I am not the Storyteller.
Relatively speaking, that is.
I am a storyteller. That much we can all be certain of. My name is Zachary Steele (find my blog here). I’m the author of two previous works which have no bearing whatsoever on this blog, or anything related to it. Of relevance, however, I am the author of the first book in The Storyteller series, The Heart of Darkness, which is at the heart of why we’re here. This blog–or what is to follow–contains the writings and thoughts of J.C. Rudolph, the man we can, for the time being, refer to as The Storyteller.
But who is J.C. Rudolph, you ask?
I don’t know. I can offer a physical description, talk of the grainy cadence of his voice, or perhaps cast a glimpse of the passion he carries for the craft of writing, but that’s where it will end. You see, I met him only once. It was a meeting that changed my life in ways I will never fully be able to convey. I may never fully understand them myself.
I can hear you now. “So, wait, you’re telling me that this Rudolph fellow is real?”
Yes. He is. But don’t take a moment of your time searching him out on Google, looking for his famed bestselling series The Damon Grell Chronicles on Amazon, or even hunting a snapshot of his face somewhere in the ether of the Internet. He isn’t from our world. Or rather, he once was, but until now, no facet of his writings have touched our world. Rudolph is a shadow, an enigma. Maybe together we can figure out the truth.
I’m getting a bit ahead of myself, though. First, you need to know what I know. You need a beginning. A start. A place to hang your hat so you know where to go when you return.
That place is Boston. The time is the Summer of 2009. June, to be exact.
I was on tour–which is the fancy way of saying I had a single event out of my home state–in NYC, promoting my first book. It coincided with my birthday, so I decided a day trip to Boston would be my present. When matters were wrapped up in NYC, I hopped in a rental car and made the drive to Beantown. I have a fondness for that city I can’t shake. It’s like the first warm blast of the sun on a cool morning. It occurs to me now, however, I should probably write about that on my blog and spare you any further intrusion to our story.
There’s a Starbucks just off the campus of Harvard, on Broadway. Nothing fancy about it. Looks pretty much like every Starbucks you’ll ever encounter. Just add about 40 intense and chatty students, pile them on chairs (or on top of one another), a few professors, and the wayward soul like myself tucked in a corner, and you’ll have the image. It was a rainy day, unseasonably cool. The perfect day for a White Chocolate Mocha and some good people watching. I don’t know how long I had been there, or how I managed to miss him, but I had only glanced out the window for a few seconds–there was a small retriever staring at me and I think my heart almost broke at the sight of his rain-drenched fur and wanting gaze–when I turned to realize I was no longer the only person at my table. An older man–I guessed him to be in his 70’s, but there was a youth in his eyes that made me wonder if he wasn’t considerably younger–sat across the square table, hazel eyes set hard upon me. He had long, stringy, gray hair and a beard tipping the base of his neck. He sat there, silent, staring at me. I’d like to say how long, but I sort of lost all sense of time in the awkwardness of the moment. I may have hiccuped in an attempt to speak, but I couldn’t even manage a greeting, much less question what he wanted. He was dressed too well to be one of the many homeless who wander Cambridge, but I couldn’t recall seeing such odd attire in my life. Looking back, I can only call it a robe. Something I imagine Jesus and his pals wore back in the day. Either way, the beige cloth billowed just about everywhere, falling upon his frame like a very nice-looking and comfortable potato sack.
He might have sensed my discomfort, because his thin lips spread in a smile that calmed me instantly. He introduced himself as J.C. Rudolph, then spoke the seven words that altered my life.
I want to tell you a story.
His voice captured me, soothing with a depth–not to mention a British lilt–I like to call the Nap Voice. Just keep talking like that and in the right setting I’m done. Think Bob Ross crossed with Richard Harris. Yeah. That. Good night, Irene.
