So, perhaps instead of explaining, the best thing to do is experience it. That's why I am happy to share this short excerpt from Richard Writhen. This is a sample from the Celestial Ways Saga Book 2, which will be released in 2018 with the title "The Angel of the Grave"...
Without further adieu, here is the excerpt. This portion is called "The Tiny Ones":
In the southwest corridor of the dry desert nation of Galgran lay the capitol city of Hruute. It was in a hovel there that two girls and a woman were sitting down to their meager supper, only afforded by that day’s earnings on the streets; porridge for dinner was par for the course in Sadine’s home; it wasn’t glamorous, but then very little about her early life was. Her mother was named Candace Cottrell, a heavy-set woman with strands of gray suffusing her long, faded brown hair; it stuck out at multiple angles from her head as she sat at one head of the large wooden dinner table. The two girls slouched on one side of it, their forearms unabashedly leaning on its lacquered surface as the three of them sat to eat their evening meal. But several minutes into the near-silent repast, as Sadine twirled her spoon in supper and Rebecca began to take a few hesitant bites, a hard knock sounded at the front door. Candace was nonplussed, but she made to quit her seat. “You two. Make yourselves scarce.”
“But mama! I’ve barely started eating …”
“No lip. Go to the basement, now.”
“But … for how long?”
“I said no lip, girl! No clue, go now.”
So Sadine and Rebecca exchanged earnest looks of consternation with each other, then they both looked back at Mama Cottrell only to encounter a steely eyed look that defied them to protest further. The two girls pushed back their chairs from the table, picked up their bowls and walked over to a floor-to-ceiling cupboard that was to the right of the small sink at the southern wall of the tiny apartment to place them in a dirty basin there. Then they headed downstairs to the basement level with their heads subtly hung, as there was nothing to do downstairs but sleep or stare out windows that were at ground level; not very interesting. Mama Cottrell opened the front door as they went, and conversed in low tones with a man who sounded young, but had a deep voice. They sounded as if they were negotiating or haggling, but the children missed the end of the conversation, reaching the bottom of the stairs and closing the decrepit wooden door there behind them.
The man left as quickly as he’d wandered in at the hour of four first clock the night before; having sobered up considerably over the space of the past several minutes, he barely staggered this time. The two girls waited in a hushed silence for several minutes, barely moving. Finally, Sadine stirred first, shuffling out from their makeshift cubby hole under the bed and walking barefoot over the scarred hardwood floor and up the stairwell to the ground floor and through the kitchen. Rebecca was still frozen in place, and could merely wait for her to come back. Finding the front door hanging open in a last act of ignorant carelessless on the man’s part, Sadine gave a great sigh, one that seemed far too large for her eight-year-old frame, and stuck her head outside to look up the street, then retracted it when she saw no sign of him. She pushed the door closed with a tiny hand that seemed almost to her as if it were someone else’s, then she went wearily back downstairs to the basement, having gotten little sleep the night before.
“She’s … gone.”
“What do you mean? She’s right here.”
Becky popped up, over the side of the bed. Her hair was mussed from brushing the underside of what they passed for a box spring and she blew it away from her face, only to be confronted with the glassy eyes of the corpse of Sadine’s mother.
“Oh gods … what happened to her?”
“That brute happened. That’s what happened. That pig killed her. “
Sadine put both hands to her forehead, as if squeezing it, then let out a small shriek, startling her friend; then she shot to her feet and stormed up the stairs and across the kitchen before throwing open the front door and heading down the street, beginning to sob. Rebecca followed her out; the morning was relatively peaceful in the pre-dawn of five first clock, all gray and misty. The sun hadn’t yet surmounted the horizon fully. After several minutes of inactivity, Rebecca faced Sadine and laid both hands upon her shoulders, trying futilely to make eye contact at first. But Sadine slowly began to calm down, and as she brushed her long brown hair out of her face, she found the other girl’s eyes, which were filled with a profound amount of sympathy. Rebecca slowly began to speak, asking the most obvious question that sprang to mind.
“What should we do now?”
Sadine cast her gaze downward again. “What can we do. We start begging. Or worse, be like her.”
Rebecca laid one small hand on her friend’s right shoulder. “She did love you, Sadie. I know she wasn’t perfect, but … she did. In her weird little way, of course.”
