She and He: Begin to Live - A Fantasy Series - Book One

By S.D. Gripton and Sally Dillon-Snape

Twins She and He have been held prisoner since birth, their mother was the result of terrible assault, the twins being the result, the boy alabaster white and white haired, the girl dark, dark haired, He has been taught to fight, She taught to cook, to dance, all skills adding to their skills when they will be sold at fourteen. Their new owner can name them. In their single room, from where they are escorted daily, for learning purposes, they practice and use a stolen spoon to hack away at their single, wooden window. Three days short of their birthday, they manage to open the window, discovering the weather is stormy, with torrential rain. They climb out onto the roof and slide away, sliding up and down rooftops, soaked to their skin, wearing only knee-length shorts, chased by Hunter Hawks and BisDarKs; a terrible, awful mixture of robot and human; that hunt down runaways. During the storm the two finally come to the end of rooftops, drop from an eighty-storey building by using the balconies and discover the Tunnels, where miscreants and runaways hide. In the first Tunnel, He finds a sword, taking if from a thief. The sword, unknowingly, is Fearless, a legendary sword with only one known previous owner, Sheellaab, a peace-loving witch. When he takes a grip of the sword He has an image of the witch and following millenia, the sword has another owner, He. In the Tunnels, She and He discover monsters, thugs, thieves, poverty, and a badly-dressed population. She also finds a female friend, her first, Myandra who leads them out of the Tunnels to a long beach where, when they step into the sea, they are kidapped by merfolk and taken down to Lantris, the Undersea city. There, they meet Ser Greeth, Leader of merfolk, who promises to be an ally if they ever need one. Following the meeting, She and He are returned to land, enter the city and discover soldiers with future weapons, cruel Masters of many children such as themselves and the city, Kyrkwyll, is a city in the sky. A whole city, the surrounding areas, forest, seas and streets and Tunnels all held in the sky by majic. The magician is a witch named Kancrik. Days pass and She and He become more involved in the happenings of the city, making enemies everywhere they go, having to use the skills taught to them by their Master, learning to be a team and protecing Myandra all at the same time. Fearless is not only a sword, it possesses all the magic of the Land, to be used for good and peace and that is the mission of She and He. To this end, the novel ends with the three of them, Myandra included, leaping from the edge of the city to the All Below...to be continued

• Language: English
• Publisher: S.D. Gripton
• Release date: Oct 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215102015

S.D. Gripton

S.D. Gripton novels and real crime books are written by Dennis Snape, who is married to Sally who originate from North Wales and Manchester respectively and who met 18 years ago. I work very hard to make a reading experience a good one, with good plots and earthy language. I enjoy writing and hope readers enjoy what I have written. I thank everyone who has ever looked at at one of my books.

Book preview

She And He

Begin To Live

A Fantasy Series

Book One

By

S.D. Gripton & Sally Dillon-Snape

Copyright © Sally Dillon-Snape & Dennis Snape (2023)

The moral right of the authors is hereby asserted in accordance with The Copyright Act 1988

All characters and events in this publication other than those of fact and historical significance available in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons living and dead is purely coincidental

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher

Cover by Snape

Part One

The Sky City Of Kyrkwyll

Chapter One

He

Rooftops

It was no bloody fun, let me tell you, when you were three days short of your fourteenth-birthday, to be running barefoot and barely dressed across the many differently, and-steeply angled, blue-tiled rooftops of the supposedly sleeping city of Kyrkwyll, in the dark, when it was pouring with rain.

You probably think me uncouth for my coarse language but, at the moment, we, my sister and I, we don’t bloody care about what your opinion might be of our language. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude; especially in light of the fact that I may need you in the future, as I know you would love to help, but you’re there and we’re here, on the bloody rooftops, in the teeming rain.

We were running and crawling, sliding up and down severely pointy rooftops, tumbling down almost vertical sides, reaching out, hanging on to whatever we could hang on to for grip or safety.

I didn’t know about her, my idiotic sister, but my heart was in my mouth every eye-blink of every moment with feelings of fear. I felt as though I’d left my stomach back in the room from which we’d escaped. I was terrified of falling because it would lead, almost certainly, to my demise. If I survived the fall, there would be certain pain and torture; security would surely be trailing after us anytime now.

And climbing rooftops in the dark, in the rain, or otherwise, was not even included in my plan for life.

It was She’s idea.

Let’s bloody go, she’d said; her exact words.

She could be uncouth, too.

Let’s get out of here while we can, she’d said.

