The Book was Better

Woof. Been a while.

Besides the world being on fire and plugging away on the next great American novel, I realized I’ve really stressed the “occasionally” part of my author bio (“…plus a blog that he occasionally updates at” yatta yatta) partially because I haven’t really had anything to say. Nothing especially positive, insightful, or worthy of public discourse, at any rate.

“But Evan,” I said to myself the other day, “what do you mean? You’ll rant to anyone with ears about Stardust.”

Fair enough, me.

(And quick side note since I’m terrible at plugging things: Go check out the Fire & Ash Anthology by Dragon Soul Press for my story “In the Shadow of Iron”. It’s got dragons and airships and all sorts of cool stuff. Genuinely some of the best dark fantasy I’ve managed. An old reviewer once said it was “like the Heart of Darkness meets Lord of the Rings” and that remains to date one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten. Okay. As you were. Thanks.)

So, back to the misleading title with a cheers to not further burying the lead: It’s sarcastic, in this case.

Stardust the movie, starring Charlie Cox and Claire Danes atop star-studded cast, is excellent. It’s absolutely in my top ten favorite films, and probably my top five. It’s associated with a lot of happy memories, and outside of Lord of the Rings, is probably the property my brain has most used when imagining fantasy and fairy tale stuff. It’s fanciful, whimsical, and a little bit cheeky, campy, all while knowing when and how to get serious when it needs to.

So imagine my surprise when I found out that it was a novel first (Yeah, Gaiman stuff notwithstanding). I found a copy at a library book sale and was excited to dive into the book which inspired one of my favorite stories ever…

Maturing into adulthood is sometimes learning to accept the cold wash of disappointment which can pale cherished pieces of your childhood.

I hated it. I hated it sooo much. And truly, I cannot stress this enough, truly in a death-of-the-author fashion. My reasons for disliking the book are completely disconnected from the real world outside how much it falls short of the movie. It physically pained me how disappointing I found it, and I keep that copy in my nightstand drawer as an artifact of my hate.

And trust me, there was a while where I felt it was pretentious to hate literature, that it was more intellectually honest to find the positive in a work than tear something down, and to a degree that’s totally true. I’ve read plenty of books and stories that were good, or okay, lacking staying power. But Stardust remains one of only two works I’ve read that I actively despise, but that’s a tale for another time…(lookin’ at you, Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu).

Remember, this rant is primarily for me to vent into the void, but if you are here, the moving forward, it’s best if you have a passing familiarity with at least one version of the story, ideally both. But if you don’t care or you’re just down to rodeo in the dark, then please join me below.

There are three primary reasons I despise Stardust so badly, and all three deal with character assassination in different ways.

The first is the protagonist, Tristan Thorn. He’s a grocery boy in a tiny English village nobody’s ever heard of. He’s naive, bordering on dumb, and a little impulsive, but in the film he’s at least likeable. That’s due in heavy part to Charlie Cox I’m sure, bringing across a sense of innocence in his pre-Daredevil days. But that’s who he is, a simple maybe-dullard with a good heart, who wants to go chase a fallen star so that the popular village girl will agree to marry him.

That’s about where the similarities between the book and movie end, though.

In the film, his adventure with Yvaine the fallen star changes him. He realizes through this magical journey that the world is so much hopelessly expansive than his small village life. Between battling witches, traveling with sky pirates, swordfighting with royal baddies, and generally roughing it in an adventurer’s life, he takes on maturity and a sense of his own limits and priorities.

One of the penultimate scenes sees him juxtaposed next to his childhood bully, Humphrey. In the early scenes, Humphrey beat the crap out of and humiliated Tristan. But now, being hardened and seasoned by magical adventure, it’s crystal clear just how much Tristan’s grown, to a degree that it’s obvious by their stand-off how a fencing match would play out between them, and through sheer aura, Tristan gets Humphrey to back down and gives away Victoria (the village prom queen) like a pair of bitchy shoes he’s outgrown.

In the book, he goes through all the same stuff (mostly), but without showing anywhere near the same kind of development, emotionally. There’s a scene where Yvaine basically accepts committing suicide by passing into the real world, where she’s become a lump of rock instead of a woman because she’s so depressed being bound to Tristan throughout the adventure, and instead of the empathy and growth he’d attained in the movie, Book Tristan basically goes, “Woof. Holy cow, that would have been a bummer. Well’p, come hither, star wife.”

After the anti-climax that is the final confrontation with the witch coven, Tristan claims his inheritance as the future king of Stormhold, like in the movie, but takes his time getting there. When he and Yvaine do eventually arrive, she remarks, “Wow, this place is kinda shit. You’d rule it so much better than it has been.” And he nods along, “Yeah, probably, but I don’t really feel like it yet.” Like, bitch, what? You were a grocery boy a couple weeks ago, where the hell did you get the confidence to feel like you’d mastered statecraft and Machiavellian politics required to rule a fantasy kingdom whose customs you don’t have the foggiest inclination into their workings. (Tell a lie there, actually. In the book it’s stated repeatedly how he just knows things. Where does he need to go next? That way. Why? He just knows. Where is the Star at this moment? Over there. Why? He just knows. I hate it.)

So in the film, you have the fulfillment of a hero’s journey, with the protagonist having grown from his journey for the better, and in the book you have the same waifish kid, except now he’s undeservedly arrogant.

