This is the continuing story of my adventures in the tale: Save me a Story. If you wish to read the introduction to understand what is happening, click this link:
https://www.hdhstory.net/Storyblog/?p=3431
Otherwise, I’ve tried to summarize what happened at the beginning of most of the sections of this story.
Visions and Small Victories
Stories and characters from the Kingdom of Selat had disappeared. They had been abducted by the evil sorceress Necroma to the isolated island of Lorn. The characters had their memories wiped. They did not know who they were or their lives before they found themselves on Lorn.
I was tasked by a mystic in my world to find all these characters and to return them and their stories to where they belonged in Selat. I was informed that the impact of my mission could affect my own world and that failure to succeed would have disastrous consequences on all worlds.
So here I stand outside a forest in Northern Selat, surrounded by friends and foes in the world of Story. These characters had not been abducted yet—their stories were now incomplete. They all, at my suggestion, agreed to work together to solve the mystery of the disappearing characters and put aside their differences, at least temporarily, until a solution was found.
Since I made the challenge to all groups and they seemed to accept it, I was the one that had to organize everything.
Did you ever try to resolve a problem between two forces that were radically opposite each other in every way? Well, up until now, neither had I.
My first thought was to put them in heterogeneous teams so that I could assign different tasks to each group. Each task would be like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. In the end, when all groups finished their tasks, we could put together the puzzle and have a plan. Well, that wasn’t going to work. There were just too many conflicts that could occur within each group to have any group actually accomplish anything.
I decided to let the opposing sides keep their own teams, and I would be the liaison between them. I kept the pied piper with me at all times. His power was known, and he had a good reputation with both sides, and surprisingly, so did I.
I met with each group and asked them if they had any information about what we were up against.
In the group I started out with, the caretaker of Selat had originally given me information (that’s who my friend Ronald said belonged to the voice that started me on this journey in Selat. Ronald then, not surprisingly, abandoned us) that I would find these stories and characters in the north. With Red Riding Hood’s granny, Jack, and Puss in Boots, who I had met along the way at the beginning of my quest, we found a letter at one of the meeting places. Fox left it. It talked about a witch casting a spell, with her words, that erased memories and also referred to an island in the north.
In the meeting with the group Ronald had been part of, they spoke of an inscription on a stone they passed while they were in the woods. That inscription stated that looking into someone’s eyes might cause you to lose all thought. It also mentioned an unnamed island where everyone had been sent to.
The most confusing part of both messages was that they ended with the same word, “forlorn,” which made no sense in the context of each message.
I felt good that we had made some headway in that both messages confirmed some of the same information. What we were looking for was in the north, where everyone was. They were on an island. And the person responsible was very powerful. You would lose your memory when she looked at you and/or spoke some words. I considered that a small victory to know that ahead of time.
It wasn’t until the next day, after a night’s sleep, that we discovered a new clue about one of the things in our messages that we couldn’t answer. It appeared to us all in a dream.
Everyone that night seemed to have a vision, more of an auditory one rather than a visual one. We all heard a voice saying, “Oops, my mistake. It should have been two words, not one.”
I didn’t have to identify who had that vision because everyone was discussing it simultaneously. But how did that fit in? I shared both messages that we had found with each group, so they all had the same information I had. Was there a connection?
I finally realized where I had heard that voice in the dream before. I had heard it when I first entered Selat. It was the voice of the Caretaker of Selat. And if it was the caretaker that constructed the clues in both messages, it would seem to reason that there was the same mistake in both of them. I called on everyone to look through the messages for similar words and find ones that might be made up of two words.
None of them made much sense “is land,” “be ware,” and “for lorn.”
An old Greek storyteller named Aesop came up to me with the answer. Though he spoke in a foreign tongue (ancient Greek?), I could understand every word he said.
“The answer is “for Lorn” with a capital L.” Lorn is an island in the north of Selat, once inhabited by many, but now deserted due to its poor living conditions and harsh climate. No one speaks of it anymore. It was abandoned well before my time, but I had knowledge of it.
“Can you lead us there?” I asked.
Aesop answered, “I believe I can.”
So with Aesop in the lead, followed by the piper and me, and then the rest of our story-seeking force, we slowly moved further to the north.
Another small victory for us.
Continued in…Wizards’ Wisdom
