), King, Lovecraft and Tolkien) into a bit of a hellish hodgepodge. It's also a love story.
I'm also trying to explore a lot of issues I have in my own life such as depression, far too much loneliness, hatred towards God and fate, etc. I decided: Instead of whining like a pretensious emo about it, why not incorporate some of it into a story and make it better for it! So, here's the first couple pages of the story, hope you guys like it. I think I've hit a gem with the storyline and everything, I just hope I'm good enough to translate it to words.
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Darkness and horror. The stench of it permeated the night-clad city of Garathen. The evil flowed in the choked arteries of cobblestone avenues, twisting through the autumn air. Silently shrieking, the darkness swarmed around an old flat, terror assaulting a mind already scarred in one of the apartments. For, this night, the mind of Gavin Isolde swam with images of chaos, evil rampant, hatred and dread drowning his soul in black. Even within his safe bed, his skin crawled and eyes bulged underneath their lids in horrific convulsions. Images without explanation, eerie flashes of death and of the ending of the world.
For as he lay there, before him were rapid and twisted images, lucid as flame and yet as unclear as smoke. Again and again the pictures came, driving a spike of fear and loss through his heart. They seemed to increase in speed, building to a crescendo that seemed like it would burst the very mind of the young man.
Suddenly, his mind’s eye focused and stilled but for a moment on the image of an old man, hunched over and gazing over a plain, then he felt his body lift as if carried by some great eagle, up and away from the cobblestone streets and steeples of Garathen. And as he soared over the black night, wretched images overpowered his mind. Visions of death on a parched, brown plain. Gnarled trees, aflame and sprinkled with blood. High cliffs, shattered by war and chaos. A lone figure, shadow etched against the unforgiving night, prostrate in desperation and sadness. An unclear image of a woman’s face, etched in fire in his mind and screaming in anguish. A tortured flock of bandaged and rotting men, swaying and moaning along their path. A figure rising on a slab of iron, flame and twisting black blasting outward.
And as Gavin soared onward, endless darkness covered the sky, a cloak of unforgiving wrath, swallowing the stars’ light and lit only by the eerie light-cast of flaming crosses. They lay in a great field, thousands of gnarled wooden crosses screaming with fire. Above, screeching through the sky, a lone falling star, a single fragment of hope, put out quickly by the looming and desolate earth.
His mind’s eye wheeled now to the side, and inwardly he retched in terror. The sun was gone, leaving only its corona, burning in silent hate in the sky. The flaming disc seemed to scream across the skies, to howl its anguish and eternal hatred upon all the earth. Below its hollow shell lay a great tower collapsing to the earth, screams echoing in the night. And in this moment he somehow knew that hope was lost, that love and peace had left him forsaken, that truly, now, the end was at hand. Flames, wrath, and ruin...
Screams echoing in the night
And just as suddenly that his terror had reached a breaking point, he jumped out of his bed, sideways onto the floor, body still convulsing. The room swam in his head as he shook and tried to keep from screaming and waking the whole building. The room was as black and empty as he himself felt, the night lay silent, and Gavin felt the familiar, biting sensation of absolute loneliness.
As his convulsions began to cease, he placed his hand on his forehead, wiping away the thick beads of sweat gathered there. His long raven hair lay disheveled on his shoulders, and his blue eyes still swept all over the room, wildly seeking and running. Slowly, ever slowly, his breathing returned to a somewhat normal pace, and he lifted himself off from the floor, surveying the room. His eyes perceived the bed, the desk and chair, the large window, the familiar sites which were twisted in fear this night.
He stepped walked hazily over to the apartment’s window and drew back the curtain, looking out over the alleys and steeples and towers of the city-state of Garathen. The trees seemed to whisper to each other as they swayed. The owls and the few crickets that remained into the October fall were almost silent, their hoots and chirps strangely empty from the mid-night air. Not even the steamworks were to be heard tonight, the clattering of the suspended locomotives and the shrieking of the moving bridges strangely gone. Only the occasional flickering streetlight cast brightness upon the cobblestones, and only a few scattered voices reached up into the black sky, attempting to lift once...
