The Plague Diaries: Keeper of Tales Trilogy: Book Three (3) (The Keeper of Tales Trilogy) - Hardcover

Ronlyn Domingue is the author of The Chronicle of Secret Riven, The Mapmaker’s War, and The Mercy of Thin Air, which was published in ten languages. Her essays and short stories have appeared in several print and online publications, including New England Review, Shambhala Sun, and The Nervous Breakdown. Connect with her on RonlynDomingue.com, Facebook, and Twitter.

The Plague Diaries Prologue

FATE IS A LINE FREE will twists into a spiral. A path fractured into forks that lead to the same place. A snake that bites its own tail. The beginning knows its end.

This is the paradox: Free will slips among the twists of fate. Crosses the valley, scales the mountain, enters the cave. Finds a new way through fixed space. The end remembers where it began.

When I was a child, I knew—believed—none of this.

On a summer morning, weeks before I turned eighteen, a pigeon, a dove, and a sparrow summoned me to visit an estranged friend. I went to her cottage in the woods west of town. There, Old Woman revealed the symbol carved in stone at her hearth. She knew I’d once dreamed of this symbol but had long concealed its presence in her home from me. Then, she said it was known “the man Fewmany” was buying land where other stones lay, but not the reason why. She spoke of the missing arcane manuscript entrusted to my late mother, who was meant to decipher the text but didn’t. Old Woman told me, “You are here to shift a balance, one with the potential to deepen our darkness or bear forth a hidden light.”

Both were my fate, the darkness and the light, and the one I chose, a matter of free will.

I thought I had a choice to accept neither. I wanted no part of a prophecy, although my blood and bones knew it to be true. Foolish, because I’d read enough myth, lore, and fairy tales to know when one receives a call—hold a candle to a sleeping monster lover, search the world for a lost daughter, take a basket to Grandmother’s house, spin straw into gold—one must heed it. That is fate. How one responds, that is free will.

So, descendants and survivors, here told is what happened to me, once as innocent as the girls in the tales I loved, and how it came to pass that I released the Plague of Silences.