It's My Birthday... Here's a Snippet of My Novella

Hey all! Today's my 28th birthday and I'm also doing something equally as exciting. I'm gearing up to do another promotion cycle of a piece of work I'm doing. This time it's a novella (a story around 17,500 - 39,999 words)! Below and in the link is the first 5 pages of this mini book. I had hoped I'd have it finished by this time and printed and in people's hands, but oh yeah. It's better to polish something than have something out just for the sake of having it out. 

So in my calculations I should have this 100% done and printed sometime in August/September. It'll also looking to go the route of Pay What You Want for the digital edition and most likely $5 - $7 for a physical copy (depending on how hefty the word count comes out to be.) 

The story is called (for the time being), "The Exchange of Secrets." It's a fantasy tale in the vain of Neil Gaiman and Patrick Rothfuss. It focuses on a young boy wandering in the forest in search of someone who can answer questions that burns within him... but for a price... 

Look out for it! I'll update when I have more to report. Thank you! 

Also, if you feel inclined, Pay What You Want/Donate @ $Dawritingcods on Cashapp! 

Here's the text below! 

The Exchange of Secrets

Written by Cody Wagner 

Prologue 

“Would you like to know a secret. One that you may tell anyone?” A honeysweet voice asked her son. 

“No, don’t tell! No one can know a secret! Especially everyone!” He said matter of fact, wiping dirt from his small fingers. 

“Not everyone, just anyone you’d like to know what you know. Those important to you. I could tell you, and it’d still be a secret. Because not everyone knows about it.” She said. 

“How do you mean?” He asked. 

“We cannot know everyone. Not everyone will listen to what you have to say. So it’ll still be unknown to others, wouldn’t it?”

The boy pondered for a moment. “Yeah! You’re right,” he exclaimed. “But I’m not sure why you would tell me a secret just to tell a whole flock of folk.” 

Her lips stretched ear to ear, giving way to a warm smile. ‘Flock of folk.’ She wondered where he heard that one. His mother bent down to meet at eye level with the boy. Her knee pressing into the soft earth after pulling weeds from the garden bed. “When I tell you, you get to decide who’s worthy enough of telling. Okay?” 

The boy nodded. “But why tell me now?” 

She leaned in closer. “Because it nearly became a secret to myself. I’ve nearly forgotten it. So, I’d like to tell you so that you may remember for me.” 

“I’ll remember. I swear.” He said. 

She leans even closer to his ear and whispers. Words so softly spoken the boy barely made out what his mother had to say, so he listened more closely. A vague confusion waves across his face, waiting for it to make sense to him. He understands, but doesn’t understand why she would tell him that now. He held his hand close to his heart. 

“Just in case I forget to tell you, or if I don’t get the chance to tell you.” She said also scraping the dirt from her fingernails. He nods. That smile of hers returns and she gets up and heads back to their house. 

It’s a secret that must be known to those close after all. He promised he’d keep it with him always. 

I.

The sound of a funeral dirge swept itself through the empty homes of a village. Her living occupants gathered in the cemetery to say goodbye to the recently departed. The sound came from the voice of a young woman of the same blood singing a song in dedication. It rang with the grief of a tremendous loss, but also with an echo of the life they led before their untimely passing. It was a beautiful song, leaving the audience in tears. The tears were from both the heaviness of realizing the weight of the loss, but also with the overwhelming beauty of celebrating the same life. It was an important task of composing and performing this dirge, she knew. With it, the spirits of the long gone would also gather unseen amongst the living to welcome them to the life beyond this one. She was sure the spirits and her mother would be proud of this song. Of her. The words traveled with the bristling wind:

“Speak - Speak love, or else I shall be lost in the night.

Lost - lost love, guide me back with your light.

Traveled far from here,

Found through your song.”

As she’s laid down silently into the Earth, a boy cries with a fierce passion, breaking that silence with aguish. It was tears from a children for his mother. They ran like the breaking of a dam with grief and for a love that can no longer be placed in the arms of the one that raised him. The same arms that would assure him of a love that the rest of the village didn’t show him. The eyes of his father just stared at the ground where his life’s greatest love now laid. No tears were shed, but a light within him had died along with her. It would be something that he’d keep for the rest of his days like a secret everyone now knows. He would not dare speak of it. His heart couldn’t fathom it. He didn’t console his son as the boy wiped away tears from his red cheeks.

“Days - Days burning down easily like candlelight. 

Sorrow - My sorrow soared an endless flight.

Traveled far from here,

Found through your song.”

The song came to an end with a note held as long as the girl’s lungs could sustain. The crowd then slowly began to disperse to reflect in their comfortable homes. The boy looked on to anyone that would look back. No one did as they walked past the boy. Then he looked to his sister as she too, looked to her brother. He spoke no words but with his eyes beckoned permission from her to leave. Yes, brother. Do what you have to do, her eyes spoke to him. It was all the permission he needed. He couldn’t bare another day in that village, in that home, without any answers to the questions that burned deep within. 

So, he ran. 

