Barren the Adventurer

Once upon a time there lived a group of birds. The land they lived on was very narrow; so narrow that hardly two could fit side by side without one falling off the land. Of course this is what they understood to be death. The other strange part of this land was no one could see any further than right in front of their faces. Everything was like a blinding whiteness. As a result, the only faces some ever saw were those of their family and their close friends. Also, since the land wasn’t very wide, you couldn’t walk from one end of the land to the other, so most spent all of their lives on the same segment of the land.

There were a few adventurers who wanted to go to the end of the land. This meant they needed to meet many different birds and pass them to continue their journey, and if they met a bird who didn’t want to be passed, they would have to turn around or fight to the death. Great stories were told of those who made it to the end of the land, but most of those stories ended with the adventurer disappearing.

One day a bird was born whose name was Barren. Barren lived on the far left side of the land. He had one brother and four sisters, but because the land was so narrow, he only ever saw his parents and brother. Barren’s parents were like most birds’ parents. They caught worms that climbed around to the surface of the land as food, they told him not to talk to birds with voices they didn’t recognize, and taught him the best way to live on the land was never to show your face to anyone you didn’t trust and never to pass people as much as you could help it.

When Barren was past of age of learning to catch worms for himself, he became very dissatisfied with his life. He thought there had to be more to life than hopping around the narrow land and only ever seeing two or three other birds. Barren wanted to know if there was something more than the blinding whiteness everyone was accustomed to. And he heard stories from his brother of famous birds, adventurers, who traveled to the end of the land. So one day, Barren decided to become one of the adventurers.

(to be continued...)