A Memory of Kings - Ch. 2

            A wave rose from a dark sea and crashed against the rocks.  The world shimmered and suddenly the rocks became battered wooden gates and the waves boiled with swords and steel, threatening to tear the doors of the city asunder.  The enraged sea curled and broke again but the gates did not crumble.  Instead the sea of spears crashed against a brilliant blue shield and above the sound of the raging ocean she heard a grief-stricken cry.

            “Stand and fall!”

            The waves continued to beat against the blue shield until the world went dark.  She found herself standing in an empty field strewn with bodies standing over the form of an old man wearing a cracked silver crown.  A shadow fell across her and she looked up to see a huge horned form standing over her.  She screamed and the world went dark again with the sound of beating wings.

            Ana awoke with tears streaming down her face, just as she always did.  Opening her eyes she slowly took in the familiar room around her; the thatched walls, the high open windows through which a faint breeze blew in to rustle her long hair, the stones; broken spear points; and fractured arrow tips covering every flat surface.  Perhaps, she thought to herself allowing a wide grin to slowly spread across her face and ease away the night’s terrors, today I will find another hilt. 

            As quietly as she could Ana slid into her plainest clothe dress and tied her long hair behind her.  Briefly she considered putting on her tough-soled shoes she usually wore out in the sands, but quickly chose instead a pair of soft felt moccasins in which she knew she would be able to silently make her way out of the temple.  Tossing a warm hooded tunic over her head she checked the small inside pocket she had sewn on herself to make sure her notebook was in place, and silently slipped out the door.

            “Ana.”  A soft familiar voice called mildly behind her.  Ana froze in mid step.  “Are you going to out to hide in the desert again?”  She could hear him smiling now.

            “What if I am?”  She replied.

            “It doesn’t seem like a very priestly thing to be doing,” the one eyed beggar shrugged with a smile, “especially not on a temple day.”

            “Ugh.”  Ana snorted, “I hate the temple days, all those people climbing up here from the city just to walk by me and climb down again.  It’s not like any of them would stay or come up on any other day.”

            “All but I my lady.”  The beggar smiled and spread his arms in a mock bow.  Ana laughed despite the unpleasant smell that seemed to billow out from his tattered robes.

            “Of course,” she giggled, “my faithful Drenimir, perhaps you could save me this year and fight off my visitors with that.”  She pointed at the chipped and rusted hilt that stuck out from the beggar’s robes.

            “I’m afraid all this relic is good for is garnering pity, without it you would never know I was once a proud young soldier in the blessed army.”  Drenimir grinned, his green eyes flashing in the early morning light, and rapped the rotting scabbard with scarred knuckles.

            The old one-eyed Drenimir had sat outside the entrance to her chamber for as long as Ana could remember, begging for alms to those few pilgrims who made the assent during the warm seasons from the city below and from the throngs that gathered every year for her blessing.  There were several others who stayed in or around the temple, but none as constant as Drenimir.  Many times during the cold seasons when the wind blew over the mountain temple she had sat next his fire just outside her door and listened to his adventures in the blessed army or of his voyage to the Island Sea. 

            “Ana?”  A stern female voice called from where the squat peak of the Temple of Adoration rose precariously in the distance.  Ana’s expression turned instantly from  laughter to dread.

            Drenimir smiled, “Some priestess you are.”  He rose unsteadily to his feet and, giving Ana a fleeting wink, he stepped into the path from the Temple.  “Run Child of Threshold!  Flee your cage towards the wonders of the world!”  He laughed.

            “Out of my way you wretched man!”  She heard the eldest of the temple sisters exclaim, but Ana was already running, and the sound of Drenimir’s laughter and the sister’s protestations soon faded into the distance. 

Read the rest of A Memory of Kings, Ch. 2, here:

A Memory of Kings - Ch. 1

He awoke to darkness so complete he could not tell the difference between opening his eyes and closing them.  The ghostly remnants of his dreams receded quickly into the blackness taking with them a memory of light.  He stood and his head cracked solidly against the rock above him.  His roar of pain startled him, as if he had never heard such a sound before, and, thinking upon this, he realized that he could not remember ever hearing his own voice.  Groping around him he felt the damp stone and began to walk, one halting step after the other.

There was no way to tell how long or how far he walked.  He began by counting the number of times he stumbled and fell to the unforgiving stone, but he soon lost count.  Several times he stopped and wondered if it would not be better to simply lose himself into the darkness, but something compelled him to continue on.  When he tried to focus on this compulsion brief flickers of memories would skirt across his mind, as if trying to break free from some impenetrable fog. 

Eventually he began counting his dreams to keep track of how long he had been in the darkness. . .or at least how long he had been aware of it.  Occasionally the shuffle of his steps against the rock was interrupted by others groping through the dark.  The first time he had heard another voice in the endless night he had began to run towards the sound, joy overwhelming him at the thought of some other soul, any other soul, sharing this eternal blindness.  Then something had gripped his arm, something hairy and dank and the voice had shrieked in terror and fled, crashing blindly into the walls of the caverns until his world was again silent.  After his seventh dream he began to hear the rustle of feathers and a voice that followed him repeating again and again,

            

“There must be more. . .there must be more.”

