These posts are scenes, chapters and other material that I cut out completely during the editing process. I’ll mark each entry with which book they were cut from so if you haven’t read a particular book yet you can avoid spoiling it. If a piece has no spoiling effect I’ll indicate that.
Alternate prologue for ‘Isle of Echoes’: I cut this as it doesn’t start the story, add a hook or introduce any main characters. Instead I switched the prologue to a scene from the past that sets up one of the main plot arcs of the book and series. The pattern of prologue being a past episode related to the main plot will carry over into the other books of the series. It has no spoilers in it.
The chronicling of past events is a source of entertaining stories; the investigation of how people lived in ancient times is a field worthy of study. History though can be more than either of these – more than amusement or academic endeavour. To be most useful to the sentient world, history needs to reveal or to demonstrate the causes of the events it describes – to find the origins of the tale. To expose what motivated the heroes to their great deeds; the ordinary folk to their endurance; the despots to their villainy. It must present those findings to the world, not only as a lifeless listing of what once was, but as a reflection in the mirror of what is now happening, and a gaze into the crystal ball of what may come to be.
It is clear that most surviving records of any given time are written by history’s victors. Those who come long after the heat of battle and revolution have cooled rely on partial accounts and incomplete evidence. If history is written by, at the behest, or relying on the information of those who prevail in its struggles, then inevitably it will be biased and incomplete; its warnings hidden by the hubris of the mighty. What wins wars seldom keeps peace, at least not for long.
These tales upon which we embark, therefore seek to bear the viewpoints of many. A cacophony of voices from across the ages from which, hopefully, a fuller understanding may emerge. If there is entertainment in the reading of them as well, so much the better.
The first task of course, is to decide where the origins of a sequence of events may lie – a matter more difficult than it may seem. Does the story of the house begin with the building of walls? With the foundations? With the rock on which they are built? But that rock was once the sandy bed of an ancient sea – sediments eroded from yet older mountains by Time’s patient allies, ice and water. Mountains which were themselves created by volcanic upheavals, eons before, of a planet born from melted rocks flung out from a distant star, cooled in a time before Time.
Think of a man. Does his story begin with his birth or that of his parents? Of the community they live in? The civilisation, if any, they are part of? But where did civilisation come from? Whence the first people, the first animals, the first life?
Next we consider the motivations for actions. Does anyone truly know why they acted as they did. If memory shapes experience and experience shapes choice, then what we recall of our lives governs in ways small or great what we do in each moment of the eternal present. “I did it without thinking” is said more often than it is true. Even when it is believed true, it is generally not, for much of the mind’s activity is necessarily shielded from the eye of waking consciousness. Deliberate denial is a choice rooted inexorably in our private past. If we cannot know it of ourselves in the moment, how then to ascribe with certainty the motivation of souls long dead, in cultures now extinct?
The gods may know the answers to these questions, but even they cannot know how they themselves came into being – who recalls their own birth or what came before it? The chains of causality, and consequence, stretch to infinity in opposite directions from any and every moment, so even the simplest story truly has no beginning and no end. Perhaps all the chains rejoin into one at some far future point – some believe it is so, but then people have the capacity to believe almost anything, it seems.
Yet we must, perforce, start our story somewhere and if this chosen point may later seem too far back, or too recent, well, those are but opinions, not facts, for this beginning is no more or less valid than any other link in those chains that might have been chosen. That being so, let procrastination yield to convenience, and our story telling get underway.
First draft of the start of Isle of Echoes
This is a short description of the city. I envisioned a camera panning across the city as I wrote it, and intended it as the start of the book (after the prologue). It has too much description and too little of anything else to work as that, so I’ve cut it out, and have a different starting scene instead.
The sun rose as it had done many millions of times before, yet still seemed to hesitate, as though uncertain of what kind of day it was creating. No clouds were there to witness its arrival and so it broke red on the sleeping world alone. Its first rays caught the mountain peaks of the isle that rose from a dark ocean. They slid down from the heights to the lowlands like a rose coloured avalanche, running swift across the marshes and the waste before finding the great forest. Hues of red, orange and gold ran along branches twisting the leaves’ colours, stirring with gentle touch the people who dwelt there. This forest was unlike the many others the dawn woke each day, for it held the great city of Navernum. Over years that stretched into centuries and beyond, the trees had been shaped, their branches interwoven to make homes, streets, shops and work places all dozens of feet above the ground. The people ran like squirrels along the branches never descending to the leaf littered floor.
