《Tales from the Afterworld - short stories collection》Story 030 - GALAPAGO (magical realism)
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GALAPAGO
As swift as a squirrel, Jay run up to the deck as soon as he heard the watchman's cry "Land! Land in view!" The light was so sudden and bright it hurt. The world looked ghostly and magical through the teary blur of the young eyes, wide open with wonder.
Jay had been waiting for that island since the very beginning of the journey. It was everything he expected it to be and more: a place of exotic plant and animal life, sweet fruit, and adventures. Everything seemed wonderful there, beautiful, alien, even the same sun and sea Jay had had enough of during his time on the ship.
The captain let his men go ashore and explore the island so they would return to the ship with fresh food and water. Little Jay wasn't allowed to follow the adult sailors into the jungle, but he was quite content with exploring the beach. He ate his share of exotic fruit while he was at it, taunted iguanas with a stick, and even tried to dig for treasure under a weirdly crooked palm tree. Meanwhile, the sailors returned.
They found what they were looking for: water and meat, the meat being the huge, heavily armoured tortoises that lived only on that island as the cook told Jay. The cook told many other things as well: mostly about how tasty their meat was and how long it could stay fresh. The ship's crew cheered up at the thought of eating proper food every day from now on. As to Jay, he couldn’t even crack a smile.
Silent and lonely, he looked at the overturned grey shells where the unbelievable creatures tried to hide, so huge yet so helpless in front of little humans. They didn’t even scream. Jay ran away, unable to control the emotions bubbling in his chest as hot as lava.
One by one, the living preserves were loaded into the ship. Tortoises can stay alive for months keeping their meat always fresh, always good for cooking. What else could a sailor wish for? More rum, maybe…
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Since the day Jay saw the tortoises, he couldn’t sleep. He heard the sounds he couldn't understand and they frightened him.
"What's making those sounds in the hold?" he asked the older boys. Some shrugged, some said that the tortoises were walking down there. But how could they walk if they were laid on their backs and stacked up like bricks so they wouldn't be able to move? It took Jay a while to realize that no one else could hear the things that he did.
He heard voices, singing, wailing, pleading. They spoke no language, they had no words, just pure emotions that tore mercilessly at Jay's heart.
One night the boy gave in. He lit a torch and descended into the hold. It was pitch black there. The air in the hold stank of rot, filth, and despair. Huge shadows moved there, born from the weak, flickering light of the torch.
Jay found the source of the voices soon: a stack of dark shells where the tortoises hid. One of the creatures raised its head; a small, beady eye blinked sharply in the torchlight. The voices fell silent in Jay’s mind, all but one that spoke to him in his own tongue.
“Do you realize, child, what your kind is going to kill? It’s the memory of countless ages, countless lives. You come into this world with empty minds, you have to learn everything from scratch and die long before you’ve learned anything properly.” The tortoise turned her other eye to the little human. “Since the dawn of time, we’ve been learning things and passing our memories from one generation to another, each new generation expanding the knowledge, adding to it. Then your kind came to hunt us for food. You killed so many before they had a chance to pass their knowledge to their children!”
A faint murmur ran through the stack of the dark shells. Five or six other voices rose from it, lamenting, cursing…
“Our fate is sealed,” another voice, powerful and beautiful, silenced them all in an instant. The Eternity itself could have had such a voice if it could speak human. The second head rose among the shadows on its long neck, the biggest one, the oldest. The others emerged from their shells following it.
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“Galapago…” the boy whispered. He heard this word from a naturalist who worked as a physician on this ship and was the reason Jay used to look forward to reaching the wonderful island. The beautiful word suited the wise ancient creature like a name.
“You are not of our kind, little human,” said Galapago’s voice in Jay’s head. It sounded warm and undeservingly kind. “I can not bestow all the ages of my memory to you. But you are the only one who can hear us, so we will tell you what we can while we still have time. Maybe our knowledge will yet do some good to the Universe. Maybe it will help you understand your world a little bit… or to forgive it at least.”
