My Novel!

[Kell]

Hey!

I know its not furry writing, and if a mod feels like deleting this cause I'm ebil for posting non-furry stuff, I understand.

But its writen BY a furry, a very cute bunny, so they should overlook its lack of furry characters (there is a very well behaved horse later on, he gets a name and everything, maybe he is actually the main character... and it IS a furry novel! Ha! you will have to wait till its done to find out!).

Anyway, this is my first draft, mostly edited to something readable, and its just the first chapter, maybe chapter and a half, once everything is formatted for the final product. I have been working on it since last winter, and am now about 125,000 words in, just nearing the real climax of the story, and really enjoying both the writing, story-making, and thought of maybe being published soon. I have sent what is posted here to a publisher, shortly after this portion was writen, and have been talking with them since... so who knows, I might, if I keep at it and get lucky, have a published novel before I'm 21...

That would be a very, very happy day for me!

Also, shameless self plug time. I write character backgrounds, story commissions, and all the rest (Furry, non furry, adult and clean), and since I simply love to write and currently lack employment, I have lots of free time, so anybody that needs somethin writen... Well, don't be afraid to ask-a-bunneh!

Anyway, here is said first chunk of story. Enjoy! Any comments would be wonderful, love it, hate it, want more, want me to go choke and die, tell me! Artists love feed back, and trolling!

Trolling, like feedback, only you get to lol at it!


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Sand. Its not something I ever thought about before. How much sand is there, simply how many tiny specs make up these vast reaches of sand. Yet here I am, nothing to see but sand and a stark blue sky. If I am not careful, sand in my boots, sand in my pants, sand in my lungs. Every step, every thought, is centered around it. The hot air, cruel wind, they are nothing. The heat stopped bothering me weeks ago, the wind, its almost a welcome gift, cooling what little skin is exposed. But that wind, on those gusts of hot, horribly dry air, is the sand. Chafing and clawing at me, at my skin, at my will to live.

   So here I am, battling my solitary way in these seemingly endless wastes, and at the same time, time itself is my greatest foe. How much time does she have? My sister, my beloved sister. How long? Is it too late, has the sand left the hourglass? Sand again. Sand sand and more sand. Sand for breakfast, sand for dinner, and sand for a grave, where I will never be found. If this is to be my tomb, how I would love to die away from the sand, how I have come to hate it.

   This is my life, one step after another, crossing the Terasia desert alone. I know that this waste is small, I made it across the Visceran Plains in the heat of last summer, five times or better the distance. That was not half as horrible. There is no life here, no shelter, no bird song in the early morning, not even any wolves to wake me in the still of midnight, howling at the moon, close. There was sand, and little else.

   Why would I cross these wastes alone? Well, the story of my life is needed to understand, who I am, what I am, the lands in which I was born and the great evil that calls itself our salvation. Love and loss, deceit and horrible wrongs.

   As I'm sure you have gathered, given my clear hate of sand, my passionate, boiling rage at what I currently find myself walking in, I was not born here. Taratha was my home; one of the many small one family farms dotting the hilly, beautiful land near it. We were rangers and farmers, we lived simply, happily. Rare was it we had anything more to worry about than a fox in the hen house, even the great wars seldom reached such folk as us.

   Happiness, innocence. I'm sure, if things had played out happily I would be sitting in the home of my birth with a wife, and, judging by the glare of the sun, she would be boiling water for our afternoon tea. The thought that I may never again see that green lush land is perhaps the only thing worse than the thought of losing my sister... of never finding her. If I must fail, if I must die alone and hunted, let it be in the tall grass, let a warm breeze be blowing off a stand of old trees, the sun low in the sky in the late afternoon, I could be happy then: I could rest then.

   All chance of a happy lot in life was lost years ago. As the government shifted, as Cromley sank his talons into every facet of the world, law slipped, and once quiet farmland became prey to lawless bandits. Even our peaceful ways and safe little world did not hide this fact, and as the tales of robberies, rape and murder reached us, our father bought a gun.

   Valuable they were, but not hard to find. He had to sell two cows to get it, but he did. He spent many afternoons in a back field, our mother not letting us out of the house. The thunder of the shot in the still air again and again. After a month, maybe two, it stopped, but I can still remember when he would come home, smelling of sweat and gunpowder.

   Then, one afternoon as I was playing out back with my beloved sister, Jasmine, we heard shouting around the front of our home. No sooner had we come to the side of the small single story home, and we saw a man, a man we did not know, slash our mother across the arm with a large knife. She fell back a step, screamed, and stumbled, falling to the grass. The man drew a revolver, shining silver in the sun, a cool, blue reflection, the afternoon sun. I remember clearly, thinking it was too huge to be a real gun, surely it wasn't real.