Here the passing dawn lit a huge glade that made a break in the trees where, in the first light, swirls of mist wound up from the floor of the glade. Further along the soft light fell on the great square – that mass of tangled branches over four hundred yards across – where a few royal guards were beginning morning drills, their breath rising in the still air. The sound of the captain barking orders echoing away to one end where the branches were polished almost white and formed into the huge gateway to the palace. Through the opening the colours passed, along the broad roadway lined with flowers and saplings all neatly tended, briefly painting them in autumnal shades. On, past the Arbouretum they went, picking out each of its many roofs, gables, turrets and hidden courtyards, that seemed to have arrived at their current shapes by accident rather than design. Across windows, balconies, spires and open spaces; larger buildings like the guild house and market hall or a workshop among the homes of the city’s inhabitants. On they went until, at the edge of the city, the houses gave way to trees that seemed to have forgotten what it meant to be a tree – each one covered with different foodstuffs: nuts, fruits but also cereals and green vegetables. These were the fields that fed the city, empty of the workers who would arrive to tend them in an hour or so. The last building before the fields was a single house in a lone tree, connected to the rest of the city by an old wooden drawbridge, raised and lowered by frayed ropes running over unoiled pulleys. The sunbeams peered in through windows carved into the tree, at an old man who was rising from his rest, his wild hair and beard momentarily dyed back to the colours of a youth so remote even the trees could not give witness to it.
Book 2: “Isle of Echoes: Armentum”
This was the original prologue to book 2, but after significant changes to the structure of book 2, this is no longer relevant as prologue. It does foreshadow events still in book 2, but does not reveal any major plot elements that are not already well signposted in book 1.
Visions From Seer
Carlook rose from her bed, joints cracking as she did so. The fire had died down but still gave off enough heat to take the chill from the air. It was dark outside, and there was no sound from any of the other houses in the town. She shuffled through to the toilet and on her return sat on the bench beside the fire, waiting for sleep to return. Before her eyelids could become heavy again she felt the familiar buzzing in the back of her head.
“Alright Seer I’m here.”
It was too late for her to get back to her bed before it arrived now. She lay down on the fur rug in front of the fire. The buzzing sensation increased, her vision swirled and then cleared to show an unfamiliar forest. A group of five men and a woman were walking along an animal track in single file. The scene focused on the old man who led them. Somehow she was made aware that this was happening now.
The images changed. Now the same group were joined by a woman with long flowing hair. They were no longer under the trees, but surrounded by a rocky wasteland devoid of growth. Yet as she watched, the ground where the old man walked sprouted green shoots that rapidly grew to make a grassy path through the desert.
Another shift and now the old man, the dark haired woman and two of the others were paddling across a lake in a makeshift rowing boat. Where were the other three men she wondered? Her interest increased when it became clear that the lake was the one beside the village of Havelin.
“They are coming here.”
A crowd was welcoming them beside a lit beacon on the slope above the beach. the presence of Olgin and Iressa at the fore indicated these events were to happen no further ahead than a generation, possibly much sooner than that.
Next there was a meeting of the village, Grimros looked furious, but Carlook could not hear his words. As the strangers passed Gristhrottle Wood, on the way towards the mines, they passed from sight and the vision faded; no more scenes followed.
Her vision clouded and her home reappeared around her once more.
The buzzing had progressed to a full blown headache centred about two inches behind her left eye. This was going to be a bad one, the nausea was coming already. Rolling onto hands and knees she crawled back to the toilet and threw up. Head pounding she staggered to her store cupboard and reached for her herbs. She dumped them out of the bag into a pot and filled it with water from the jug by the sink. Hands shaking, she carried it over to the dying fire. She set it down, stoked the coals, added kindling and then the pot.
A wave of nausea gripped her and she hurried back to the toilet. By the time the vomiting stopped the water was bubbling. Using the cloth hung on a peg for that purpose, she pulled the pot out of the fire and set it on the hearth. She dipped a cup into it, and drank down the infusion scalding hot. Sleep was done for the night for sure.
The images from her god, Seer, had been coming as far back as she could remember. There was little warning beyond the buzzing sensation, and no explanation of the images she received. It had always been left to her to interpret them as best she could. Sometimes that was difficult as they might come as single images of people or places she didn’t know. On other occasions they had been essential to the survival of the community, like the time of drought a few years back, when the food she had directed the town to save had been what fed everyone through the next winter and spring.
Tonight’s telling was unusual for having five separate scenes. It seemed clear that a group of strangers was coming to Havelin, and would arrive at night by boat. The meaning of Grimros’ displeasure was uncertain, although not an uncommon state for him. He had always stated that there were no people left outside the valley, that the records passed to him by word of mouth over generations were sure of this. Yet these visions spoke to a different reality. He would not take well to the contradiction. She would need to be careful. It seemed the strangers would leave heading for the mines further up the valley, though why that was important she had no idea.
Drawing a second cup of tea from the pot, she thought of what she should say to the rest. They would need to keep watch–if the strangers arrived at night she did not want them getting an arrow in the eye from someone thinking they were a wolf after the chickens. Once they were here, she would have to see how it played out. Grimros wouldn’t be happy, so maybe there was some good would come of it.
She smiled and hugged her arms round her legs, knees drawn up to her chest as tight as her stiff joints would allow. Reflecting on the images she had once received about Grimros. In those he had been clearly angry and had left the settlement with two others, a crowd gesturing him to go quickly. Not a happy parting. She had wondered several times in the years since, as Grimros became Keeper of Records, as he grew too fond of the power his position gave him, and again now, just how his fortunes would change to see him hounded out. Trying to understand it was idle speculation, which wouldn’t clean the bathroom. It did not stop her staring into the flames of the fire long enough that the first greying of the black outside arrived, before she stood up and got ready for the day.