Posted in Posted by Rudyard Kipling

*strides in, shaking the early morning dew from her boots* Heyloo, all! OK, announcements!!! We are NOT changing our template, but we'll keep the loverly ones y'all made for the contest-that-was-doomed on hand just in case. Thanks so much for your participation, they were all glorious! But we decided to stick with the old one, as Violet and Snick and I brushed it up a bit.

Also, I am currently no longer writing in M'aine, it fell through the floor. Thus, I went on a mad inspiration-searching party, and finally have decided something: it was high time to start something NEW. Hence, "Fire and Moonlight", or FAM for short. It's a fantasy novel and I'm really, really excited about it! Here's the prologue; feedback would be most appreciated, as it's a budding thing and in need of nourishing.

Fire and moonlight. These two things stood out like a streak of ink against a hide canvas, so stark and bright in the realm of memory. The jagged black cliffs, fringed with green grass which whispered in the slight breeze; the rasp of the embers upon the camp fires, glowing through the dark woods, highlighting every bare winter tree trunk like a host of black-clad apparitions. The moonlight shot through the darkness like a ray of hope, a ray of something beautiful into something darkly alluring. The darkness was all around, the moonlight was all above the in the sky, playing in and out of wispy violet clouds as though the light they bore was a lighter burden than it really was. Nothing made sense but the fire and the moonlight, and that was good. Nothing should make sense, not on a night like tonight. It would have been wrong for something good, save the ghostly moonlight, to make free with the world that night. Fire and ash, fire and moonlight. How different they were. How bright the fire was. How burning hot, burning flesh, the stench of death...the painful memories. Fire and moonlight. How beautiful, how horrible.

"Darkness," the girl had said. Rafe was right. It was dark, not only in the night, but also in the heart. The island was dark and the crash of the sea was far off, reverberating around inside the woods, between the tall black trees, flying into the fire and dancing with the moonlight. Rafe was always right. It was in her blood, the blood which perhaps wasn't all red. Frightening to think it, but how else could one explain her words to her younger sister that morning?

"There is a great sorrow, wrought by fire, which will soon fall upon us," Rafe had said. And she had been right. Wrought of fire, fueled by frenzy, remembered by the fire in the camp fires piercing through the darkness of the woods. Nothing would ever be the same. Not after the ash-filled afternoon-time. Not after the sorrow which fire had brought fear and pain, fire and burning flesh, the aching memory of something once possessed and now lost, gone forever, burned up with the flesh and the memories of past times. Past times which had been good and pure, sacred somehow. Sacred because of the contrast between those times and all that now lay ahead. Darkness, fire. And moonlight. Moonlight was cool, purple moonlight shining into the dark of the woods.

What would happen to them now?

The girl walked on through the woods, away from the beat of the sea, away from the throb of the life around the remaining coastal villages. She did not want to recall life. Life was nothing to her now. Life had turned to ash with the flesh, the burnt flesh, the horrible stench of pure and plain death. Her sister had been right. Perhaps from now on, everything was darkness. Darkness and fire light...yet as the girl looked up into the heavens, up into the vast expanse of velvety violet light pouring cool and sweet from behind the wispy clouds, she could not help but think wistfully of the alien thing called hope. Many people had spoken of it. Perhaps hope was still alive, still hiding somewhere amid the ashes and the ruins. The ruins of the village, the remains of burnt bodies, the stench of death. How could hope survive in such a place as that? Yet somehow, some way, it must have. Because the moonlight was shining, and it seemed different that what it had been last night, or last week, or last springtime. Hopeful. It was hope, and it was shining down upon the girl's face.

The girl turned away. It was too soon, far too soon after the tragedy, the ash, the fires. The death. Too soon, far too soon. The girl veered off into the woods and she heard music. It was unlike any music she had ever heard, even though she had heard it played in the deep of the woods many times before. They, the music-makers, were the ones who kept the fire alive. Not the evil fire which had brought pain and death, the stench and the blazing thatch within the spray of the sea. It was still fire, yet it was different, just as the moonlight shining around the fire was different. The music, tambourine and fiddles made of the wood of the trees, and drums from the hide of the deer which fed in the woods, wove itself into such a pattern, such a beautiful array of sensations throbbing in the heart and echoing around with the moonlight and the burning light the embers cast upon the barren tree branches. The girl was almost hopeful. The music was strange because it bore pain and sorrow as well as renewal and hope. The players had heard of the village, then. Were they playing for her? The girl imagined they were and her feet began to move in such a way that she was almost dancing to the music, moving her feet with the beat of the drums and the clang of the tambourine, and the lilt of the fiddle playing in the darkness, surrounded by the moonlight, cast with a light from the blazing camp fires. An elemental poetry of natural hope, of sorrowful destruction, of a darkness which had bore down upon the tiny coastal village, the sorrow which had burnt out hope from the people, the fires which had destroyed all but two. The girl and her sister, the sister which spoke of darkness, Rafe the girl who knew darkness like she knew her own soul. She had warned. The girl suddenly stopped her feet from moving, stood still and alone and lost in the deep of the fire-lighted darkness. Rafe had warned. Yet was the girl's sister always right? Yes. Rafe had known. The girl had no idea but somehow, some way, Rafe had known and she had spoken, and no one had heeded. Her own sister the least of all. The girl had not heeded because she wished to cling to the last bit of hope within herself. It could not be true, it could not be true, it must not be true. These were the words she had heeded and trusted, not the words of her wild, dark sister. She had not listened because she did not wish to, and now the hopelessness has abounded with the leaping flames and the moonlight had almost been consumed with the darkness.

The face was dark, lean and handsome through the bare gray branches. The girl found herself staring back into the black eyes, looking at her from their place in the shadowy face, which belonged to a boy sitting next to the camp fire, a drum in his lap. The drum was making a slow, steady beat like the dying throb of a heart, a life which was fighting to gain the right to live. The girl stood in the darkness of the woods while the boy, surrounded by his own people, made music to mourn the passing of so much hope and to summon the renewal of the hope once again. The hope in the moonlight which streamed down upon the girl standing alone and lost and hopeless. The fire and the moonlight, the darkness and the boy sitting with his drum, staring at the girl, the girl who had not heeded because she loved hope more than life.

The girl suddenly turned from the boy's black eyes and ran off into the woods. The moonlight had touched her bare arms, shone down upon her defiantly-tilted head, had ignited with her, like the fire which had caught onto the salt-sprayed thatch in the tiny coastal village, a hope which she felt unable to feel so soon after its loss. Hope had no place, coming back so soon, and she hated it for that. She began to hate hope. She did not love it anymore because she had once cherished it above her life, above the sense which would have heeded dark Rafe's words, and it had destroyed her. The girl turned, fled from the firelight and the moonlight alike, into the darkness. The boy sat with his people, far from the heartbeating of the sea, and drummed for the hope which had been lost, drummed for the hope which could be found once again.