Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

AARON SAFRONOFF – SUNBORN RISING – BENEATH THE FALL – 2016

Enter that world and you might not come back. This world is magic, mesmerizing and haunting. It is another deeper dimension to our 3D universe. We enter some fourth dimension that will lock yourself off from our reality.

First you’ll find out our human time hierarchy, we took so long to invent and develop, is just transmuted into a vertical spatial hierarchy from a deepest Fall to a highest Loft and in between these two many layers and tiers. This is disturbing: the deeper, the older, the more forgotten. Discover what we cannot even remember of our deepest genesis.

Then that change of direction is not enough and the author decides to transmute our cosmic world into a sylvan universe. The Loft is the top layer of a rain forest: the branches and leaves that are at the very top of the tree vegetation where they can be exposed to the sun and sunshine, and the Fall is the deepest imaginable deep reality of this rain forest, the roots, partially aerial and partially subterranean. And each level has its population.

The Loft hosts a diversity of intelligent species, none of which are human by appearance. They are all kinds of fictional animals, from Marsupilamis to all kinds of strange beings you have never seen. But they are intelligent and live in homes dug or built in the superior layer of the forest. They also live in a society that has its rules and customs. In fact you are justified to think this diverse fauna is nothing but the human species who has adapted in its diversity to the sylvan world in which they have been transferred by some cataclysm.

The main two characters are a mother Brace, her daughter Barra and the recollection of their father/husband Gammel, an adventurer in spirit who has disappeared and left behind many notes that Barra discovers and starts reading. Curiosity kills the cat as is well known, in this case it opens the door to many surprises for the pussy cat. This Barra is soon joined by two boys, if we can call them boys since they are “animals.” And that builds a trio, which is the best figure of speech for an adventure. Two is too intimate and four is overcrowded. After all they are the three Musketeers all over again.

Barra discovered in one tentative visit of the lower level known as the Middens that some creeper is growing up the trunks and that some aggressive and extremely numerous insects supposedly accompany the creeper and multiply like flies. Barra tells her mother who tries to blow the whistle but no one really hears, or wants to hear in this society totally frozen in some unchanging tradition.

The society is a feudal very clanic society governed by a council composed of people and representatives that are de facto or de jure but certainly not elected and forced to justify their actions to some electors. In the same way the leader of these Elders is Jarrun, a very aristocratic conservative man who does not like women and hates children. In other words, a blown whistle can only sound like an alarm that brings the cops and the jailers and take the blower into custody preferably in a straight jacket for as long as necessary, as long as it takes the whistle to get icy cold.

In front of this blocked situation Barra and her two boy friends decide to go check under what it looks like and naturally they are attacked by the insects and they cannot cope and they fall in the Fall and find themselves at the level of the subterranean roots. That deeper world must have been inhabited but is not any more and that’s where I am going to part from the story line because the adventure has to be yours and cannot must not be mine.

I am sure you will like that surreal reinvention of human life in such colorful and exotically different garb and dress. Be sure to tie up your topknot securely if you do not want to lose your ribbons in the big chasm, and enjoy that girl Barra who has the longest tail imaginable and uses it all the time to catch up her boy friends. Isn’t that against nature for a girl? Have a good trip and fare thee well, meaning do not do anything evil if possible.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU