Have another snippet! I’m almost there, folks – not at the end of this novel, which is reaching the end of its first act, but near the 50,000 word mark.
Boy, oh, boy, is this gonna need editing. 😀
As usual, this is messy, unedited, and pretty much raw.
I like it anyway. 😀 Enjoy!
She coached us to gather water in anything that would hold it, even pouring out some precious skins of mead or wine or beer (for there would, she swore, be plenty more where we were going) to hold more. We gathered what herbs and vegetables and food we could, and used magic to slice and dry some meat as well.
We were storing up because there would be precious little to eat on the road.
Road, you say?
Yes. Road.
THE road.
The Salted Road.
It saddens me to realize now that all songs and legends about this road are lost.
It was once THE road. The one road which, if you could find it, you would never be lost. The one road that lead straight through teh world, unerring, unstopping, unstoppable, absolutely made from magic and so uplifting that it was the cure to all misaligned ills.
Merchants sang of it. Children sang of it. Old women told stories by fires of adventures had alongside it, and the dangers of leaving it before reaching the end.
The Salted Road… has been forgotten. And I never dreamed that it would be. So many things seem eternal, seem, in the moment, to be without end and culturally permanent scars. The great flood; the memory of dragons; the knowledge that there are demons in the dark.
But the Salted Road has been forgotten, and with it, the dream of permanence in any true thing.
I tell you now of the Salted Road, and I beg you to listen, for if you remember what I say, perhaps there will be future generations who sing of it still.
For it is missed.
It will never be again – but nevertheless, it mattered.
