Chapter One: The Boy from Ravo
Bohdan Dune and the Perilum Tales
Warmest greetings and salutations!
The day has come. Bohdan Dune and the Perilum Tales is launching after so many twists and turns and tears (by me). It’s so exciting and thrilling to send it out, believing it will land exactly where it needs to.
If you haven’t already, be sure to read the official introduction here! An interview with the cast is also available here if you missed it.
Happy Reading!
Bohdan Felix Dune was a very brave boy but the trouble was he just didn’t know it yet.
He was lanky and observant with a wild mop of auburn hair and spent nearly every day of his life packing salt from the Dry Sea. It was an exhausting, thankless job. For the most overworked and underpaid people in the whole of Gallimaufria, unfortunately for Bohdan, were the Salt Dredgers. Salt Dredgers were similar to what you or I might think of when we imagine assembly line workers in a factory. Or inmates breaking stones in a prison courtyard (depending on your Dredging role of course).
Every grain of salt was harvested, cured, flavored, then directly packed into gorgeous multicolored glass jars blown by the glass blowers in Shard; the neighboring and exceptionally wealthier of the two towns along the Dry Sea. On the very rare occasion Bohdan wasn’t raking, scooping, or packing salt inside the blazing Dredge House, he liked to help his mother with their goats or watch the stars from a tattered hammock on the roof of his tiny house.
As fate would have it, Bohdan lived on the poorest street in the poorest town in the Wastelands. Ravo was a speck of a village. Covered in hot, dusty sand and speckled with cactus, or cactrees as Wastelanders call them, which soared as tall as towers. He lived there with his mother, his older brother, and their two dozen goats.
Bohdan’s father, Jago, had been a jailor at the infamous prison a mile south of Ravo, Beggar’s Plea. Sadly, he was killed in a skirmish between a few of the inmates shortly before Bohdan was born. But Bohdan’s mother insisted Jago lived on in Cobran’s appetite for adventure and Bohdan’s love of stories.
Bohdan’s mother, Odetta, was a kind and intelligent woman, who could whip up a scrumptious meal out of nearly nothing and sing all the while, as if she lived an easy life. Her long auburn hair and hazel eyes stood out amongst the tanned, dark Wastelanders like a flame flower. But despite her endless generosity and having lived along the Dry Sea for nearly twenty years, the citizens of Ravo liked to gossip about Odetta’s curious past, of which they knew almost nothing.
Cobran Jethro Dune, I am grieved to say, was without a doubt the worst older brother in the entire world. Selfish, proud and cruel, he too was a Salt Dredger and the spitting image of his father. Tall with thick black hair and warm brown eyes. He was a confident and eager thirteen year old with a knack for mischief, whose sole mission in life was to make Bohdan miserable.
The Dune family, like the rest of the families in the Wastelands, lived together in a house of clay. Not soft clay, like the kind you mold in your hand, but dried and hard like stone. It was ugly and pitiful to look at, but it kept the blazing heat of the Wastelands at bay and provided shelter from the relentless firewinds and waspwinds (but more on those later).
The brothers slept in a little room upstairs, which they reached by a ladder of rope, while their mother slept in an even tinier room next to the front door. The rest of their house was a wide open space divided by a short fence of woven sandreed. They had a modest kitchen, with a hearth near the far wall and a low clay table where the family would sit on threadbare floor pillows whenever they ate their meals. Odetta had a single shelf to hold her small spice jars, a few clay bowls, plates and cups, and a glass pitcher for her special cactree tea.
But the majority of the room was an indoor stable for their goats.
While it may seem strange to you or I for a family to share their living room with animals, it was perfectly commonplace in the Wastelands. When someone is as poor and hungry as the average Wastelander, and a goat could mean the difference between life and death, stealing became a necessary evil. I’m sorry to tell you that animals kept outside in Ravo were rarely there come morning. And so, the few goatherds and shepherds in the sleepy village kept their animals in the safest places they could; their homes.
Day after day, Bohdan and his mother did what they could to put food on the table and to help those less fortunate than themselves. Though citizens of Ravo were at the bottom of the social food chain, Odetta being a goatherdess meant they had milk, butter, yogurt, cheese and meat. But without the luxuries of refrigeration, they sold most of what they made to the wealthier families of Shard or the Pig’s Sty.
But twice a year, Bohdan and his brother felt like kings when their mother would make the perilous journey to Chaosity.
Chaosity was the capital of Gallimaufria. A city bursting with colors and festivals and travelers from all over the kingdom. It was also the home of Lazy King Lors, a grouchy man who was allergic to nearly everything and left the actual running of the country to his charismatic nephew and a team of advisors.
At the Market in Chaosity, Odetta would trade the specialty wool she and her sons sheared and carefully dyed from their goats. Even though Bohdan had never traveled outside of the Dry Sea let alone into the thriving metropolis of Chaosity, he was certain his ma’s wool was the finest in the world. He beamed with pride each time she returned with a large sack filled with gold coin from the wealthy Lushlanders and Heartlanders eager to make rugs or blankets or sweaters for their yipping little dogs.
Much to his brother’s dismay, the boys were never allowed to accompany their mother to the city. Bohdan was perfectly content to remain within the safety of their little corner of the middle of nowhere. Everyone knew that getting through the Marshlands, which one had to do in order to reach the Heartlands from nearly anywhere, was a miracle in and of itself. And whenever Bohdan or Cobran would try to talk to their mother about the swampy bog, she would simply smile sadly and say, maybe when you’re older.
Be that as it may, Odetta never failed to return with a gift for her two boys. Iseldian carving knives from the Lushlands or colorful Heartlandian sweets that tasted like something you could only experience in your dreams. Jars of honey from the Flatland meadows beside the Clementine River. But Bohdan’s favorite gift by far was his beloved, tattered copy of The Perilum Tales.
Books were as rare as rain in the Wastelands, and Bohdan had memorized it cover to cover. A collection of fairy tales written about the mighty Perilum, elusive River Bears, stone walls of riddle-reciting toads and the like.
After her latest trip, however, the boys were made to wait until their birthday’s to open the treasures brought back from Chaosity.
And today Bohdan would finally get to open it.
It was Julianuary 28th and Bohdan Felix Dune was officially twelve years old.
Thank you for reading along! Stay tuned for Chapter Two of Bohdan Dune and the Perilum Tales, releasing next Monday!
-Periwinkle