   That thought was robbed from me, as the crack of a gunshot ripped the silence that had followed our mothers scream. No sound followed the shot, and I realized I had closed my eyes. When my eyes finally finished opening, it felt like it took hours for them to uncover what was before me, the man lay dead, a hole where his left eye should have been, and my father stood on the front step, arm still extended, now shaking, pistol still smoking.

    Such was my first run in with violence, and I believe that had that man passed our farm by, saved his own life, and left us be, that I would very likely have that wife, and right now now, a cup of coffee. Our father bandaged our mother, but she never truly recovered. Infection, then fever set in, and although she lived, infection beaten and fever gone, she was weak for the rest of her days.

   Never again can I remember seeing my father smile, or hearing my mother laugh. That single pistol shot ended all innocence in our home, all happiness. It was snuffed out, blown away like the smoke behind that perfectly placed shot.

_=_=_=_

For the years that followed, in those mirthless, cold gazes from my father, never did I see hate, or anger. Fear ruled his life I think, looking back. I never knew him to relax, to enjoy the glass of murh he used to have most evenings all through my childhood.

   Twice a week, from then till the day we left the farm behind, he made us learn to defend ourselves. He taught us to shoot at distance, fast and well. He taught us the feel of the pistol and the revolver left in our grass by the unlucky bandit.

   He taught us the way he had learned. We shot the weapons over and over, until our wrists hurt and our ears buzzed. We stood in the field in the late spring sun, in what had always seemed the safest of places; tainted it seemed, by the stink of the guns, by their flash and thunder, holes deep into the old trees that we fired at, pictures of men drawn with white wash, hearts filled with holes, heads little more than sawdust.

   We were children, it was a game to us. But there was something about the cold edge to our beloved father's voice, his praise always forthcoming but the look in his eyes when our shot went wide, or when we dropped the weapon while loading chilled us. Fear drove him, fear and love for his children, and I do not blame him for the life I lead today. No, he did what he thought was right, and if he had not, I would not be here today.

   My skill with guns, my guns, has been vital to me, but perhaps the most meaningful skill, the most important to me, was the blade. Rain or water could ruin my powder, a single shot could miss, or not be enough, and the revolver was far from a piece of art; it jammed and misfired. So he taught me to defend myself as he had been taught by his father, and back for generations.

   In times now long past, the army was not the governments hired goons; every man was expected to defend his nation, to fight for it in times of war. Every farm for generations had a sword, or several, every town had a smith that knew how to craft a blade, every man had some skill with the blade. In many places this was a long gone part of life, a forgotten way of life,  something tales were told of, but as I said, this was an old place, rarely touched by change, and men still trained their sons when they came of age.

   Just as the crack of gunshot marked my first training, side by side with the smell of the powder and gentle wind, my mastery, if that is a fair term for it, I may be giving myself too much credit, of blades is coupled forever in mind with the sound of bare feet sliding over hair, and the smell of sweet, or stink, as it certainly seemed by the end of the day.

   It was against the law; not that laws were really enforced any longer, to bear steel, to swing a blade, even in training. The new government, of which we knew nothing in our happy little world, had banned most weapons from any but its own army and police forces. So our training had to be hidden from prying eyes, not that there were any. However, my father wished no trouble with the forces that sometimes patrolled the area. As such, each days training was held in the old, run down barn, not used since my father's father ran the farm, our animals no longer requiring two barns.

   In that dusty, hot old barn, he taught me and trained me. Some may confuse the two, saying to be trained with a blade is to be taught. That man is either a fool, or does not truly know how to use his sword. To be trained with a sword is to become used to its feel, to become used to the shock of blows as they first rattle your fingers, then shake up your arm, jarring your shoulder. It is to learn to keep your sword at the ready, your arm swinging, your mind sharp enough to block for hours. The teaching is the easy part, swing here, swing there, hold the blade like this. The true key to swordsmanship; or so I was taught, is not fancy footwork, memorized patterns or anything else of the sort, it is stamina, quick thinking, quicker arms, and luck.

   Luck. I guess I should pause here and mention my feelings toward luck. I am lucky, if such a thing is possible. I have been shot at more times than any man has right to be, and never hit. I have fought many times my number and always found the advantage. Am I so skilled that I have avoided every pistol shot and musket ball sent at me? Am I so powerful that no ten men can stand before me? No, never. As far as violence goes, battle, war and fighting, I am lucky. At the same time, my life is a long list of horribly bad luck, and I feel every time a well aimed shot goes wide, whistling past my ear, that those around me have paid for my luck with their own misfortune, time and time again.