Since that night, Jay came to the hold as often as he could and listened, listened, listened, his little body sprawled on the dirty floor, his spirit soaring sky high with the wonderful voices. Their numbers dwindled one by one. Jay learned to say his goodbyes in silence, to hide his feelings under a mask of indifference. Tears betrayed him sometimes, though, dripping from his eyelashes. He blamed the bright sun if someone asked him what was wrong.
“Don’t refuse to eat the meat,” the survivors told him, “for if you fall ill and die, everything will be lost.”
So Jay ate the meat of the tortoises and when he did he thought of the priest in his town’s little church who always said that wine was the blood of Christ and bread was his body. One by one his teachers died, killed either by thirst, hunger, illness, or people. In the end, only Galapago remained.
“I am proud of you, my pupil,” she said. “You accomplished what I thought was impossible for a human. The stories that live in your mind now would be enough to fill several tortoise lives, and we live much longer than your kind! Yet I must say that you gave us much more than we gave you, child. We had never known before what it was like to teach someone. Nobody ever taught us, we were given our memories as they were and added to them. This was our way. What we did to you was different. The greatest thing we ever did, the greatest joy we’ve ever known. You, humans, know no other way to pass the knowledge, but to us, it was all new. We treasured every moment. Thank you, child. Jay. If death is the price to pay for what I learned from you I will gladly pay it. I wish I could pass the memory about it to my children, but, alas, this wish can not come true. I’m going to die tomorrow. My final hour is near, I can feel it. Do not cry about me, do not refuse to eat my meat. Take one of my little scales as a keepsake… I’m not going to tell you stories today. Let’s just keep silent awhile together.”
When Jay arrived at the port his hair was grey, his blue eyes darkened with sorrow, an ancient sage’s eyes on a child’s face. People gazed at him with fear and wonder and stepped aside as he walked alone through the crowd, a little scale clutched in his hand.
He used to be a carefree boy as quick as a squirrel, he ate exotic fruit on a strange island and teased iguanas with a stick. Without the burden of knowledge, his spirit soared above the world back then. Now it walked with a heavy step, carrying a load of memories, as heavy and poisonous as lead.
Change your world, Jay. Or at least try to forgive it.
(May 15, 2005)
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Reincarnated Cat Becomes a Magical Beast
She is but a street cat who suddenly finds herself dying a sudden death. The next thing she knows is that she is in a new land where magic exists and she finds that she is no ordinary cat anymore. She has turned into a small kitten once more of silver colour, with green eyes that have a tint of red to them. She may sound like a normal kitten, but actually, she now has the power of magic, making her a Magical Beast in this world. She also finds that her intelligence has skyrocketed and her memories are as clear as day. In the future her name will spread as the partner to a grand Magician of the Wilderwolf family. But for now, follow her as she meets this Grand Magician at a young age and grow up together, forming an unbreakable bond along the way. Author's Note: This will be a long project, just fyi. It'll take several chapter just for our little main character to meet her future partner and there will be only a few big time skips to age the characters. I intend to have a lot of this story telling the story of how our duo grow up at a steady pace, so don't expect to see our main characters out saving the world any time soon. XD
8 249Gremlin's Greed
When the power of one's magic is directly linked to how strong they believe they are, fools are kings. Jasper, a foul mouthed gremlin with a penchant for eating rats, has a serious problem. His only friend, Ethan, is dying, and the only cure is an artifact with enough power to make a god. Joined by a young pirate woman who has never used magic before and a mysterious woman that seems to know their future before it happens, they set out to save Ethan's life. His chances of survival don't look good. With every day that goes by, Ethan grows weaker. They set off to the Ashen Lands, where even the self-proclaimed gods fear to tread. Luckily, Jasper isn't a god - he's a gremlin, and he's completely and utterly insane. He's going to save Ethan's life, no matter what it costs him. Minutes to Madness is a lighthearted fantasy novel speckled with comedy while retaining the serious undertone of a race against time. The entire novel can be read on my patreon or on Amazon. READ OTHER WORKS BY ACTUS: My Best Friend is an Eldritch Horror Morcster Chef
8 194The Pleasant Potato Inn Co.
