The Storyteller, The Prince, and The Djinn - Preface & Updates

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

❝ By all rights, I should be dead.

​It is stories that keep me alive. Stories shared, day in and day out, for so long that I have lost track, and anyways—I can’t trust the passage of time here. There are two moons in the sky and the sun is strange and unknown to me, rising in the west and setting in the east. 

I can’t be sure that time here is the same as time beyond the Veil.  
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Stories keep me alive, but all of them are untrue or, at least, based on some truth long forgotten and willfully expanded upon. I share fireside tales, legends, myths, and imaginings that were told and retold, shaped and reshaped, by countless minds and tongues. I weave them together, linking them and reconfiguring them so that they stretch over the length of an interminable night full of foreign constellations and ephemeral tongues of blue-green-pink fire. I ensure that, as dawn peeks rosy and diaphanous over the horizon, I’ve led my listeners to the edge of a precipice, there to perch on the exhilarating edge, desperate to hear more.

And then I yawn, theatrically but truly, and remind my audience that I am mortal, and I need sleep, and that their stimulants are as likely to sicken me as to keep me going, and may even kill me. They don’t want me to die. Not yet. I am too entertaining to lose, to kill, with their mischief and their cruel play. My stories are mine by virtue of my telling them. No other can resolve them as I would.

So I bargain. A tale for a day. A tale for my life. A tale for some measure of peace, here in this world that is not my own.

But now I undertake to tell a true story, a story that is mine not only in the telling, but in the living of it.

My name is Shahira. I am a sixth child and a third daughter. I am a wife to a crownless prince. I am—I was—the apprentice of a Keeper of Chronicles.

This is my story. ❞

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Welcome to the re-re-re-etc.-vamped version of Legends of Mourra, Vol. 1 - The Storyteller, The Prince, and The Djinn. Note the change: my main character's name went from Halah to Shahira, and Sirin's name is now Intisar. 

I'd originally chosen 'Halah' because back then SPD was a pretty different story with a much 'grander' plot including a whole civil war, among other things, and Halah was inspired by the blessed lady Halimah, nursemaid and foster mother to the Prophet ﷺ . The story has changed--and Halah-the-character has changed--that the association is no longer obvious or precisely applicable, so her name's been changed to reflect that. Shahira is a call back to Schehrezade, which SPD is a loose retelling/adaptation of, as you can see from the preface above!

Another change: SPD is now in first person! It's made the story feel much easier to write, and you can see my rambly thoughts on how and why here. (Oh yeah, I'm back on tumblr lol).

Anywho, that's all for now!

​Happy reading and writing  𓂃🖊