And dying. Gavin heaved a disgruntled sigh, relaxing a bit to lean against the window. Arms crossed, eyes downcast on the street, he just stood there, soaking everything in. He felt cold, standing there trapped in his mind. A million anxieties entered his head all at once, and he felt the heat leave his body. Crossed across his chest, his arms began to twitch, and he cursed in frustration as he kicked out and began to pace to eliminate his nervous energy. Going back and forth across the empty room he thought about many things: an endless cycle of thoughts voiced and repeated and arguments won and lost the next second. Wringing his hands, he finally stopped, and the next second heard a generous peal of laughter. His head lowered and he stopped moving, eyes wide open. The laughter came again, and he distinguished that there were two sources: a man and a woman. His mouth curled into a slight snarl, and he turned his head to look.
Down in the alley below the window-sill, Gavin could see two lovers, dreamily entwined and walking down the path, laughing quietly. For a moment his heart leapt in wonder, a familiar emotion which he immediately silenced. His stony eyes gazed on them as they passed his window, and to any who could see him (and their were none), there was more than stoniness in those orbs. There was conflict. “Dammit”, he breathed, turning on his heel sharply to face away from the window. His eyes betrayed for a moment the thick, built up tears locked behind their veil, and he shook his head defeatedly.
A fine time for worrying about his life as a legendary loner when he was apparently going insane, Gavin thought to himself. Wretched fool. Nobody’s going to help you out with this, the logical, cold, and dominant part of his mind voiced. Whatever would come would be his to handle. Sighing, he pulled the wooden chair from its place under the desk and sat in it by the window, eyes sadly looking over the town.
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Far away from the troubled mind of Gavin Isolde, evil surged elsewhere, as the world slept in blissful ignorance and nature fidgeted in silent fear...
Sweeping out of a shadowy meadow between the Tower, a messenger sped along his path, his horse galloping hard in urgency and fury across the barren landscape. Wrapped in bandages and covered with a heavy brown cloak, he urged the beast onward with a long, shrieking whip. Around him, the ground and air whirled; the dark spirits screamed in exhilaration as beast and rider ripped across the scorched plain. The dirt spun around him, the panicked sun set behind him, and as darkness spread across the sky, the very soul of the world twisted and writhed in foreboding as he sped along his path.
From the great forests rounding the plain and the Tower, the beasts watched with wide eyes, some frozen in place and some sprinting away deeper into the trees. In desperate retreat, the deer and the squirrels shook nervously and finally succumbed to fear and ran into the foliage. The bears growled quietly, stoically holding their guard for a while but soon were also driven back in silent fear.
The crows squawked and the birds chirped in panic, flying from their perches and following the great mass of fleeing beasts. A horde of dark and light feathers, they suddenly wheeled, drawn by some power, around a figure perched on a large rock on the edge of the forest, his tattered cloak-covered frame gazing at the Tower and the messenger. The long strands of heavy fabric whipped in the newly created breeze, but his body remained planted to the boulder, a stoic and blank creature against the panic and confusion. The birds chirped frantically and the crows squawked furiously, continuing to wheel round and round his seat. Slowly his head lifted, and his blue-grey eyes flashed pure power. For a moment, they seemed to reveal terrifying rage. The gloved hands clenched, and an unidentifiable but breathtaking force crackled through the air. The trees shook all through the forest, and the wolves and bears howled.
The forest seemed to whisper, a growing symphony of panic spreading outward. The man’s frame lifted slowly off from the rock, and he stood there, head downcast at the ground, and turned away, making a holy sign with his hand in the direction of the tower. The birds around him broke ranks, and flapped quickly into the foliage. Tears entered his eyes as he gazed at the tower and its twin, hidden behind.
“Forgive me”.
Face crestfallen, he grasped his gnarled staff, beginning the long trek into the forest.
To this, the jinn were not blind.
