Samalin: Fantasy Land
The land is waiting...
I vaguely remember being in English class around my second or third year of highschool (2002? 14yrs old?), halfway through a free-writing assignment of some sort. Mine was something about a lone fox (of course) called Linger scavenging around for food in a dingy city enviroment; stubbornly sticking around after all the other foxes have left to search for their equivalent of greener pastures. I forgot that particular non-story soon afterwards but the fox character - coincidentally - lingered in my mind.
On the ferry ride home I started up a thing on some maths graph paper about a land awaiting the dawn; what would eventually become Samalin's prologue. As far as I can gather, this whole lasting obsession with dawn stems from the time our mother took me and my sister out to the coast one time as kids when it was still pitch black outside. We all sat on the cliffs watching the first beams of sunlight appear, and hearing the birds start up with the gathering light and warmth; like the land itself was waking up.
So I had the starts of a massively pretentious prologue. At some point the land in question became Samalin: Fantasy Land. I think I have a pretty good idea where I plucked the former name from (I believed at the time I had just come up with it, which is possible I guess, but you never know); given that I was rabidly into Tamora Pierce's books and one of her characters was a mage named Numair Salmalín... It's not exact but very close. Too close? I suppose I'll never know since my younger self was adamant that I'd made it up.
Funnily enough, another Samalin in the fantasy fiction genre appears in the sixth Wheel of Time book but that at least is happy coincidence - I didn't get into that series until years later.
Regarding Fantasy Land: that subtitle was pasted on in some sort of bizarre I'll show you when complaints arose that I was living there and needed to stop doing so. Nothing any other teen hasn't heard of course...
From there came the other characters and more random worldbuilding and then a 12 Steps of the Hero's Journey plot so thinly veiled that everything was showing. By the time I'd hit about the middle mark the story was so confused as to what it was and where it was going (and I belatedly discovered my 'oh so original' plot was so overused it was cliché) that it faltered and died completely.
Nevertheless, it was my first go at writing anything original on a larger scale than a few pages for school related work, and it stuck with me even when I'd had a few goes at other things and realised just how much my original word-baby blew chunks. In my mind I retconned the entire story and its plotholes - some of which showed up in Werrets and a few chapters of a Samalin rewrite, years later. Those ideas are still floating up in my brain somewhere even now. Not sure they'll ever see the light of day but given I started with a dawn perhaps it makes poetic sense for them to. So maybe one day.
For more indepth info about plot and characters feel free to read on!
The first draft spans about 7K words. I have it in a old word document (as most of the chapter files) with all the chapters compiled. It follows on from the quickly jotted down notes I'd made on the ferry all those years ago from the birdsong-dawn prologue and soon introduces our main characters. For this draft, they only made up five: a fox, a rabbit, a mouse, and two made up creatures called a memenoi and a fermion. Respectively, Firespark (previously Luinger), Fuurball, Squeek, Paoli and Liibber. At this point I was still madly capitalising every animal noun - even for Fox and Mouse... probably owing to the Narnia series. A lot of this story was definitely lifted from that series in hindsight, some of which I'll get to later.
The peace is disturbed as a Rabbit bounds across the grass from the forest, and dashes across the paddock. A lithe looking Fox chases it, its eyes bulging with excitement.
The five friends rejoin each other after a game of chase over the green meadows and their chat is soon interrupted by the nearby herd of horsekind galloping close by; a herd of regular equines you'd see on Earth, unicorns, wingers (at some point I remember calling them Pegasi but wanted to change this as Pegasus was a mythical character from an Earth story and even my young naive self realised it'd be awfully weird if Samalian horses with wings shared the name. So they became the uninspired wingers. Their leader, Bakrhen (previously Blade) was thusly a wingercorn (previously pegacorn); with both a horn and wings. Sort of pre-FiM My Little Pony meets the opening of Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.
What they saw was a stunning sight, and it didn’t happen very often. A hundred Horses, many being Unicorns or Wingers galloped at neck-breaking speed across the many meadows and paddocks, not stopping to rest.
Afterwards, and unexpectedly, the world is barraged by a massive cataclysm: earthquake, what sounds like a lightning strike and explosions. The ground splits and most animals everywhere freak out and revert to mere instinct. Fuurball follows suit and dashes away whilst the others lie prone and frozen. After the painful noises end Firespark regains consciousness just in time for Paoli the resident psychic to prophesise about evil overtaking the land and come out of her own trance.
