Tall Tales: The Nymphs' Symphony (Scott T Beith's Tall Tales Saga Book 1)

by Scott Beith

  Shadows of concrete stones made up multiple distant mausoleums and crypts where I believed similar looking housing flats should have been, as many of them even seemed to be interconnected underground by a series of webby tunnels not too dissimilar to the royal catacomb bunkers.

  My anxiety had reached an all-time high, accentuated by the sheer fact that I was, for the moment, all alone. You’re ok. Everything’s fine. The quiet is good, I kept trying to remind myself, simply trying to adjust to a new cold and foggy landscape I was ill dressed and prepared for.

  I glanced around, quickly checking for silent stalking movements nearby, looking down upon the dried blood along my arms that trickled down like tiny little rivers that weaved left and right around the grooves of goose bumps as the light of my necklace exposed the truth of just how cold and afraid I was. My dread only ever able to ease when I reminded myself how deathly still and quiet the graveyard was. The calming thought that I must have been in a place that no one had travelled to in a long time.

  I followed along the downhill gated path, trying to account for where it stopped and started due to the scattering of erupted posts and other ornaments, such as wooden seating that had long since rotted and rusted to decade old neglect. A pathing clearly dilapidated due to both a long lack of maintenance as well as some form of serious vandalism and desecration.

  Ordinarily, over time the forest tends to reclaim its dominance on all things forgotten, but the forest I could see was clearly too sick to fight back anymore. Spurts of erupted vines spat out of almost every structure, while it seemed only mushrooms, weeds and roots of dead former trees appeared to be capable of repossessing ownership of their disintegrating highland.

  Unfortunately for me, despite a huge lack of leaves to block my view, I had still lost all sight of Arlo upon my sinking impact with the grave, and knew only that he had continued toppling down the small hillside somewhere well ahead of me, vanishing into the fog and deeper unknown.

  So ready to start chasing after him, I needed to find the prince but was staggered initially over how best to do that. I argued with myself about whether I should call out his name, but ultimately figured that would be ill advised, given the terrain and situation. My mind going against my more primal and basic instincts, as I decided it would be safest to creep slowly in search for him instead.

  There were many similarities that matched the Capital along my walk, such as each unique bend of larger trees and old clumped piles of rock deposits unmoved from where they ordinarily sat inside the castle by the most eastern edges. I knew which way to walk, as I felt as if I hadn’t left the Capital at all, but rather had been displaced into a land virtually identical to my home – only one much darker and grimmer than what I had grown to love.

  I noticed how there were no leaves on the trees or bushes at all, that the forest canopy was completely exposed to the elements, revealing a full scatter of stars across a foggy but cloudless nocturnal skyline. The lack of life troubled me deeply, even if it was a good thing to have, it just didn’t feel right to be able to see things so exposed and uncovered. Where back in the world I knew, being exposed to the elements without a strong protective companion should have led to me being swarmed by dozens of big wild predators, much like all stories survivors of the famine used to recall. And yet of all things strange, I was alone in the dark, completely unharmed by the wild.

  It seemed that I was in a place truly condemned. I felt like I might have died from the fall and was just left wandering through an astral plane of dry rotting emptiness. A hellish world in which the trees and bushes looked as if they were just one more acidic storm away from being uprooted or melted away altogether. It was as if the whole landscape were facing severe drought, with only the most primitive ferns and fungi capable of clinging to life.

  I continued to follow along the pebbled remains of their maiden path towards a middle centre, looking around cautiously as I evaluated the nightmare I was caught within, unable to shake the thoughts that perhaps Milena had been right about everything, and that all she wanted to do was keep us away from a place like this at all costs.

  How futile my efforts felt to be, after personally seeing the aftermath of a rainforest suffocated by drought. The very kind of famine our Sun-spire actively prevented from ever happening to us.

  Plagued by doubt and vulnerability, part of me hoped I was simply dreaming. That I had fallen prey to one of Delphi’s dramatic premonitions and was merely envisioning a nightmarish future of our world if Midas never built the spire for us, in order to teach me a lesson about messing with things I didn’t understand.

  My deepest fears of alienation and abandonment had virtually been brought to life. The fear of being left alone cold and starving in the darkness happening to be the only thing compelling me to push forwards, as I wanted to do nothing more then speed up, find Arlo and learn how to get out of their shadowing world, even if it meant leaving before I found my best friend and princess.

  It was a weird sensation of knowing precisely where I was and yet having no clue of where exactly I needed to go. I questioned whether old philosophical discussions I’d had with Akoni were true all along, whether we had accidentally broken the very thread of time and reality and jumped into the future, becoming lost under a deep dreamless hibernation inside the void between space, only to come back out of the vortex a huge number of years later. Or whether it was perhaps, by some equally dramatic absurdity, that we had found ourselves inside a new world altogether – one that happened to greatly resemble our own world, if not for a few subtle yet highly cascading number of changes.

  The second hypothetical situation sounded much worse on the surface than the first, but it happened to be all I was hoping for. For at least it was not as irreversible as having slept dormant for years and year,s only to arise back into a world where everyone we knew and loved was dead.

