The Life and Times of Jaran

[Jaran]

Well, I'll post one of my short stories here...tell me what you all think. :)

Many stories begin with the phrase “Once upon a time”. But what, in all reality, does that truly mean? Does this mean that this time was somewhere long in the past? Or perhaps that it only happened once? Or maybe even that it happened on top of a clock? No, what that phrase instantly conveys to our oh so very human brains is that this story happened in a time of yore, a time in which everything was different, a time in which everything was magical and fantastical. Now perhaps, this phrase has begun to become trite. But there are always those times in which it is proper to use. And as this story did indeed happen in a time of magic and fantasy, our story begins with this same trite phrase…

Once upon a time, in the land of Aranil, there was a young couple who was very much in love. Now, mind you, they were not very rich and could not afford to lavish their affections upon each other as far as the material concerns went, but they did their very best to make each other happy in any way they could manage. As you can imagine, this entailed much time spent together in bed, and on the floor, and everywhere else they could find to show their love for each other. With all of this affection being thrown around, it was only a matter of time until they had company. And indeed, in no time at all, company came in the form of a beautiful baby boy. Now, the child was so beautiful and strong from the time he was born that his parents could not decide on a name for him. So, they merely called him Love until the time at which he was cognitive enough to decide a name for himself. Love had a very uneventful early childhood, for there is not much to do when you are very young, save set around and suckle at your mother’s breast. Therefore, that is exactly what he did, with much fervor and determination, until he had reached his goal. (You may ask, what was his goal? And I would answer you, why, to become the strongest baby ever known, of course!) Of course, this was not without damage to his mother’s ever-loving breast. His father knew not what to do with the strongest baby in the world, and his wife could not stand up to his suckling much longer without losing one of his most precious assets in the world, so he set out to find a goat for his young, yet extremely strong, son. Upon finding such a goat as he thought could withstand the fervor and intensity of Love’s suckling, he promptly caught it and brought it back to his cottage.

Now mind you, this was no ordinary goat. This was an Aranil Forest Goat, which was thought by some scholars of the time to be the largest and most milk-giving goat in the world, and this one was no exception. Love’s goat stood at least 5 foot high when on all fours, and when it reared, it could probably bring down the very strongest of men, no mention to elves, which the young man’s wife just happened to be.

Therefore, the young couple set about to tying the goat down with at least four fresh ropes for each leg, then affixing them to the nearest trees with as much determination and strength as they could summon from their muscles (which no doubt, were formidable in their own respect, although not the strongest in the world, as their son’s were indeed the strongest for a baby, but then again, not everyone can be the strongest anything in the world). Upon lashing the Goat firmly to the trees, the young elven wife carried young Love to the goat’s teat.

Young Love instantly knew what came from these large ponderous nipples and proceeded to fasten his mouth quite securely around the poor goat’s teat. Love drank and drank and drank until he could not drink anymore, and sat back down on the ground, quite happy and quite full. The Goat however, seemed as though she could not take anymore and proceeded to chew lazily on the grass that grew abundantly around the young family’s cottage.

After a few more days of such treatment, the young father began to realize that the Goat would not last much longer. In fact, he reasoned that the goat should most likely die the very next day! (Young fathers were terribly bright about how quickly something would die in those days) So, after much consideration, the father decided that it should be time to wean his young child. After all, he was the father of the strongest baby in the world, was he not? If his young son were strong enough to kill an Aranil Forest Goat through the mere cause of his suckling, then his son should very likely be strong enough to eat the meat thereof with no complaints on his part.

Therefore, after the poor Goat keeled over the very next day as he thought it would, he set to slaughtering the poor creature. It took him long, long, long into the night, and his lovely young wife was asleep long before he was. However, he succeeded in his task and the Goat meat was properly cut and ready to eat the very next day. As his son was always the first one up in the house, Love was no doubt surprised that his father came to pick him up right as his eyes opened. If he was though, he made no show of it through any adverse facial expressions.

Now, imagine you are a young half-elf baby who just happens to be the strongest in the world through the power of your own will and mighty suckling. Then, say that your father is a human who is not only strong, but also, stronger than you are, and capable of making you do things you do not wish. If your large human father tells you that you are no longer drinking milk all the time and are now going to eat meat or you will starve, then what shall you do? Of course you shall eat the meat, for you are but a young lad who hardly even walks yet, and has no idea of how to fend for yourself.

