Purplynd

Brian K. Woodson Sr.

Description

Purplynd is a love story wrapped in a mystery—an infant is left at a daycare on the edge of the capital city, and the struggle between utopian dreams and dystopian realities grow with the child, until one battle determines which is the most powerful. Here is how one reader describes it:
Purplynd is so much more than a bunch of great words strung together by a master writer. It is a magic carpet ride to the edges of the imagination, the universe, and one’s moral fabric. It is a vehicle for an adventure of the mind and spirit. It’s not just a great read; it’s a fast ride. It took me to places beyond my imagination, showed me red places in my soul, and challenged what I had settled on as my integrity—all while on a beautiful purple voyage. It is a magical, wonderful, inspiring political and theological journey.

Sujets

• Sci Fi
• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• Science fiction
• Fiction
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 08 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781984588388
• Langue: English

Extrait

PURPLYND
 
 
 
 
 
 
BRIAN K. WOODSON, SR.
 
Copyright © 2020 by Brian K. Woodson, Sr.
 
Library of Congress Control Number:       
2020913175
ISBN:       
Hardcover       
978-1-9845-8840-1

Softcover
978-1-9845-8839-5

eBook
978-1-9845-8838-8

 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
Rev. date: 09/14/2021
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
813635
Contents
Purplynd
Protasis
The Beasts of Laish
Danger in the Darkness
The Troubles Begin
The Baby Grows Up
Break from Biscuit
Escape to the Mountains
Love, Death, and Danger
Aciam Aj
Destiny
Appreciations
 
 
 
 
 
