She's Been Waiting Three Thousand Years to Tell This Story

 I have been writing Tuptin Anna Dunez for a long time. Long enough that she feels less like a character I invented and more like someone I've been slowly introducing myself to, one scene at a time. She is old. She is sharp. She has lived through things I am still figuring out how to write. And if I'm being honest — she is more me than almost anyone else in the Dragon World universe.

Which is exactly why sending her out into the world this week felt like standing at the edge of something very high and looking down.

The Chronicles of Draignatur is a podcast. Anna's podcast. She is the narrator, the storyteller, the oral historian of a world that has existed in my head for years and on my pages for nearly as long. And as of next Monday, she will be in your ears.

The idea didn't come from nowhere. My children and grandchildren have spent many years at Renaissance fairs, and I've watched more than a few storytellers work a crowd. I love them. I love the whole concept — the way a good storyteller can take a restless mob of sticky-faced children and flower-crowned teenagers and collapse them all into silence with nothing but timing and the right word. We don't get to Renaissance fairs as often as I'd like — California holds them in the hot months, and hot months in California are not for the faint of heart. But at the last one here in Visalia, something clicked. I watched a storyteller on a low wooden stage, and I thought: that's Anna. Not that she wasn't already a storyteller in my head — she always was. But that afternoon I understood she was an oral historian. Someone who had been there. Someone who remembered. Someone who could look a child in the eye and say "every word" and mean it across three thousand years.

I recorded the first episode this week. I sat down with my microphone, my script, my sound cues, and approximately one thousand second thoughts, and I did it. My voice. Anna's words. Cula breathing warm air at sticky-faced children in the front row of a Renaissance fair stage. All of it, out loud, for real.

I won't pretend I wasn't terrified. There is something about your own voice that is different from your words on a page. Words on a page have distance. A voice is just — there. Immediate. Yours. And Anna's voice, when I finally found it, turned out to sound a lot like mine, which I suppose I should have expected and somehow didn't.

The first episode takes place at a Renaissance fair, on a low wooden stage draped in gold and violet, where Anna sits in a carved chair with Cula half-coiled behind her and a crowd of children staking out the best spots in the front row. There is a syrup-faced boy who learns the hard way that sleeping dragons absolutely do notice children. A toddler gnaws a lemon ice. There are cats. There is always Cula, ancient and unamused and present for every single story Anna has ever told in three thousand years.

And there is Anna, leaning forward in her chair, scanning the crowd, waiting for the exact right moment to begin.

"Once upon a time," she says, "when I was a very little girl —"

And then she stops. Because that, she tells them, is a tale for another night.

I have so many more stories in my head. Anna has been waiting a long time to tell them. Episode 1 of Chronicles of Draignatur drops Monday, August 31st on PodBean. If you want to step into the world before then — or go deeper after — the books and all the lore are waiting for you right here.

Keep your eyes on the skies. And don't touch a sleeping dragon. 🐉

🎙️ Listen to Chronicles of Draignatur on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/6h1SklM43D0S0r1nd6bwYn