Point one, Movie.

Next up is Robert DeNiro- I mean, Captain Shakespeare.

In both tellings, he’s the captain of a sky vessel.
…
Cool, glad that’s covered.

In the movie, he’s awesome. They aren’t just a sky ship, they’re lightning-stealing pirates. They fly around in the clouds capturing lightning during storms to sell at black markets around the kingdom, and they accidentally catch Tristan and Yvaine in their nets. (They were up there for a much better reason in the movie, too. Magical mishap, but in line with their respective characters much better than the book.) When Shakespeare hears Tristan is from England, he takes him under his wing, but surreptitiously. To the people of the magical world, England is wondrous to them – rumors and legends and stories. He took his name from the Bard because he secretly loves theater and dress-up, but maintains his reputation as a ruthless pirate, so people hear “Captain Shake-Spear, rawr!” He’s got depth and dimension and humor and sincerity and- gah! He’s just great. He changes Tristan’s appearance and takes him on as his “nephew” to teach him swordplay and culture in a montage that sees Tristan and Yvaine actually come to like each other so a happy ending makes sense, rather than the dismal shit you get in the book

Speaking of…

In the book, he’s in it for, like, four pages. Tristan and Yvaine in the clouds for a lazier reason, Tristan goes, “Help! Anybody!” and the Captain (not named Shakespeare, just nameless, if memory serves) goes, “Oh, hey. I heard coincidentally heard you. Here’s supplies and passage to where you want to go. Goodbye now.”

Then he fucks off. Gone. Poof. No development. No heart. No soul. No character. Just a convenient way for the protagonist to get home.

But even that doesn’t compare to what they did to my boy, Septimus. My beautiful boy.

Played by Mark Strong in the movie, he’s everything you want in a villain: he’s ruthless, cunning, merciless, and persistent. He’s a constant, dogging presence in the background of the film pushing the protagonists and even the other villains, the witches, forward. There’s a terrific scene where he’s been thrown off course in his hunt for the star by a soothsayer planted in his ranks to falsely guide him, lying to Septimus about the results of bone dice he uses to divine questions, and they come to a beach with no way forward:

Sep: “You said to go east, so we went east. And yet, no star.”
Soo: “I’m sorry, my lord. It’s the runes. I do as they tell me.”
Sep: “Well, I have a question. So let’s consult them again. Am I the seventh son of the king of Stormhold?”
Soo: <consults stones> “Yes!”
Sep: “Is my favorite color blue?”
Soo: <consults them again> “Yes!”
Sep: “Has excessive begging or pleading ever convinced me to spare the life of a traitor?”
Soo: <consults the stones>
Sep: “What do those symbols mean?”
Soo: “No…”
Sep: “I want you to cast them again, real high this time.”
<the stones are tossed high>
Sep: “Do you work for my brother?”
<stones show ‘Yes’>
<Septimus immediately stabs the soothsayer and finds a new way to press forward>

Gah! He’s wonderful! And even in the final scenes of the movie, in a battle with the witch coven, he holds his own against dark magic, then dies tragically against the Big Bad’s voodoo doll sorcery in one of the more creative and thrilling villain deaths you could ever want.

In the book…he gets bit by a snake after contributing NOTHING to the story.

And that could be hyperbolic, but not here. In fact, that’s mostly what lies at the heart of this rant, how my hatred for the book really festered. I sat back, soaking in the end of the novel and realized that if you plucked Septimus out of the book version of the story, absolutely nothing changes. He’s described with all the attributes from above – cunning, ruthless, blah, blah, blah – but he goes on to display absolutely none of them.

At one point, it’s implied he follows his brother Primus into a town, but Primus shakes him and tricks him into getting onto the wrong boat by shaving his beard and changing his coat. Later, Septimus discovers Primus’s dead body and knows with absolute, unwavering and unexplained certainty that the big bad witch lady is the one who did it, and so by the laws of his people or whatever now has to kill her before he can resume his hunt for the star. He tracks here to a small cottage that he lights on fire and revels in her death, only to be bitten by a snake that turned out to be the witch who was one step ahead. He dies, she builds a new hut, and the story goes onto its whimper of an ending. Take him out of it and NOTHING changes. Primus is barely inconvenienced and the witch kills him like she’s dealing with an inconsiderate girl scout.

Bonus rant: That witch, by the way, suffers from Irredeemable Idiot Disease by the end. She goes from being a long-lived and wise woman of the swamp who’s felled cities with her terrible magic to cursing a fellow witch with the inability to ever perceive the Star they’re after, then later interrogates that same witch if she’s seen the star. It makes me want to bite off my own toes.

And for those things, I will forever loathe this novel. It has some genuinely cool ideas and fun imagery throughout, but they’re just plastered into it without meaning, like playground stickers into an attempt at a college-level essay.

Phew. Thank you for letting me get that out of my system. Please check out Fire & Ash.

Ciao.

Tempest

Silas winced as more rain lashed at his eyes after he’d dared a glance at the storm around them. It had come upon them so suddenly in the night, only the relentless and violent tossing of the ship could adequately dispel the hope that it was a simple nightmare. He heard his fellow sailors screaming on the deck far below him, and above the howling winds and gutturally roaring waves, his ears caught their awe-struck cries. Silas chanced a look down, and what he saw drove almost all the rest of the world away. In the wine-dark waters churned an aurora of brilliant colors…

A ley line.