 
To Cassa ndry
and the drop of rain that changed your name.
Purplynd
I N ONE MURDEROUS move, the supreme leader would quell a rebellion in its infancy and settle a score with the one purl on the planet that he both hated and feared. It would be a decisive and powerful move that would quiet the noise about his ascension to the most powerful position in the empire. The dratsab controlled all the relevant places on the planet, and his unquestioned rule was unusually ruthless. He served the interests of the elite but answered to none. But a cancer that began just outside the capital had grown to infect significant cities in the realm. Clusters of unproductive purple, useless to the industrious and progressive parts of society, had become unmanageable. Enough of them had ceased showing up for work that the economy began to strain. Wages were beginning to rise and profits to fall. The ringleader of these circuses was one insignificant purl. If the dratsab wished to continue as the supreme ruler, he would have to eliminate this purl and thereby restore order to the realm. The test of his power would be how quickly he could cut off the head of the movement and pull out its heart. His predecessor, although handpicked and ruthless, had failed. He would not.
Protasis
P URPLE COME IN the same shapes and sizes as humans. They are not human at all, though it would be understandable if someone, perhaps a child, could not tell the difference, especially in the dark or in the earliest morning light. Purple have hands, feet, and features just as we do. They are as smart as we are. (Some would insist smarter.) Their eyes are more colorful and interesting than ours, and there are other differences, of which you will soon learn, but the strangest thing about purple is something that would be glaring to us but went unnoticed among them. If you or I met a purl, it would be the first thing we would see; and until we got used to seeing purple, I am sure we would stare impolitely. But it would be a very rare purl indeed who would notice and fewer still who would comment on the color of another purl’s skin. This is curious because adult purple come in one of two unmistakable colors, red or blue. It wasn’t always the case, but purple became unable or perhaps were just unwilling to perceive what was obvious. Perhaps this inability is what caused the problem. Perhaps it was something else. Still, this lack of perception on their part would be of no concern to us were it not for the entangled nature of our existence. You see, there is good reason to believe that Purplynd mirrors Earth, or perhaps it is the other way around. This is for you to de cide.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
T HE TROUBLES BEGAN as all such troubles do, in the middle of nowhere with no one watching. In this case, it was an insignificant suburb just outside the capital. There, unnoticed, was a wonderful daycare started by a very kind lady who loved to dance. She would always go out dancing with her friends and was quite good at it. She loved dancing so much that her friends took to calling her “Dancing Daisy.” Well, Dancing Daisy used to work with a friend who kept children. It was just to help her out until she got another job at first, but she was so good at making the children laugh, dance, and enjoy being at daycare that she never left. In fact, when that daycare closed, she started her own. It was called Dancing Daisy’s All-Day Daycare because they kept the babies for as long as their parents wished. The business cards for Dancing Daisy’s All-Day Daycare said on the bottom in unmistakable red ink, “Don’t worry if you’re late … we never lock the gate!” which meant, of course, that Dancing Daisy’s was no nine-to-five babysitter but a real-life, around-the-clock home away from home for little ones. Maybe that is why he was brought t here.
Now it had been a strange few weeks in that part of Purplynd. The days began to grow gray until every one of them had a dark and brooding sky. For the first few nights, the stars came out bright and shining; but after a while, even they were overtaken by the darkness. The dark air felt particularly cold and strange in certain spaces that seemed to move on their own. Or maybe it was that there were pockets of warmth moving around. It was very difficult to tell because anyone walking or riding outside would feel the pleasant warmth one moment and the desolate cold the next. No one knew what was happening or what the weather meant. The warmth was so wonderful when you were in it, but the chill, when it came, cooled to the bones and filled one with a sense of loneliness. It was not the regular loneliness one feels from time to time. This was a loneliness that made one feel abandoned without hope. It felt as if all life had left the planet, never to return, and you alone remained. In fact, as the weeks went by, purple began to feel more of the lonely cold than the wonderful warmth. Some said that the cold was taking over. The purple in town began to loathe going outside for fear of being overtaken by it. Purple could be minding their own business walking here or there, and the cold would come without warning and grab them. When it came to someone, it would make him or her feel so alone that most purple, male or female, would weep. For weeks, this strange weather was centered over the town of Biscuit. Purple did not think that coming home weeping was good for their health, so the purple of Biscuit started staying indoors as much as poss ible.
But at Dancing Daisy’s All-Day Daycare, you wouldn’t know that there was a cold pocket anywhere. Of course, Daisy stopped taking the children outside the second day that the strange weather began. That first day when she saw the children begin to cry as the wave of a cooler breeze passed them, she knew something strange was happening. And unlike some purple, she wasn’t one to dillydally around with things that were wrong or off or even the slightest bit strange in a bad way. So she brought her little charges inside and, for weeks, made the inside of Dancing Daisy’s All-Day Daycare so wonderful that the children never knew that something outside was different. Parents would come to pick up their happy children and would begin to linger because Daisy’s was so warm in that peaceful, happy way. Daisy would make sure that the parents would completely wrap up their children before they left the house.
As the weeks went on, parents would come in weeping because the short walk from the car to Daisy’s door was so terribly lonely and cold that, in the few seconds it took Daisy to let them in, they were almost overwhelmed with sadness and grief. In fact, the weeks of growing cold and darkness got so bad that, all over Biscuit, purple began to feel depressed, even though they stayed indoors and off the streets. Only purple with jobs that were vital forced themselves to go out into the bleak and bitter loneliness that had captured the town. So Daisy only had two toddlers that last week before he came. Their parents were school administrators and were the only ones who came to school that whole week. They picked up their children as soon as the last school bell rang and long before the now very dim suns set and the darkness took complete con trol.
On the third evening at seven o’clock, three hours after the two children had been picked up, there was a knock on the door. It was the strangest knock Daisy had ever heard. Somehow everything went still moments before the sound reached her ears. For many years after, whenever Daisy thought of that moment, she couldn’t remember if the stillness came before the knock or after it. But vivid in her memory was the second hand on the living room clock moving to seven o’clock with the loudest tick she had ever heard and, immediately after, the insistent loud knock on the door. As she remembered years later, she realized that the clock didn’t get loud all of a sudden; rather, for some reason, everything but the clock got really q uiet.
And when she opened the door, instead of a breath of bitter, lonely cold, there was a pocket of warmth that