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The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr
by George R.R. Martin
Category: Fantasy
Description: Tired and bloody from her battle with the Seven, Sharra stumbles through the gate onto a pristine planet, the kingdom and prison of a solitary singer doomed to await Sharra's arrival...
eBook Publisher: Electricstory.com, 1976 Fantastic Stories
eBookwise Release Date: November 2005
 
23 Reader Ratings:
Available eBook Formats: OEBFF Format (IMP) [33 KB]
Words: 7250
Reading time: 20-29 min.
George R. R. Martin's description of Sharra is a love song best read with a goblet of wine. First published in 1976, 'The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr' is an epic, a mystical tale full of much yearning. It begins in a valley caught in twilight when Sharri slips from one world, wounded and blood-stained. She kneels by a rocky stream where murky green water runs swift; crawls to an exhausted sleep under a dour tree. Here, in a land of suncycles, a wistful man of charcoal hair--a king, a god with a fog voice whose music is an infinity of beauty and mournful mists of a faraway horizon that shimmers and colours air--carries her to his castle where the lives of two people: one imprisoned in a world, the other a wanderer between worlds--indelibly touch. The writing is vivid as night, its clarity sharp and honest. I have a foible of steering clear of rave reviews, five star ratings and media hype; sometimes gems hide in the unnoticed. Classed as fantasy, this story of immense wealth is bound to slip the majority of mainstream lovers who would, otherwise, have clawed for it on knees and tears. If any one such reader stumbles upon this review, race. Race hard for this eShort. -Eugen Bacon, Fictionwise Recommender
There is a girl who goes between the worlds. She is grey-eyed and pale of skin, or so the story goes, and her hair is a coal-black waterfall with half-seen hints of red. She wears about her brow a circlet of burnished metal, a dark crown that holds her hair in place and sometimes puts shadows in her eyes. Her name is Sharra; she knows the gates. The beginning of her story is lost to us, with the memory of the world from which she sprang. The end? The end is not yet, and when it comes we shall not know it. We have only the middle, or rather a piece of that middle, the smallest part of the legend, a mere fragment of the quest. A small tale within the greater, of one world where Sharra paused, and of the lonely singer Laren Dorr and how they briefly touched.
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