Massive ribbons of green and streaks of violet cut swathes of mercurial silver and indigo against the abyssal darkness of the sea at night. Within those colors sparkled crackling stars, like embers of a cold cosmic fire that ebbed and flowed with Thalassa’s own pulse. The immense strength of the storm swelled, pulling up a twisting wall of water. The cyclone gripped the ship, lifting it from the ocean’s seat. It drew the mystical colors up around them as a web, surrounding the ship and its sailors in it as though swaddling a babe. Seamen screamed and planks of the deck were ripped into watery oblivion.

Alone in the crow’s nest, he felt his pruned, aching fingers gripping the wood, desperate for any purchase and bleeding into the grain. He did not want to die. He could not. He had a need to return home so desperate and primal but to only be the gods’ gift to mortals. At last, he dared a glance at the sky. Primal, chaotic pressure swelled, and upon being noticed, it loosed. Alabaster lightning cracked from pregnant clouds, reflected in Silas’s eyes.

And it struck him.

He felt it in a single, phenomenal moment stretched across eternity. Within it, his life became a story indivisibly told. He thought of home, of white gulls against blue sky and the sandy fronts of Sanplona. His mother’s laugh, the warmth of her breast, and the months of cold pain following her death, all silently remembered in a fractured second. The sickly desperation of life alone, the relief in being found by his mentor, Brunah. The fulfillment in his hands, holding coins he’d earned with his own sweat, then by his first trade. But overshadowing it all were his wife’s eyes and his daughter’s face, standing over the memories like monuments.

Agony unlike anything he’d ever mortally known burned every fiber of his body, but not alone. Golden joy. Bitter and resentful scarlet. Ever-present lavender wanderlust. The violet of unfulfilled ambition. Sickly green anxieties and worries. Love’s warm magenta. They were all felt in an instant, and then, in that same moment, he was scattered, spread across the sky like paint on an artist’s palette.

World War Squirrel: Air Assault

“Command, this is Acorn One. Command, come in, do you read? Over.”
[Ack! I’m hit! Oh God!]

“Copy that Acorn One, The Nest is reading you loud and clear. Over.”

[It’s coming by again! Get down!]
“We’re getting hammered down here, Command. Requesting immediate air support, now! Over!”

“Roger that Acorn One. Request granted. Sending some Gliders your way. Over.”

*

“Sugar Squad, do you copy? Over.”

“Copy, Command. Sugar One responding. Over.”

“Got a request for a fly-by. Sending you the coordinates now. Over.”

“Received, Command. Sugar Squad, preparing to launch. Over.”

*

“Got that bombing run on the way, Acorn One. Sit tight, boys. Over.”

[Sir! Spreckle’s been hit!]
[Aaugh! So…soggy… Tell my mate I love her…]
“Roger that, Command. You’re really saving our nuts on this one.”

*

“Sugar One to Sugar Two. Come in, Sugar Two.”

“Sugar Two reporting.”

“Let’s get an open channel up here.”

“Done. Air’s yours, Sugar One.”

“Good. Gliders! Report in.”

“This is Sugar Three, reporting.”

“Sugar Four, reporting in.”

“Sugar Five here.”

“How’s that tail wind, Sugar Five?”

“Steady and ready to drop the yolks on these folks, Captain.”

“That’s what I like to hear, Corporal. Gliders! V-formation! Our target’s the giant at the smokestack.”

“Let’s get these assholes.”

“Hoorah!”

*

“Ugh, Christ!”

“What’s the matter, honey?”

“I think some squirrels just threw bird eggs at me.”

“I told you, it agitates them when you turn the sprinklers on. I think it hits their nest or something.”

“Ew! These eggs are rotten!”

“I keep reminding you to adjust the sprinkler head.”

“Dammit, some of it got on the grill, too.”

“How about we just finish up the burgers inside?”

“Ugh, fine.”

*

“Confirmed hit, Command. Dead on target. The giants are turnin’ tail.”

“Roger that, Sugar Squad. Great job out there today, boys. Come on home.”

The Good Ol’ Days

I was talking to my highschooler the other day and he said something I’ve been holding onto. I guess his physics teacher mentioned subatomic particles while talking about atoms, and my kid asks, “Where does it stop?”

“What do you mean?” goes the teacher.

And my kid goes, “I thought atoms were the smallest things in the Universe, but now we’re saying there’s things smaller than that. Where does it stop? Are there things smaller than those particles?”

And bless him, his teacher goes, “Y’know, we don’t know yet, but probably.”

So he comes home and now we’re talking about it. And we start talking about how, well, the Universe is infinite, right? It doesn’t have an end. It almost can’t, because even that thing we call the end is just edge of the Observable Universe, because if it has an end, and if it’s expanding, the obvious question is “What’s it expanding into?” Even if it’s empty nothingness, that nothingness is still something, in the end, if it’s space to be expanded into.

And this is all him saying this, but he goes, “If it goes infinitely out, why can’t it go infinitely in?”