  From those thoughts, I started feeling a panicked need to pace quicker than what I was, search every gravesite and barky shrubbery for the presence of my possibly injured prince.

  But after turning my head quickly and realising there were dozens of small tiny twigs caught in my hair, it struck me with a small triumph – a victory and accomplishment – that Arlo and I had indeed found the gnolls’ homeland.

  That feeling drove me to tell myself the mission only felt like a failure because I was letting it do so, that if anything, by the same token of luck and determination, I should be able to find a way out of the hell hole I’d put Arlo and me into.

  And so, prioritizing the need to look for Arlo, I also tried to keep in mind that I needed to also find and obtain whatever trans-dimensional stone or device the gnolls must have been using in order to enter and exit our world upon their freewill. The motives of why those scavengers attacked our world becoming remarkably clear to me as I continued to search through the emptiness of their wisp-forsaken wilderness in search of my prince.

  I continued down a ghostly trail towards the lowest grounds of the hill, trying to stay positive, despite each crypt and corner I turned giving me less and less chance to ever find Arlo again.

  I was becoming less secure about where I was as each moment pushed on. I found it harder to maintain my silence as each leaned over gate and bush led to nothing more than further dirt and graves. My hands went from freely touching and feeling every surface curiously to being tucked to my sides at all times. I started avoided all broken railings and ledges as fears started to fester within me, too afraid to lean anywhere that was too far into the shadows, fearing a multitude of gnolls’ claws shooting out and taking hold of me if I did so.

  I wasn’t sure why I was so timid, why I wasn’t using a chance like the one I had to truly test the limits of my powers. I had always assumed that my confidence would grow along with the strength and prevalence of the shadows, but if anything, I was going out of my way to refrain myself from bringing the whole forest to life each time I was spooked in minor alarm.

  The fact was if I wanted to, I
could mould shadows as large as monuments. I could condense the shade into that of solid stone and build myself a castle fortress for Arlo and me to shelter in… and yet the fear of accidentally hurting myself or him in the construction of it stopped me, the darkness in which things unseen could hide was almost preventing me from checking everywhere thoroughly.

  Instead of properly jumping gates and checking crevices behind posts and stone housings, I was rubbing my arms to warm them as I started sternly whispering, “Arlo, Arlo!” towards the corners I couldn’t see. The night was shockingly cold and I was doing my best just to shiver through it, finding it difficult to repel a deeply unforgiving atmosphere.

  I found the lack of respect to the crypts and broken statues sight disturbing. I was surprised to see an old Nyx statue on the path where courtyards would be in my world, centred among more tarnished tombstones and old stone garden bedding. Its moth head was cracked open and its antennas snapped off, as if the statue had been smashed deliberately by an axe. And yet, all of the precious gemstones were still inside it.

  So strange to see someone go to the trouble of defiling such a monument and yet not take a single precious gem for trade or sale. Perhaps those stones were purely aesthetic pieces of art that had no materialistic value in gnoll society. Either way, it meant I was dealing with a community without any means of economy or trade.

  I felt bad for all the poor souls that must of once lived in this world. Whatever they were, they were intelligent enough to build things, and yet must have long forgotten aspects of morality such as honour, dignity and respect.

  I had reached an area equivalent to where I thought the palace or southern alley streets should be, capable of finding a few parts of the south walls still built up in the distance. So it seemed a whole similar city and civilisation had once existed there.

  It was like death without dignity, after the graves had been built. Clearly no one bothered to stay around and help preserve the place for those who were lost. I passed many unmarked graves, neither a word nor prayer had been left to help identify who each being was. It was a hauntingly tragic way to put someone to rest – their body left unable to disappear and yet unable to be properly remembered either.

  I decided it was in my best interest to stop thinking about them and spare myself from freaking out any more then I already was. Instead I began considering what I should do next. My main goal was to find Arlo, and then a way to rescue Anara while also searching for the way gnolls enter and leave their deathly homeland.

  My travels had gone far, possibly further than Arlo could have rolled, and so I had no choice but to stop and rethink my options. The fact was he could’ve been hurt or in need of help. But maybe it was the opposite – that he was also uphill looking for me, or perhaps hiding from predators hoping I wouldn’t scream out his name and give away our positions.

  I had almost left the open cemetery through its crumpled down southern walls when small plant life like beach ferns and tree shrubs began to wriggle once again, the branches of willow trees rattling to shadows while I compelled myself to move towards it, hoping such life meant Arlo was close by.

  I was afraid of provoking any predators lurking nearby, but too many minutes had passed, and Arlo was still nowhere to be seen. I had already checked behind every tomb and collapsed concrete wall. Every gate post and open field of trees and graves.

  My sanity reduced with every second I was stuck out there alone, following an old shredded stone slab built path. And so I exited out of the old castle’s ruins and headed into the hinterlands dropping downwards from below, skittish and jumping at every sound. I was seeing every rock and stone in the distance shift as it formed the exact shape of my prince sitting down in injured wait of me.

  One of these shadows was prickly, and had the hair of a prickly beach cactus plant. A wild baby cucumber sapling that was interweaved in a unique bundle identical to the exotic figure and shape of one that had been transferred from the forest and taken to Milena’s water gardens as a piece of beach decoration.

