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The Boy Who Chased the Sun Prologue


Today I'm trying something different. Sometimes, I'm working on a story that has all my attention, and I don't want to shift gears and writing something else (like a blog on bananas--spoiler alert this is actually coming soon).

So instead, I'd like to enlist your help. Below is a prologue for a story I'm working on The Boy Who Chased the Sun. It's short, and I want to know if it draws you into the story. I'd also love any thoughts on anything from the below, including characters, the way things are presented, if the story sound interesting to read based on the prologue, etc., etc. Comment below with your Facebook account and let me know what you think.

I'm also including a brief synopsis so you can get some context for what the story is about, one I already have on this website. So, without further ado, here goes the experiment.

The Boy Who Chased the Sun Synopsis

An ancient legend, one forgotten by time, becomes the mission of a young traveller as he races around the world seeking the truth of a mythical child who chased the sun across the sky.

Prologue

The stars have always intrigued me.

I would stare at them for hours as a boy. Though my father didn’t share my fascination, he joined me in the fields one night to try and understand my curiosity. I asked him about the meaning of eternity, the idea that all things have neither a beginning nor an end. He laughed at the question, telling me that my time would be better spent worrying about my sheep.

Ironic that I would be cursed to experience it while he and the rest of our civilization crumbled away.

My recollections of him and it have become faded memories, made so by the sands of time. The days of my youth seem so distant that I sometimes become convinced that they never happened at all. To imagine those I left behind, the sound of their voices or the familiarity of their faces, is nearly impossible now.

The only evidence that they ever existed lies somewhere amidst the jungles beneath me. I could see the ruins once, even from all the way up here amongst the mountain peaks, but over the years, the trees from the east have swept over the valley, leaving nothing but a dense wilderness filled with serpents and great beasts.

Has the world forgotten what it hides, or does it simply not care? I contemplate this when I come across travelers passing through the mountains. They cannot see or hear me as I walk beside them and try to converse with them. I am like a haunting ghoul, the sort of lost soul that my mother would tell me about when I was a young boy.

Because I cannot get through to them, I listen to the stories they tell each other and try to absorb any knowledge I can about what the world has become. This is tedious and requires patience. The languages they speak are odd, though I have developed a talent for interpretation, one born from my former travels.

Perhaps they are the ghosts, I muse, and I am simply a lunatic. That would be no less wild than believing that I am a prisoner of time. The gods are certainly cruel beings. I once scoffed at the very idea of them when my mother would recount their tales, but I feel differently now that I have become a myth of my own making. Yet I wonder, does anyone speak of me as the legends of old? I doubt it. There is, after all, no one left to tell the sad story of the boy who chased the sun.

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