Eliza's Fancy (A Faery Romance Part One)

By Zachary Harper

When Eliza wanders into an enchanted forest, she sees amidst the trees a Black Knight who steals her heart before riding off into the unknown distance. Pulled by this sudden love, she sets out to find him once again. Along the way, she meets fantastic friends and faces formidable foes in an adventure that delves into both the life-giving power and the dark-sided danger of love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zachary Harper
• Release date: Feb 24, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458071170

Zachary Harper

Zachary Harper attended the University of Iowa, receiving degrees in Classical Chinese and Linguistics. Having studied Greek, Hebrew, and Chinese, he immersed himself in the faery tales and folk lore that fired the imaginations of the great early writers and served as the foundation of literature for thousands of years. Now he, too, draws from the well of the muses, writing parables and fables meant to both educate and entertain, hoping for nothing more than to inspire conversation on the ideas too complex to fit into anything other than simple stories.

Book preview

Eliza's Fancy

a faery romance

Part One

Zachary Harper

Published by Zachary Harper

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Zachary Harper

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Cover art by Fifi Albatche

To Eliza,

May you find the love you have gone so long without.

To My Mother,

Thank you for teaching me all that love is truly about.

On Poetry

Dearest Reader,

There was once a time in history when poetry filled so many vast and endless pages of books that one couldn't step into a family library without the very ink singing in meter and stomping in beat. But those days have long faded, and the rhythm of the song-stories is no longer easy to distinguish, as our ears have grown accustomed to the crashing marches and brass pitches of the ever forward-moving novel. The average book talks, whispers, and occasionally gives a nearly unidentifiable yelp that startles you into confusion, but it rarely flutters its voice in sweet-spun melody. Even modern poetry has exchanged form for freedom, and thus lost that which made it poetry in the first place while still grasping pointlessly on to the word whose meaning it has rejected. Yet because both the novel and the modern poem can be done with such outstanding talent and gripping emotion, they have often brought with them a deriding sneer towards the very literature that paved the way for their rise. For the very first stories that shook the artistic world were poems, set to song, and accompanied with a tapping foot. And when one loses the ability to read music, it seems like a droll mess instead of the framework for a symphony.

It has been to many peoples surprise when I explain that the book herein is written with some semblance of meter, and that I try and use rhythm as a musician would use it. There are verses, choruses, bridges, introductions, codas, and every other structural support found in music both on the radio and in the concert hall. And while I make no assurance that such things are written particularly well or sung with a particularly smooth tone, they are nonetheless composed with a particularly meticulous plan: to make the poetry as natural as possible to a completely untrained reader.

It is my hope, and here is where all criticism of my form should rest, that the beat will flow as naturally as speech while still imparting that sense of structure. To those of you who have not touched