   But I sidetrack. Those days in the barn, my father worked me like a dog. He never let up, he never let me quit. I will not deny it; he struck me if I failed to stop him, he was not about to stop a blow with a padded sword. Cracked ribs, sore from head to toe, I learned not only how to fight, but how to keep fighting, how to deal with pain and discomfort. It may sound brutal, even cruel, but once again I must thank him, for every day I grew stronger. I don't know if he had some faint glimmer of understanding, some sense about what I was to face over the next decade, but without those hot, painful afternoons, old straw and dust under bare feet, blades wrapped in old blankets, and often nothing but the dull clash of the muted blades and grunts of effort, along with the sound of our feet kicking up dust as we moved, fought, danced.

   Thus is my childhood. I will save you from the tale of my first failed romance, of my small amount of schooling, and the fall afternoons spent merrily taking wagons of food to the nearest town to sell. The fairs and the friends. Those things don't matter, and everyone has their own tails of childhood in that sense. But don't let this fool you, I had that, long afternoons down at a pond with other boys from the area, jumping out of trees and skipping rocks, fighting over foolishness as a very young man, making a fool of myself in an attempt to impress a girl. I had a normal childhood, by all standards in the area.

   However, it ended suddenly and unexpectedly. After a life working on a farm, a life spent loving his family and wife and working, his long days training himself and his children, both to farm and to defend what was theirs, my father died in his sleep. A heart attack we think. My mother found him one morning, unmoving and clearly dead, arms under his pillow, head turned to the side as he lay on his chest, face still in the relaxed, painless mask of sleep.

   Sadness is a hard thing to put into words, truly, to explain the loss of a loved one is impossible to anyone that has not felt such pain. I forget the week that followed, and all I can remember of the next is making soup for my mother, fearing she would waste away if I did not make her eat something, and holding Jasmine as she cried for what felt a lifetime.

   Jasmine... I guess, she is what this story is truly all about, as you will come to learn. She is my younger sister, by just short of five years. She is tall, beautiful, or was last I saw here. As a child, she was a lively, happy being, prone to vanishing in the early evening to go out and catch bugs in the field. Not afraid of anything, or so it seemed, she was a strong girl, always happy to do her share of the work, even the unpleasant parts of farm work. Last I saw her, she wore her hair long, almost to her hip, black and straight as an arrow. She always favoured dresses, large, frilled, fancy, so unlike everything about her. Her favourite delicate dresses were sewn lovingly by our mother.

[Kell]

    We were close, close as any brother and sister could be. We fought often, petty arguments, nothing important, we were siblings, kids. Our love for one another was never questioned. We were, save our parents, one another's only family, and for most of our lives, only friends.

    Weeks passed, time seemed to drag by. The fields were left unattended, the animals only fed when it came to mind. Before any of us managed to drag ourselves from our grief, my little farm, my home, was already showing signs of falling apart. My father had kept that farm together, and his sudden death shook the family too much for us to carry on.

    We sold all we couldn't move, and with all our worldly wealth in my purse, I loaded what little we had kept into a rented carriage, and we made for Xand.

    Now, I had visited that city once in my life as a very young boy, but remembered nothing of it. My mother had grown up there, and met my father on a trip to the country. She wanted to return to the city of her childhood. When she left, it was, as most city's are, dirty, crime infested and unpleasant. However, at the time, the government was still as it had been for generations, and the city was simply a large city, not the capitol of some vast, corrupt, evil beast.

    It was a long trip. I remember many dull days in the small carriage with my mother and sister, waiting for night to come, passing time with card games and conversation. The loss of my father had all but stolen my will to do anything, and my mother took it harder still. She cried at night, cried during the day, ate as little as she could, and mostly sat in the cheap carriage gazing out the window, watching the hilly, lightly forested country with its huge open fields slowly melt first into deeper forest, and then the great open plains.

    Cattle country, I hate that part of the world. The soil too thin for anything but grass and a few scraggly trees, dusty and rocky, cows everywhere, horses a rare sight. That isn't what bothers me, no, not at all. It is too open. I grew up in hilly land, bumpy land, at least this god forsaken wasteland has bumps and hills. I remember seeing things and not reaching them for a day or more. It felt so open, so exposed. And the wind, worse then here by far in that late fall, cold and dry, biting at your skin and cheeks. I felt sorry for the driver; he came down with a cold shortly after we left home, and we could hear him sneezing as he sat out front, exposed to that wind all day.

    The sky was beautiful, however. I remember the sky still. I would sit at the window on those long days, nothing but the breathing, or sobbing of my mother and sister and the clack of horse hooves, my own thoughts clouded and confused.

