I lost count of how many winters I had survived. The first one was the hardest. To hunt for something to eat means that there are a lot of things that will try to eat you. I lived amongst the monsters that lurk in the wilderness, away from civilization. The only source of water was the rain and snow, and seldom did I encounter puddles to drink from.
The settlements that I have encountered were either destroyed and pillaged or drove me away because I am a bad omen, or they could not afford to feed another person in these trying times. Or maybe they knew me as a thief who would steal travelers’ food. The only shelters that I had stayed in were either caves or under the canopies of trees. There are many times that I have slept in the open sky.
I had forgotten what people are like, aside from hostility. Much of my journey was spent alone, among animals, the grass I tread on, and the trees that I encountered. I found myself reminiscing about my family, wondering if they were still alive. I have conversations with myself without opening my mouth to avoid the pangs of loneliness.
I kept walking west. Countless steps did I tread, in open fields or within forests. There were days when I was too sick to walk and had to rest until I recovered. As soon as I recovered, I continued my endless trek home.
At some point, I had marched to familiar lands, places that I had been to in the horde’s wake, and I knew I was going the right way. I saw the familiar mountains that I always saw back home but on the other side. I saw the pass between the mountains, and I knew I had to get there.
As I trudged through the forests, I saw a great, clear lake, and once again, I felt how parched I was. I ran towards the lake, but I was shocked by what had appeared in my reflection. I did not remember having long hair or a growing beard, and my reflection made it apparent on how tattered my clothes were, as if I was wearing rags all along. I gasped at the sight, and my voice too, sounded different. It was dried and hoarse, and I do not remember my voice being this deep.
Once I had recovered from my initial shock, I scanned the lake for any hidden aquatic creatures that might devour me if given the chance. I threw a rock at the lake, which echoed a peculiar sound like the lake had swallowed the stone, and once the ripples had settled, I had decided to bathe in its waters and drink as much as I could before setting off.
For several days, I made my way towards the mountain pass under the open sky. Whenever I heard the sound of some kind of beast, I stopped moving entirely to hide in the grass, and I only moved when I was completely sure that there was no one around.
It took another set of days for me to trek the mountain pass. I almost forgot how uneven the path was, with various rocky bumps that I had to climb in certain points. I had to hide behind rocks, crevices, and caves to hide from the beasts that often came down from the slopes. There was little to no wood to make fires with, and so I often slept on the cold stony ground at night.
Finally, I emerged from the other side of the mountain pass after days of trekking. When I saw the empty and cracked walls of my home, I rushed into the open, gateless gateway and I saw only scattered stones, charred wood, mounds of ashes, and sun-bleached bones.
I desperately searched for my family, and anyone that may hear my calls. I trudged through the debris scattered in familiar streets, corners, and buildings until I found myself climbing up the upward path to our longhouse. Instead of family greeting me home, the familiar longhouse I grew myself in seemed to be ripped into a burnt and broken carcass of what was once home, with the familiar tile roof shattered into scattered pieces, and the strong wooden beams and walls shredded into splinters.
I walked on the elevated wooden floor of what was once my home and glanced at the rooms that were once there. I searched for anything that might lead me to them, whether be it letters or missing items that marked their departure, but all I saw was ashes and untouched belongings. I rummaged through the wooden chests and I saw it full of clothes and trinkets. I saw no bones, but the floor was sprinkled with blood which dried long ago.
Next, I searched the grounds surrounding the house for graves, but there were no markers to be found. I had searched the area I used to carve stones in, but all of the tools were gone, and all that was left was ash and dust.
They must be somewhere safe. They must be. There were no corpses. There was only bits of bone and dried stains of blood. The chests were full of belongings, their clothes, trinkets and all.
And so I marched alone. And so I marched again. Until I can find my family.
Author Statement
This novella is a fantasy story set in my primary worldbuilding project of the same genre. Akin to how Tolkien sets Lord of the Rings and his other works in his world, the novella is among many unfinished, unpublished, and unrefined stories within the world. Like how Tolkien frames many of his stories as “discovered books of our antediluvian history” as a literary device, the novella is written in a way that it frames itself as a lens to another world, its modern prose trying its best to make sense of the fictional world it is set in while maintaining readability. Many elements and peculiarities within the text are local to the setting that are incongruous if compared to the real world. The novella’s setting is set in a small, remote section of this fantasy world.
The novella has a primary anti-war theme in its conception; specifically, the narrative highlights that war is both horrible and mundane despite its glorification in many forms of media. The plot defies the traditional heroics of fantasy, making it in line with George R.R Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series in regards to tone. The fantasy setting of the novella serves as a narrative device for defamiliarizing the text, presenting the theme in an unfamiliar light. With the usual features and conventions of fantasy, namely the presence of magic and fantastical people and creatures, the atrocities and terror of war can be highlighted under a fictional lens. The features of the setting that the novella takes place in are less important by themselves and instead serve as narrative devices to portray the primary theme of the text.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
The glorification of war takes the form of the stories the protagonist has heard from travelers and the war stories of the protagonist’s father. The fictional species that the novella had taken from Greek mythology, the Centaurs, known in myth to be rowdy and wild beings, are used by the narrative and the first-person narrator to emphasize the inhumanity of the invaders of the story through their non-human qualities, as well as the foreignness of their attitude and way of life that is contrary to the hometown of the protagonist.
