Hello everyone! Please let me know if you would be interested in reading more of this. The following prologue is the beginning of the chronicled events of a section of my childhood which was very dear to me. I plan on writing several installments on the adventures of Sofira, Raven, and Isobel, written as if the children actually were the fictional characters. Again, please let me know if you're interested.
Many thanks,
S.S. Rose
Child's Play: Prologue
We walked, one after the other, into the musty stone bowels of my only friend’s house. The basement was cool, quiet, and dark, save the pulsing afternoon light that leaked in through the thick-paned glass door like watercolor onto paper. There was an old guest bed huddled in the corner, dusty and moldy in its prolonged vacancy. On the other side of the sliding door a hot tub hummed and boiled. A pair of threadbare couches conjoined at the hip had been arranged around the half of the room with a carpeted floor. The wooden door with old-fashioned glass windows stuck out of the wall adjacent to the stairway that wound up to the main floor. Through that door was a sort of walk-in closet and in the closet was a storage cupboard, which doubled as a labyrinth, and trebled as a goblin’s cave.
In this basement, this enchanted grotto, I was not myself. Rather, I was all the different selves I might have been if I had gotten any say in the matter. This day, I was Sofira. Sofira the Brave, Princess of the Goldenwood Realm, a fantastical hybrid of wood-nymph and elf and the rightful heir to the crown. An enchantress, Sofira was skilled in the art of weaponry and could only be killed by four strokes of the ruby dagger or fifty thrusts of the diamond sword. Her only notable shortcoming was a slight emotional weakness which often lead her to be overly affectionate towards the roguishly handsome Raven.
Raven, embodied by my friend’s brother, was the beloved of Sofira as well as a woodsman and spell-caster. He possessed a tongue of cool fire, which quickly seduced and enraptured the vulnerable Sofira.
His sister, and my only friend, was the fair lady Isobel. Soft-spoken and quietly angry at the world, Isobel was Sofira’s closest confidante and a knighted lady.
Brooding in the catacombs and still shadows of the basement lurked the blackhearted Desdemorn, the bloodthirsty lord of dragons and hellfire and all things unimaginably wicked. He guarded one dangerous secret of Sofira’s past that might prevent her from wearing the spotless crown of Goldenwood.
Among our party, we possessed only one boy, the brother, who by default became the blurred chiaroscuro of both Desdemorn and Raven. Gradually, as the days and weeks progressed, the two became frightfully alike in nature. This puzzle I fretted over during countless car-rides home, head rested on hand staring out of the window at wet blurring trees.
Oh yeah, and figurative language is when you say like "music was written by Mozart" instead of "Mozart wrote music."
). I love the language that is almost childish, in a good way. Not childish in small vocabulary (come on, you're using words like "chiaroscuro"!) and not childish in the depth of idea, either. There is so much depth - it makes me curious how deep you must have gone into your imaginations as a child, and then enhanced the background and depth as you got older.