I wasn’t about to protest. I love stories, and I love hooks that make you zone out the world in an effort to follow every word like a child in wait of presents. I wasn’t going to let go of that hook no matter where it led me. So I listened as he spoke of a world called Elysium, and of a young wizard named Damon Grell from a city called Demos, and a dark wizard named Lord Ahriman. He told me of Damon’s struggles as he grew from an twelve-year-old boy with little magical skill into an eighteen-year-old man with perhaps the greatest sense of magic the world had ever known. He told me of Lord Ahriman’s desire to plunge Elysium into Darkness, of the many ways in which he attempted to do so, of the encounters that followed in which Damon brought them to an end. They were epic encounters, and my imagination hummed in an effort to keep up with the imagery. There were many other characters as well–so many, in fact, I found myself amazed at this man’s ability to contain them all in memory. I’ve known my share of writers through the years, and no one had ever put on a display of natural storytelling like Rudolph. There were no pauses, no hesitations, no semblance of uncertainty. Every movement of the story flowed naturally into the next, seamless. He spoke in a fluid motion like the soft flow of waves to the shore. And his voice never wavered.
When he stopped, he leaned into his chair, hands in a steeple before him on the table, a notable smile parting his lips. Despite the silence, it took my mind a moment to catch up, to file the final image of the final battle between Lord Ahriman and Damon Grell into understanding. Then I frowned.
“Damon Grell lost? Ahriman killed him? That’s how it ends?” I admit my voice arrived a bit too loud, but as my siblings will agree, it tends to do that when I’m baffled.
To his credit, Rudolph didn’t flinch. “I’m afraid so.”
Perhaps sensing my rising frustration, or maybe because he had heard the same argument many times before, he held a wrinkled palm before me. “I know, I know. It was a tragedy that should have been–could have been–avoided. But let us, for the moment, move on. Let us talk about why I am here.”
You know that moment in a conversation when you have no idea what the other person is about to say, but you know it isn’t going to be anything you want to hear? And yet you all but lean forward as if you couldn’t imagine hearing anything else? That was this moment. I had no idea who this guy was, or what the point of his story had been, or why I should care, but if it meant he was going to talk some more, I was all in.
“I am here because I need your help in saving my world.”
That’s what he said. Just like that. And I laughed. I laughed as any person would when presented with something so absurd that it could only be meant as a joke.
Only he wasn’t joking. Before I could pronounce my rising sense of dread at the dead-panned look he offered, he continued. He told me he had been led from his world–Elysium–to this very spot, at this very time, where he would find a writer who could help him complete the story he could no longer write alone. The story of Oliver Miles and his quest to to vanquish the evil Damon Grell could not.
“But,” he conceded, yet again cutting off my protest, “as any good writer will preach: ‘Show, don’t Tell’. Here.”
He withdrew from his robes a weathered old journal, pages tipped in gold, brown leather binding faded, several creases running the length of the spine. With a curious grin, he handed it to me. “Open it and see. When you are ready to return, let the journal know. It will lead you back.”
“What?” I laughed again. I’ve always found a gentle laugh can mask fear quite well. What it doesn’t mask is acts of stupidity. Like when a strange person hands you a strange journal after he tells you a strange story, tells you to open it and see and you actually do it.
I want to keep this short, which I regret the same. What happened next is a story unto itself. In fact, what happened next is something I think Oliver Miles can relate to. What happened–and I still find the sound of this memory layered in absurdity–is I opened the journal, nearly blinded by the piercing light surrounding me. When my sight returned–a matter of seconds after I opened the journal–the cafe was gone. Or, rather, I was gone from the cafe. Either way, I stood atop a hill, the rolling green before me absorbing the landscape, rising to a great height in the line of mountains beyond. Between, nestled in the valley below, a broad city spanned the gap.
I didn’t know it then, but I stood upon the grounds of Elysium, looking upon Demos, the city Damon Grell had known as home. It took an hour before I moved from the spot. It took a week to return. What happened in between reshaped my understanding of reality, and set me on the course I’m on today. I had to make hard choices, some of which I would have deemed ludicrous before my trip to Boston.
