Excerpt: Once Upon

Once upon a time, there was a world.

Much like the world that you and I call home (as much as anyone calls anything home, I mean) this world was nothing like perfect. It was a tangled, messy, gangly thing; it was confused and strange, full of mysteries and riddles and unanswerable questions (and unquestionable answers) and everything else that serves to make so vast a thing as a world truly real.

Sometimes, there was ugliness—at times, there was beauty. There was fear and the courage it brings in equal measure, there was hate and wrath, joy and apathy. There were promises made and broken, wrongs righted (and rights made terribly wrong, darling) and bright things turned dark, then lightened again by inexorable time.

Oh, let me speak to you of time! Kingdoms rose and kingdoms fell over decades and centuries and millennia, and the tide came in and out hundreds of thousands of times, wearing down boulders to beaches and beaches to nothingness. Palaces crumbled and were rebuilt, songs were written, sung and forgotten, and then written again by another who carried the same feelings, the very same agonies and doubts and secret wonders. (As we all do, holding them close within our hearts, even if we don’t quite know it.)

Men lived and died under a sun that rose in the east and sank in the west and burned (and burned, burned, burned up everything underneath her) until she burned herself out. Forests grew up and were hewn down by the ages; cities were built and razed to the ground beneath the feet of man and the brutal hands of nature.

Woman gave birth to daughters who grew and lived and turned into women themselves, and had children of their own (and the cycle chased its own tail forever) and sons grew into fathers who watched their progeny march off to fight and die in another one of a countless number of wars, and sometimes it was the other way ‘round (and daughters bled for their country and the men waited for their lovers’ return) and sometimes it wasn’t.

But most of all, in this tattered, knotted, endless world, there was love.

Once, in the days when the stars shone bright in the dark night sky and the sun burned fierce over the day, there was something called love, and it was the greatest and most terrible power in the whole of the world.

(Would you like me to tell you a story about love, darling?)

Ah! See, there we have it—I must confess, I thought you might.