    At night, thousands of stars would appear, the same stars I had grown up under, our slow progress across the land could not hope to change the stars overhead. The window turned to a mirror in the late evening, before we stopped to sleep, and often I gazed into my own eyes, wondering when those eyes had gotten so old, so tired. Was my hair losing its colour? At nineteen?

    It seemed nothing mattered, like life couldn't sink any lower, I was hopeless, nothing seemed worth getting up for, but I forced myself to, if only so I could help my mother into the carriage.

    Just when I thought things couldn't get worse, as always, I was proven wrong.


_=_=_=_


Outside was a slight change to the landscape, we had been going uphill for a day or two, slowly climbing, hardly even worth calling a hill. The land slowly became rockier, with sparse tree's here and there. The air was getting colder, winter drawing near, early in the morning, I could see my breath in the air, a cloud hanging in the air for a moment, before vanishing.

    We broke camp and climbed back into our usual seats in the carriage shortly after sunrise. The morning seemed normal enough, chilly, dull, a few birds calling in the distance, now a squirrel or even a rare deer to spot out the window, half hidden by trees.

    My mother and sister talked quietly about their plans once they reached the city, what sort of work we might hope to find, how they would find a home. I stayed quiet, gazing out the window and listening to the slow beat of hooves.

    Suddenly, their conversation was cut off, everything was cut off, with the crack and echo of a gun shot. The horses bolted, a few rapid, confused tugs followed before the carriage started moving forward again, faster now. Just as the horses were nearing as close to a run as they could reach with the carriage behind them, another shot rolled across the early morning.

    I don't know what followed, really. I assume the carriage came to a sudden halt and rocked violently. All I know for sure is I was thrown to the wall and ended up on the floor, beside my mother and under my sister. Both scrambled to get off of me, and my mother out the door.

    My head swam for a moment, before I found my feet and stumbled over to the door. Before I reached it however, I heard a scream, my mothers, and when I looked out, I saw why.

    A few paces away a large, boorish man held my mother, one hand on her throat, the other on her arm as he dragged her away. My sister meanwhile was screaming at him to stop and following. Slowly walking over, a tall, thin man with a wide brimmed hat on and a heartless smirk on his face was making his way over from the other side of the caravan.

    Then my eyes rested on the horses, or what had been our horses. They had come almost to a run before the second shot, and one horse had clearly died from it, body limp, hanging in the harness. The other horse had not fared so well, when his companion had been shot the full weight of the carriage, all their belongings and four passengers shifted to him, and the balance was wrong. He had clearly tried to stop, likely out of fright, but the speed and weight driving down behind him was too much. Broken bone stuck from his legs, bones having shattered, and he lay on the ground, bleeding and screaming as only an injured horse can. The man in the wide brimmed hat reached out, and with a pull of his revolvers trigger the horse went silent.

    For a moment, in the wake of that third shot, there was total silence in the morning. A silence so heavy and tense I could taste it. Seemingly without a care in the world, the man in the wide brimmed hat flicked his wrist, the cylinder flipping out. He tossed the three empty casings to the ground at his feet, and slid three more into their place from his front pocket. Meanwhile, the large man's left hand made its way up to my mothers chest, and groped her, making her face redden at once, and bringing a foolish, childish look to the man's face, which quickly earned him a glare and a shake of the head from the other man. The click of his cylinder closing, locking back into place, seemed to echo, and as he drew the hammer back with his thumb the moment of silence ended.

    My mother, after having seemed to give up fighting, twisted free of the man and reached into her sleeve. A moment later, she was flying back at him, a fair sized kitchen knife glinting in her right hand. Her scream of rage, for a moment, pierced the morning air more easily than any gunshot, the large man struggling to get the sword at his hip ready before she got to him.

    The charge was cut short, and his life spared however, with a fourth gunshot. The air shook from the high calibre revolver, loud as thunder. In the blink of an eye, my mother was gone. The bullet took her in the left side, upper rib cage, and blasted a hole out her back, larger than my fist. She spun once, knife flying from her hand to the grass, and fell limp, dead most likely, before the bullet left her back.

    "Now you kids listen to me. Your going to give us everything you have, or we are going to kill you." The man in the hat started, as he flicked the cylinder our again, " 'fact, I think that pretty little girl is going to give us a fair bit more than just your money, and then we will let you two go on your merry little ways in life, and we will go on ours.

    Laughter danced in his voice, and a cruel, heartless, purely uncaring gleam was clear as day in his eyes. I did not do him the courtesy  of returning his words.