And I ask him what he means, and he says that, well, if space goes infinitely out, it doesn’t make sense that it stops going the other way. Like, it seems less likely that we’ve found the starting point – atoms at first, now subatomic particles, maybe later something smaller than that – and everything else just gets bigger from there. So what if there’s an infinite smallness too?

He said he tried telling his friends this stuff and you know how kids are. They tell him stuff they heard in Ant Man, then google some stuff about quantum this and that without understanding what they heck they’re talking about. But, I mean, come on. We do it too.

But then he goes, “Is Time the same way?”

And again, I ask him what he means.

And he goes, “Well, it didn’t start, right? Because how would Time start if there’s a time without…Time?”

And I tell him I don’t think it works that way. He asks me why not, and I tell him that, I guess, I don’t really know.

“So, for argument’s sake,” he goes, “what if there’s always been Time? Like a Forever Past. There’s never been a time without Time and without Stuff. No beginning to it, there’s just always been Stuff, whatever that is.”

Okay…I say.

And he goes, “So then what about the future?”

“Well it hasn’t happened yet,” I tell him.

He says, “Sure,” but in that way you say things when you’re just being polite, and then he goes, “But why not?”

I ask him to explain, and this is what he gives me.

He says that to people in the past, like the 1800’s, we’re living in their future, and it’s real to us, so why wouldn’t it be as real for them, even if it hadn’t happened yet, because bottom line, our present, their future, is a real thing, and right now proves that. So why not the same for our own future? If Time goes back forever, without a Beginning, just always being, why wouldn’t it be the same for the future? The same way there’s an infinite expansion to space, going forever outward, getting bigger, why can’t there be an infinite smallness?

So, he says, the same thing we did for space, accepting that it goes infinite in both directions instead of just the one, what if we say the same for Time? There is no end to it. There will never be an End to it, just like there was no Beginning. It just…is. Everything didn’t just Begin, it always Was.

It’s had me messed up. He’s at his mom’s now, but I’m still up thinking about all this. It’s changed how I look at the Future. I used to think that determinism or Fate was at odds with Free Will, but I don’t know so much anymore. Maybe we’re just characters in a movie, everything in every way already determined in some unknowable way, but us, here, now, in our freedom to choose, are going to make it that way. It’s got me thinking about when I die, however that’s gonna happen, and wondering if when it happens, I’ll experience it with a wonder like, “Ah, wow. So this is what it’s gonna be like.”

But mostly, it has me thinking about now differently. Like, if Now isn’t the vanguard of the timeline like I’ve thought, the place where the Future becomes the Now, and instead it’s just somewhere in the infinite middle with the Future set, as real now as it will be when it happens…

I don’t know, I guess it makes me feel like I’m living inside my own memory. I look around and go, “Huh, a lot of this I’m going to forget. But what I’m looking at right now. Feeling right now, hearing, smelling. Sometime, I’m going to be remembering this moment. It’s like I’m alive in the Memory of Some Day, all the time. Makes me remember that even when times get tough, the Good Old Days are happening right now.

…

That, or he got into some reeeaaally good weed, and I need to call his teacher.

The Window Seat

“Sir?”

–

I read once that astronauts experience this thing called ‘the overview effect’. They get up there, into space, and they look back down at the Earth. And all in one frame they see their home. All of it. Everything they’ve ever known, all in one spot. And behind it is this endless, limitless, boundless, timeless, infinite expanse of empty black. It’s the closest thing to seeing the face of God itself.

And in that black, distance suddenly means everything and absolutely nothing at all. Miles no longer matter. And everything that maybe seemed so foreign or strange as a different country or culture on Earth is suddenly realized to have been so embarrassingly close by this whole time. There’s no such thing as an Other, or a Them, or a fight that’s at all worth fighting over when you see it from up above.

It’s why I like having the window seat on airplanes. When it’s taking off or coming in, and you’re just a few thousand feet above a major city, and you get to see it all while still being close to it. See all the cars on the highways, see all the streets winding like veins through business centers and neighborhoods, seeing all those houses, each with a family or two inside…

I read about another term too, called “sonder”, out of the Dictionary of Dark and Nameless Things. It’s the term for that existential feeling you can get when you realize that everyone you meet, everyone you come into contact with, even if it’s just a glancing one on the sidewalk or in a restaurant, they each have a story and an inner life that’s at least as rich and complex and complicated as your own, with thoughts, observations, dreams, lessons, experiences, wants, pains, et cetera.

However complicated my life may feel sometimes, or how drowning or urgent it may seem to me some nights, seeing all of those streets, those houses, those lives, those souls and lived experiences remind me how many of us there are. They remind me how incalculably many of our stories there have been throughout history, each and every one as meaningful or tragic or triumphant as the next. It reminds me that I am a drop within an ocean, one star inside a galaxy, no less phenomenal for my smallness nor my brevity on this planet, which itself is one among untold billions. And in that brevity and in that smallness comes the privilege of ever being.

And that, in itself, is pretty great.

–

“Sir?”
“Oh! Uh, yes? Sorry. Yes, what? Sorry.”
“Would you like anything from the drink cart?”
“Ah, a Sprite. Thank you.”

This Old Jacket

Oliver and Sarah walked along the beachside park. The wind was crisp with the sun trying its best to warm them from behind the heavy overcast. They walked on the sandy grass beside the paved path to make room for all the joggers, strollers, and headphone-wearing rollerbladers that used it too. They each nursed their own vanilla ice cream cone while they walked.

