised when the Old Man’s voice came to him.

“Men do many things…but whether men have a right to do them is the question…”

Leif furrowed his brows. None of these man’s words ever made sense to him, but he still tried to understand them nonetheless.

“Do you mean …one of the Great Ones did this? Or was it an Illun-Jahobet?”

Again, no answer. The Old Man, however, turned away from Leif and began to walk along the edge of the cliff. He did not look back, so Leif stood and caught up with him, falling in stride next to the cloaked man. Leif was out of questions to ask, so he only walked in silence. It seemed like that was what the Old Man wanted this time. Silence.

The crashing of the waves far below met his ears. He realized he had never seen the sea except for in these dreams. He did not know how his mind made up the ocean if he didn’t even know what it looked like, but dreams were strange things.

“This is quite a beautiful place,” the Old Man said as they reached a large rock jutting out from the scorched earth. He sat upon it, and Leif followed soon after, resting himself next to his companion. Beautiful, Leif thought. I do not see what is beautiful about this.

“Are you from this place?” Leif asked, making sure his tone was gentler than he had made it before. The Old Man shook his head.

“No. I am not.” That was all.

Leif nodded and turned his head to look over the cliff again.

“I am so very far away from…” he said and then stopped. He had been about to say “home”, but then again, he had no home. There was no need to keep calling the village home. It was gone. There was no place to go that would give him that comfort like the village had. The Tarik would not, by any means. Nor would even a city like Tiakken or Al-gaiden. Perhaps he was not meant to have a home. After all, Jorund had been right about one thing. His words echoed through Leif’s mind now. “The wind will take us where it wants us to go. Perhaps we will become as we used to be. Wanderers.”

WRITING UPDATES:

Current Word Count: 135,000

Progress Through Novel: 61%