  The stems were identical, while the pins and spines interlocked in the exact same way as the very plant I had to water only twice a year upon her request. To my surprise, the young plant hadn’t grown with age, nor withered and disappeared along with all the other plants nearby. It looked exactly the same, serving as proof to me that I wasn’t displaced years into the future, but merely within a parallel reality to my own.

  It became clear to me that the place I was in was just a shadow of the world I called home. Much like the dead plants surrounding the plush cacti, our two worlds were two rivals of which competed for the same light source, which meant one world was to starve, fail and be on the verge of collapse, while the other more stronger counterpart got to bask and bath in complete and unbridled sunshine.

  On the cosmic level, two similar worlds were competing with the same star for sunlight. The one the gnolls were born on happened to be the poor and unfortunate world that was on the losing side of the spectrum, facing a very cruel and imminent fate, as inch by inch the reaper seemed to be tugging itself towards them, pulling them further into darkness and damnation of a cold and callous extinction.

  Everything made sense to me suddenly – even the gateway to how I got there was starting to become simpler. How Camilla used the space between space to shift herself from one place to the next, occurring to me with a similar flash – that one missing link about her skillset and how it could build the bridge that brought us here.

  The ability to move tiny black holes next to each other was an otherworldly talent far more unique and extraordinary than the rest of us possessed. They weren’t skills as easily defined as tinkering with aspects of sound or light like Arlo, Anara and I did. Nor was it something of complex biochemistry either, like the mutually symbiotic relationship with skin bacteria that Radament, Ariss and Midas had.

  Camilla’s gifts were truly magical in the sense that she could alter matter – moving things into grouped random black holes and then out white holes that occur spontaneously in nature. I thought back to one of the first times I ever saw her gifts for myself, how divine and out of the ordinary it all was.

  It was the day I first met Akoni. I had sat next to him by accident. He was an outcast and bookworm who watched from built up wooden bleaches while Camilla undertook the trials of the topside beach cliff training pits in order to revamp her name and be elected into the community as the next Legion Commander for the Capital and its borders.

  I could recall myself asking young Akoni how his mother could do the things that she could do, the two of us began having an in-depth discussion about it, the only two spectators in the grandstands more curious than they were entertained.

  The whole crowd was mesmerised by the vibrant colours of the portal stone Camilla was using for ulterior purposes. She manipulated the terrain from spewing lava to autumn woods, followed only by a frosty winter wonderland, all because she was capable of moving things through Midas’s many marvellous gateway stones.

  Before I got used to them, her gifts used to fascinate me beyond compare. I thought she was divine – something supernatural in nature because she could simply control things that were outside the realms of rationality and reality.

  It was how she made herself as cloudy as a shadow or ghost, to be composed of condensed fog and smoke when she willed it, able to use invisible nano-scopic wormholes to shift matter through areas of trans-dimensional space.

  “My father calls it a crossroad phase,” Akoni had said to me, spoken back in the days only a few years after his exile, back when he believed his father was a good man and had a reason for doing the terrible things that he did, a child hell-bent on reading every book and journal his father ever wrote. An upset child wanting nothing more than to be like his estranged father, despite all the kids that bullied him because of it. Coincidentally, this happened not a great deal before his major breakthrough discovery about fairy fire and the potential of creating a metal eating plasma.

/>   “If the universe is as big as its told to be, and there truly are as many solar systems in this universe as there are grains of sand on earth, then it’s possible that somewhere out there across the expanse that there is an equal amount of stardust that just so happens to get compiled in exactly the same way and at the exact same time for multiple replicas of our world to be identically formed,” he said, the very first incomprehensible statement he ever said to me. Humbled only by the sheer lack of breath he had upon saying it.

  “Meaning,” he added with a huge anaemic puff, “statistically speaking, it’s more likely there are worlds identical to ours out there somewhere in space than the chances of identical worlds not existing,” he expelled to say, said almost sarcastically and condescending, as if he were used to mockery from this point of his statement.

  Yet bulling himself only by the effort it took him to speak it out loud, the battle for breath he had due to the poor congenital health he was born with, suffering from chronic exhaustion, anaemia and a thousand other bouts of health conditions, like his crippling pneumonia, early acne, asthma and very bad eyesight.

  “I don’t understand,” I recall asking him.

  “Of course you don’t,” he quipped back rudely.

  “Well explain it to me then,” I added, my invitation to continue bringing a full state of confusion before eventually bringing a smile to an ordinarily bitter and expressionless face.

  “Well, think about it… If all these reoccurring mirror worlds were to propagate at the same rate along our own time scale – assuming our universe is only one quarter through its life cycle as current theory suggests,” he’d continued, still out of breath, “Well, then, that would mean, by ratio, that three quarters of every parallel world would actually be identical to ours… With only one quarter being subject to any slight, but dramatic cascading change. So the eventual point of divergence that turns a world from being a perfect reflection to being parallel has only occurred to one quarter of those out there,” he explained before using a wooden self-made air inhaler to help regain his breath after his lecture.