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

by Scott Beith

  To me it felt almost like a metaphor of our two worlds: that maybe one world must die in order to save the other, or whether, if resources were to be halved, then both worlds could live equally in poverty. What a bitch Mother Nature could be, considering that in so many cases of survival those were the only two options one got to choose from. But perhaps that was the decision Milena was prepared to make, unlike Midas and many other nobles who loyally followed him.

  Despite the rain that had just fallen, or that it was actually day instead of a silent pale midnight, wherever I thought we were to travel seemed to be too unsalvageable for food to exist within. It appeared every droplet of rain that fallen on the dry river I stood upon had already been selfishly swallowed up by the dirt and had left none for potential life above to grow upon.

  “Where are you going?” Pilly called out to me loudly, standing still by the dam in another brief suspended wait. “There’s literally nothing down there.”

  I had been about to follow the dry stream downhill, thinking it would eventually lead to food and water. “Oh, I’m sorry. I just thought–”

  “You thought wrong,” she sharply responded, cutting me off mid-speech. “It didn’t rain anywhere near enough to refill any of those smaller streams.” She announced from the small distance as I turned back towards her. “Come. My prince found a way to desalinate salt water for our swamp plantations. Its this way,” she said before pointing towards the dry dust valley to the left, indicating we needed to head away from the mountainside and towards the area where my world’s meadows would have been located somewhere nearby. “Just follow me closely, ok?” she stated loudly, walking away from my approach, not appearing afraid of predators or adversaries, as she was happy to shout and walk along the low ground for once.

  “Sorry,” I apologised as I hurried to catch up with her and her careless stroll towards the dry empty dirt hills ahead to her left.

  Once I caught up to her and walked along her side, she didn’t say anything for a very long while, the two of us walked to an awkward silence, pacing up the crests of each hilly peak only to briefly stop each time and glance around for subtle traps and observe the footprints of other gnolls who must have lived in the safety of the under-hollow.

  We were walking in a sound silence, and even though she seemed quite content to remain quiet, I felt uneased while I walked along beside her, waiting for her to get used to my presence. One ongoing hope that her obvious disdain for me would gradually begin to mellow the longer she got used to having me and my ogre there beside her.

  More than a few times, I felt just as oafish as the ogre on my other side. I was constantly tripping and wandering clumsily near Pilly, never realising how often I naturally miss-stepped until I was doing my best to avoid it within my travels. Unlike me, Pilly moved so confidently and swiftly that she was as silent as any prowler, just like Anara who rarely ever stumbled. Pilly also seemed like someone who was just so cool and popular, regardless of what she was doing.

  I admired Pilly for how brave and fierce she was. I began to even like her as soon as she warmed up to me enough to start talking and teach me the ways of reading the forest and tracking potential dangers.

  “That’s the shredded skin of a skink,” was the first casual thing she said to me. “Stray ones sometimes wander out here, following the scent of nymphs who leave the forest. We gotta be careful. I reckon it’s probably buried and hidden itself in the dirt somewhere up ahead,” she claimed. “And those footprints are fake,” she said later, noticing tracks in the dirt. “You can’t trust everything you see. The imprint is too clean. Someone’s made them deliberately to lure us down there, so try not to tread on any random patches of leaves or twigs, ok? They could be spike traps.”

  “Thank you. You’re very observant,” I would complement to her in kind each time she pointed things out to me, the two of us feeling fairly safe, given the desert-like distance between all trees, brambles and other barky terrain.

  “When you’re in a place as scarce as this, you have to know where you should be looking,” she mentioned to me. “And also to know when exactly to be quiet and listen,” she added. Happy to give me hunting advice, as we continued walking with a more respectful conversation than the awkward silence we had before, being as patient as I could while I waited for Pilly to warm up to having me there before I asked any big questions.

  “You know, for a girl with all your power, I don’t think you’d actually last one day out here completely alone,” she remarked, spoken under a casual tone of curiosity rather than direct insult as she seemed to be willing to break the ice and allow us to begin to have a more deeper discussion.

  “Yeah, I know, haha,” I confessed, the brute honesty of it making me smile and laugh. “I’m just thankful I’m not alone anymore,” I ventured to say. “To be honest, I’m pretty new to being outdoors altogether. I was just a maid up until a week ago.”

  “You’re kidding me, really?” she responded, genuinely astonished by my remark. “That’s, uh… yeah… that’s very interesting…” she mused, just coming to terms with how different, or perhaps alike, I was to the other version of myself I was figuring she must have known. “Well, it’s for the best I’m sure,” she stated rather cryptically, stopping us quickly to a false alarm, with the breaking of branch in the wind startling her. She put her finger to her lips in order to indicate a quick need to be quiet, drawing and shooting an arrow into the tree just as an insurance measure for spooking anything nearby to come out from hiding.

  “You know what I find most strange?” Pilly said, returning to the conversation casually after a short delay and lack of movement from the only oak tree that was visible in any direction to our right. An innocent, and almost welcoming smile pressed across her face as she looked ready to amuse herself.

