Folklore (eBook)

Legends & Secrets

Dylan Siunwa (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
400 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
9780001083615 (ISBN)

Infos

Maina tries desperately to navigate his half-dead, half-alive predicament of an existence, all while still fighting off his darkest demons until an unforeseen organization seeks him out to help rectify a souring precursor for war amongst the various factions of supernatural beings that occupy the strange city of Sundari. But while he doesn't call them friends, but necessary allies, he and they, must eventually hunt down the severed pieces of a puzzle to stop a crazed extremist from threatening the lives of millions of people.

A gruelling tale loaded with betrayal, angst and suspense that will leave you teetering at the end of each chapter.

Textauszug

Sura ya 1

It was on a mid-January afternoon that Maina found himself by the Buxton Medical College school pharmacy again. And was usual to him, he sought to purchase a box of oxycodone across the counter though inadvisable, with him being well aware such a drug couldn’t be bought just anywhere more so at your local pharmacy. You see he had struck a friendship, though blatantly opportunistic he did make clear, with Faraji, who was the local boy, say man: Who worked for the owner of the pharmacy herself. But since the owner rarely saw use of showing up to manage her own microbusiness, she just taught Faraji the basics: which drugs were most commonly purchased and for what, the arrangement of the drugs on the shelves and instructions for dosage. Now it wasn’t like Faraji had any medical or pharmaceutical knowledge, no, he was just some brainless vagabond, intelligent in his own way but completely being manipulated by the pharmacy’s owner for low wages, some perceived. And why, in the first place, did Maina need such a lucrative painkiller that was used to practically treat cancer patients?

Maina had been alive for more than two centuries, though he didn’t really consider such living: more like surviving. And in those two hundred years he sought means to ease his apparent immortality; drugs. There were a couple of reasons as to why he took them as with anyone. No one really just stumbles upon drug and substance abuse just for the sake of it. Perhaps escaping depression, perhaps enjoying the momentary high in order to forget life’s troubles and problems. Maina’s cause and reason for his obvious addiction was her: Bei. They had been together for literally decades, two supernaturals in a natural world living as though they were made for each other; as though they were made to be together forever. And when she died in 82’, at the hands of Al-Maawy, who killed her in the name of defending the integrity and sovereignty of the Sundarian witch clan of Ajab, Maina just broke down. He had lost his tether. The only girl who kept his body, his soul, at bay, in this world, from drifting into the next. But it wasn’t as if it simply could. He had survived two centuries without dying, and now that his intended actually did, he had nothing to draw his attention away from the constant bodily pain he experienced from the very day he became a supernatural. Maina was a jini. One of his kind. Entirely rarely yet, for some said, and it was rumoured that majini were made or emerged at most once every thousand or so years. A jini, according to Sundarian folklore, was an individual who existed both as a ghost and as a human being, such that they were both halves of two worlds in one whole. Jini had the ability to exist immaterially in a physical world. Rumour had it they manipulated psyches and minds for whatsoever reasons they had, whatever their intentions may have been. But this apparent state of being both dead and living was not so godly-intended. Jini had to endure immense constant pain for their entirety of their lives (and this was entirely long for what was dead could not die), because their bodies had to withstand their apparent existence in the limbo between life and death. Were their bodies alive, were they ghosts? Apparently, even the universe couldn’t decide. It just allowed them exist as they are. In pain. Forever.

No one really knew how to precisely kill a jini. And if there was anyone with such crucial information, Maina would have ended his own miserable life ages ago. After Bei’s death, he didn’t need life, he needed the peaceful unknown void of death. He wanted to be with her. But after multiple attempts at his own life: ingesting poison, bleeding to death, motor vehicle accident, bullet to the head; he got pretty appalled with his inadequate state of everlasting life. He drank poison, died but woke up a measly hours later. He slit his wrists in a bath tub, died and awoke yet later. He even walked away from a head-on-collision accident, he once guiltily caused for his dire need of eternal sleep, unscathed but bruised insignificantly. It was as though an appropriate way to die wasn’t yet invented for him. And he was in a dilemma, stuck between a rock and a hard place, for if he did not die as he slept, he’d wake to that same constant pain that Bei had once made him forget. A pain of indecision. A pain of doubt on whether one should be living or dead. The pain of lack of choice.