And so, you cannot blame young Love when he very nearly choked on his very first piece of meat, for he had no way of chewing it up, having not grown any teeth as of yet. However, his ever-so-loving and wise father had not thought of this and so took Love’s choking as a means of the baby trying to defy his authority. So you can imagine that when Love started turning the most terrific shades of blue and red that his father began to become a bit worrisome. If his son were the strongest in the world and also the most cleverly rebellious, well then! He might have just a little bit more of a job on his hands then he thought! But just as that thought had slowly burned its way through his cerebral cortex and was storing itself in his long-term memory, another thought slammed into his mind like a hammer against an anvil.

“You dolt!” it said, beginning quite well, he thought later on as he meditated on the mistakes he had made that day, “Your son has not yet even grown his first tooth and you give him meat which is too large for him to even gum into suitably swallowable pieces of digestible food? The wretch that spawned you must have rued the day he every thought of laying hands on a woman!” After he was done mentally reprimanding himself, he proceeded to beat the poor child’s back very fervently, causing the meat to dislodge from Love’s trachea and allowing the young one to breath freely again. At this, the young baby cried out, “My God, man! What are you doing to your only son!?!”

All the young man could do was gape in awe.

[Jaran]

The Life and Times of Jaran: The Naming

The life of a child, ah, to live it again. When your days are filled with joy and laughter, love and peace, there is nothing more you could possibly wish for, save that it go on forever. For the child who was known as Love, this was all he wished. Well, that and to be the strongest child in the world. As a baby, he had accomplished his goal of being the strongest at his age. However, now that he was a child, there was much more competition.

At the time Love was born, the strongest child in the world was an orc named Gru'tarr, who had reportedly torn a tree out of the ground with his bare hands, and then broke it over his knee. Of course, Gru'tarr had normal bones, so breaking the tree also broke his leg. And as everyone knows, orcs are not known for having the best bonesetters in the world, so Gru'tarr quickly became the strongest child cripple.

When Love was one year old, the strongest was a minotaur child named Mouauom (Minotaur have a very limited vocabulary, due to their bovine vocal cords, so they make up for it with their long names which every race in Aranil finds very hard to pronounce. This generally makes their parties very dull and monotonous.). Mouauom had gone into a rage after losing his favorite toy and had charged through a six-foot stone wall. Of course, he gave no thought to what lay on the other side of the wall, but I am sure he had plenty of time to think about it as he plunged over the fifty foot cliff that the wall had been built on.

Now that Love was two, he was somewhere in the vicinity of number two, a hair's breadth behind a demon known as Raska. This little demon was known for tearing his victims apart with his bare hands. He had supposedly taken on approximately twenty-five highly trained demon hunters and come out with nary a scratch. True, he may have been protected by a pack of summoned cerberi, but then again, he was only a child.

Of Love's two wishes, the ability to stay a child forever was second on his list, but he would soon wish that it would have been first. However, on the night that his life's crucial turning point came, he was not provided the chance to decide which path he would take. Rather, the Goddess of Fate, Myssa, flipped her Coin of Fortune and set the following events in motion.

So it was that one fateful night, Raska and his pack of cerberi invited theirselves to Love's family cottage. As they let theirselves in, Raska immediately grabbed Love's father and tore him in two, spreading gore throughout the small living area. Just as Raska let the corpse halves drop, one of Raska's cerberi attacked Love's mother. A cerberus knows no such intangible such as mercy, therefore her screams fell on deaf ears. Fuzzy, cute, evil ears, but deaf nonetheless. When Love saw this all transpire, he very soon became the strongest child in the world, for he grabbed the nearest thing to him, (Which just happened to be his elven mother's silver ritual dagger.) and hurled it with all of his formidable strength into the demon's chest. Now, as any good demon hunter can tell you, silver is the best metal to use in demon slaying, and if you are going to slay a demon, the best place to aim is directly in the heart. If Love had wanted to be a demon hunter, he was definitely showing potential, for he hit the perfect spot, which instantly turned Raska from the strongest child in the world into the deadest corpse in the world. As Raska fell, his cerberi howled loudly as they dissolved in a bath of flame, leaving Love by himself. He walked to his mother and father's corpses and knelt next to them reverently.

"Mother, Father, I had decided my name before that disturbance. Now that you are dead, I imagine that this would be the most opportune time to inform you of it. I have decided to call myself...Jaran.