Gavin could not sleep. When he tried, he couldn’t bring himself to separate himself again from the relatively safe world of everyday reality, to throw himself at the mercy of the twisted workings of his imagination. He couldn’t close his eyes without being greeted by images of ruin; his eyelids could not fall without being branded with the visage of a burnt corpse crucified against the sky. A half-dozen or more he tried to brave the dark journey of his mind, but was driven half-mad by an unplaced fear and revulsion of the world. He felt, when he closed his eyes, as if a thousand spiders were storming his bed and as if a merciless specter were looming over him. Only twice was he driven to screaming, and only once was he given to maddened raving and crying.
The waking world was hardly better. When he picked himself up from the bed and sat at his desk or at the window, Gavin would feel an unplaced weight on his heart. He was familiar with the emotion, and in some ways had learned to deal with it, albeit somewhat negatively. It was solitude, the horribly anxious creature that gnawed at him day after day. In some ways, Gavin puzzled madly at its source and how exactly to remove it.
For the thousandth time, his mind wrestled to find the source of it all. He had grown up in an orphanage, but with an abundance of playmates, to which he was something of a leader. He had read passionately tales of adventure and dreamed in the high, cheerful manner of all exuberant boys. Even though he was in such an apparently dreary circumstance, having no parents never really bothered him. The orphanage’s priests and nuns had been enough for him, and he was very happy there.
Gavin sat at his desk, pondering silently while watching the flickering gaslight play across the wood surface. He had left the orphanage, left it because he had no other choice, left it because it was utterly destroyed. A great shiver reaved through him. The fact that it was destroyed was all he wanted to acknowledge in his mind, he did not want to dwell on the particulars.
He had been picked up on the side of the road by a passing line of carriages, painted in the royal colors of House Penbrook, an archaic aristocratic family within the city-state of Garathen’s borders. Lord Penbrook himself, at the time in his thirties, had personally stopped the carriages, and had walked out onto the road without bodyguards to pick up the little crying boy.
Gavin had lived at the lord’s manor for the rest of his childhood and adolescence, growing up under the tutelage of fine scholarly teachers and ingenious weapon masters. Even in the face of such fortunate luck, however, the deterioration of his soul had grown into an intense flame. He was always known at the manor and in the nearby town of Hollow Crane as the loner, as somebody who few laid eyes on without automatically assuming that his was a case of madness. From the cheery adventure tales he turned to tragic works, poring over thousands of volumes of the macabre, of bloody tragedy, and of insanity and damnation. Indeed, though the elderly lady who maintained the lord’s library may have been disturbed by this pale boy and his fascination with the nightmarish volumes of forgotten lore, she was happy in a way to see a young boy able to comprehend them.
Only recently had he moved to the city of Garathen, on doctor’s orders because of a nervous breakdown he had experienced on an assignment from Lord Penbrook to deliver a message through somewhat insecure and dangerous woods. Deep in the dark trees, his mind had consumed itself in nightmare, and his eyes grew wide with torches of devils surrounding the encampment, evil and hissing fog encroaching on his space and the wild screams of tortured agony and death.
A philosophy teacher of Gavin’s had once elaborated on the fragile balance between the mind and the imagination, and how dangerous it was when the balance was broken. Unfortunately, the young man had lived to see how very right he was.
Reaching the end of the tale in his mind as he always did, Gavin cursed loudly, reaching down to open one of the desk’s drawers. He paused for a moment, feeling the parcel his hands were wrapped around. Dammit. He shook his head and drew it out, laying it out on the desk. It was a letter, a small sheaf of parchment stamped with the seal of Lord Penbrook and written in the large handwriting of the powerful man.
Gavin had received it a week prior, reading it over once and thenceforth condemning it to the hellhole of his desk drawer, celebrating his victory with a hearty bottle of absinthe and heavy dosage of opium. Tonight, though, he felt unusually alone (even for him) and wanted some evidence, some proof that somebody out in the world had cared enough to write him or acknowledge him in any way. Wiping away the sweat from his long hair, he began reading...
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I can't help shaking the feeling that I'm flying through the story too quickly, most writers would take like 20 pages or so on that series of events....Meh, as long as it works, right?
Any suggestions would be incredibly helpful
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