And it was true, Maina did not really choose his current state of being. He did not choose to fall in love with a famous witch only to lose her decades later, all in the name of safety for the majority. He did not choose to drift back into pain soon afterwards. And if it was anyone else (probably not imbued with the power of the paranormal) such addiction to oxycodone would have killed them in a matter of years. But with Maina, he had been addicted for decades. And likewise, he presumed his immunity to death aligned as well with overdose-induced means, so he gave up. He became unwilling to live. Now it was a bit of an oxymoronic paradox being unwilling to live. First of all, he couldn’t really kill himself no matter how much he tried. However, he realized, though rather a while long later, that Bei, even in the afterlife, wouldn’t want him to spend the rest of eternity in desperate search of his own mortality. She would have wanted him to be better, do better, live better. Even so, reluctantly.

Faraji spoke across the counter into the room that was only populated by Maina.

“Look, I managed to sneak off a couple of sachets off the shelf but I couldn’t get a whole box off without Miss Amondi noticing. I guess that will do well enough for now”

Faraji never really asked Maina what he was using the oxycodone for, he just provided it. At an affordable price of course. Obviously, with the diminutive amount of money he was being paid by Miss Amondi, one wasn’t shocked at what he did behind the books. Although it would be a lie to say he wasn’t the least bit curious. Faraji was the dictionary definition of curiosity in Buxton Medical College. Every once in a while, as the students learnt in class he zipped up and about so he learned what they learned. Moreover, Faraji actually loved to gossip. He loved the mini-drama that ensued on a daily basis at the college. He loved hearing about relationship squabbles and feuds. He loved stories with conflict and dilemma. And truth be told, Buxton Medical College had had enough to its fill in such. So, in an effort to build rapport with his ‘customer-in-confidence’, Faraji tried to get as much information about Maina’s life as he possibly could from him, and his schoolmates. The college was a small one just off the junction that birthed the Malindi highway through the Malu Bridge. Buxton Medical College was a humble one, of not more than 40 acres of hard dry bare land. Its buildings weren’t storied, with all the classrooms and laboratories at ground level. It had a library, but many referred to it in reference to its size as a practical corridor. The administration block was not an impressive one, for it also was not storied, with all its offices, independent of hierarchy of position, at the ground level. And it was also crumped. Too crumped, some students had to add.

It was in this crumped environment that a close-knit society of students, teachers, subordinate and ‘insubordinate’ staff was formed. So, it came as no surprise the speed with which a rumour started by the most ambitious girl in school, about the most attractive girl in school, spread to reach the mind of someone as insignificant as the school’s watchman himself. BMC was small, and so was the society that resided within it. After all, fires spread best in a small room.

Faraji tried switching the subject to matters more comprehensive. So, he asked,

“Is what people are saying about you and Toti true? I’m just curious.”

“And what, are people saying about me and Toti!”

Now Maina replied, somewhat sluggishly unbothered, to this question, because well that simply was his demeanour. Faraji presumed it was his addiction to oxycodone that made him so, but he couldn’t be absolutely sure, he had met worse addicts with livelier faces. Moreover, Maina really didn’t care what people said behind his back. He had gotten used to spite and despise for years, what would a couple of prissy, little, spoilt college kids say that could possibly hurt or enrage him, plus he was aware as to what Faraji was referring. And actually, he wasn’t really amused by it. Mayhap, he didn’t even care about it. Toti was apparently, the most attractive girl in BMC, or at least in Maina’s year. She was a short, caramel-skinned, wide-eyed, rather quite smart type of girl. And this among others, was cause for alarm or strict reason to Maina and practically all the other gossipers at campus. For everyone wondered, even Maina, why such a gem of a woman was with the dullest, dimmest personality for miles. And yes, at that moment Toti and Maina were together, or less accurately, they were dating. It had only been going on for a couple of weeks after Toti’s cataclysmic termination of her and her ex’s, Makiri’s, relationship. And when it ended, the waves of gossip concerning the reasons for its termination that zoomed and swept through the grounds were so vast in multiple degrees: with one reason being that perhaps he cheated, most preferably she did; it was a mutual breakup; she had eyes elsewhere. As Toti landed upon Maina as her eventual rebound, some said, the most latter reason came to realism. It became more realistic, and less yet. Why, because to the entire multitude of people, they wondered, even Maina did, why on Earth would such an attractive vivacious girl...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 20.10.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch
• ISBN-13: 9780001083615 / 9780001083615