Manuscript Information: [Complete] [100k] [YA/Fantasy/Historical] The Bards' Guild

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First Page:

Over one-thousand years ago, rosy-fingered dawn, her knuckles flecked with faint scars of pale white cloud, pulled up the curtain of morning. There, stretching out endlessly beneath the red light, was the City, which seemed to yawn and smack its lips with the first sounds of activity—the door creaking open to let the dog out, the chamber pot being emptied into the street, the sobbing baby being taken into a quiet corner by a wet nurse. But in time, the sounds of the first hints that day was coming faded away, and the City settled back into quiet and stillness as if to say, Five more minutes, Mom, five more minutes.

A certain boy was peaking around the corners of every puffed-up merchant’s tent and tavern stable outside the walls of the City. He was maybe thirteen years old—though that was a guess on his part--with tousled, dusty brown hair and eyes with the color and something of the sheen of fish scales. He was undersize for a boy of his age, though by no means sickly-looking, with a small, pointed nose. His mouth was always just a bit open and his eyes continually darted from object to object, so he always looked like he had forgotten why he had come to wherever he was, which quite often he really had.

His name was Janus—just the single name, as it was an epoch when unimportant people only needed the one. He had his doubts about that name, though. He was from a country called Hibernia, and a Latinate name didn’t seem to fit what he remembered of the place. His memory, though, was full of holes, the largest of which was when and how he had learned to read and write. People who knew of his literacy tended to assume that, being a Hibernian, some monk must have taught him, seeing as that country was thought to be practically overrun with monks. Janus had no idea what they meant though. He could clearly remember Hibernia—the leaves on the trees rustling in the wind, the dewdrop on the grass in the morning, and the sheep crap getting smeared on his shoes when he stepped in it—and he knew he had never met a single monk in all that country.