Ghostwriting Fantasy Fiction Sample

 

The following text is from Chapter One of a fantasy title for adults about the adventures of a young warrior.

Chapter One

Daybreak. It was a welcome sight for Horian, who’d walked many miles in darkness, and as the blush of dawn glowed all at once, thin streaks of light flowed over the cottages and rural land that lay before him, turning the thatched roofs of his boyhood village into bright morning gold. A moment later, dazzling rays of sunlight pierced the canopy of clouds overhead and light splashed everywhere, chasing away the last shadows of night. After many months away, it was good to be home.

Horian took the dirt track down from the mountains and through the village, enjoying the familiar twists and turns he’d run down so often as a boy. The long months of apprenticeship had matured him, put muscle bulk on his young body, but as the dirt path ended and his parent’s cottage appeared before him, he was suddenly that same young boy again, the one who had been sent away to train, carrying nothing more than a cloth sack and a blunt blade.

But something was wrong. As he approached the stone cottage, stepping off the well-worn path and through his mother’s bright green herb garden to reach the wood door, fondness and familiarity faded. Instead he sensed danger.

The cottage looked the same but it was gloomy somehow, as though the sun had sent some night darkness scurrying into the fissures of the hardwood floorboards and the crevices of the thatched roof. As Horian pushed the old latch and swung the door open, the air was cold and still, as though the cottage had been abandoned. This wasn’t the warm, happy home he had left. There was dust everywhere. The blue-clay vase on the windowsill was thick with it, as was the fire pit and the timber floor. Even the fine portrait of his mother hanging on the wall had a light gloss of dust over it, although this did little to dull the beauty of the young woman in the picture, with her fine pointed nose and high forehead so typical of Dycentian ladies.

Where was his mother? She was always up at dawn, lighting the fire, sweeping morning dew from the doorstep, boiling dried strips of meat with plums for breakfast, but the house was quiet and no one stirred. By the portrait his mother’s bedroom door was tightly closed, and Horian went to it, pushing it open slowly, a sense of dread creeping over him like a dull bruise.

The bedroom was warm and feverish, the air damp with human breath and sweat. In the bed lay a woman – the woman from the portrait – but she looked as different from that likeness as a horse’s hoof does from its liver. The hue of her skin, which was once the colour of the moon, was now translucent and whiter than bone, and her eyes, usually green as a summer meadow, were black, with rivulets of red veins running to the borders of the sockets. Those eyes, those beetle-black eyes, fixed on the figure in the doorway and moistened as they recognised the boy, now almost a man, and much-loved son.

‘Horian.’

Horian dropped his canvas sack and ran to her side.

‘Mother.’ He kneeled beside her and combed faded strands of hair from her damp forehead. They were thin and fragile under his deft fingers. ‘What happened… you look… what’s happened to you?’

Her frail, bony body lay beneath two goat skins, and he noticed the cloth sheet beneath her was grey as her skin. Tough straw strands poked through the frayed, sunken mattress cover.

‘Do you need water? Here, let me give you some.’ He took the leather flask from his waist and held it to her shrivelled lips, where she sipped at it gently, as though it were a little too hot. She tried to smile, so overwhelmed was she to see her son, but her smile died on her frail lips as the pain came again, seizing her body and pulling her in all directions.
Horian sat, useless and horrified, as his mother’s now skeletal frame contorted before him like a wet cloth wrung by giant hands. After a moment, she was still and looked into his eyes once more.

‘I’m dying, Horian,’ she said, taking his hand again. ‘I don’t have long. No, no… don’t say it. There’s nothing you can do. No one can save me.’ A single tear rolled down her sallow face as she drew a deep breath. ‘But I’m glad you’ve come. I didn’t want to go without seeing you.’

Horian grasped her hand. It felt like soft ice.

‘Tell me what’s happened,’ he pleaded, taking his wash cloth from a drawstring bag and dabbing her forehead. ‘I can bring medicine. Where’s father?’

‘Horian.’ She reached up and touched his young, firm cheek, painfully aware that not long ago hers were equally fleshy and full of life. ‘It’s too late for that now. There’s nothing you can do for me, or your father.’ Her eyes quivered then, but held his gaze – a gaze that said the words she couldn’t:

Your father is dead.