“Happy birthday, again,” Sarah said.

“Thanks,” Oliver chuckled weakly.

“How’s it feel to be thirty-three?”

Oliver chewed the inside of his cheek a moment in thought before answering.

“Tiring,” he said.

“Yeah,” she conceded.

They kept walking after that, occupying themselves with peoplewatching as they went. There was someone in large, flappy pants juggling bowling pins with a hat full of tips nearby. They saw an old couple laughing together on a park bench, and looked on at what seemed to be a fiery teenage break-up out on nearer the shore. There was also an overturned tricycle with a young father inspecting his son’s scraped knee next to it.

“I’m not as patient as I used to be,” Oliver sighed. “And that’s kind of a bummer. It used to be easy, but now it takes effort.”

Sarah nodded sympathetically. “I get that,” she said.

“I’m an optimist at heart, but the more I see things not work out it gets harder and hard to be that way. It’s like being out in the cold with an old jacket on. It’s familiar, cozy, and warm enough to keep out most of the chill, but it’s gotten thin with time and has some parts along the seams. You can feel the cold on the other side of the fabric and bits of the breeze sneak through here and there, but the jacket’s there too, keeping the heat in. It almost becomes about which you focus on is which you feel more, the warmth of the jacket or the chill reaching through it, and you flicker back and forth in this limbo between comfort and discomfort, making it sort of both and not really either, all at once.” He took a big breath, then let out a somehow bigger sigh.

“But I like my jacket,” he said.

Sarah glanced between Oliver and her own shoes. “It’s a pretty good jacket,” she agree quietly.

END

Night of the Hag

Doste peered anxiously out the window. The moon was high, and there were a scant few clouds to hide its light. There was no one about at this time of night, but he remained nervous all the same. He drummed his fingers on the windowsill.

“Is this truly necessary?” he asked over his shoulder. His wife, Brynn, sat by the fireplace with their guest, and his eyes focused on their reflection in the glass. “We could think this over another night.”

The cloaked figure sat hunched opposite Brynn, poring over items in a deep wicker basket, and paused, silently looking first to Doste then to his wife.

“We have thought on this,” said Brynn, her voice soothing and warm. “We have thought and spoken and prayed, but this will be our chance.”

Doste felt himself frown slightly and a breath hissed from his nostrils, but he didn’t offer further protest. He joined them by the fire, and his gaze fell to the cloaked figure who had begun arranging items from the basket onto a small, whittled tray and grinding them with a mortar and pestle. Some of the reagents he recognized – whiteleaf powder, blackroot stems, Kingfoil moss – but some of the others being ground made his stomach uneasy.

“Yes, well,” he muttered, “I had imagined the help of a medicine woman in more of a…traditional sense.”

The figure cackled, and what little light from the fire reached into her hood briefly showed a face with unsettling features. “What I bring you,” laughed the hag, “is stronger than any medicine or faith you will find.” There was the smell of swamp water when she spoke, and her voice cracked against the ear like broken branches. She mixed the last of her components and brushed these into a separate bowl of liquid, viscous as blood.

Doste looked to his wife, but Brynn met his eyes easily with a smile, undisturbed by the creature’s presence. Her warmth never ceased, and he took such comfort in that. He allowed himself a deep breath, and together they waited for the hag to finish her concoction. When she had, she set the bowl between them and reached out with a gnarled hand, palm up.

“My payment,” she said simply.

“Oh, of course,” said Brynn, almost embarrassed. She reached into the folds of her dress and came away with a folded piece of cloth, which she handed to the hag. The hag looked it over quickly by the light of the fire and, seemingly content, stowed it within her cloak. Doste wore his confusion on his face, but Brynn discreetly shook her head at him.

“Place it beneath your bed, leaving it undisturbed for one week,” instructed the hag. “After your next bleeding, have your husband take you. Then, you will bring the bowl into the wilderness to the north and empty its contents onto the roots of an oak which bears a scar in its bark. When this is done, well…” Though her face was hidden in the darkness of her hood, the two could hear lips sliding back over wet teeth in the way of a grin. “Enjoy motherhood,” she concluded.

Brynn nodded solemnly, though she softly quaked with an inner excitement. She searched her thoughts for a few moments, struggling for words. “Thank you,” she said finally, the start of tears shimmering in her eyes.

They exchanged nods, the hag collected her things, and had opened the door when Doste stood.

“What if it doesn’t work?” he asked.

She paused in the doorway, the quiet howl of wind behind her, and she turned to face him. Still behind the darkness of her hood, he could feel her eyes on him. She gently cackled. “Then I’d suggest you visit an herbalist, Doste,” she laughed. “Because the problem then would lie not with my aid nor your wife’s womb.”

In the time it took for his cheeks to flush and for him to blink, the doorway was empty and the two were left alone, the hag’s laughter echoing hauntingly on the nighttime breeze. Doste turned to Brynn.

“What did you give her?” he asked.

“All she wanted was a poem on something of my mother’s,” she said. “So, I wrote her an old nursery rhyme I remembered from when I was young onto a piece of her wedding gown.” Brynn shrugged. “Cunning women are strange. But what’s more,” she strode over to her husband and embraced him, “is that we’ll soon have a family, Doste.”