Tobias is the oldest of the Boyd sextuplets. His siblings are, as follows, Penn, Penelope, Ignatius, Cassiopeia, and Odysseia. They're a wild bunch but Tobias can normally reign them in before they get into too much trouble. One day, Tobias helps an old man scare off some punks causing trouble around his store. As thanks, the old man gives him a medallion and warns him not to put it in strawberry lemonade or bad things will happen. Tobias heads home and, finding all his siblings there, tells them about the medallion and the ominous warning the old man gave him. Ignatius, being an idiot, snatches the medallion and plops it into his glass of strawberry lemonade before Tobias can stop him. A second later and Tobias sitting in some strange land with purple grass, a greenish sky, and a faded, blue sun. Unfortunately for him, a giant tortoise looking thing running right at him, sharp teeth bared and horns ready to gut him. It’s by sheer luck that a slime comes along and just absorbs the thing or...whatever it is that slimes do with their food. Tobias fears that he's going to face the same fate until the slime speaks. ”Oh? Is this a human? I should probably kill you...Before I do, let me ask you something. Do you like potatoes?”
8 150Narice Arkline and the Seven Element
Among us are guardians. They are known as Aqayans. -- 700 years ago there was a war. Good and evil. Dark and light. On the side of Darkness - cursed creatures, wizards, and most of humanity. On the side of light Aqayans and Elfa with the remnant of humanity. Humanity, Wizards, Cursed Creatures, Aqayans, Elfa. In the end - the darkness lost. The leader of the darkness - Ka'atra was sealed away. The council of seven decided that magic was too dangerous in the hands of humanity - and erased magic from existence. Aqayans watched humanity from afar- ensuring that they would never again stray. 700 years passed by... then one day... Ka'atra broke free. - A young boy- Narice- is the only one resistant to Ka'atra's dark magic, but with no magic of his own and- how will he be able to stop his enemy?
8 227Aliad [Dropped]
A man dies and gets resurrected as a prince in another world full of magic, elves, dwarves, winged humans, beastmen, and dragons. Come and read what happens when a man from the modern world meets the medieval ages filled with beings he could only see before in his imaginations.----------------This is my first fiction that I wrote so I hope I am doing well. It starts slow as I need to explain about the world. It is flagged as many as I could as I have a lot of ideas that I could make this story go towards. Edit: There is a rewrite of this story known as Aliad - Tale of Zed which can be found through this link: www.royalroadl.com/fiction/1820
8 172Star Wars IX- The Rise of Skywalker
"We've passed on all we know. A thousand generations live in you now, but this is your fight." A familiar voice, Luke's, whispers. Luke Skywalker stands net to R2-D2 the sky around him burns shades of orange, yellow and red and behind him a Jedi temple burns.Kylo feels his father's hand upon his face the watched as his father falls into the abyss."Your journey nears its end." A sinister voice now whispers, and a flash of blue light reveals a fleet of Imperial Star Destroyers filling the vastness of space as blue fire leaps between them.A powerful red laser of an unseen weapon obliterates the surface of a planet.Shrieks, whispers and screams and then the sound of a lightsaber igniting. A fiery red saber but behind that saber is Rey, her hand twitches and the saber becomes a double-pronged staff. A maniacal evil laugh cackles.Kylo woke with a start and sat upright on his bed.Written after the first trailer dropped and finished before the film was released. Contains references to previous films, novelisations and comics.I'm a Reylo shipper but there will be no major smut- one additional slightly adult chapter at the end of the book.#Bendemption#Reyloisendgame#1-starwarsfanfiction 25.12.19#1- Dyad 4.5.20 (May the 4th be with you)#1-Bendemption 4.4.20#17- Reylo 25.8.20#1-episode iv 30.11.20#2- reylofanficyion 6.1.22'This is legit my favourite reylo fan fiction OMG it's so in character and like literally perfect for episode 9 I'm dying this is amazing.''You definitely did justice to this story, so much warmth and hope at the end.''Why couldn't Rise of Skywalker be just THIS?? This story is miles better than what we got. This was wonderful and healed so many wounds inflicted by that movie. Thank you so much for sharing this. Your hard work is much appreciated!'Consider donating to Adam's charity Arts in the Armed Forces.https://www.gofundme.com/f/bensoloslegacy
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