The saudad are the story-keepers of these lands. They walk the threads of fate and remember.
Seeing stories as threads of a larger weave keeps their telling in perspective. The teller cannot forget that each thread depends upon the others for its meaning. Each thread connects to countless others. Together, their weave tells the true story.
It is with such realizations, such wisdom, that we begin our tale and name the legends that came before. Their weave has shaped the story we have to tell. Just as this new story will forever change their weave.
This is the prologue to the serialized story, The Tree of Silver, by Beth Ball. Soon, you’ll be able to join in the story yourself in a special story fragment journey called The Last Dragon of Sanctuary!
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The Last Dragon of Sanctuary
Two hundred years ago, one of the last dragons of Sanctuary fell. The dragon, Sharr’kahn, attacked King Tavian’s forces as the king and his army rooted out the last of the usurpers to the throne. Sharr’kahn’s bones still reside behind the throne of Sanctuary.
The throne where Tavian still sits.
But this is not the king’s story.
One true beginning of our tale harkens back even further, eight hundred years before Sharr’kahn’s defeat, across the mighty rivers of our world, upon the banks of Bastion. There, one of the few survivors of the fall of Orison washed ashore, her tiny daughter in her arms.
They were not the last of their people, far from it. But the girl would grow to be the first Chosen of Cassandra, a title serving as the promise between the goddess of fate and the saudad. If they would add her stories to their own, the goddess said, they would be her people. And as her people, she would grant them the ability to walk the threads of fate.
The first chosen had a daughter, a priestess, and she in turn brought a daughter into the world. Their line continued, and nearly one thousand years after the fall of Orison, we meet a new heroine, Erela, as she walks the streets of Delmoir in the forest kingdom of Lis-Maen.
Few here remember her people’s first home though its loss hovers over the saudad still.
Of course there is a second true beginning of our story that came into being even before Orison’s fall. But for that legend, we must wait and watch as a new legend unfolds.
Thus begins the second tale of the Tree of Silver.
The adventure continues:
Available November 22, 2021 at 8am EDT.
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The Tree of Silver Prologue, “The Last Dragon of Sanctuary,” copyright 2021 Beth Ball. All rights reserved.
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