END

This was another character origin I wrote up for someone’s D&D campaign. The first half of it, at least. It goes on to be for a warlock who’s part hag, essentially, but I never finished that bit (gave the notes to him to complete…I think. It was a few years ago.), so the first half is more neatly wrapped up than I otherwise left it.

Anyhoo, more stuff on the way. Hope your days are treating you well. 🙂

Ardan Brokenfoot (& news)

The foothills of the Nettiri Mountains are silent, eternal, and still, but for a howling wind. A roll of thunder rumbles its way across the moonless sky, and the clouds, pregnant with the coming rain, begin to loose their storm on the earth below.

“Aaaauuungh!” Yasha screams. Her breathing is harried, and hair clings to her face heavy with sweat. A woman beside her, Ritu, clasps one hand tightly with her own, and with the other holds Yasha’s face by her chin.

“Shh,” she soothes, “you are strong. Like earth- like the mountain, you are strong.” She moves the hair from Yasha’s eyes. “Now, again. Push. He is almost here.”

“I can’t.”

“You will.”

“I can’t,” she screams again, agony drawing out the word. The whisper of the hut’s deerskin curtain breaks the steadily drumming rain for a moment, revealing a mountainous man in the entrance. The tattoos on his bare chest glisten against the modest firelight within the hut. He huffs out a single excited breath.

“Has he come?” he asks.

“Soon,” says Ritu. “Come, hold her hand. She needs you now.”

The wind gains and hours pass, the screams of childbirth bleed into the howling of the storm outside. Then, of a sudden, the tempest dies and the cry of a newborn boy takes its place. His father, Korg, holds him, the pride clear on his face, but the expression soon sours.

“His foot,” he rumbles. The goliath holds the tender infant gently, the aberrant shrunken foot held aloft on two fingers, displayed like a withered leaf on a healthy vine. “What is wrong with his foot?”

Ritu smiles and shrugs a shoulder. “What is wrong with his foot?”

“How will he run?”

She brushes aside his long hair, revealing half an ear with a large bite mark. “You can still listen.” She smiles again. “At times.”

Korg barks a short laugh, which leaves behind fierce grin. He turns to the boy’s mother and kneels. “What do we call him?”

Yasha beholds her son for a long moment.

“Ardhan,” she whispers at last. “After your grandfather.” She holds his leg and beams brightly. “Ardhan Brokenfoot. A name to give him strength.” She then gestures weakly for a box near her bedside, and Ritu nods. The old woman brings the wooden box, and Yasha draws from it a talisman on an invisibly thin silver chain. The talisman itself is a chip of dark stone, but as the light catches its surface, faintly iridescent markings of an unknown script shine against it. The wind outside begins to swell, and Yasha holds the boy’s forehead to her own before slipping the necklace over his head. “You will have a good life, Ardhan. This will help you find it.”

*

As Ardhan grew, he would come to know the land as well as the corners of his own mind. It was harder for him than most, but that adversity blossomed into a strength few others shared. Nestled within the mountain walls of the Nettiri, it was a land of slate, pine, and storms, but also of voices that came in many shapes. The winds had their song, the village elders had their chants, and even the great pines would drum the air with their crackling boughs. But Ardhan would know more than just these.

In his years walking the mountain forests, he would see figures cloaked in dark mists, eyes dimly aglow beneath ethereal hoods. They never frightened Ardhan, and where they walked more songs would follow. The songs were like a humming melody he could feel in his bones more than he could hear it aloud. He would walk the woods with them, playfully seek them out, and where they ventured he would find strange things like the talisman he’d been given as a baby. He would collect these relics in a light sack and return to show them to his mother and father, though they would pay him no mind.

It was on another day like this that he returned to the village and found a group of strangers speaking to the tribe’s eldest, Grontu. The strangers wore dark mantles and hoods that obscured their faces. When they spoke their hushed whispers to Elder Grontu, his lip curled in disgust. Ardhan didn’t hear very much from his chosen hiding place, but what he did spoke of ancient relics and mystical powers. He held the bag at his side a little more tightly against his body.

“You ask of things you only pretend to know,” Grontu spat angrily. “Heed my warning and depart, or else I-”

Ardhan was pulled suddenly off his feet by his hair, and he landed on his bottom in a small cloud of dust. His mother loomed over him. “What do you think you are doing?” she whispered harshly. “Their words are not for one so small.” Yasha regarded him angrily for a long moment, then held a breath and her face softened. “Head home. Dinner is soon. Go,” she said, giving him a light push. His mother’s eyes were warm, but she was not to be tested on this. So, embarrassed and wiping away tears, the young boy nodded and ran off.

He rounded the last turn and was at the opening to his home when a gentle tremor went through his body. He stopped short, but soon recognized the resonant hum in his bones. Ardhan glanced about and soon saw them – dim, crystal blue eyes glinting at him from the shadows of distant pines. They beckoned him, pulling the at the strings of his spirit with a wordless call as undeniable as gravity. Again he looked about, thought of his mother’s warning, but defiantly tightened the strap of his bag and set off for the woods.