“Yeah … in her little way indeed.” Sadine shrugged her off and began walking barefoot down the pebbled walk that passed for the road that ran past her home. Rebecca darted back into the house, went down the stairs as quickly as she dared, then went for their shoes, nervously glancing at Candace’s body as she did so. With a pair in each hand, she retraced her steps in the earth and avoided the clumps of gravel so as not to cut her feet; Rebecca was about fifty feet further along the road than she had been, head hung and eyes staring, unseeing, at the roadway. Rebecca patted her left shoulder, stopping her and pointed with the only free finger of her own left hand at the pair of tiny shoes in her right hand, raising her eyebrows in silent entreat.
If it hadn’t been for Rebecca, her best friend through thick and thin, maybe Sadine would have fallen to the wayside of society much sooner and thus perished; but as it happened, they at least had each other to lean on in those first few, strange years of co-mingled youth and terror. The next several weeks passed by in a fugue of hunger and uncertainty. The two girls went from place to place, eventually sneaking out of one of the city’s gates and trying to make a hardscrabble living out in the countryside, among the farms and villages. They wound up, more often than not, hiding in empty stable stalls and under bridges that were large enough; thankfully spring was still upon the lands of the nation of Galgran and they at least were not accosted by the cold … which was more than could be said of the roving predators that they encountered on an infrequent basis. They always employed a buddy system, however; never splitting up, they became even more inseparable than before and afforded not a speck of trust to outsiders and strangers.
A woman approached her about thirty-five minutes later while she and Sadine were casing the village, walking parallel paths down two thoroughfares and checking in at every other alleyway. You want some food, no? Well … if you’ll take work, I have some chores that need minding.” Rebecca gave her an odd look, as the woman looked like the human equivalent of a stray cat. She was willowy as a reed, with hair that was a shade between tawny and light orange, long waved and unkempt; she wore a dress that was a dark forest green and black-beaded bracelets with matching, woven necklaces that had a strange symbol as their centerpiece. If she has food, she certainly has no need for it, thought Rebecca suspiciously. But that was not her response; “Chores?” said she, favoring the thin woman with one of her best, patented little smiles, designed to charm just about anyone that she happened to come across. “Sure, I guess we could help you, derr ...”
“Derr?” The woman returned her mock cheerfulness back at her sevenfold with a hearty grin. “How refreshingly … old fashioned. You can just call me Miss, like the other ladies in town. Miss Agneta Khaine. Have you been here long?”
“No … miss. Me and Becky have just been going around the outer villages … mostly looking for food, or maybe some small coin ...” The woman’s long face straightened out into a strange blankness of expression. “Yes … of course. Food. Well, the first step is to find your friend.”
Rebecca’s eyes narrowed, and she looked at the ground for a moment before meeting the woman’s gaze again. “Oh, she’s never far, miss. We keep close to each other ...”
The woman led them to the outskirts of the village. There, built into the side of a hill and partly underground, was a small hovel with two front windows and a wooden door.
“I learned most of what I know from my great-grandmother. I was even younger than you two are now, when she taught me.”
Rebecca looked at Agneta suspiciously. “That young?”
“Sure. I couldn’t control it very well, of course. That stuff comes with age. But I could perform the odd parlor trick, even then.”
“Huh.” Rebecca looked over at Sadine, who seemed to shrug imperceptibly. Like what, what can you do now?”
“You think that I have to show off for the likes of you? Two runaways?”
Sadine seemed irked by the woman’s dismissal. “That’s not what we are, miss. It didn’t quite happen that way … I mean, voluntary and all that.”
“Indeed not, indeed … Well, I can do stuff like this. And with that, the woman raised her right hand up to her own eye level and she murmured a word to it, which sounded like “coursu.” It instantaneously burst into flames, and she gazed at it, a mad gleam came into her eyes. The two girls were aghast; they had never seen anything like it. “Well, I can do stuff like … this.” And with that sentence and a corresponding grin, she began to whip the thin limb about. The two girls almost danced backwards, trying to avoid it at all costs, and she gave chase, thrusting it at each of them in turn, causing them to whip open the still-unlocked front door and run shrieking out into the night and seek refuge in the woods that surrounded the domecile. The weird woman stopped at the woods’ edge and the arm’s flame guttered out with another word uttered from her full lips. She began to call out to them, a small smirk playing upon the lower half of her face, but her well-lashed eyes remained dark and cold.
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Well, there you go. I hope you enjoyed what you read.
If you are interested, here are some links providing background info on, and interviews with, Richard Writhen.
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