One could tell a story about the evolution of narration. Times comes and goes, and the stories that are told are the ones that people need to hear. If my creations are part of a story — and oftentimes they are– then it matters greatly what kind of story I wish to tell. The one I’m telling now needs a hero, but with a hero must come a villain. Sometimes, it is easy to forgive the monsters because the effects of their past are like a leash driving them insane. Other times, the best story to tell is not a morally ambiguous one, but rather one about a monster who is proud of his immoral tendencies. Sometimes, a monster just needs to be a monster.
I bring another page out, ready for a quick outline. Alaeia will be buffered and shined by my knowledge of the man she would so epically pit herself against. The man she will fight will be monstrous, seeking nothing but money and the pleasure that comes with robbing those who already had so little to begin with.
He needs a name. Alaeia’s was chosen because of the ease with which it could be spoken on dying lips. But a man driven by greed would need a different sort of name, harsh, but gilded with sweetness that belied his true nature. Geoffrey. I’d never met a good man who bore a name like Geoffrey.
His recipe would be a simple one. You see, there are two types of stories. When we are little, our parents pass down tales that teach us what it means to be good, kind, better. They are stories that give a child hope and a naive perception of the goodness of the world. After all, does the world not look better if a thing is either good or bad? It is only when we are older, when we realize the world is not built so simply, that we begin to question the morality of what inevitably came in between. We chase that invisible line that separates true good from true bad through stories that promise to shift our perceptions and give us empathy as a result of our journey. It is a hopeless endeavor.
This is a story I would give to a young girl in a small village who has felt nothing but the oppression of big men who want everything while the little people were content to just keep the bare minimum for survival and were denied even that. I wanted this to be a story built around a marionette who was brave and fierce like the young girl had so desperately wanted to be. It would be one of hope, of a single, unyielding line that separated good from bad. Geoffrey was evil because he wanted to be. And sometimes a simply-made marionette could play a big role in an epic story.
Arrogance. Greed. Pride. I scribbled the key ingredients on the paper. He’d need some men to protect him and act as strong-arms. They would be little, nothing. Mindless. I wouldn’t even need a recipe for them; just a few well-placed powders that would result in a single drive: follow Geoffrey’s orders. Take what is not yours. But for Geoffrey, the rest would come on their own.
I filled out his information — taking two-thirds of a page, as compared to Alaeia’s whole page, front and back — and nodded decisively at the result. When the stage was set and the marionettes came to life, I would take one more trip out of my cottage and return to the little girl in her small village. This would be my gift to her. Even if she couldn’t become Alaeia, at least she could still dream. That was perhaps the best gift I could give her.
The Mad Chronicler 