It was the very first time we’d ever been able to force open a window, high up, where we were housed and held behind thick, stone walls and metal-studded dark-brown doors. We knew it was high because when She was required to work in the kitchens or I was needed to train on the parade-ground, we were escorted by leather-clad, helmeted soldiers down six long sets of stairways, wide, with intricately carved dark-wood banisters along the long-drop side, high walls on the other with no paintings or decoration of any kind, all the way down.

When we finally wrenched the bloody window open, heavy rain poured in. taking us by some damned surprise. We never heard any sounds in our room, never, not from the out or the in-side. When we looked out and down from the open window for the first time, we discovered it was very bloody high indeed, terrifyingly high; a straight fall to swirling mist below, and who knew what lay beneath that, only more death.

To be perfectly honest with you; you being a friend of both my sister’s and mine; I didn’t want to go. My future was already planned and I didn’t mind it, but She bloody insisted, showing me how to get out, pulling herself up into the window frame, scrambling onto the window-ledge, balancing first, standing on tippy-toe, leaning out and up, holding the top of the frame with her left hand, my stomach flipping, turning, my heart pounding, her head already higher than the window, stretching up with her right hand, no sign of fear in her; none at bloody all, not a single tremor or a moment of hesitation in her body until, releasing her grip with her left hand, she reached up with that one, too; and, with a flick of her long bare-footed legs, she was gone from my view.

Luckily, she disappeared in an upward direction; not down.

Bloody buggering bastard, I thought!

Just because she was three-minutes older than me, she thought she had the right of life and death over me and, as it turned out, she was right. I ate my fear-filled heavy-breathing and gasping, pushed aside my drooping heart, dragged what courage I could find at the bottom of my dirty feet up to my chest, stepped out of the window onto the ledge, wobbled, leaned out, did not look down, looked up only, saw her staring down at me from the edge of a roof, water dripping from her nose and chin, hair almost flat against her head; nobody wanting her when she looked like that. Somebody would want her eventually though; when she was dry and prettified, that was her fate; she would be wanted by many, to be used and abused. She would spend so many hours on her back she would become fused with the straw mattresses upon which she lay.

That was her fate.

I knew it.

She knew it.

Which was why she climbed out of the window in the first place.

To change her fates.

She reached down for me, extending her right hand, I took it for balance and confidence only, scrambled out and up in one movement, joined her on the roof, lying breathlessly next to her.

‘Come on,’ She hissed through the noise of the pounding rain and off she went, sliding down one roof after another, climbing the peaks with her usual grace and agility, using her tiny feet to traverse the narrowest of edges, moving silently across the city, me following.

We had lived in this city all our lives.

I say lived.

We hadn’t lived in it at all.

We had never been residents.

Only prisoners.

We had been caged in the room out of which we had just escaped for all our, almost-fourteen, years, released from it only to attend learning sessions in the room next to it; to train on the parade ground; me; or work in the kitchens; She.

Throughout our lives we’d only ever met teachers, only spoken to kitchen-staff and those training or teaching me the parade-ground. We had no friends, we barely knew what a friend was, we knew nobody our own age; father owned us, that was that.

And we’d only met him on thirteen occasions; that was every birthday we’d ever had. He would appear in the room in his leather armour, his helmet beneath his left arm, a muscled old man who never seemed to change over the years. He’d never spoken to us, just received reports about us, he simply nodded his head, smiled his ugly smile and departed. I suppose we would have met him again on our fourteenth, but we were no longer his property, we were free.

I laughed at the thought.

Free?

We were not free at all.

We would be hunted down anytime now and executed; father could do nothing else with us; we were runners and runners were worthless. All those years of care and education wasted. I didn’t suppose we were the first of our age to argue with grown-ups about plans for our lives, but not all would be killed. We would be killed without even discovering who we were.

We didn’t have names.

She was She and I was He.

This was the very first time we’d been out and about in the bloody city; almost fourteen; on the bloody rooftops in the pouring teeming rain. We knew not where we were in relation to other places or where we were going; we only knew the name of the city because we had been taught it during our learning lessons. We were simply moving away from the room in which we’d lived.

The city was called Kyrkwyll; it was the Capital of All Below and sailed in the sky.

That was the teaching we had and, like you; because I know you’re bloody clever. you can read for a start, that must make you cleverer than almost the whole population; we didn’t know how a city could sail in the sky.

At least we knew what sky was, though She had only viewed it through windows from the kitchens in which she had toiled, I had seen it from the parade-ground on those brief occasions when I had the chance of a glance upwards, during those times when a weapon was not aimed at my heart. It was an occupational hazard on the parade-ground, having a weapon aimed at your heart.

And Kyrkwyll ruled All Below.