"Now the time of darkness has come, now the world will be cursed. As others were taken, soon they did fall, our land with Evil shall be immersed." Paoli spoke solemnly and with a deep, powerful voice.
Firespark jumped and shot a look at Paoli who had now come out of her trance and was looking around.
Bakrhen appears, distraught, shows Firespark a vision of an evil entity and entreats them to journey and defeat it, because a lightning bolt struck his daughter and killed her - thus marking the first ever violent death in Samalin. Firespark goes off to find Fuurball, and finds she's hiding in a burrow hiding from him as he's a predator animal. He calls her name in confusion and she 'comes to'. Once reunited Bakrhen (the worst excuse for a mentor ever) grants them the power of friendship indicated by a sign of unity, their forehead marks; allows Firespark to speak the lingua franca; and sends them on their way.
"And I suppose you know where we’re all going?" Fuurball demanded, puffing a little.
"No," Firespark replied simply.
They soon come across a chukka (batwinged rodent things) scout called Eititee. He leads them to their underground colony and there meet Skifla, the colony's leader. Skifla shows them they've already taken one of the evil lizardlike imps (that have been swarming the lands ever since the natural disasters struck all at once) prisoner. Firespark is able to communicate with it thanks to Bakrhen's gift. In revulsion at its explanation that they are there to kill Samalin's inhabitants and take over as they have so many other world's before, they resolve to kill the imp first but are stopped by Paoli. Instead, Squeek asks to fight it fair and square. They remove the magic barrier and through some streak of luck Squeek bites through his spinal cord after their original tussle. (Y'know, for kids!)
He continued biting and champing his way into the spine’s nerve system until a very stunned Skifla picked him up gingerly by the nape and deposited him next to Fuurball.
This first draft ended soon afterwards as they were leaving the chukka colony and heading onwards.
The second draft I have saved changes some things around a fair bit. There was always editing of some sort going on during writing these early drafts, which I wasn't particularly keeping track of. The Draft 2 version I do have saved is about the same length plotwise but owing to the Chosen One Character Reshuffle it bumps the word count to about 10k. I ditched Liibber. Bakhren's son (not daughter) dies in this version, leaving Asha his (previously unnamed) daughter to join the Chosen Ones. Not sure entirely about where Xunnacha came from besides the fact that dragons are cool. And as for Swift, our final add-on character to tally it up to lucky number seven... well; the more wings, the better?
Eventually, I separated the chapters into individual files from that second draft document and edited/wrote further:
Prologue: Dawn breaks on a picture perfect Samalin; owing to Datora the DayBird singing the new day slowly into existence. (She must have taken lessons from Aslan in her youth, or something.) Samalin has three moons, apparently; and if you weren't already convinced how awesome this world was, well younger me was intent on telling you again the paragraph next.
It's where all our dreams combine, a blessed place.
Chapter One: The Dawn: Introducing Firespark and Fuurball. Nearby, Bakrhen leads his herd with his son and daughter close by. Up North, Paoli and her friends and family live near to the mountains. Paoli can feel something's wrong, to the confusion of her mother. In the mountains, Xunnacha tends to her volcano as she waits for it to erupt. Squeek and his family is introduced next; only now he's Squick the feila (a made up anthro rodent species with big ears). Swift the peregrine falcon is also playing chasing games through the air with his father.
A Memenoi child sat with her mother. She played her normally favourite game with stones, but today, tossed them almost listlessly.
Chapter Two: The After-Dawn: Fire and Fuur watch the horse herd gallop past. Bakrhen chats to his children during a break. Paoli is deep in a trance which soon worsens and comes to a head when the world tears apart and the Evil arrives. Xunnacha's volcano starts to erupt but she's distracted by the fleeing crowds of creatures below and the volcano stills. She takes off in a rage to search for the cause of all the commotion. Squick's been separated from his family in the chaos. Swift's family makes for a forest. Fuurball succumbs to fear and instinct and follows the frantic tides of animals. Danta gets hit by a red ('cause it's evil, ok?) lightning bolt; Asha flees the herd in grief. And Paoli's still in that trance.