[Jaran]

This is the 3rd part of the series, and the latest one that I've written. Eventually, when I've made enough of them, I'll probably put them all together into a book and change the name. Anywho, this is the last one for awhile...after this part I'm going to transition out of his childhood and into adolescence....


The Life and Times of Jaran: Purity's End



Light and dark.

Yin and Yang.

Fire and water.

Good and evil.

We define the world we know in absolutes, to make sense of what we experience every day. But to a child, there are no absolutes, save the ones his parents carve into his mental patterns. As a wise man once said, "To the pure, all things are pure." As it is with all children, so it was with the one known as Jaran.

(Author's note: In Jaran's last outing, his parents were tragically killed. To all who read this, if you have not read the other stories of Jaran's life, I highly recommend that you do so now.)

Jaran was going through a lot right now. In fact, most people would say that he was experiencing a tragedy that no young person should ever have to deal with. But, Jaran's destiny had been decided by the Goddess of Fate, and, as they say in Aranil, "Once the Goddess flips her coin, there's no redo." The child was sitting on the ground, observing everything around him with wide eyes and an open mind. The sky was grey, the grass was green, and rain was falling from the heavens, as though the gods themselves were weeping for the terrible fate which had been assigned to the boy.

Jaran, however calm he looked on the outside, was fighting back emotion on the inside. His mind was continually throwing one thought at him.

"Why did you meditate for so long? You could have saved them had you been yet one minute earlier! What kind of a son allows his parents to die like that? How can you even stand to allow yourself to live?"

Now, imagine the scene laid before you, my dear readers, and know that Jaran had good reason for his self-depreciation. For laying on the ground before Jaran were the bodies of his now deceased parents. His father's body, which had once been so full of life and strength, was now reduced to two gory halves of a whole. His mother was in no better shape, for her once glourious and beautiful body was now torn to shreds by the sharp fangs of cerberi. Jaran himself was covered with his parent's blood, and it trickled down his face, making it seem as though he were crying crimson tears.

Jaran could stand this no longer, and stood up quickly, resolving to give a proper burial to his beloved family. He walked quickly to his father's tool shed, from which he produced a makeshift spade and pickaxe. Now, there had been no deaths in this family before his parents, so there was no burial plot for past family members. So, the young child began to shovel huge chunks of earth away in two parent-sized holes, about fifteen feet away from the front door. As Jaran dug, he realized that this work was doing wonders for his psyche, and had helped him forget his sadness for a time. Nonetheless, he still had the good sense to realize that this was only a temporary solution, and had no delusions that his depression would again commence when he had finished the graves.

Now, let us take a break from this sad scene while Jaran digs his parent's graves. Before this story, Jaran had only been known as Love, for this was what he made his parents feel when he was born unto them. However, at the conclusion of his last story, he announced his new name to the corpses of his parents, and the story ended. Simply stated, this caused some small amount of confusion. So, here is the explanation of his name.

The name Jaran in his native Aranilean tongue means, "A small bird in flight, dropping to the ground, and being stomped upon by a herd of elephants." However, his native tongue was not the language which he derived his name from. In Azalrea, the land of the elves, Jaran was a name derived from the word "jerin" which meant "Of the Wondrous Folk", or simply, "Wonderkind". The Wondrous Folk, or Wonderkind, were a tribe of elves who, in ancient times, had spread peace throughout Azalrea and had ceased the constant warfare waged upon each other by the numerous elven tribes. So, in its derivative, Jaran, it means simply "A Wonder". So there you have it. Jaran named himself "A Wonder" due to the self-realization he had attained during his meditations. Now, back to the story.

Finally, a short time before sunset, both graves were finished. Jaran began to slowly lower his parents into their graves, and as they settled in, they made a soft thump, which matched the low beat of Jaran's heart, as despair finally began to set in. Something he had never before felt welled up inside of him, causing rivers of tears to flow from within. He fell to his knees and cried out in the pitiful wail that only a child can produce. Now, there have been many tears cried by numerous children, but none before had matched the emotion which Jaran conveyed through this, his first sob.

The sun had set before Jaran was finished with his cry. As he stood up and began to shovel the earth back into the graves, he realized that he felt different somehow. It was almost as if this event had changed his entire thought process. Jaran did not know it, but he had taken his first steps on a journey which would last him a lifetime.