Tempest: First in the Tales of Myth

My name is Tempest, and this is my story. A story of confusion and trusted friends; wrought with dark enemies. This is a story of Fable, of Legend… of Mythe.

One

I was. I happened. I don’t know how to say it better than this: In the blink of an eye, I existed. I found myself crouching on top of a mountain, high above the clouds, wind swirling around me. But I didn’t falter.  I sat listening. For these words rang throughout the desolate white caps: “You are Tempest. Find your meaning. Make your choice. Come to me.” A powerful force from behind blew into me, not the wind, but something else. I was carried off my feet, over the edge of the mountain, and dropped into the expanse.

***

I awoke, my back to a hard, tilted surface, the sun shining on my face. Pink clouds floated in a light yellow sky. I stood up and studied my surroundings. The surface I had just recently occupied was the roof of a modest little tavern. It was tiled with long flat rocks, and smoke billowed from a chimney an arm’s length to my right. All around were houses of varying sizes, some as tall as an oak, some shoulder height.

  As I looked around, I began to hear muffled voices from below. The smell of food wafted out a window. My stomach growled pleadingly, and I went to the edge of the roof to descend. I climbed down the drainpipe a ways, and then dropped the remaining ten feet. I landed on my feet and opened the tavern door.

Opening that door brought on a bombardment of the senses. The smell of cinnamon, sizzling bacon, toasting bread: all of these tempted my taste buds. The sound of multiple voices, shrill and quiet, load and boisterous, filled the room. But the strangest things were the people.

Sitting in seats around the room were creatures that you would never imagine to see in real life. A large green orc sat on a wooden barstool, chatting casually with a dwarf. A thin wolf-man hung from the ceiling by his toes. Three fairies flitted around the ceiling in conversation.

A squinty eyed lizard almost as long as the room slithered up to me and lifted its face up to mine. The voice of an aged woman issued from its throat. “Sit down, young man! Your face is as white as silk!”

“Y-you’re a snake,” I mumbled to myself as she slithered towards a chair in the back. She stopped immediately, her face spinning to meet mine. “Do not insult me. I am a basilisk, small in size, but a basilisk none the less. You will do good to remember that.”

She slithered towards the back again, and I followed more quietly. I did not want to insult her again. When she reached the chair, she flicked it with her tail, and it spun around to meet me. I sat down in it and spoke to her. “I am sorry for my unkind words. I do not know the difference between a basilisk and a snake. Would you care to tell me?”

Her face softened. “I should not have been so quick to anger. How old are you, child, twelve? Yes, about that… and you must be foreign… See here. You will never do good to confuse a Basilisk with a common snake, so I will tell you the difference. A Basilisk is a creature of Fable, the Lord of Lies. I am disgusted to be his creation, but there is nothing I can do more than conform to Legend, King of Truth. This I have done more than any other basilisk you will meet.

Basilisks are dangerous creatures, especially as they are dark. A basilisk’s eye can petrify those of weak spirit, and those of stronger spirits are tainted by an unnatural fear. They use this ability to their advantage as they are very large and, accordingly, very slow. With a mid-section as thick as a tree trunk, they have a huge appetite, enough that they can devour half of a town as a meal. There haven’t been many Basilisk attacks recently, but this is thought to be from the increasing animal population in the forest.

I questioned her in one thing. “What about your eyes? Have you ever accidently petrified someone?” I tried not to ask this accusingly, and she luckily didn’t take it as so.

“I had a hunter cut my eyes out thirteen years ago. I didn’t want anybody around me hurt. The reason I am so small is because my eyes helped me hunt. By the time I could hunt with my nose, I had been eating vegetables for years. I decided to stick to it. Now let’s get you something to eat.”

As she slithered away, I gaped. She had her eyes cut out! That was true sacrifice. I was still thinking about this when a voice sounded next to my ear. “Yeah, she’s something, isn’t she?” It came right next to me, and my fist swung before I could stop it. A leathery paw caught it snugly, and the upside-down face of a she-werewolf sat with its snout not two inches from my face. A grimace stretched across its face.

