Merlin's Son (ePub)

Merlin's Son is a book fabricated using the genre of historical fiction. Meteor was the only son of Merlin, the celebrated alchemist and advisor to King Arthur and mentor to William the Conqueror (French: Guillaume le Conquérant), the first Norman King of England. Meteor was born 23, March AD 1066. His namesake was derived from the occurrence of a prodigious shooting star seen in the sky on the night of his birth. It would betide that the shooting star that was observed was the 18th reappearance of Halley's Comet in known human history.

Meteor was born with a large red birthmark on his face. The lore at the time was that the red spot on his face was precipitated when his mother, while pregnant, caught a glimpse of the flagitious Red Dragon as mentioned in Beowulf mythology and Arthurian legends.

As a young boy, Meteor incurred dreadful burns. Merlin treated these burns with a hastily prepared alchemistic remedy, which healed the burns, but for reasons arcane to Merlin, turned his son's skin cobalt blue and stopped his cells from changing over time. It was as if the sea of his blood was frozen in the year AD 1075. From this time on, Meteor would always have the body of a boy, and would never be able physically to mature into a man. He would cease to age!

Meteor was indeed eternally trapped within the body of a prepubescent youth, yet he was still mortal and might experience death like everyone else from an accident or a fatal disease. Meteor, over time, would incur celebrated wisdom and attempt to apply his erudite knowledge to benefit mankind and especially children with special needs. The saga begins just before the beginning of the 21st Century. Meteor is almost millennial in age himself and befriends Ryann, a five-year-old girl who has just lost her father to a tragic and unexpected death. Ryann begins writing this memoir four years later at the age of nine as an assignment for her language arts class. She will later revise it in eighth grade and then again as a senior in high school. Ryann will fabricate the final edit, which is the amalgamation of four eras of her life, during her thirties.

This novel is created with a kaleidoscope of scenes from antiquity and brings to the twenty-first century reader a rich tapestry of ancient history as well as the modern era. The narrative will flow to three Wonders of the Ancient World including the mesmerizing city of Babylon and its enthralling hanging gardens; the resplendent city of Alexandria and its magnificent forty-story lighthouse and finally the pyramids in Egypt including the Great Pyramid of Giza, as well as the older Step Pyramid of Djoser in the Saqqara necropolis near Memphis, Egypt.

The saga will be launched with the 'lightness of being' as could only be perceived from the first flush of an adventurous child. The content and form of these early chapters will parallel the simplicity of language, but surreal imagination of this nascent phase of life. Later, the youngster will mature into an adolescent, and the dialogue will phosphoresce to this transitional high energy state of being; the written dialogues will metamorphosize accordingly. At the end of adolescence, emotions will be exalted with a scintillating narrative that champions the most numinous love stories of Western Civilization. In the end, the child has now evolved into an adult and has the opportunity to perceive the full cornucopia of a life well lived, with its splendiferous moments of ecstasy, but also with the liniments of real instants of the agony of fate. The author was most touched as a youth by the Scottish writer J.M. Barrie's, Peter Pan and the French novelist Jules Verne's, Vingt Mille Lieues sous Les Mers (20,000 Leagues under the Sea), and gives us Merlin's Son in an analogous genre, but with an added fabric woven with gossamers of history, plant medicines, Old Testament Script