Chapter 1: Passion

TIME IS A FLAME that burns the past as we flee before it to live our lives. We build the flames higher, feeding them with our passions. Sometimes those passions threaten to consume us, and we run faster before the flames that pursue us.

Once in the flames of time, there was a storyteller caught in the passions of his love. He had once been his village’s dragonslayer, but the dragon he met was the gypsy Madame Selah Welinska. From their first meeting, Steven George had known that he had met his dragon and she had conquered him. He made his way on the long road with his love, telling and trading stories, sometimes mending and repairing the projects that villagers brought to him. He was not as fine a tinker as the famous Armand Hamar, but it seemed his fires were always hottest and the pots he mended stayed mended.

But as time passed, the lovers’ passion increased, so that it threatened to consume them. Not only did they love passionately, but they fought passionately as well. When Steven looked into Selah’s eyes, it was hard not to see the green vertical slits of the dragon he had once mastered. At times, he felt so hot that he feared he would burst into flames. Lately, it seemed every decision in their unconstrained lives was cause for conflict.

It was this, in fact, that brought the couple to their current campsite. The patient little donkey, Xandros, who willingly pulled their meager possessions in a cart, had come to a fork in the road and had stopped, waiting for the couple to tell him which way to turn. He would have followed directions from either, but neither could agree on the direction to take. Steven stood on the left path, while Selah stood on the right path, shouting at each other about the merits of which way their journey should take them.

“It is too cold to go north into the mountains,” Selah stated matter-of-factly, in a voice that could be heard a mile down either path.

“The path into the forest provides shelter, food, and firewood,” Steven responded in a voice that made the donkey cringe.

Selah scuffed in the dirt with her bare heel and proudly pointed at the ground. “The yellow brick road goes this way,” she said. “I follow the long road and the bricklayer Xandros has paved it with bricks.”

Somewhat dismayed by this bit of news, Steven scuffed at the road on which he stood and spoke up sharply. “The bricklayer has been this way as well,” he said pointing at the yellow bricks paving his road. “We should follow the road the bricklayer laid into the forest.”

“You traded for warm clothes in the village a week ago while I was in the hills. I am still barefoot.”