Chapter 1

Dr. Jalek Holan receives an ominous on his desk and encounters something strange in the woods. What could it be?

When Dr. Jalek Holan had left his house that morning, he assumed that the day would go as most days before it had.

He had woken up, mane askew, a slight ache in his right side from sleeping some way his body didn't like. He had gotten ready for his job at the university as any good teacher would have done, the steam of his morning coffee swirling around his muzzle, a half read lesson plan from the previous night in his hands. Glasses had been shoved blearily against his face, shirt freshly starched and not quite feeling right against his body as he dressed. Gold scales parted with slate colored points and stripes, scattered with white freckles, Jalek not particularly tall and thinly built. His horns were starting to pale early as a few stray strands of gray touched his temples.

He had put his hat on his head and left his house with his briefcase and a hastily packed lunch. Jalek was never one to be quite as put together so shortly after waking as he was today, but he had done his best. Today was going to be busy, and he was going to be ready for it. He promised himself the previous night that he would finish grading papers and the solace of the empty observatory would help him do just that. The weight of performing well always on his mind as he started to set his sights for tenure. He had hopes within him to perhaps make the academic cut by his early forties. It had started creeping upon him faster than he would have liked as he shuffled towards his mid-thirties. He left before his wife and children were awake, careful to close the door behind him as quietly as he could.

There was still much to be done at the university, and the day had barely even begun. The slow crawling chill of an early autumn morning would burn away to a slightly-too-hot afternoon. The school year had just started. Students were still getting into the first few weeks of their classes, figuring out where they were and how fast it took them to cross the campus from their dorms to get there. The late flowers were still clinging strongly to life as Jalek crossed the manicured lawn around the observatory to the building's back door. It stood atop a small swell in the back side of campus that backed up against a fairly large swath of deciduous forest. The trees deepest and densest in the small ravine that the one side of the hill loped gradually down into. The birds were singing this morning, perching themselves on the lip of the dome. A few branches were starting to lose their green from the sweltering summer that had just broke only a short month before.

Jalek greeted a few students on his way. He couldn't tell if they were early risers or trying to get home having never gotten any sleep the prior night. Other than those few passing hellos, he kept his eyes down, more focused on getting to where he needed to go. His books were clutched to his chest with one arm, his briefcase weighed down beside him. The dragon's ears were pulled back, he didn't care for any type of cold even if it was going to be short lived once the sun had a chance to hit noon. I, the meantime, he looked forward to the small hearth in his office that he would sequester himself in front of while he graded his papers. The observatory not insulated at all, but it was a price he had always been willing to pay for his own pursuits of science. That reminded him that when he got home that evening, he needed to check his water heater, the shower had been too cold for his liking that morning.

The echo of his own foot steps around the telescope room was comforting.

When he got to his office, a snap of his fingers and a click of magic made the hearth spring into life. He waved a hand and the lights came on with a soft buzz, the newly replaced bulbs making him squint blearily for a moment. The curtains drawn from last night were opened to let even more light in. Jalek spent another cup or two of coffee collecting his thoughts.

The daytime classes were taken up by theory. He lectured on the minutia of planetary systems, things so far flung away that they were only in the sky by suggestion simply because the telescope said the object should be there. The chalk on his palms always left them lighter between the scales.

At night, the great observatory doors shuttered open, and the telescope fixed its gaze upon the washes of stars above them. Cevinia 3, The Great Shield, Olympus �™ West, Alabaster the Warrior, the constellations circled above him as he and his handful of students watched the great dance of space and time for a few hours that night. When the labs concluded, he sent his pupils on their way, leaving him alone to roll the ceiling plate closed again. The crank he churned with a great amount of effort and a lot of creaking and groaning was the original one that had been installed with the building and never changed despite the easier magics available in modern times. As he strained every muscle to get it to turn, the thought crossed his mind perhaps to ask the treasurer if they had the funds to upgrade it.

When he finished, Jalek let out a great exhale. It felt like the first breath he had taken all day.