*

Hours later, the sun hung in the sky, threatening to dip below the horizon and painting the sky in warm hues. The chill wind rushed over him as Ardhan made his way back home to his village. This was not the first time playing with the mountain spirits had kept him from home so long, but this time it was sure to enrage his mother after he’d disregarded her intructions. Though as he came close to home, a feeling of dread settled in his stomach like a heavy stone. It was the dry season, but a mist hung in the air and climbed lazily from the ground like smoke.

There was no one here.

He heard voices, but they were quiet, muffled, like he was hearing them through a thick cloth. Ardhan followed the voices in circles all about the village, but found no one. A chill gripped his heart as he realized something. It was slow to come, and it wasn’t true for all of them, but the truth remained: the voices were saying things he’d heard before.

“Their words are not for one so small,” said one, the voice of his mother.

“Come. Hold her hand. She needs you now,” said another, the cunning woman Ritu.

“You ask of things you only pretend to know,” came yet another, Elder Grontu.

“He has come?” the proud voice of his father, Korg.

Ardhan stood there in the center of his village for minutes, his home now reduced to a hollow land of ghosts and echoes.

Those next hours and what would be the next several years passed over Ardhan like a high wind, staining his memories only as blurred flashes. He remembered seeing the crystal-eyed mountain spirits and running with them to the woods where he found sleep in the hollow of an ancient pine. He remembered a woman with a gentle face and raven hair looking down at him as he woke. She fed him, and gave him hope, a home, and purpose. He didn’t see himself as he grew into a strong, capable Goliath warrior beside her, but he remembered their travels. They traversed the wilds and great cities alike, both harsh lands with terrible beasts and civilized bastions with towering spires were their home.

And through it all, the voices of the mountain spirits of the Nettiri were silent.

*

“Okay,” said Jaya, tossing a stormy, raven-black lock of hair away from her face. “I’m going inside to inspect the merchandise for our client. This one’s gonna be high profile in the long run, so I want you out here to make sure it can get off on the right foot.” She waited a moment, then snapped her fingers. “Hey, Ardhan. You listening?”

The pair stood in front of a parted curtain obscuring an entryway in a shadowy alley. Between them filed a short line of hunched figures carrying unmarked crates and nondescript sackloth bundles, and across the way on the corner of an intersection of the city’s dusty dirt roads was the colorful storefront of a toy maker. Baubles gleamed, clockwork animals jumped and spun round, and magical lights drew designs on the curved glass of the windows. Ardhan broke off in the middle of a chuckle.

“Mm, yep. No problem, boss,” he said. “Nobody’s getting in without the sign.”

She regarded him skeptically for a few moments, but settled a hand on his massive forearm and squeezed gently. “Good,” she said. “Things are going to be different after today. Stay sharp, big guy.” He reassured her by adjusting the grip on his saw-toothed greatsword and smiling, which she returned with a wink before disappearing behind the curtain.

Ardhan stood watch, and time passed, offering nothing of note. Then something happened which hadn’t in so long he had almost forgotten even the deepest memories of their being: a melody hummed through his bones. Here, he wondered, in the heart of a city so far away? He looked up and down the alleyway, and there at the end stood one of the figures of his childhood, cloaked in darkness and melded with the shadows and the stone. Ardhan regarded the spirit, and a torrent of memories – of his village, of the mountain pines of the Nettiri, the echoed voices of his mother and father – they all assailed his mind at once, and the craving for answers returned, as fierce and as strong as it had been that night.

He followed the spirit, and as he did, he felt almost like a boy again. His muscles forgot their aches, his skin lost its scars, and the weight on his heart he’d forgot was there lifted. He reached the end of the alley where the spirit had been, and saw it now across the populated thoroughfare of one of the city’s main bazaars. It was like one of the games they had used to play when he was a child, the games he’d taken shelter in when he was young. They had made him feel safe through times like…

Like the night his family was taken from him.

A familiar sense of foreboding and dread suddenly fell on him like a leaden sheet. He spun around to see a hunched figure in the distance, exiting the meeting place he’d been meant to guard. Ardhan broke into a sprint, and upon seeing him, the figure darted out of sight. “Jaya!” he called. “Jaya, get out of-”

The world went white.

A wave of force blew him back the way he’d come, sending him flying out of the alleyway altogether. The building which housed the business his friend and mentor Jaya had been overseeing exploded, erupting in gouts of emerald flame and streaks of alabaster lightning. Ardhan tumbled through two market stalls, and panic spread through the crowd. He looked up from the pile of splintered wood and broken pottery, and the last conscious sight he held was of the crystal-eyed mountain spirit standing in the flames of the ruined building, holding Ardhan’s gaze with its own.

Then darkness took him.

END

That was a D&D character origin story I was asked to write for a friend. I was flattered, if not outright honored, as this friend didn’t need help writing a good story in the least bit. He’s grown into a REALLY good DM and could have done better himself. Nonetheless, it was fun to put together.

And in case you missed it: There’s news! Had a couple of publications this summer, firstly over at Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight Magazine is my story “Just like Old Times”, and more recently is my Sci-Fi story “Software” with Third Flatiron’s Offshoots: Humanity Twigged anthology. Check ’em out, let me know what you think, and live well.