She snapped her other paw over my mouth before I could yell. “Well that isn’t very nice! Here’s me trying to make a conversation and you start throwing punches! Humph! Here, follow me.” She pulled me down a hallway. We went up a staircase and through a door. Now standing on a balcony thirty feet above the ground, she ran to the railing and pointed up. I looked, and my mouth fell open.

There were the mountains. They shot up into the sky way above the clouds. How far had I fallen? “They are beautiful, aren’t they?” She stared up into the heavens. “I wonder how it would feel to fall off one of those.”

“Yeah, I wonder.” I shuddered.  “My name is Tempest, what’s yours?”

“Chord.” She sat staring at me for a moment, and then said, “We probably shouldn’t have left Minerva like that.”

“Who’s Minerva? The Basilisk?”

“Yeah.” Her yellow eyes suddenly glowed bright, and I looked away. When I looked back, a twelve year-old girl sat in front of me. She had red brown hair, sharp golden eyes, and a strong looking body. She wore clothes like mine; a tunic, loose legged pants, and leather boots that reached the top of her shin, except more obviously fit for a girl. She had a broken ‘V’ pendant around her neck that hung slightly off kilter.

“We should get back. Come on, I’ll race you.” She took off sprinting towards the doorway, but I was closer. A heated race through the hallways landed us back at my original chair. We were both panting when we sat down. Minerva slid up to me and spoke quietly, a smile on her scaly face. “I see you’ve introduced yourself to Chord! That’s good. You will want to get acquainted with a few of the Fables and Legends before tomorrow.

“There is a festival going on tomorrow, in which you might want to participate. But there will be many other creatures there that may want to speak with you. You need to know what they are to communicate with them.”

“Why?” I asked, confused. “It’s logic!” she said, a look of surprise on her face. “Say you had never seen a chair before in your life, and someone told you it was a weapon. Would you sit in it? In the same way, it can be dangerous to converse with those here if you don’t know their names.”

“Well, no, I suppose,” I said, slightly befuddled.

“I know you just showed up, so you may be confused. It seems like you have never seen any of our kind before. You probably want some time to yourself.”

I nodded quietly, and she continued. “We have had a lot of business recently, so we have no rooms open but my Library.”

She used her tail to point towards a stair well that went up into the ceiling. As I ascended, Chord yelled, “See you tomorrow! I’ll be waiting for you near the signup for the races!”

“All right, see you then!” I yelled back, excited. I had made my first friend! Thinking of this brought me to a question. “Minerva? What do you call this place?”  “What do you mean?” she asked, “the Inn?”

“No, no,” I replied. “This entire land that I seem to have just dropped into.”

“Tempest, I suppose you wouldn’t know, would you? Well then, let me be the first to officially greet you: Welcome to Mythe.”

  ***

After showing me where the bathrooms were, Minerva left me in the Library with a cot. Before she left, she told me that I could look at any of the books that I wanted to if it suited me. I didn’t know how to read, but I just nodded and thanked her for her kindness once again. Her reptilian lips curved into a smile, and then she left.

I lay in my bed for quite a while before realizing that I wasn’t tired. I got up and picked the first book off one of the twenty or so giant bookshelves. It was a thick volume with no title on the cover, but it smelled of age and dust, and it piqued my curiosity.

I opened to the first page. Blank. The next was the title page, I suppose, but all I saw were strange symbols. I figured that these were what Minerva had called ‘letters’, but they seemed indecipherable. As I flipped through the rest of the book, I began to see a pattern. Maybe I could teach myself to read! I flipped through ravenously. Whenever I came across an Illustration, I tried to read the passage next to it, to test how I was coming along.

By the end of the book, I had lost track of time. I felt that I could read fairly well, and so I began to read the next book in line. I finished the first shelve of volumes in an hour or so, and continued on reading fervently on. Eventually, I realized that the light was no longer flickering. That doesn’t make sense, I thought to myself; it’s coming from a candle. I looked up from the book and saw a melted stub of wax on the candle tray. When I followed the source of the light, I realized that it was coming from the sun. I had read straight through the night, without even recognizing the sun.

Then I remembered myself. Maybe it was simply because it was the second time the sun had risen in my life. Today would be an interesting one.