He would check his mail next. After that he would close up the building, he would go home to his family, he would go to sleep, and then he would start the same routine over the next day, and the day after that. Routine he craved, but somehow, in all his brilliance, never quite accounted for anything to disrupt it. The mail would come to his box at the observatory, and he checked inside it every day at almost the exact same time. It always marked the end of the day for Jalek, one of the last tasks before he could go home. The box just inside the front door of the building was bronze in color, wrought iron with a lock that opened under his claw tips and flopped open revealing the contents inside it. As he absent-mindlessly shuffled through student's late work, useless notifications from the school, he felt the weight of the day behind his glasses. The tug of exhaustion pulled at the corner of his eyes. His office was warm, unlike the cold of the main observatory theatre, and that made the tiredness in his body worse.

A single envelope caught Jalek's eye, he held it up to try and read the type face on its front but only found that it was merely addressed to him with nothing more written upon it. It didn't look like a school envelope, perhaps it was from someone else in the faculty. It smelled strangely, almost like moss mixed with something mechanical, as he opened the unsealed lip and pulled a small paper free from inside it.

I may not be there to join you,
but They will soon be watching you.

Remain calm.
You have no choice.

Jalek squinted at the hand scrawled note, turning it over just in case he could glean something from the back. It was just as empty as he expected. He puzzled over it for more than he would like. No glint of recognition came to him about the handwriting. In the end some part of him supposed he could chalk it up to some sort of fraternity prank that he never would be let in on by some poor unfortunate rush candidate. Yet, even despite that conclusion, something didn't feel right about it. He couldn't help but sniff the paper, his nose yet again met with that strange smell that he couldn't quite place and that intrigued him. Perhaps this paper was kept somewhere with mold problems long before the writer ever sent it.

Behind him, suddenly, came a sound. It was faint, almost a murmur among the glow cast from the tiny hearth beside him. If he had been concentrating any harder on the strange letter in his claws, he might have missed it. A quick sizzle, muffled by sheer distance, a small flash of green light streaking down from the heavens in the window behind him. He caught it out of the corner of his eye. He spun around quickly, as though that might help him catch a better glimpse at what he had just seen, or rather, what he thought he had just seen. It was so fast he could have almost left it to some trick of the light in the lateness of the hour.

He stuffed the note into his pants pocket, grabbed his flash light, and went outside to see what he could find. The feeling of unease settling in the pit of his stomach. There wasn't any forecast for a meteor shower tonight. There was nothing of visible celestial significance to be had that he knew of, and yet a meteor of that luminosity and size might have a companion. Jalek stood out in the cold hoping that, perhaps, he could be lucky enough to see another.

The observatory was shielded from the light of the town below it by the stretch of forest around it, the trees dark and shaking softly in the late night breeze that kicked up out of the north. He foolishly had run outside without a coat and, even though he put his arms around himself as he watched the wash of stars above him, he found little solace in the chill of the evening. The sky was beautiful. Clear as smooth glass, dark, pin pricked with things so deadly and yet so far away that still somehow influenced everything around him. Some of the stars probably had died long ago and he was looking at corpses, some were probably still encouraging their progeny to keep a tightened orbit around them. Everything that ever was and everything that ever would be, all billions of light years above him.

When the sky seemed calm, still, unbroken and undisturbed, he couldn't help but frown in disappointment. The eons of dark and radiation, silent above him like the great watchers of Etenese myths, offered no impromptu star dust dance this evening.

As Jalek meant to return inside, the snap and crack of a twig behind him nearly made him jump out of his scales. He fumbled with the flashlight, clicking it to find it pitifully sputter to life. He slapped it against the palm of his hand as though that would make the slowly dying beam stronger. The fur at the back of his neck stood on end, the sudden grip, great and violent, of a dread he couldn't quite explain crawled down his spine. The failing light was the only thing between him and whatever was creeping in the line of bushes behind him, just out of sight. He hoped that it was merely a deer, or something like that and he was overacting, but the sudden rush of fear that hit him as though it were a physical thing begged his mind to think of things other than deer. The snapping branches felt too big for a deer. Wyvrns were extinct in this part of the world, and any small protodrake that skittered around in the underbrush this close to civilization was desperate or young and inexperienced at avoiding people. Great winged beasts like the Roc and the Great Owl only migrated through here when it was blisteringly cold too early up north.