However, the unnamed protagonist is framed by the narrative to be trapped by the unfortunate circumstances he finds himself in, with little to no agency until near the end of the story. The feeling of helplessness also extends with the lack of dialogue from the protagonist, with the only lines of dialogue from either his family members or those who had conquered and enslaved their hometown. Instead of dialogue, the nameless protagonist is mainly characterized through his inner thoughts, portrayed through a first person point of view. This choice serves to highlight the primary anti-war theme of the novella, that people are unwillingly caught up in the circumstances of a war, conveying a feeling of helplessness.
The choice of not naming the protagonist and his family members serves to remind the readers that anyone could be a victim of war, while the antagonists, the Centaurs as a whole, are sometimes named; mainly the leaders of the Centaurs, “Tzamurbeg”, the chieftain and his heir, “Tzhanlaan” are named because in real life history, those who declare war are always the leaders of men or heads of state. The novella’s protagonist serves as a lens to the experience of the refugees that war creates.
According to Castelliani’s The Art of Perspective, “...with the intimacy of first person comes a vulnerability for which there is little or no cover, and with that vulnerability comes both a more exciting opportunity to win the reader’s engagement and a higher risk of rejection.” The novella uses a first-person narrator to allow readers to feel the emotions of the protagonist more intimately despite the lack of a name. Castelliani also notes that “every narrator is essentially unreliable is the simple fact of his humanity,” regardless if the narration is done in a first-person or third-person manner. Despite the nameless protagonist being a resident of the world, he grew up confined within the town, and much of the information he has of the outside world is from travelers and storytellers who have been to the outside world. An excerpt from the beginning pages of the story expresses this best:
I heard from the merchants, bards, and travelers that come into our town that there is an entire world out there. Vast rivers, castles of gold, and cities floating in the sky. The farthest travelers bragged in the taverns and gambling houses that they had met many kinds of people, not just people like us, but people made out of paper, people with long ears, people who are short but strong, and people with horns and fur. They had spoken of “oceans”, lakes that were as wide as the skies above, and as vast as the steppes in the frontier.
This excerpt summarizes the world outside his town that the protagonist thinks he knows, as well as the environment he grew up in. The supposed facts about the world, the “golden castles” or “floating cities,” and the many kinds of people that supposedly exist beyond the walls of the protagonist’s hometown might or might not be true, and considering that this novella takes place in a fantastical world, the former might be true. He compares the concept of the ocean to a lake and its size to the sky and the steppes, suggesting that he lives in a landlocked area and a lake is the only large body of water he has known.
The protagonist’s perception of war is colored by the stories he hears from his father about his time as a soldier and the stories of heroes told by the bards. This glorification of war created a false illusion that the act of fighting was heroic for the young protagonist until the reality of war came with the invasion of the Centaurs from the steppes. When he witnessed the arrows first impale the town’s local militia as his mother sheltered him, the illusion was broken. His limited perspective as a slave of the Centaur horde also portrays the invaders as not only cruel and barbaric, but they are vast and unstoppable, but this illusion too, has been broken near the end of the story as winter came. His hatred, fear, and limited knowledge of the foreign invaders also contribute to the unreliable quality of the first-person narrator, blurring any sense of objectivity in varying degrees of exaggeration and ignorance.
Being set in a world that follows the features of conventions of the fantasy genre, the setting is bereft of readily available technology. Timekeeping devices, especially those that can be used by an individual like a watch, aren’t available for the protagonist and the setting the novella is placed in.
Yet time plays a significant role in this novella. The techniques of Joan Silber’s “The Art of Time In Fiction,” mainly the narrative technique of“long time” are used for the description of the passage of time within the narrative. Silber’s technique of “long time” is not only used to tell the story chronologically but also to emphasize the length of time of the novella. The majority of the story is focused on the time spent by the protagonist in the unwanted company of the Centaurs who had taken him as a hostage and slave.
While accurate indicators of time are nonexistent in the text, abstract terms like “days”, “weeks”, “moons”, and “winters” are used to denote a rough estimate of spent time within the narrative. The use of “moons” and “winters”, specifically lunar cycles, seasons, and other “universal” events, are historically used in real life before the prevalence of exact markers of time to denote specific swathes of time because these are familiar with things that were specific to those events; for example, the planting of crops during summer. The setting the novella takes place in also has a lack of timekeeping devices. Moons are the novella’s stand-in for months and the term “winters” substitutes the term “years”. The use of such terms decorates the text with a silver of pseudo-archaic prose that is present in many fantasy works such as Tolkien's, yet the novella is written in primarily modern prose.
Quick summaries are also used to gloss over lengthy, redundant, and sometimes great events that are ultimately irrelevant to what the story is trying to tell. The long march of the horde the protagonist finds himself is shortened into brief sentences that describe what had happened, and give context to the scenes the text focuses on. Aside from the initial siege and the final battle the protagonist is forced to participate in, many of the Centaur’s sieges were glossed over in favor of the nameless protagonist’s solitary journey. To completely describe the entire march of the protagonist in defined detail and almost diary-like recounting of events is a fruitless and pointless task that would bog down the reader.
By the end of the novella, the reader will have an idea of how much time has passed. At the end of the story, the nameless protagonist had successfully escaped from his enslavers during a losing battle, and he walked in the general direction where he came from in an attempt to return home. Yet as it turns out, when he saw his own reflection on a lake, his hair had grown long, and he had sprouted a beard, implying that he had journeyed for several years alone in search of his home.
When he arrived at his hometown, he saw that it was now in ruins.
The influences of this novella, mainly from the genre of fantasy, and the way the story has been written using the aforementioned narrative tools can give readers another perspective on reading or writing fantasy. Although grand and epic plots are the focus of the zeitgeist of modern high fantasy there can also be “smaller” stories within the genre.