The Storyteller

D grades, flunked school, set light to the classroom, but boy, could he tell you a whopper!

Created using AI

You live between his words, searching for him, the Storyteller. Late at night, reading from a map in my mind, voices telling you that too many have travelled this way.

It’s the long distance between each word. Over a ragged hill, hear him? Wild dogs howl, follow him, moving past that home on the shoreline without a way to turn back. The Storyteller's bones jibbering and jabbering, lightning flashes and thunder roars, and a child’s cry is fading.

The Storyteller calls back dreams, taken so many years gone by, and in the rolling mist, he sees a world you have never seen. A castle lit by candlelight, a drawbridge and a hooded figure. You feel yourself trembling in a world you’ve never known.

It’s the storyteller.

There’s a moment, known well to every writer, when the page no longer listens. The words that once danced now lie heavy, inert. We wander the rooms of our thoughts, knocking on closed doors, pressing our ears to silence. In those moments, many turn to muses.

But here’s the quiet truth — the muse is not a being of flesh and myth, fluttering in from the garden with dewdrops on her lashes. No, the muse is forged. She is constructed from…