When I did return, which happened as easily as Rudolph suggested, I found myself back in the cafe. Much to my astonishment, a mere ten minutes had passed. A week had passed in Elysium, but it cost me a mere ten minutes in my world! J.C. Rudolph was nowhere to be seen. Nobody in the cafe payed me much attention. I don’t know how they missed it. It’s not often that someone gets sucked into a book, then magically reappears out of thin air ten minutes later. At least I hope it isn’t.
Needing to escape the confines of the cafe, I grabbed my belongings–which now included the journal–and headed off to my hotel. I’m not ashamed to admit I talk to myself. Often. But silence consumed me the remainder of the evening. I got back to the hotel, scribbled down everything I could remember on a notepad, collapsed in the bed, staring at the ceiling until the specter of dawn tickled the spotty window of the room.
A week later, back home, still trying to convince myself it hadn’t all been a vivid dream, two packages arrived, with no return address. The first I opened had an envelope atop a stack of leather-bound notebooks. There were thirty-two in total. I opened the envelope and unfolded a letter. The handwriting, loopy and a little shaky, was borderline legible.
Enclosed you will find the entirety of my writings. My musings on the craft aside, you will find all you need in order to tell the story of young Oliver Miles. You have seen Elysium. You know the Darkness it faces. The only hope my world has to overcome this evil is in the power of the words you will write that speak of its boundaries, the strength it receives from the readers who believe in your tale, in the heart of a young boy who has only ever known of it through the tale of Damon Grell. It is now up to you. Tell the story that can save Elysium.
— J.C.R
The first notebook, which I flipped through in a mad hurry to open the second box, had various entries detailing Rudolph’s–he never mentions his real name, in case you were wondering–childhood in an orphanage. During these days, he wrote stories of a land called Elysium. Buried deeper, I would eventually find the details of his first journey through the doorway leading into the world he had imagined. The world he had created.
The second box contained five books–hardbacks, with no jacket or artwork to speak of. Each bore a title and the author’s name: The Damon Grell Chronicles by J.C. Rudolph. Five books that have never existed in our world, but as real as any I had ever held. I read them straight through, without stopping. For all Rudolph had brought to the oral tale, nothing could have compared to the thrill of reading it. I’ve never known a story with so much life. Having seen the world certainly helped, but I could sense the presence of each character, each place, each event as it unfolded before my eyes.
It took me almost a year to fully sort through the notebooks. It took me another year to compile the information meant to tell Oliver’s story. It wasn’t until I read the final page of the final notebook that I truly understood the task ahead of me, and the importance it carried. There, in a single page, below the words, “Oliver’s Prologue” Rudolph left me with the summation of the tale I would tell.
I want to tell you a story.
You might feel as though you know it, through and through. It might remind you of days long gone, in which you drifted into the world of dreams, longing to be the hero of an entire world. I believe, however, by the end of this tale, you will find it is unlike any story you have ever heard. It does not need to be told in order to exist, but without you it is nothing more than whispers drifting in an unattended breeze.
You see, this story is alive.
A story is only words, you must be thinking. Just a collection of characters, and places, woven in a tapestry of imagination for the reader to enjoy. To a degree, I grant you that truth. However, you will find words do breathe, pages do turn like the steady rhythm of the heart, and life filters through you, into the story, and gives it form. For every life, there is a story, and for every story, there is a life. It just so happens this story was infused with life long before this moment, and now, just now is looking to usher you into its world.
And so, the journey lies before us.
This is the story of Oliver Miles, a young boy drawn into a world that only before existed in the pages of his favorite series, The Damon Grell Chronicles. There he must search for clued to his past in a world both familiar and unfamiliar, where a secret city holds the key to a powerful magic threatening the world, where stories are more than words, and where he must find the answer to the one question he believes can defeat the rising darkness: Who is the Storyteller?
Our story begins, where every story before it has ever begun:
In the beginning, there was a boy whose life very much belonged to the books he loved.
You have to understand, I truly didn’t know what it meant until then.
Now I do. It isn’t just Elysium I’m supposed to save.
Oliver Miles is real.
His life is in my hands.
I need your help.
Who is the Storyteller? 