Ted

The raid began in the cold blue light that preceded dawn. We jolted from dreams of noise and light, to then realize that the noise and light had pierced our night journeys and ripped us from our own reveries. This was the first stealing of us, from our dreams and then from our beds and then from our families and from our childhoods. Our captors appeared as shapes standing over us, etched in a void. We knew who they were, who they had to be. We knew the stories of how in their distant land they had mastered the darkest arts, and wielded great and terrifying powers. We, in our settlement called Cadmere, knew no such magic. That made us fear the Insaloreans, and to live at the edges of their shadowlands. We had for centuries. But now they had come for us. They had come for we who were the children. We never saw our parents. They never rose up from the dark to save us, to claw and to thrash. Later, we came to presume their deaths, killed before the invaders rounded us up and bound us with cord. But as the sun rose over the mountains and our last day of innocence slowly set with the moon over the distant mountains, we were still crying for them, calling for them, expecting them to burst through and save us. My father’s last words to me were, “Be strong in all you do.” Our captors hid their magic well. They relied only on their muscle and our fear. Or perhaps that was part of the illusion. They were large, these men, but something was wrong, too. They looked sick. Even though I’d never seen them, I could see—we all could see—that they were diminished versions of who they once had been. But they had sharp weapons, and heavy clubs. As they bound our wrists in cord, then bound us together with the cord into a long line, we knew better than to fight back, unless we had chosen to die. They spoke to each other but we did not know the language. We could only judge tone. I will maintain always that they sounded sad. An hour into daylight, the dew glistened in the meadows. The sky was stunningly blue and held not even one cloud. We were children who had hardly noticed such beauty until we saw now we might now lose it. We were growing up moment by moment, like sunflower stalks reaching toward the sun. It was too beautiful a day to lose everything. Some of us shrieked and tried to will the world to return to what it was. But we now knew that wasn’t how it worked. Our captors grunted and did their work, seeming unenthused and untriumphant. Stealing children may not have been what they had ever imagined themselves doing. They might have been unhappy with the mission. But that did not compel them to show us mercy or sympathy. They would not even look us in the eyes. But we realized that was our own magic power: to make them see what they were doing. Many of us cried. I cried very hard, and felt no shame. I was twelve and had been telling myself I was done with all that. My life to this point had been simple, as lives wrapped in love have the tendency to be. My family and our animals and the small house with its good warm fire. I wanted for nothing, but I had imagined great things for myself. I had dreamed of the world without ever ranging more than a few miles from our small village. But the world had forced itself in, and it was not the outcome I had imagined. The man binding my wrists coughed as he worked and said nothing. I wondered if he had children of his own. I wondered if they were anything like me. And I wondered if he loved his children as I knew my father had loved me.

All, Looking forward to learning more at the conference! 1. Story Statement: The children of a small and insular mountainous society are seized under force by raiders from the larger monarchy on the lowlands, taken as apparent chattel. The children soon learn they are to be replacements for their captors’ own, who have been wiped out by a deadly plague that devastated all, but somehow spared most of the adults from death while taking their children. Those captive children, then placed on farms and in workhouses, are desperate to learn what happened to their families and their homeland. Did the adults of their society survive the attack? They feel alternately bereft and forsaken. But they are carefully controlled by their captors, who try to convince them they were not kidnapped at all, but rather saved, and that their families had quite willingly surrendered them, and that their new masters are actually their new families. Years pass. Then three of the older children, now in their teens, decide to break free. They make their arduous way home in the face of many dangers, and with a growing sense of rage, to find out the truth about that night their lives changed so abruptly. 