He left without a second thought about it. He wasn’t sure if anyone followed him to quell his spirit. He didn’t care to look back to find out. He just let his feet take him where his heart needed to go. It looked for someone deep in the woods that surrounded the village like a cage. The boy heard whispers of someone that may pacify the demons rattling in his heart in his time of sorrow, so he was going to take that chance. Into the woods he went; fullspeed. 

The sound of his ceaseless footsteps soon too died from earshot of his home. 

***

A boy, with his feet toiled and sore, made his way through the dark woods, far from the made path, in pursuit of answers to the questions that fastened themselves tightly around his heart. 

He had left home two sunrises and two sunsets ago, walking toward a keeper of secrets. He, himself wasn’t sure whether or not they actually existed or if they were mere whispers from  superstitious elders back from hence he came. He liked to believe it. In all of it; fables, folklore, myths: Stories that were passed down from mouths of the branches of family trees that seemed largely too fantastical to be true had to have some remnants of the truth to sprout from. 

He had to try. There was no sight toward brighter days anymore. There were many things obstructing that kind of line of sight from recent events. The boy’s candlelight of life was slowly smoldering, but not yet extinguished. He had to find his own way of rekindling what’s been lost. 

Troubles at home made it so that the house wasn’t a home anymore. What is a home to the unwelcomed and to those cast aside but a prisoner in their own hearts? He kept some sort of hope alive in the meantime. May it be in the answers to the questions he seeked, or the warmth of the sun from it rising each morning. Or towards a day where those in his home notice when he’s gone for multiple days at a time. The light from within would not allow for it to be extinguished so easily. 

Experiences left the boy tired and nostalgic for a time that never existed, but not yet calloused like the soles of his feet. Then he saw something rising higher than the stretch of the tree branches. Black smoke. It was contained. Nothing from the like of a wildfire, nor like the accidental burning of homes back in the village. It was from an intent of warmth in survival. Someone was out here in the far reach of the woods, and the boy stumbled upon that secret. He looked on with a hope slowly kindling. 

He gripped the sigil that hung around his neck in a silent prayer and walked forward. There was nothing to go back to at. Not until he found the wisdom he sought.

***

In his near distance, the boy traced the ever-spewing smoke from the chimney attached to a stone house. It was lean as it could possibly needed to be to fit a single occupant in. Too small for a family to grow up in, too large for a lone soul to fill all the empty spaces. 

He walks up along the stone path toward the house of the same stone encasing its exterior. The wood seemed too brittle to knock on without breaking the whole thing. There was no knob to grab onto. So knocked on the door he did. 

Knock. Knock. Knock. 

He stood there waiting for a response. Then came footsteps tapping at a precise pace toward the door. 

“And who might you be?” A voice crept through the silence. 

“Just a boy. With some questions.” He retorted. 

“Questions? What questions do you have that I may answer?” She asked. 

He gathers himself for a moment. Her voice had a tired kindness to it. She had much patience and diligence in the long years since her creaky voice had first begun to spoke. “Do you grant wishes?” He asked. 

“Wishes.” She didn’t question. “What good do you have for wishes, ‘Just a Boy’?”

“I’ve just… been carrying so much hurt. Maybe I would wish to keep that burden off of me.” 

There was a silence as that last string of words left his mouth. Keep that burden off of him… 

The door opened just like her curiosity. Just as well as his. 

The fire cooking lit up to whom he was talking to. He expects the frail woman to be ugly and made crackling with time. An old hag of an evil hellspawn she was not. The boy found a beauty in her. Her hair intertwined like vines. Her skin tough as tree bark. Each wrinkle like a brook flowing back to her moss colored eyes. She wasn’t haggard at all like the cruel villagers described her at all. She was just a reflection of the surrounding environment itself. 

“I do grant wishes. In a certain way. Who cares to ask?” She asked. 

“Just a… just a boy.” He repeated. 

“You’ve said that once already. That can’t be it. I don’t think that’s a name the wind whispered to your mother as she carried you before you were born. May I know your real name? Could you tell me?” 

He recoiled at the meer mention of the word. ‘Mother’. It’s why he came knocking in the first place. 

“I… don’t know.” He unassuredly said. 

She took a step toward him, examining his face, particularly his eyes, closely. “I like to keep things for questions that people may seek an answer. Consider it a payment.” 

He paused. He began to look in his pockets for a coin or two. 

“No, no. I have no use for paper, coins, or any of that, like. I find uses of secrets, favors, in items that take with them a history. The worn and weary tell me stories of an echo of the past that is long gone. I would like things of that nature. So first, tell me a simple secret: Tell me your name. Your real one.” She asked with a slight crack in her diligence. 

The boy found the courage in the back of his throat. It was a step forward. 

“My name is Ewing.” He confessed. 

“Ah, a tender name, it is. A secret for a favor in return it is then, Ewing.” She took a step to the side and beckoned for Ewing to come in. He obliged as the twilight’s chill swept across the back of his neck as it took the daylight with it. He walked inside and gently closed the brittle door behind him. With the closing of the door, darkness approached the door much like the boy had.