    Before either of the men said another word, or moved, my left hand had found the handle of my pistol. It shot up, and clicked, seemingly to me, of its own free will. I felt the old impact against my palm and wrist, the jolt of force as the deadly lead was sent flying where I willed. It seemed fake, it couldn't be real. That wasn't my mother bleeding, I wasn't killing a man.

    She was, and I was.

    The shot did not go wide, it did not go high. It did just what I wanted; what I knew it would. It passed threw his chest, and out his back, he half spun as he fell, stumbling backwards. Not dead, I could hear his scream, his grunt and his agony. I knew he would die within seconds, knew I had shot only inches above his heart, that his lung was pierced, that he would be dead in seconds. I didn't care, I wished I had a revolver so I could put another hole in him.

    The number of pistol shots at my disposal was not my only problem however. The larger man had his sword in his hand, and was running at me, yelling, bellowing. He got close before I could more than draw and raise my own blade. He forced me back a step, then another, until my back was pressed to the cold wood of the carriage side. I smelt him, unwashed, unclean, wretched breath and pock-marked skin

    I had my blade above my head, holding his at bay, my left palm pressed against the back side of the sword. Thankfully, it was a single sided blade, much like a large kitchen knife, thick, heavy, with a slight curve to the blade. Sharp, fit for stabbing, for slashing, and most importantly at this moment, for blocking the blow of a man almost twice my size.

    He pressed down, and I could feel even the dull steal pressing into my palm. I knew he would overpower me soon, and if he didn't, I didn't want to put my sword against his weight and strength, I feared my blade might loose such a battle. So, I did the only thing I could do.

    I half turned, throwing my right elbow into his chin, and keeping my blade against his to keep it away from me, as my left hand reached up and grabbed one of his wrists. He had both hands on the hilt of his sword, making my job all the easier. The sudden, hard blow to his jaw confused him if nothing more, and I threw my right foot against the inside of his left calf. He fell, sprawling before of me, sword flying from his hand. I kicked him once, and made to back up, when the small knife he had drawn with his left hand made itself known.

    Not as slow, or as stupid it seemed, as I had thought. The blade slashed at my left knee, and a roar of pain left me. I stabbed him through the throat and then fell away, blade falling from my hand as I tumbled to the ground.

    My head hit the ground, or was it the wheel of the carriage? Either way, darkness filled me, pain washed away by blackness, and I fell from the land of the waking rapidly. I remember praying there had only been two, and that Jasmine was alright, and that my mother was somehow alright. I remember someone at some point moving me, and the pain filling me so suddenly and so totally that it snapped me back, long enough for me to lash out and scream, before I fell back into the dark.

    I woke that evening, still in the dirt beside the caravan, the bodies still where they were, my sister curled up on the ground beside me, seemingly trying to sleep. It took a long time for the pain in my knee to register; it was pushed aside for so long by remembering what had happened that I made it to my feet before I realized my leg could hardly hold me.

    I screamed again, waking my sister, and fell to the steps of the carriage. Panting from the shock, surprise, and pain, I looked down. My pant leg was torn, and bloodstained from mid thigh down. Slowly, I reached down, and started trying to pull the rip open enough to see my injury.

    "Don't touch it, I bandaged it... it wasn't anything deep..." I looked down, and saw her looking up at me. Tears stood on her eyes, eyes unlike mine. Her eyes, blue and deep, dark, like deep water or the sky before a storm. They seemed so dead in that moment, as she slowly moved to sit beside me, "I thought... thought you were gone too, until I noticed your bleeding..."

    Her dress was torn, one of her favourites, and I assumed that the missing fabric was likely soaked with my blood and tied around my knee. Her right eye was ringed in a faint discoloration, "Who hit you?" I asked softly, my hand very tenderly reaching up to slide a fingertip over her already forming black eye.

    "You did... when I tried to move you... I must have hurt you terribly, you didn't even open your eyes, you just struck out a few times, and then slipped away again... I did my best to bandage you without moving you." She said, leaning against me, closing her eyes. I could see tears ruining from them already.

    "I... I'm sorry..." I said, it sounded weak, even to my ears, sounded pathetic, given that I had struck my own sister as she tried to save my life. I put my left arm around her shoulders, kissing her forehead softly, "We need to get inside... I think we both need to sleep."

    Not for the last time, we slept in one another's arms, both crying, inconsolable; fear and anguish at the loss of our father, and now our mother. Pain and sorrow kept sleep from me until the sky was already growing bright.


    I felt her get up to leave, and let her go, unable to even move my ankle without making myself whimper with pain, I tried to get what sleep there was for me to have, and I don't believe I have ever felt that wretched before in my life.


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Hope ya enjoyed it! :D