2. Antagonist statement: Understanding the nature of the perceived enemy is baffling to the children. Are the people who took them away slavers or saviors? Are the children captives or adoptees? The monarchy is overseen by a young queen, thrust to the throne when her father, the king, succumbed to the plague. She tells the children they have been spared from death, that their lives are now infinitely better, and that the future of this land is theirs. But she also refuses to the tell them the truth of how they came to be taken, and what has happened to their parents. The specter of an extermination hangs heavy, even as she assures them all is well. Indeed, the queen seems infinitely kind, yet equally inscrutable. What is the real plan? This is a land of ill-educated, impoverished, plague-damaged people, so unlike the more learned place from which they were wrenched. On the home front, our protagonist Cyprian is sent to live with an older couple on a remote farm. Slowly, Cyprian must learn their language and come to know their story. They grieve their dead son, but Cyprian rebels against any notion he should replace that sorrowfully lost boy. 3. Titles: The Children Plot Upon a Self-Born Hour A Return to Abandonment 4. Comparable works: The Odyssey – In many ways about a painful return home, only to find your home changed without you. The Painted Bird – Children cast on their own in strange lands, trying to find their way back to those who forsook them. 5. Core Wound and Primary Conflict The primary conflict will be the fight to find an answer, against those who intend to conceal it. The journey that must be taken to find that answer involves veal conflicts – pursuers trying to capture them, thieves determined to take what they have, and in the end clues that may not eve reveal the sought truth. But it also includes people believing they are truly trying to save the protagonists from themselves, a much-harder battle for the protagonists to wage. As with the story of any quest, the characters are tested, forced to evaluate their own beliefs, and required to change and grow with newfound knowledge. 6. Protagonist Inner Conflict There are three protagonists, among whom Cyprian is the storyteller and primary point of view. The others are Seda and Adamian. As they journey, they carry with them a variety of inner conflicts. Each embodies one more than the others. -Fear – Despite their hopes, they aren’t sure what they are hoping for. To find their families dead will both free them of the nagging sense they really were abandoned. But it will be the confirmation of their deepest personal loss, and the true beginnings of inevitable grief that must accompany that. -Anger – They know, innately, that to find their families alive and well will not be a joyous reunion, but rather will be the source of deep-felt pain, to know they truly were cast away. Seda and Adamian especially feel this, as their lives have been one of forced labor by a farmer who seems to hate them. With each step toward their goal, they become more aware of the hard truth that awaits them. -Uncertainty – They seek an answer knowing that the answer will not guide them in what comes after that. Only the unknown lies past their quest. -Regret – For Cyprian, who has been treated with love by the older couple who took him in, he feels the odd sense he has betrayed them, despite all. But he knows he has cut ties from a life which he will be unlikely to return to. He has given up their love, however modest, and that may have been too easily squandered. 7. The Setting The time in which this is set is amorphous by design. Could be any era that predated the Industrial Age, but probably the Middle Ages. This is a tale of three cities, for the most part. - One is up in the mountains, a place of clean air and lush fields where self-sustenance is easier; it is a place in which the ease of survival has allowed a place devoted to knowledge and wisdom. But with knowledge can come doubt, and overconfident aspirations. The remote location is its own natural defense; the difficulty in reaching it both protects and isolates it. They have grown as a people on their own schedule, far different than those who live below. - Second is the larger place in the lowlands, separated from the mountain ranges by arid bands of desert, fertile but still a harder place to live. Small farms make do and raise crops with great effort; few people can read and even fewer seek knowledge and enlightenment beyond the necessary. They are not evil, but in their labors and experience they are a harder people than those up in the mountains; there’s a very simple practicality to everything they do. Now, ravaged by the plague and having lost their children, they feel a need to do what’s necessary. They are ruled by a young queen trying to find her way and fill the void of her father’s undeniable influence over the people, and may be seeing her well-intended missteps. - Third is a peninsular city-state, a seagoing people for whom every day is a chance for a discovery upon the endless waters stretching out from their shores. They are happy and worldly in a way that comes not from books but from deep experience and wide travels that put them in contact with far-flung societies; they are risk-takers possibly inclined toward recklessness. They live in balmy days of sunshine that sometimes fools them into not noticing the inexorable passing of time. They are strong from the work but endlessly light in spirit.