Tag: War Torn

Constellations

Getting back out of my house once more.

“You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again.  Only no sky can blind you now.  Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations.”

-Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

The problem is that you think a constellation is a picture.  You see in the Night Sky’s plumage an unknowable design–but merely a design, to be studied for meaning, for intent.  But would you study it for its use?

A pair of points makes a line, and each line is a connection, yes, but also a barrier, a demarcation separating one side from another, a within from a without.  And in the Night Sky, millions of lines, millions of walls become a vast, shining labyrinth, home and prison to Existence’s greatest shame and most inexorable inevitability.

When the Night Sky first dreamed the world into being, he had yet to look upon it.  As he did, the multiplicity of his subconscious vision greeted him: the earth, the forests and fields and seas, the creatures, the first gods and their Magics, and yes, of course, mankind.  But beneath it all, a second greeting, singular, arose from the darkness.  It was Hunger.  It was Lack.  It was Cold.  It was Freedom.  It was Song and Promise and Desire, All That Was Not, All That Should Have Been, All That Might Yet Be.  The humans gave it many names–the Minotaur, the Wendigo, the Voice that whispered and sang in the night–for it hunted and devoured them with a cold and unfathomable tenderness.

To spare the rest of his dream, the Night Sky sealed the darkness in the space between the stars.  Its whispers would not be silenced, and its hunger–the hunger of all creation–would not be sated, but for a time, none could heed its call.  They would look skyward and be saved, struck senseless by the vast array of beauty and light.

The Maze in the Mists

Slight change of pace. This is the introduction for a new setting I’m working on for the Rale universe. Credit to Kelsyn for the original concept.

You have been walking this road for some time now.  It is an unremarkable road, unpaved, trodden uniformly by an infinity of unrecognizable footsteps.  All around you is mist, itself unremarkable for its familiarity–you’ve been living in it for longer than you’ve been walking the road, after all.  It is everywhere in this place: blanketing the fields, suffusing the woods, wrapping the scattered towns between in its damp embrace.  You suppose you can still remember that there was a time without the mist, but the specifics elude you.  All you remember is this:

You were a soldier once.  You and your companions.  You no longer know who you fought, what you fought for, or where, but by the time you stopped you had nightmares.  Bad ones.  The kind that woke you not screaming but frozen, paralyzed by the notion that whatever you had been running from in your sleep had crossed into the waking world.  It was there with you, standing over you, behind and to your left, just out of your peripheral vision, breathing heavy, deafening.  You could feel the rancid condensation of that breath on your forehead as that nameless creature reached down and caressed your hair with dirty fingers and whispered:

“Why would you do that?”

Whether you could answer the query is moot–you can’t anymore.  You never told anyone about the nightmares, save your companions, and you all agreed it wasn’t the sort of story anyone would want to hear.  The war stories, though?  The ones that preceded the nightmares?  Those you traded away gladly for the means to sleep soundly again.

That was the thing.  This place in the mists operated by different rules.  The people here had different wants, a different economy.  When it came time to pay for your meal, your provisions or board, they did not ask for coin.  They asked for a story.  And when you told it to them, it was gone.  It was no longer yours.

Not all of your stories were horrible.  The good memories you traded for fine food, company, and wine.  The solemn ones you traded for fresh clothes or flint.  The everyday occurrences, the uninteresting daily nothings weren’t worth much, but in a pinch you found they bought you attention, an ear to listen as you vented your increasingly formless rage.

You learned ways to make your stories last.  You could tell only a single side of a complex tale, embellish banalities, omit details that you could cling to for a while longer.  Sometimes it worked.  Most often they would see through you, not that they minded.  You were still offering a story of sorts, and it was still payment.  A falsehood was just worth less than a truth, and what you bartered for was measured accordingly.

As time passed, as you walked the road, you grew poorer and poorer, and you remembered less and less.  Sometimes you were able to trade your labor for someone else’s story.  Sometimes your travels and choices and happenstance allowed you to forge your own anew, but too often you found yourself giving away more than you got, and now…well, now you have been walking the road for some time.  You don’t remember the last time you saw anything but the dirt and the mist and the imprints of travelers before you.  But, of course, that could be for a number of reasons.