Dreamers
Dreamers takes place on Ghiron, as does most of my writing. This is a beautiful world that is not meant to be based on any historic period of anyplace on Earth. It is a beautiful land of magic, with wilderness, domesticated land, cities, and everything between. Although in some countries one or more races rule supreme, in Querel, the country where this tale is set, all meld, usually peacefully, although mixes between them are frowned upon. These races consist of humans, dwarves, halflings, and eight races of elves: air elves, dark elves, dry elves, forest elves, mountain elves, plains elves, sea elves, and white elves. Mixes of different races of elves are, if anything, despised more than between more distant races, perhaps because they are the more common.
The scene set, on to the story itself. Tierelle is a young girl of a noble family who all her life has loved to sleep, because in her dreams she meets a boy little older than herself, a child of the streets of the big city. As long as she can remember she and Shar have been the closest friends, for all that they have never met in the waking world. Mocked by her friends in school for her beloved 'imaginary' friend, she hides his existence from everyone. But she still rushes to get to bed every evening and will stay asleep as long as she is allowed.
Shar is a street child, a pickpocket and thief, who struggles from day to day just to stay alive. He doesn't remember his parents, though he supposes they must have existed at some point, and refuses the protection of the guild of thieves. The only thing that keeps him from giving in to the despair that runs rampant on the streets is his dreams of Tierelle, and her matter of fact stories of her own life.
Together they live their nights in a world that changes around them to fit their desires. They share hopes and dreams, jokes and fears. With time they grow closer. That they might never meet in the waking world never crosses either mind, they know it's only a matter of time, and each longs for that day, the day when they canbe together. But in the waking world there are other people, and when it comes to people there is always trouble. Especially when it comes to a relationship between the daughter of a forest elven lord of ancient lines and a street thief who knows nothing of his parents except that one was a sea elf and the other a forest elf.
Meeting only causes more trouble.
The first five chapters of this were first available at Elfwood in the Wyvern's Library. There I got a lot of positive feedback on it, and a representative of Dancing Willow Publishing ran across it and got in touch with me. We came to some tentative agreements, and Dreamers, under some title to be divulged (and discovered) at a later date, should be hitting the electronic shelves in January of 2001.
If ye'd like to get a bit more of a feel for it, we have an excerpt. Also known as, for the moment, the first chapter of the story.