Write a story about the moment when everything changed

This is actually a small fragment of a novel I’d like to write. Fantasy novels are such undertakings, but maybe someday.

It was the sort of freak occurrence that would have reverberating effects throughout the realm for generations. Imagine a horse falling out of the sky over your head. Now imagine it has razor sharp talons and a beak designed to rend struggling flesh from the bone. Imagine your mother falling down to protect you.

Try to tell that woman’s husband, that child’s father, that this is one out of a whole forest. Try to tell them the role in the ecosystem, protecting us from those who would take these woods for themselves. Tell the frightened, shouting masses to be calm. Just try to tell them to think about what they are about to do.

In the year of the wise man, the dry season, to raucous applause, Alisair Greenwarden overturned millenia-old protections. Laws so old they may well have been written by a congress of demigods and forest spirits. The leaves fell around us, brown and brittle, descending from the swaying trees who may have been young when these laws were first drafted, whose judging whispers we would never understand.

How one tragedy leads to another. That child. That poor, helpless babe whose mother died to protect her. She will never know a time before taxidermied gryphons stood in the sacred hall. Before eager young men wore necklaces of gryphon claws and wove elaborate fables about their latest kill. Before our people turned against our own protectors.

Featured Art – http://www.sarina-brewer.com/gallery/taxidermy-art-fantasy.html