We were never taught any further details. We had no idea what All Below meant or to what it referred. We did not know how large Kyrkwyll was, how many people resided in it; what kind of people they were, what government it had, if any; we had knowledge of nothing of that, nothing of anything, just the name and the fact that it sailed in the sky, which had to be a load of bloody bollocks.

And the All Below?

Collectively, we had no idea.

As She and I were being taught, we were reminded, often, that being educated was a rare and wonderful thing, we were constantly told how absolutely privileged we were. The teachers, of course, were appointed by father-owner, so we assumed that almost everything good they said about learning was bloody bollocks.

We did not understand what All Below meant or was, if it was anything at all. We knew nothing other than what we learned or had overheard listening to conversations through half-closed doors or through holes in walls. We believed we knew it was the Land beneath the Capital city; which was the largest city in the world; one-third of the whole population living in it, so we’d been taught, the rest of it being pretty bloody empty, obviously. Somewhere to hide, She said.

The All Below; perfect for escaped prisoners.

Which is what we now were.

We had never committed any crime but simply by escaping we had demeaned father-owner, we had cast aside his cloak of superiority and power, we had cut him off, if not at his knees, then at least at his toes. We were still classified as children for another three days and we had outwitted him; him; one of the twenty richest and most powerful people in the city; him; the bastard of the house in which we were kept.

We’d heard residents of the house whispering how scared of him they were, how terrible were the punishments inflicted on those who disobeyed his orders or failed to complete them in a timely fashion or style. We felt the tremors of deep-rooted fear, the shaking of bones beneath the skin of the wearer. When we stated he was a bastard of Johalian standards, we were more than correct.

That’s what She said, anyway.

And I was not being bloody funny or arsy by not revealing our names.

We didn’t have any; we never had names; She has always been She and I have always been He; short and sweet; end of bloody story.

We were never given names because father-owner; who is the bastard of Johalian standards, though we have only ever heard of Johalia through teaching and at holes in walls; we have done a lot of listening at holes in walls; is one of the twenty richest people in the city of Kyrkwyll, which probably means in the whole wide Land, including All Below; never bothered.

About fifteen-years-ago; as we understand it; he purchased a pretty seventh-wife as a spare. She was someone who was to be kept pure so he could ask the very best price for her if he decided to sell her later. once she’d been trained to cook and clean and hold conversations, when she knew how to make a bed, had watched how activity was conducted therein, so that she would know what to do when it was her turn. One afternoon, soon after her arrival, whilst out shopping with the other, mostly jealous, six, she was attacked by a gang of ugly-minded, violent ne’er-do-goods, encouraged, of course, by the tittering smirking six. They all understood the consequences of the gang’s activities. When she was returned to father in her battered and bleeding state, clothing ripped and torn to shreds, father was most angry. Not at the gang who had attacked her, not at his other six wives for encouraging the attack, but at her, his seventh wife. He invited her family to kill her, as was his legal right. It was not so much an invite, that was just words; words can be very clever; you know; clever one out there, taking no part in our story yet, but you just wait, we will pull you in; they can mean one thing but mean another, too.

It was not an invitation; it was mostly an order from a very powerful being to a family that was less powerful. It was father’s right under law, to ask her family to kill her because she had been unfaithful to him; she was despoiled and useless to him; he had wasted money on purchasing her. Being an innocent who was attacked by a ruthless gang who had been encouraged by his other wives, didn’t count, apparently.

It was her family’s right to challenge my father’s request that was not a request and, as their appeal slid excessively slowly through the legal systems, and before a date for her execution could be set, it was discovered she was pregnant.

Father-owner was fine with that.

In place of a pure wife, he would have a pure child. He could demand the wife’s parents pay for the child’s upbringing and he would recoup the money he paid for his seventh by selling the child.

He could wait for his wife to be killed.

Her family would have to pay for her upkeep, too, and any child or children born to her, up to the age of fourteen, when he could legally sell them.

The children turned out to be my sister and me. Father-owner would keep us in his huge house; our upkeep being paid for by my mother’s family; until we reached the age of fourteen, when we could legally be sold to the highest bidder, or to someone father liked, a friend who would be helpful to him in later life.

***

Escape

Mother, of course, once she recovered from the birth of twins was collected by her family, given a fine meal and killed in father’s choice of death. We never learned her name. We’d never been informed of what death that was, but going by his reputation, it would not have been instant.

I said he was a bastard, did I not?

And because he did not recognise us as family; we lived with him, but were provided for by mother’s family; he kept us locked in a room and would not give us names because, once again, that was his prerogative. He decided to leave our naming to the people who purchased us at the age of fourteen.

She and He were what we were and what we are.

And because mother was attacked by a gang of ruffians and thugs, probably full of drink or drugs or both, who were of several different