He swung the light beam around, his breath caught in his throat. Another snap and he was frozen to the spot.

"Hello?" he called, hoping that if it was something big and scary that it would simply take off at the sound of his voice.

Instead, it felt as though that might have drawn it closer.

Things grew too quiet, the chirps of early insects slowly swallowed up as a stillness settled upon him. Jalek scanned the treeline with the flashlight. The quick glint of something snapped his attention back on his search.

What was he seeing? It was close, only about 20 feet away from him, it had to be at least 10 feet tall, or maybe it was smaller, perhaps even taller, the shadows that engulfed whatever it was not to be permeated by the pitiful flashlight. But he could see them. Eyes. Big. They were watching him, reflecting iridescent discs in the beam. He was seeing the depths of the cosmos in those eyes, something he should not be looking at and yet he was, caught in the gaze, predator and prey, the eternal dance for things to eat and be eaten, consumed by bigger and more violent star dust. His body felt cold. The eyes squinted at him. He heard a slowly growing deafening hiss from between those eyes.

And suddenly his head head hit his desk with a thump, a painful and rather ungraceful jarring for him to find himself back in his office chair. The faint lavender glow of a soon erupted morning filtering in through the windows behind him. His glasses weren't on his face, instead they were folded neatly away from him. He could see the flashlight back on the shelf it always lived in as though he had not moved it at all. A dream? Nothing but a dream? He sat there bewildered for longer than he would have liked to admit. Everything had felt so real, he couldn't recall something that vivid happening to him in his sleep in his adult life and something about it made the creep of discomfort come back to him.

He frantically reached into his pocket, searching for the note. Surely, that hadn't been a dream, and yet, he came up empty handed.

He swallowed hard and tried to banish the disorientation from his head, pressing his fingers into his eyes to try and wake himself up. His wife was probably going to be mad at him that he didn't come home last night and didn't even call her to tell her he wasn't going to be. He tersely grabbed his coat and briefcase and ran as fast as he could to his car. He paused over the mud, dry, on his shoes.

Jalek drove home as quickly as he could, sneaking quietly into the house. When he did his best to slip into his spot in their bed without waking his wife he utterly failed. He heard her stir in the darkness of the room, the brush of disturbed sheets against her blue skin must have been enough. She wasn't a particularly heavy sleeper like he was, and perhaps he should have known better than to try something like this. Since he was caught, he opted to just finish crawling into bed and nestled his head in the crook of her shoulders. Her hair was the deepest navy, so deep it was nearly black, slightly curled and sometimes caught the light just right over their dining table that he couldn't help but find himself distracted by her being there beside him. They had been married for only a few years. As he pulled her close to him, he couldn't tell if he was holding her out of love or if he was still shaken by the strange happenings the night before, or perhaps it was both.

"Did you fall asleep at the observatory again?" She whispered to him.

His ears perked. Despite the statement being factually true, he debated elaborating. Perhaps he would, but not now, it was too early on a Saturday morning. "Yes, Leenie, I'm sorry." He apologized.

"Don't be," she muttered to him, gently touching his face before resettling herself to go back to sleep.

He whispered a soft utterance of love to her, though he doubted she could hear him as she drifted back off almost instantly. He soon followed, but the tugging at the back of his mind haunted him, the eyes. All he could dream of was the eyes, something reached for him in the darkness of his mind but he couldn't tell what it was. It felt cold, and yet burned, something felt painful against his arm and perhaps if he was not locked into his sleep, he might have screamed but he remained unmoving. The early morning passing by the two of them utterly undisturbed.

Reviews

[JayG]

• When Dr. Jalek Holan had left his house that morning, he assumed that the day would go as most days before it had.

The basic premise of all fiction is that things go wrong, so you’re telling the reader nothing useful with this. And more to the point, this is NOT Jalek leaving the house. This is you, TELLING the reader he does, in a voice whose emotion the reader cannot know to place into the words.

I hate to hit you with this, but, here is where most acquiring editors or first-readers would turn away, because you’re transcribing yourself telling an audience a story, which cannot work for reasons that are invisible to the author.

