: Tim Muirhead
: Finding Heraan
: Vivid Publishing
: 9781925590388
: 1
: CHF 3.00
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 200
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
'Finding Heraan' is a work of fiction about a young man, Ageres, who is tasked with delivering a powerful message.  The task proves a lot harder than he expects. He is confronted with many challenges, not least the fact that many greet his message with disinterest! Finally, he finds the village of Heraan, and there, his message has a powerful impact. But the impact is not what he'd expected. And even after the message is delivered, he faces challenges and temptations that threaten to destroy the very truth-telling that his message has unleashed. It's an allegory, of course; a philosophical fable.   We live in an increasingly diverse world, where differences of religion, race, gender, and even beliefs, threaten to create a cowering silence, or dangerous conflict.  We need to find ways that we can genuinely speak to and hear each other, and 'Finding Heraan' gives an opportunity for readers to reflect on what those ways might look like.

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Sophia’s Gift

 

Ours was a Kingdom where magic and wonder were still known, but only to those who chose to see.

It lay beside a deep ocean, whose horizons flickered and sparked with the wings of dragons that flew between places unknown. Only the bravest seafarers had ever seen into the eyes of the dragons, and it was said to be the most wonderful and the most terrible experience of their lives. But this, as it turns out, is not a story of seafarers. Or of dragons.

The land that rose from the ocean’s wild, glistening shores was bright with colour and bustling with life. It held jungles dripping with growth and shadows, and patchwork fields swaying with the love of custodians’ hands. It held forests and woods full of wonders to be found, and fairies and elves just out of eyeshot. It held red and glaring deserts, all silence and emptiness and hidden scamperings. And high mountains, whose crowns were barren and whose feet were life itself.

The colours of the flowers, the flight of the birds, the chaos of the butterflies, the endless cycle of life and death: these were part of the magic, but they were not the magic.

The glowing of the moon and the power of the oceans, the searing sun and the soothing rain, the breezes and winds, the rivers and streams, the endless, endless, flow of life through the veins of tree and creature alike: these were part of the magic, but they were not the magic.

The magic could not reside alone in any corner, or jungle, sea or field. It sprang from every creature and every plant, every rock and pool of water. But only in the spaces and connections between them could the magic take hold. And alas, the magic was in danger. For division had begun to deplete the land. Yet only few could see.

The lands of our Kingdom rose, in their different ways, to a great ‘Ring of Mountains’ capped as white as the clouds, with hillsides of greens and faraway blues. This Ring of Mountains almost encircled a high, broad, lush valley.

Long ago, the valley had held a thousand brooks and a dozen streams that had danced their way toward one great, swirling waterfall which dropped away towards the lands below. But, generations ago, the people of the valley had built a dam above the waterfall, and created a large, still lake. On the shores of this lake now stood a busy, rushing, smoking City, all straight lines and inge