Sunset on Vuori

"" *A very curious tale is told of that sunset. Of how these young explorers saw it on a Rainy day filled with Dark skies. Piercing sunlight beyond clouded horizons. Unreal, yet so much Real in its own unreality. The End of the Rains, they called it.*

I wanted to see the End of the Rains.  *""*

Sunset On Vuori is the fourth story in The Vuori Chronicles series, written during springtime in 2018. While initially scheduled to be an individual story, it was chosen to be the first of the 8 additional Vuori Tales to be added to the trilogy of the Mountain Chronicles. A monumental shift from earlier story writing, Sunset on Vuori takes on a more kid-friendly, fairy-tale like narrative depicting the adventures of a little fox on the Lower Tops of Vuori, and marks the introduction of the Fox as the POV animal for many of the Chronicles to follow.

*Word Count*: 1433

*Preceded By* : The Ends of Vuori

*Succeeded By* : Vuori: Tale of the Shadow Slope

## Release

The story was released by Vuorior James Kingston in April, 2018 and is marked IV in The Vuori Chronicles. With the weather opening up and the advent of the Evening Winds carrying the elusive Springtime Breezes very much known to Vuoriors, Kingston chose to further explore the Vuori Tales, in honor of all the other locations, stories of which remained to be written.

## Plot

Sunset on Vuori follows the inner thoughts and adventures of a young fox, apparently a member of a Reynard tribe residing in the top of Zacharitsa, next to the Final Antennae. The curious nature of the young fox leads it to paths way lower than the allowed limits of the Fox Elders, including The Monastere, the First Antenna and the bypaths of the Narrow Road.

While rushing to see the elusive top Where Partridges Gather, the fox is reminiscent of old tales of a band of humans who reached the top amidst a blaze of sunset through a sky burdened with clouds. It is just one of the many references in the Chronicles series to the End of the Rains, the infamous Sunday trip back in April 2014 where Vuoriors conquered the Rainy Skies and reached the Partridge Top in tune with the coming Sunset.

Unfortunately, the fox treads too low in the brushwood of these tops, and is found by illegal hunters who shoot and kill it. The story concludes with an account of the fox's final moments and its admiration for the stars glowing in the moonlit night.

## Style

Sunset on Vuori belongs to the first type of storytelling, told from the POV of a fox, with a narrational tone and following personal elements. It is a masterful craft of plot mixed with airy, picturesque descriptions of the locations included in the story, and introduces the main theme running along the rest of the Chronicles, *narration through imagery*. It is a technique that allows author James Kingston to explicitly draw the picture of all discovered locations in a narrative frame, which rids the story of tedious, impersonal recounting and places it in context.

Like plenty other stories from the Chronicles, it is unknown whether the rather sad conclusion of the tale and its descriptions serve another way of storytelling, or are an attempt at injecting the narrative with a hint of poetic elements. What can certainly be deduced is that these stories all contribute to The Vuori Chronicles' image as a lyrical ode to the beauty and glories of the Poikilo Oros.