March Firsts

Here are just a few of the first sentences I enjoyed this month.

Well. This is harder than I thought it would be.

"And finally," Jamie said as he pushed the door open, "we come to the main event. Your room."

The old stories tell that when the first person woke up on the first morning in the world where this tale takes place, he yawned, stretched, and said to the first thing he saw, "Well, here we are." The man's name was Dwayne and the first thing he saw was a rock. Next to the rock, though, was a woman named Gladys, whom he would learn to get along with very well. In the many ages that followed, that first sentence was taught to children and their children's children and their children's parents' cousins and so on until, quite by accident, all speaking creatures referred to the world around them as Aerwiar.

On the sixth of April, in the year of 1812--precisely two days before her sixteenth birthday--Penelope Featherington fell in love. It was, in a word, thrilling. The world shook. Her heart leaped. The moment was breathtaking. And, she was able to tell herself with some satisfaction, the man in question--one Colin Bridgerton--felt the same way. Oh, not the love part. He certainly didn't fall in love with her in 1812, (and not in 1813, 1814, 1815, or--oh, blast, not in all the years 1816-1822, either, and certainly not in 1823, when he was out of the country the whole time anyway). But his earth shook, his heart leaped, and Penelope knew without a shadow of a doubt that his breath was taken away as well. For a good ten seconds. Falling off a horse tended to do that to a man.

There are three truths I have come to learn in the year since the Dragon War. The first is that both humans and dragons have the capacity to be good or evil.

This is a story about darkness and light, about sorrow and joy, about something lost and something found. This is a story about Love.