  “No, what?” I asked curiously with my own friendly smile, hoping this would be the conversation that led to me getting some answers.

  “After almost eighteen years of difference, you still ended up with my brother in both of our worlds,” she stated. “Some could call that fate,” she hinted with a similar smile that Anara usually wore when she liked to meddle in others’ affairs.

  I stood still, thinking about what she’d said, leaving her to bend down and swipe a few leaves and twigs with the gold tip on the top edge of her bow, as she then proceeded to press her hand into a claw print left in the dry dirt, possibly feeling for some residual heat left behind from whatever creatures came before us.

  “You even look at him in the same way,” she surmised, leaving me in somewhat of an awkward embarrassment as she stood back up and waited for my reaction.

  “Actually... he’s betrothed to another – at least I think he still is.”

  “You think?”

  “Um, yeah… It’s complicated.”

  “Oh, well I’m sorry,” she politely replied, a new kinder persona seeming to have emerged. “Well, you might actually live longer this way,” she joked, a certain sense of sadness and insecurity in her tone, and she looked away to avoid eye contact with me just afterwards.

  The two of us continued going over one last dusty hill only to arrive beside the huge erupted steel gates of a giant square paddock lush with grassy reeds and swamp fields hidden by the hill, as the gates sat at the bottom of the slope and were only as elevated and high as the hill was from its tallest peak.

  “I like your bow,” I said, looking down at the gold-tipped metallic corners of her brown and green long bow, two candle wicks curled inside the tips beside a thin flint striker plate she must have used to quickly light them up with, all of her arrows stashed upon the side along the wooden shaft as a bundled dozen sat readily in their own cradle. “You’re quite amazing with that thing,” I added in further compliment, hoping it alone might help explain a few more things about the connection between our worlds.

  “You should’ve seen my mentor with it,” she stated, smirking nostalgically.

  “Doctor Maxwell?” I then asked i
n a brief confusion, forgetting for that very brief moment how different Anara and Pilly’s lives must have been and how silly I was for believing he could have also been Pilly’s mentor too.

  “No. Zephyr,” she told me. “I always wanted to be a doctor though… But Maxwell died almost a full decade ago, so I never got the chance to chase that dream,” she added remorsefully.

  “So what happened here?” I finally asked.

  “You really don’t know, do you?” she said sceptically, seeming to finally accept that I wasn’t merely playing dumb about my lack of knowledge but rather that I had never been clued in to what her world actually was. “Our worlds were once exactly the same,” she told me upon our loose sliding drop down from the dirt hill upon the two locked gate fences and its entrance, putting her bow around her back as she carefully climbed up the locked silver gates first. “A mirror image of each other… Two perfect reflections exactly equal and opposite,” she explained as she climed, vaulting down from the smallish gate upon the wooden planks of the path on the other side, waiting for me to carefully affirm my hands around sides of each spiky post in order to avoid the pointy ends as I lifted myself over them one side at a time.

  “Our worlds were so alike that if you accidentally travelled from one to the other, you would have never even known,” she explained to a certain level of envy as she waited for me to drop down slower and in seemingly less graceful way than she had done.

  I was more focused on what she had to say than where we were, but together we had entered what could have only been considered heaven’s embassy inside hell. It was one huge well-constructed rice paddy field, made of multiple square flat paddocks with boardwalk planks that divided each harvest area and their diverse plant vegetation. We ourselves coming in beside some viny passion-fruit plants upon countless rows of wooden fencing stalks, the ivy-looking plants lush with the red stringy straws of saffron reeds that were ripe for wheat milling.

  As well as countless other citrus-based foods that grew both large and plump due to an intense lighthouse glow being emitted from some scarecrow obelisk monument attached to a stake over in the very centre on a second level wooden perch that overlooked the entirety of the lush lively water garden.

  “Nothing would have felt different,” Pilly continued, “other than maybe a weird feeling like you had relived the same day twice,” she added, speaking as if she, too, were reminiscing about a time before all things went sour.

  As she finally started explaining things we were carefully stepping over each vine that grew over the boardwalk and under the planks of the knee-deep swamp water, making our best effort not to break those weeds, trying to preserve what life they had there, regardless of its actually utility.

  “My world was once just as glamourous as yours,” she added. “But unlike your world, where most live in a lush blissful ignorance, there’s not a nymph alive out here that doesn’t know about ‘the divide’.”

  “What divide? What happened?” I questioned her, intrigued, as we proceeded towards the centre of the sanctuary, running my hands along old wooden fencing posts of each new harvesting field as we headed towards the brightening light source. “Was it the famine?” I pondered to both her and myself.

  “Was that what you called it?” she replied, strangely amused by my question. “Well, yeah, I guess you could call it that – a plague is a plague, regardless of its name,” she stated in reflection.

  “But no, it was what came afterwards. Your king and his whole infernal idea about building a second sun to light up his kingdom and castle,” she explained. “He designed that Sunspire of yours to extract light from other areas of the cosmos… But what he didn’t consider was that the light your world was receiving was being stolen from ours. And we know that to be true because our king was trying to do the same thing on our end… But since our sun rises just as yours sets, our spire seemed to only do the opposite of what it was intended to do, with each day only bringing us further and further into the cold darkness.”