All of Samalin was silent, they had never seen or even encountered anything like this in their lives, and neither had their grandparents. All had been brought up in a carefree land where no danger existed. A stunned silence prevailed.
Lights flashed, the whole world was totally white, then deepest black. Then from the horizon smaller lights flashed. From the large cracks in the earth came more rumbling noises.
Running, running, running... Firespark took another look at the destruction and passed out...
It seemed The End was near.
Chapter Three: The Morn: The chaos over as quickly as it had begun, Firespark regains consciousness. Asha is still trying to escape her father. Paoli intones the prophecy and teleports away from her family to help fix things. Xunnacha spots three other Chosen Ones and sets her sights towards them. Squick is lost. Swift isn't. Asha bumps into Firespark with Bakrhen in tow and Firespark gets to see the vision.
The scaly form flew, over the clouds. She enjoyed flying, and didn't take it for granted how exhilarating it was to bank quickly, go into a steep dive and zoom to the ground, only spreading her wings when about to hit the ground.
Chapter Four: The Noon: Asha urges Firespark to take on the quest to defeat the evil. Fire finds Fuur and off the group go again with Bakrhen's gifts in tow. Asha senses magic and Paoli teleports to them after searching their minds to make sure they had good intentions. Xunnacha lands soon after.
Xunnacha didn't notice the humour on Fuurball's part. Instead, she looked over her shoulder. "We should go. There is a Forest close by, so we can seek out these others you say are important."
Chapter Five: The After-Noon: Paoli reaches into a void and finds Squick on the other side. She's somehow able to pull his physical body from one place to another by keeping ahold of his mind. Once all inside the forest (bar Xunnacha), Swift snatches Squick from Firespark's head yet they manage to convince him and his parents that Swift join them relatively quickly before dusk, when they come across Eititee.
As Eititee led the group across the middle of the clan, a sudden hush fell across it. Even the babies felt this and stood in the water, staring at the strange Samalians. Suspicious Chukka faces dominated in the crowd, trying to stare Firespark down. He blinked and looked ahead at Eititee's back.
Chapter Six: The Sun-Down: They meet Skifla and the lizard-imp, which Firespark can understand thanks to Bakrhen's gift. The rest of this scene pretty much plays the same as the first draft.
Skifla motioned to the far left. A hastily made ball of Magic shield surrounded a hissing, glaring lizard-imp. As they all noticed, it spat more eagerly and danced a shuffling walk round its prison.
Chapter Six Point Five: Interlude One: Nimpha, the unicorn betrothed to Danta, carefully follows the group until they reach the chukka colony but she finds herself surrounded by imps; which taunt and swarm her. She bolts when one lands on her back and Eititee comes to the rescue.
He soon had Nimpha in his sight, and dropped neatly onto the bumpy hindquarters. The imp, looking behind him, snarled and dug his claws in a little further. This made Nimpha screech and run ever faster.
Chapter Seven: The Night: The group sleeps under Xunnacha's wings. The next morning Xunnacha finds a vista of red fog covering the way ahead. They detour once Firespark finds out first hand that it's low-lying dangerous gas, and come across a labyrinth of hedges and vines. They journey through, Xunnacha has to free Swift from the entangling vines and the whole group are soon after beset by its caretaker; a snaketongued shapechanger called Riesh.
Swift zoomed up and passed the barrier, then snatched the Bird in his claws and came back down. "Take your true form, Shapechanger. Your mischief is over." he sneered.
Chapter Eight: Paoli: In Paoli's perspective for the most part. Riesh the Shapechanger and the Chosen Ones trade words about the evil presence then the presence takes over Riesh's body. Xunnacha stamps on him and the connection severs. The group mourn for a moment and move on; only to be attacked by a pair of wolves once out of the labyrinth. Paoli brings them back to sapience and they invite the group back to their den.
Paoli squinted as the voice made her head hurt, and could only watch, as Squick nodded, as the thing that was not Riesh staggered towards him and reached out a hand warping as he spoke, growing claws and another clawed finger. The Evil that had grown inside Riesh was finding it hard to keep himself together, Paoli saw, and shuddered at the sight of the flesh drooping. But she couldn't move, the voice paralysed her whole body. It all had happened so quickly!