The first, and insurmountable problem is that verbal storytelling is a performance art, where HOW you tell the story matters as much as what you say. Lacking scenery and actors the storyteller must replace both with their own performance. But...can the reader know where to change expressions to illustrate emotion? No. Can they know the body-language you would use and the visual punctuation of gesture? Again no. Nor can they know when to change intensity, cadence, and more. But those are vital to the performance, because virtually all the emotional content of verbal storytelling resides in the performance, not the words. The stoyteller's script, which is what you give the readers, lacks the all-important performance notes that would tell the reader HOW to perform that script—a necessity, given that you've appointed the reader to that role.

You’ll see no problems when you read and edit, because you begin reading already knowing where we are, who we are, and what’s going on. So you have context the reader lacks. For you, every line points to action, images, and more, all waiting in your mind. So, as you read, the narrator's voice — your voice— is alive with emotion, and the scene lives

But the reader? For them, every line points to action, images, and more, all waiting in *YOUR* mind.

The thing we all forget is that on the page we have the actors, the scenery, and more. And while we lack the images and live performances of film, we can do what film can’t: take the reader into the mind of our protagonist.

On the page we don’t tell the reader a story. We can’t. Instead, we pull the reader INTO the story and make them live it, as-the-protagonist. We calibrate the reader's perceptions and actions to those of the protagonist. That way, the reader will react as the protagonist is about to.

Why does it matter? Because when that character then mirrors the reader’s “advice” they become our avatar. We feel that we've made the decision, never realizing that the author, via the tricks of the profession, has "programmed" us to do that by placing us into the viewpoint of the protagonist. And by viewpoint, I don't mean first or third person point of view, as indicated by the personal pronouns used. I mean we make the reader view and react to events as the protagonist is about to. I mean giving the reader an emotional investment in the situation.

Think of the times when you had to put a book down and decompress because the action was so intense you had to stop and think over the situation and what to do about it.

A reader is never happier than when we make them say, “Oh hell...NOW what do we do? As E. L. Doctorow puts it: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” The problem is, how to do that, or even that we must, was never mentioned in school, because professions, like Commercial Fiction Writing, are acquired in addition to the general, employment-oriented, skills we’re given in school.

There’s no reason you can’t master those skills as easily as you did the nonfiction skills we are given. But, master them you must, because your reader has been choosing work that was created with them, since they learned to read. They don’t see the tools that were in use, because, as always, art conceals art. But readers EXPECT to see the result of using them, and will turn away from what doesn’t —which is the best argument I know of for digging into those skills.

My suggestion is to try a few chapters of a book on the basics, like Debra Dixon’s, GMC: Goal Motivation & Conflict. You can read or download it on an archive site like the one linked to below.

https://archive.org/details/goal.motivation.conflictdebradixon/page/n5/mode/2up

I think you’ll often find yourself saying, “But...that makes perfect sense. How did I not notice it, myself?” Of course, after the tenth time, you will tend to growl the words, but still, you''ll be amazed at how much more realistically the story will read when using those professional techniques.

So...I truly wish my news was better. But as I said, above, the problems are invisible to the author. And it’s not a matter of talent, the story, or how well you write. So, I thought you might want to know.

In a way though, the news is good. Most hopeful writers never learn of the problem, and give up, thinking there must be something they lack, but which successful writers are born with. But think of the successful authors who are accused of being “no talent hacks.” A person with great but untrained talent has no advantage over someone with no talent. My view is: “Talent? Were talent enough, there’d be no need of rehearsal...or editing...or Photoshop. And if desire were the key, we’d all be famous. Sweat, though. That’s the magic elixir.”

Wilson Mizner said, “If you steal from one author it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many it’s research.” So...research! 😆 Dig into the skills the pros take for granted. If you are meant to write the learning will be fun. And if not? You’ve learned something important. So, it’s win/win. Right?

One thing that might help: my own articles and YouTube videos are meant to provide a kind of overview of the differences between the nonfiction skills of school and those of fiction.

But whatever you do, hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
Articles: https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@jaygreenstein3334

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“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
~ Mark Twain

[AmonScreibt]

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