Sonnestein

Note: This is a not a whole story. I only posted the beginning because I've been told there are more issues here than any other part. If anyone wants to read the rest, say so and I will post it or PM it to you.

Ever since I was a child I was told stories of the Times of Revolution, the constant rising and setting of the sun. I grew up in a world where night was a thing of myth and the sun ruled our lives in every aspect. It just sat there in the sky, burning, drying up our rivers and the sweat from our bodies. It rained sometimes, but not enough for our crops to grow well and just barely enough to keep us all from dropping dead. According to my guardians the sun’s rotations halted six decades ago from the time of this story, plunging us into the dry, thirsting world we inhabited. For many years there was no sense of time. Those who managed to survive had to fight off madness. Mankind, no, all forms of life, were made to flow with a pattern, and when the gods intercepted life’s most necessary flow they disrupted the pattern of the mind. It wasn’t only about being unable to get a good night’s sleep, though that was a large part of it. What truly brought about the madness was being unable to comprehend the ordinarily simple concepts of past, present, and future. Imagine trying to explain something which happened a year ago when you do not even know the span of a minute. Complicated, yes? I believe it to be impossible.

According to my guardians our city was one of the first to re-establish time. The priests chose five men and five women and gave them the status of Clocks. These men and women were assigned the task of deciding when it was time to work and time to sleep. They were hardly ever consistent. They could only guess from the urges of their own bodies, so one day might have been longer or shorter than the previous. Inconsistent as they were, they were all we had to help us maintain a pattern.

Please understand that while I speak of “days” and “hours” in this narrative, I had no way of grasping how long the time span really was. What I had to work with was only a rough estimate at best.

On the other side of the world a permanent night descended. We called this place the Nightlands. I’d thought about what it would be like to live there, but I knew it was a bad idea. Most of civilization over there had died of starvation and cold by then, and those who somehow continued to survive were long, lanky white things with blind eyes and pale, feathery hair. Some would say the night had sunk into their brains. Over time they had developed their own culture of sorts, and they were very secretive about it so no one knew exactly what their lives were like.

Our lives were spent tunneling into the ground for water, gold, jewels, and whatever else we could find, but especially water. There was not a rich Noble class who got the best of everything just because they happened to be rich; anyone who refused to work lost their share of whatever food and water there was to be found. Even the women cut off their hair and donned men’s clothes to work along side their husbands. Children were put to work in the mines as soon as they turned eight years old, and those who were unfit to work were done away with swiftly. The only ones exempt from working in the mines were the priests, so they could spend their time trying to understand what it was the gods wanted. Oftentimes people slept in the mines, because it was cold and dark though often difficult to climb out depending how deep down they worked.

The clash of hammers against stone never stopped. The dust from the mines created a choking cloud around the city. Even on the rare occurrence a shallow well was found, no amount of liquid could satisfy the thirst of one who has breathed in the dust. Everyone suffered from a chronic cough and an inability to draw a single full breath. Every day there were at least several people, mostly children, who dropped dead from dehydration or heat stroke.

It was the common belief we did something to anger the Sun God Hollace, which is why he halted the sun. The priests came up with a short list of people to be sacrificed every two weeks or so, the theory being if they sacrificed the right people Hollace will forgive us for whatever it was we did. So far the sacrifices have not worked, but we kept doing it anyway because we knew of nothing else which might make the sun set again. As if these offerings weren’t bad enough, the priests began claiming that in order to truly please Hollace the sacrifices must be executed slowly and painfully. In the old days it was just a quick operation, a flash of blade, a heavy thunk sound, and it was all over. During these times it was a drawn out process, with much screaming and bleeding.

It was also a part of our tradition to appoint someone to perform these sacrifices and the rituals which accompany the offerings. This person was called the Catalyst. He was a young male between ages fourteen and thirty. At each birth the priests went around and inspected the male babies using some sort of divine means. The baby they chose was taken from the distraught parents to live with the priests, and from then on his time in the outside world was very limited. His parents were not permitted to see him and he was not allowed to make friends or procure an education apart from what he was taught by the priests. The priests taught him everything he needed to know about our gods, the myths, the rituals, and the writings. More importantly they taught him how to turn his heart to stone, so he could hack the sacrifice to bits or watch his skin curl and shrivel inside a raging pyre without the slightest shade of sympathy. The Catalyst was considered the very embodiment of the wrath of the gods and was looked upon with fear which was often mistaken for respect. When a Catalyst outgrew the age limit of the profession, he was then made a priest and the apprentice Catalyst took over the job.

