This is my novel, a project I've been working on (on and off) for 9 years or so... I've written about 130.000 words on book one and I'm into 80.000 words of book two. It's my first attempt at creative writing (story-telling)
It begins like this...
Beta copy 1.
The Other Side of Here
Written and created by Gary Carter
Book One. Chapter I. The Night.
"The Universe is very big and very, very old, and so it stands to reason that odd things... unexplainable things do occur, sometimes to those who least expect it..."
Nym.
There are numerous tales told of heroes vanquishing evil and stories spoken in hushed voices over crackling campfires of dragons laying waste to all before them, but rarely a tale about an unassuming child who is brave.
Back when the sky was still young and the hills and mountains were strangers to the clouds, and the first seeds, offspring of the first trees began to grow, Dragons roamed freely, the Fire Breathers the bards called them. The dragons, it was said, controlled all of the old arcane magic and its powers that flourished within the strange and enchanted world of Minus. Men and dragons once lived side by side and in relative peace, but they, the children of men grew envious of the dragons and their power over them. Men of ambition, blinded by their own greed sort the secret that lies within all arcane magic, they wanted the power all to themselves, they were corrupted by its allure, as vane kings often are, and so war...
But first, we must meet our unassuming hero, for she is still unaware of her own fate and that of the enchanted world of Minus........................................................................
Outwardly Ellie was an ordinary eleven-year-old girl that did most of what ordinary girls do at that age, scale walls, climb trees and cross lava lakes, before undertaking daring leaps over snake-infested pits or fighting off the odd troll between breakfast and lunch.
Ellie liked dragons, she had books on dragons, and whenever she could, she drew dragons, big or small, fierce or gentle... Where this interest in dragons came from, she couldn’t say for now, only that she liked dragons and that one day she hoped to find one. Many’s the time she would sit in her room gazing wistfully out at the world through her bedroom window daydreaming, perhaps to faraway lands or further still, to a place where the Fire Breathers lived.
Ellie could speak with animals, it seems such a simple statement to make, but it is true none the less, she could speak to animals before she could walk, it was a gift that she never really questioned at all. She understood what they were thinking... almost feel and sense their world through her own eyes and understood what they were saying and they understood her too. It wasn't out of the ordinary for the child to sit and have a conversation with say a cat or a dog or even a bird, remark on its song, that in the end it really didn't seem that big of a deal to her any more. It had never occurred to Ellie that this was strange, though she did wonder... But there was no mistaking it, animals felt calm near her, they seemed to be drawn to her, almost like a healer... Perhaps part of her thought or imagined that it was all in her head and so went along with it anyway, just for the fun of it, after all, she did like to daydream now and again.