  By that point of her story, I wanted to seem at least a little shocked and surprised. But in truth I couldn’t frown or gasp in disbelief, because the fact was I already partially knew what she was saying to be true, after all she was the living evidence of it. Evidence everyone back home would believe if she revealed her face while standing next to Anara.

  “Oh,” was all I could afford to gently mutter, rather bland and anticlimactic, considering how distorted the general fabric of reality had become to my own understanding of the universe.

  “So while everyone on your end got to live the lush life, you left us in the darkness,” she bitterly persisted to explain, surprised for her to have said it in a way that distanced me from the blame she had placed upon the rest of my equally oblivious kin. “Midas failed us as a king, but he didn’t try to leave willingly like he did in your world. Instead, him and his queen have spent every moment since that fateful night, trying to rectify there one humongous mistake, by any means necessary…”

  “But your family overthrew him, right?” I asked.

  “We tried…” she responded. “He was so determined to make things right again – so willing to save his brethren from starvation – that he started making deals with the wrong kind of devils. And now, because of him, we are at war and facing complete annihilation because of it.”

  I was truly lost for words. Stunned and staggering for something supportive to say, but I couldn’t think of anything, as I simply had no real ability to even pretend that I knew her pain and suffering. I mean I used to think my life was tough, but what did I actually know about true agony when I lived in a civil world with high walls and plenty of resources?

  “I’m really sorry, Pilly. If we’d known–”

  “How could you not?!” she blurted out, spiteful enough to cut me off, her former temper returning as she stared at me as though everything was my fault – a resentful stare very similar to both her mother and her brother.

  “We honestly didn’t know. I swear it! If we had, we would have turned the Sunspire off a long time ago,” I defensively tried to convince her.

  “No, you’re wrong!” she snapped back, some of her hostility lessening. “Because some of you did know,” she stated, clearly referring to Midas and his loyal followers.

  “We can’t talk in your world. Your sound and light affect us much more harshly than it does right here – it’s hard enough to breathe and stand upright, let alone try and voice our problems with you greedy lot…” she snarled, yanking my shoulder as I tried to defensively turn from her. “You just don’t get it. Our very own daylight now repels us! The only thing our hearts and our bodies want to feel again is what rips us back into the darkness like harsher gravity, always pulling us back into our own inhospitable world each time we go to yours for a small piece of paradise,” she said to me. “The cold truth is we have made every effort to communicate with your kingdom in the past, and that never got us anywhere” she stated madly.

  “So you thought it was a good idea to start abducting our soldiers and farmers as justice for what we unknowingly did?” I contested. “Let not forget you’re world declared war against us! We thought you were four-legged animals that stalk and eat our children,” I snapped, suddenly becoming the spokesperson for a world being accused of genocide. “We may be thieves, but you are all murderers,” I yelled, the two of us stewing in a mix of both threat and anger. “We have lost many innocent…” I said, speaking calmly.

  “Not as much as us!” she spat back to me spitefully.

  We both fell quiet, taking a second to breathe. My thoughts always went back to Radament and all the guards who left the Capital one day and never came back. I was still furious deep inside, but even in my anger, I knew in my head that my world had clearly taken more than we had lost ourselves, just as I knew in my heart my world was more than equally in the wrong.

  “Look, you’re right,” Pilly was first to admit, surprising me as I was just about to say the same, both of us willin
g to accept there are no winners in war. “But, Kya, you have to understand that our king is very powerful, but he isn’t very well… In the very beginning he did send the hostages back to your world. I mean we only took them so that they could tell our story, but with each villager and messenger we sent, nothing seemed to ever change for us. The truth of what was happening to our world was being concealed by members of your parliament, and because of that, our king only grew colder and more vengeful each time around. That’s why he declared war. It was a means for us to reclaim our former lives by stealing it back,” she explained, turning to walk towards the glowing centre, just one small paddock and bend from the middle of the sanctuary.

  “I don’t think you could ever understand what it’s been like for us living like this,” she stated. “Light isn’t just about food, warmth and security – it’s about happiness… and hope. There’s a true beauty in colour, in that it’s the breaker of nightmares and fears,” she said. “Would you like to know what the worst part about the darkness is for me?” she asked as we turned the last corner before the small stretch: a large group of wooden stake pedestals that elevated upwards like wooden stairs towards the flaring man-sized light source staked onto a huge centre post.

  “Yes, I would,” I politely tried to express.

  “When I turn colour-less and go transparent, I’m the only one who can actually walk in your world without being pushed down by the bone-crushing strength of your world’s light,” she digressed. “But every time I use it, I get to feel nothing but a blind and dark cold. I can stand up and bask in your sunlight, but I don’t get to feel that warmth spread across my skin, nor have any colour return to my hair. I’m left haunted by how hollow I feel while I walk among your villagers playing by the beach as they bask in the sun.”