Chapter Nine: Firespark: On their way back Xunnacha takes Fuurball and Paoli on her back. Soon afterwards Fuurball falls off. Firespark says a magical prayer to the divine fire that's part of his namesake and saves her, then continues with a dragon guilt-trip. At the wolf den, the scout picks a fight with Firespark and they tussle. Later they meet a few other members of the pack whilst awaiting a meeting with Alpha, the alpha.
He couldn’t see much, but knew they were nearing the edge. Epsilon gave a short howl of dismay as they flipped into midair. Firespark saw the other startled Wolves look up at the two enemies in the air then they fell onto the stony decline and rolled down it, still intertwined as Epsilon bit Firespark’s paw and him Epsilon’s flank.
Chapter Ten: Swift: One of the wolf mothers is halfway through labour. She explains a little more to Swift about where the evil presence and all its minions came from after the birth and finally Alpha turns up to continue the explanation inside his own den. They learn more of Ghiazhan, the evil presence's home world, learn it's possible for a Samalian to recover their sapience yet still remain traitor, and Alpha lets them know a group of the very same type of altered fermion are out for the Chosen One's heads. Soon after, they appear at the entrance and Alpha turns out to be a turncloak himself. Swift calls Alpha's bluff and the group flees, but not before one fermion stabs Fuurball in the side and she collapses.
"They have been following you since the attack on Rittagiz at the Chukka clan, numbered ten. They are a large but slow group of Altered Fermion. Altered is our word for the second stage of Change; the one where they gain sentience but use it wrongly, Ghiazhanian-like."
"Rittagiz nearly Rim'ed me," Squick stated, his eyes beady. "we didn’t attack him."
Chapter Eleven: Squick: The Chosen Ones flee the pursuing wolves. Alpha enters the red mist to cut them off and Xunnacha flames it. The gas combusts and Alpha burns. They go to continue running but can't find Fuurball. The remaining group argue and grieve, but decide to stay together. Firespark figures that if they can't locate Fuur with everything they have at their disposal they should seek out the elemental foxes to help. Thankfully they're in quick walking distance after Xunnacha spots a herd of dangerous-looking gantaur. At the home of the foxes, Earthbound attacks Firespark. The others jump in but Earthbound speaks another language. Firespark difuses the situation.
They all stared at the blackened field horrified. Alpha had been burnt alive, indeed he was still moving. His fur had fallen off in many places and he leered through sunken skin, moving his mouth soundlessly before collapsing white-eyed on the smoking grass.
Chapter Twelve: Asha: Foxes with powers, the writer shipping Firespark and Waterdew, and Asha navel-gazing. More foxes with powers when the elementals summon Etherit the fox ether spirit for guidance. She's halfway through addressing each in turn. This chapter remains unfinished.
Seated with all senses primed with excitement Firespark glanced at Zephrygale. The latter blinked, then concentrated, lowering his head. Slowly the breeze quickened, flowing around the circle and uniting the elements.
Chapter Thirteen: Xunnacha: Remains unwritten owing to a chapter reshuffle
Chapter Thirteen Point Five: Interlude Two: Alpha is keeping himself alive with magic, and heals himself with the sacrificial killing of a rabbit (which he believes is Fuurball) his pack bring him. The pack get attacked by a rebel group of 'invisible ones' which have begun wielding weapons like the altered yet still fight for Samalin. The wolves are outnumbered and outplayed. Alpha lasts the longest with his mate but they, too, fall. The only ones left are Mu and her pups hiding inside the den.
Alpha raised a claw, the skin around it blistered, and disembowelled the Rabbit, chanting as he did so. Magic congregated towards the Altered Wolf as the sacrifice squealed, still alive. The chanting crescendoed as the Rabbit sunk further into death, and Alpha was made whole again.
Chapter Fourteen: Fuurball: A group of mammals calling themselves the Ghia-hunters find Fuurball and carry her away from danger; spouting nonsense about rifts and a place called Erth as they go. Fuurball tries to heal her slashed leg (yes, it was her side, not her leg, in Chapter 10) but she blacks out with the searing pain.
The Samalian halted abruptly, and brandished her stick with the metal on top. “Ever seen one of these, Rabbit? It is the Magic that works against the Evil’s kind. Don’t ever, ever say we have given it up, for we have not.”