Once Upon Another World
Book One of the Salak'patan Series
By Shiva Winters
Edited by Melody Hewson
Copyright 2012 Shiva Winters
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Chapter One: The Tangled Beginning
Journal Entry: 07/03/20XX
I've never written a journal. I've never really felt the need, not in the 25 years of life that has precede this one. The truth of my day-to-day existence is probably so very boring to most, that were anyone to ever read a conscientiously kept journal by me, it would suck away that person's essence and leave them to go on an undead rampage for brains. Still some part of me has grown convinced that such a record of my existence has become necessary, and for whatever reason my consciousness has come to agree. However, since almost nothing has ever happened to me and I fully expect that nothing will ever happen, however first there are some necessary legalities to get out of the way.
WARNING: Imbibing the contents of the following journal goes against the Surgeon General's advice. Should you choose to continue be warned that the boredom that results will cause severe allergic reactions in most people. Common symptoms include patchy baldness, rashes on the buttocks, Napoleonic complex, bloating, the desire to play the accordion, tax audits, traffic tickets, the need to have more than 10 cats, and boredom that often leads to coma and eventually death.
My name is Raven Sinclair and I was born in a small town in Indiana USA, located on the tiny blue and green planet called Earth. Though my origins are ever so humble, at this time I am living in New York City. And in all truth I have been regretting the decision to move here almost since the moment I first committed myself to it. While the city itself is amazing and perhaps even one of the wonders of the modern world, unlike most others I did not come here to 'make it big' nor simply because I was lured in by the bright lights. This city is like no other and as the saying goes, 'If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.'. Well there is something left unsaid in those well known words, if you don't 'make it here', this city will devour your soul and leave you an empty husk. And I am starting to think I have begun to feel just a little of that emptiness within myself. It is not that I am failing, quite the opposite in fact. I think my lackluster feelings for this place have almost everything to do with the fact that my motivations for coming here were not entirely pure. In truth were I to give voice to those motivations I would fail utterly at the task. I don't honestly know why I choose to make that decision, even in those first moments after I made them, other than the fact that deep down some persistent whispering voice was telling me that if I came here something would happen, something I've always wanted. For all that I long for the day when I can quietly slink back across the countryside and go 'home', that unspoken and unclear belief has still managed to keep me from leaving for over a year now. I can't help but wonder if that same voice that drove me to leave behind everything I have ever known in order to come here, is the same voice that now prompts me to write a journal that most likely will never be of any significance to anyone.
As I think back through the years, I can not help but feel that driving force has always been a constant in my life since I was a very small child. In truth, my life has been plagued by visions… perhaps 'visions' is too strong of a word. They are more like lucid dreams, but ones that would come both during my waking and sleeping hours, and lacked that disconnected sense of reality that dreams typically contain. Throughout my life I have been visited by a young girl my age who would appear out of thin air. And while this could simply be dismissed as the products of an over active imagination, these visitations have never been quite so unreal as to make that a possibility in my mind. While my sanity might still be in doubt, the facts of the matter have not yet disproved my mental stability, much less that these visitations are not entirely and wholly real either. At times she would only appear for mere seconds, other times she would stay long enough to talk with me in a voice not quite heard with one's ears. But as the years progressed she appeared more often and would remain at my side throughout entire days. As strange as it might sound to someone who is fully immersed in what most would consider reality, she has been my best friend for the whole of my life. As a child I told her everything, my deepest, darkest secrets, things no other person has ever known, or will ever know.
It could perhaps go without necessarily being said that I was never a 'normal' child growing up, and as a relatively well adjusted adult I do believe that even without my 'visions', that I would not have been considered to be like the other children. Even discounting my unusual visitations, as I search into those far off childhood memories, it seems to me that I've always been one of those people was on the outside looking in. It perhaps does not be need stated, but I was never one of the popular kids, and despite my sizable stature, I had no desire to play sports, no desire to go to parties, and really no motivation to undertake any of the things children of any age are supposed to do. I always stood at odds with the world around me, as if some part of my soul was always telling me that I did not belong there. Tis a strange thing to realize that you can look at the world outside your window and know deep down that this is not the world you were supposed to have known. But strange feelings aside, I suppose that disconnected state of being aided me in the career into which I have met with success, and nothing else need to be said on the matter at this time.
Where my family was concerned, or not, my father was neglectful and inattentive for the few years that he was swirling about in my earliest of memories. By the time I was four years old he was gone, having divorced my mother and run off with some bar skank who may or may not have been a hooker when they first met. His absence from my formative years is perhaps of no great loss. As for my mother, well.. it is has been my observation that only a single mother can be as giving and self-sacrificing as she was. She was dedicated to the health and well being of myself and my younger brother. At times she worked three jobs to insure that we had food and shelter. And even though she often had to work late hours, no matter how tired she might be, she always had time for the two of us. The love I feel for her was in every way earned and deserved, and in every sense she did an amazing job of raising the two of us. While she could only do so much to meet the selfish demands most any child would make, I can honestly say having heard many a horror story from others who shared my generation, that I had a peaceful happy childhood. So were someone to go digging back into history long since past, I can not imagine they would not find much evidence as to the reasons why, or the causes behind, my little touch of madness, since the facts of my reality are not all that different from many of my generation.
My involvement with Sione, my 'imaginary' friend, continued throughout my childhood, awkward adolescence, and even through the crucible that is modern high school, broken only by her occasional absences. As we both grew older her visits grew more infrequent, perhaps only rightly so considering we both had a great deal less free time on our hands. This perhaps gave me more reasons to doubt the nature of her reality, but despite the doubts that did and continue to infringe on the beliefs I have held close for so long, it has not yet changed them. While I might one day come to believe that she was merely a figment or a fairy tale created by a fevered brain, which would be a very sad day for my current self, my belief still remains firm that she is every bit as real as I am.
I graduated high school with a joy unparalleled in all of human history, only too eager to leave behind the days trapped in the same halls and rooms with my so called peers. Rather than attending college like so many others did, I spent the next couple of years working meaningless jobs and trying to figure that age old qu
estion of what I wanted to do with my life. Having never been in the possession of much of a social life and having spent many a night outcast and alone, there had always been time and motivation to fill those empty hours with something to cut through the silence. For me, that outlet was reading, and it was a hobby I started as early as the fourth grade and continued throughout all the years of my youth. I suppose if one reads enough books, the desire to write one of their own will eventually strike them, at least this was the case for me. At some vague point in that first year after high school, it became a new hobby that I took up one evening when I had nothing to read and the TV had been on the fritz. As it would turn out, spending so many years reading fiction novels coupled with a 'unique' sense of reality gave me all the background I needed to become a writer myself. Shockingly enough, by the time that I was twenty-one I had my first best-selling book.
So it was that when the decision to move to New York prickled at the back of my mind, I had more than enough money as well as a few legitimate reasons to venture across the states, taking my chances in the big bad city by the bay. Especially since my agent, most of the major publishing houses, and the world at large all used this city as their doorstep. Still, there are far too many days when this city and the people that fill it, make me wish that I had stayed in my dark little backwoods of a home town where life was simpler…
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