Oasis

Jeremy watched the birds circling overhead. Seeing the black dots dance in their circuit above him, dark wings flickering against the bright white-blue of the sky, it was sort of like a negative image of sparkles in his eyes, and the thought of that made him chuckle. His tongue prodded dryly at the back of his teeth. He was lightheaded. His heat-shrunken brain reminded him that dehydration caused things like that. He chuckled again.

This was bad.

His feet were hot, so he tucked them underneath himself as best he could, into what scant shade his car provided against the abusive sunlight. Looking out, he watched the heat waves ripple against the unending white of the salt flats.

“You really should have packed some water,” said a voice.

Jeremy turned his head limply in the direction of the sound. There was a man leaning against his trunk. He wore loose-fitting linens that billowed gently in the warm desert breeze, bangles about his wrists, and nothing on his feet. The man smiled softly at him.

“Jared Leto?” asked Jeremy. The man barked a full laugh, but shook his head. “Thank God.” Then, after a moment, he asked “Am I dying?”

“A little bit,” said the man, nodding. “For real though, no water? Nothing?”

It was Jeremy’s turn to shake his head, then, reaching up through the open driver-side window, withdrew a mostly full bottle of bourbon.

“Wow. Not much good that’s going to do you.” The man in white took a seat next to him. “How’d you get way out here?”

“Mid-life crisis,” Jeremy answered simply.

“Some people buy a motorcycle to cope with those, maybe dye their hair. Not you?”

“Nope. Divorced, then bought a car I can’t afford and took it somewhere I could drive it really fast without getting arrested.”

“Race track didn’t make sense for that?”

“I guess not. Always wanted to drive on the salt flats, loved the idea of the desert. Or, at least, I thought I did.” Jeremy eyed the bottle in his hands a moment before setting it down. “The desert sucks.”

“It’s not great,” the man agreed. A few minutes passed with them both watching the few, thin clouds in their struggle against dry air. “If you don’t mind me asking, what’re you running from?”

Jeremy fought the reflex to deny the question and say that he wasn’t running from anything, and instead actually thought about it. Because, of course, there was an easy answer. He was running away from an utterly crumbling life: failing marriage, dead dreams, the shame of those things now hanging over his social circles like a immense wet blanket. And while there was still truth to an answer like that, the longer he took to steep in thought over it, it didn’t feel like the complete truth.

“I don’t think,” he began at length, “that I am running from something.” The man in white watched him patiently, feeling that the rest of the answer was incoming. “No. I think…I think I’m running after something instead. It’s like a dream, maybe, but one that I’ve never had- or maybe, more like one I’ve had a thousand times. That, and I listen to too many hard rock highway songs.”

“The ‘us against the world’, ‘drive fast and die young love song’ type?”

Jeremy flashed a finger gun. “Bingo.” Despite himself, tears slowly began to well up in his eyes. “So, when I bought this stupid car, tore off the lot, and drove it out here as fast as it could go with the top down, it wasn’t supposed to be by myself. That’s never how the daydream went. It was supposed to be my wife and I, middle fingers up in the air, rock music, all the rest of it. Not, well, this.”

“Well,” sighed the man in white, “what are you going to do, now that you are here?”

“I could just…die. Lots of people have done it.” He looked at his warped reflection on the bourbon bottle. A hot breeze blew dust over Jeremy’s feet and speckled the brown glass, aging it in an instant. For a moment, he considered what it would look like to someone who found him out here, weeks, maybe years after he died. Skeletal, coated in dust, forgotten. What stories would that person come up with as to how he got here, or would they find it obvious? Since Not Jared Leto was clearly just a figment of his dried up imagination, it would be the bones of a single lonely and doomed idiot who drove out to the desert, broke down, and died.

“You could,” nodded Not Jared, “but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“It would be easier. A lot easier.”

“Than what?”

“Going back.”

“‘Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave.'”

“Ghandi? Old Testament?”

Not Jared laughed. “No,” he said. “Albus Dumbledore.”

END

I wrote that up at work the other day on nothing more than a whim. I was listening to some rock music from my teens years, felt a scene coming on, and voila. It definitely feels a little unfinished, but I had nowhere else I cared to take it, but I imagine Jeremy made it home, apologized for something, and lived happily ever after.

Anyway, news! Had a couple of publications this summer, firstly over at Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight Magazine is my story “Just like Old Times”, and more recently is my Sci-Fi story “Software” with Third Flatiron’s Offshoots: Humanity Twigged anthology. Check ’em out, let me know what you think, and live well.

The American Business

“America doesn’t really have a main export anymore. You ever notice that? We send all our manufacturing jobs overseas. As a country, we suck at business.”

“Oh, our country’s great at business, it’s just that you and I aren’t in it. Our main export is conflict. We sell weapons and training to our customers, and those goods and services are only valuable when they’re used.

“So our main export in conflict. Foreign military bases are our storefronts, and fear is our advertising – which is brilliant, because it’s so damn universal. Not everybody needs your blender, or your specific bladder medicine, or needs to see your new movie. But everyone – EVERYONE – gets scared. So, sell the cure to that fear.

“Side effects may include violence, which leads to more fear, and sooner or later you’re dependent on this business. You can’t get off the drug you were dealt. And it’s just as well if your neighbor is on it, because that just means you’ve seen the commercial, and you’ll be a customer soon.

“Or that’s just my two cents, anyway.”