            

He soon realized it was his voice mumbling, and clenched his teeth tight.  The sound of feathers, however, continued.  He could not remember his name.  He knew he had once had one, had once had a life somewhere. . .that was not here.  Yet when he tried to remember the details faded into the fog leaving but brief flashes of memories like glinting reflections from the falling pieces of a broken glass.  In those glimpses he saw things he did not understand; a king, a lamb, and falling stones.

Read the rest of A Memory of Kings, Chapter 1 here:

Open publication - Free publishing - More mythology

Founder Effect - Ch. 1 (very rough draft)

“What do they mean father?”

They had descended together into the enormous cut in the ground, first by walking downward around a winding gravel track, then by riding one of the hundreds of excavators around the spiraling road that ringed the dig.  Gradually they had descended through layer upon layer of sand that had been packed carefully into the walls and covered with a clear sealant to hold it in place.  An hour after their journey had begun they had arrived at the flat bedrock where the sand finally came to an end.  Looking up from the base of the dig Jon could see a near-perfect square of pale-blue sky, as if he were standing at the bottom of an inverse pyramid.  The flat floor of the dig was a flurry of activity with excavators pulling sand from one side of the dig and transporting it to the other where it was dumped into molds, sprayed with sealant, and set out in the harsh light of Ra’s two suns to dry.  Later, Jon knew, they would be used to continue building the walls of the dig itself.

His father had rushed straight to the newly excavated section of ruins where a central clear square had been unearthed.  At the center of this square, embedded in the rock so that only it’s straight angular lines gave any indication of its presence, was the door.  It was the same dark brown color as the surrounding rock, yet its outline was unmistakable.  It was a hexagon, with two of it’s parallel sides running much longer than the others to form a doorway eight feet tall and four feet wide.

“A gate?  Here?  That’s impossible.”  Professor Emerit, who had worked with his father since the beginning of the dig on Ra had exclaimed.

“And yet here it is, this is unmistakably a Founder artifact.”  His father had replied.

“What do they mean father?” Jon asked, pointing to the odd markings that surrounded the door in all directions, spiraling into the unexcavated sand nearby.

“Most of these are clan markings. . .old clan markings.”  His father whispered breathlessly as he hunched over the etched figures.  “But these here, the ones that spiral out from the gate, these are Founder characters.”

“Gates are always found in space, orbiting stars or planets, and never this small!”  Emerit continued, unable to tear his gaze away from the stone door.

“If the Founders could build a gate in space the size of a small moon they could certainly build one the size of a man.”  His father replied.

“Can you open it?”  Jon asked, his young eyes growing wide with excitement.

“No. . .no one here has an effect strong enough to open a gate that’s been locked, we’ve sent word to Arra and they are sending. . .someone.”

“A prince?”

“The youngest, he is about your age I. . .” His father’s words breathlessly stopped and, as Jon watched, his expression changed suddenly from excitement to incomprehension to terror.

“Jon.” He whispered. Following his gaze Jon slowly looked down at where his hand was resting on a flat rock next to the door’s frame. From beneath the dawdling sand a tiny blue light was blinking silently. His father lunged toward him just as he heard Emerit yell,

“Torian, the door!”

He felt the rock shift beneath him as the door opened, hurtling him into the darkness. A million points of light burst into view, sharpened, and raced by in a blur. Jon felt head his real as his brain desperately tried to make sense of what was happening; he felt a burning cold tear at his skin while feeling first weightless and then nearly crushed, flashes of intense heat blasted through the cold only to retreat just as violent a suddenness. Without pretense a dim light rushed towards him until it encompassed everything he could see. He wasn’t aware of the complete silence of his transit until sounds foreign and familiar began to assault his burning ears as he was flung through the door onto a cold floor.

Jon breathed rapidly, trying to catch his breath. The air felt damp and acrid and was nothing at all like the dry desert air of Ra. Cool beads of sweat formed quickly in the humid air and pooled on the stone floor where the same spiraling characters worked their way out from the center of the room. His eyes felt hot and his vision was blurry but looking around he knew he was in a room, there were walls, strange flickering torches, pillars and statues of strange creatures frozen in the midst of some kind of battle. Jon rubbed his eyes and tried to focus on them; the statues were enormous, standing several feet higher than himself, and depicted long-necked reptilian creatures with brilliantly painted multi-faceted eyes. The statues wore a strange kind of armor, and by it’s color and design Jon immediately distinguished two distinct groups. He tried to move forward to get a better look but his legs crumbled and he collapsed onto the floor with a shout, he reached out to catch himself and grasped a slender scaled arm. Opening his eyes Jon looked into the reptilian face of a statue that, Jon realized, was not a statue at all. All around him he saw the creatures he had originally took to be inanimate move from where they had frozen when he had first burst through the door. Bending their long scaled legs they formed a half-circle around him in an unmistakably familiar gesture; they knelt.

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