My name is Sonnestein, and I was the Catalyst of my city. This is the story of something that happened a while back, when I’d only been Catalyst for a year. I was fifteen.

Ok, this looks like a Prologue to me. It was beautifully written, Sonnestein had a clear voice, and - great name by the way . I really like your personal style as well and the things you describe seem really original. However you told us everything, spoon fed us the entire back story. I would have loved to see this woven into narrative and that would have made this idea of a prologue obsolete. Its a big lecture really, and although interesting to read to a fellow fantasy writer the average reader may slam the book shut if it isnt a gripping narrative. Post the actual story next so I can get a flavour of how you deliver Sonnesteins tale.

You have me hungry for more of your work!

Regards, Adam

Why thank you! That's the best thing I've heard in a while!

It's just that the whole thing is twenty-two pages long (but short by comparison to everything else I write) and it's actually a really long letter to the village he ends up in by the end of the story. Since the village doesn't know anything about his old city, I thought it would be best to start off by determining the environment and culture instead of going off into a narrative. I also started it off the way I did because oftentimes in stories about made-up cultures, I like things spoonfed to me instead of having to figure things out as I go along. Although it's not really a prologue, I have a friend who suggested I make it a prologue as well, so maybe I'll do that.

And about Sonnestein's name -- it came from a combination of "Rammstein," a band, and their song which inspired this story, "Sonne." Here's a link if you'd like to hear it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl7Pe-yW11w I can't get sued for that, can I? Oh, and as you'll see if you read on, I took the liberty of using German numbers because of the song. Can I do this?
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"Sonnestein" Continued...

It was a day like any other; hot, dusty, endless. The messengers came running through the city, blowing the horns which signaled the reading of the new list of people to be sacrificed. Almost everyone stopped their digging to climb out of the mine and gather in front of the priests’ Temple, where we lived and worked. The Temple was the grandest structure in the city. It was painted dark red, though much of the color was eroded away by sandstorms. It stood almost three times taller than the average home, and five times as wide. As with most homes, it was made from sun-dried bricks and built without a ceiling to allow any scant bit of rainfall to accumulate inside. I will be honest here, it was not much to look at from the inside, and its grandeur paled by comparison to the edifices of our neighboring countries, but it was the closest thing to a place of royalty that existed for miles around. Therefore, it was great.

All of the seven priests were already gathered outside, eight if you included me. Their ages varied, but they all had very little hair and their skin was riddled with burn marks. I often heard them in their room as I tried to sleep, praying loudly around their crackling hearth, taking turns throwing themselves onto the fire. Supposedly the gods speak in the patterns of the burns they receive, telling them whose turn it was to die.

“As of late, Hollace only calls for one person to be sacrificed,” said Morgen, the elder priest, to the assembled crowd. “After days of meditating, we have discovered this boy holds the essence of the sun inside him, in his very likeness. Sacrificing him will unleash it, and the sun will set again.”
A murmur of excitement rippled through the crowd. There were cries of “Who? Who? Out with it!”

“The boy’s name,” said Morgen, “Is Simon Link.”

A grim murmur rippled through the crowd. Every head turned to look at the chosen one, who stood toward the edge of the assembly. I had not known him personally (I had never known anyone personally), but the priests had spoken of him in the past. Apparently he wondered into the city many years ago as a lost, scared child with no memory of where he had come from except for “endless darkness.” He had the lightest skin and hair that anyone had ever seen, and very strange eyes – light blue, with a glass-like clarity to them that makes one think of doll’s eyes. He was first seen stumbling around with his arms out in front of him, squinting as if in pain and wearing outrageously mismatched clothes. Because of his complexion he was first taken for a malevolent ghost and it was only found out otherwise when someone knocked him unconscious by hurling a lump of silver (the sacred metal) at his head, confirming he had a solid form.
It was soon discovered he’d come from the Nightlands. Although he seemed unable to remember anything, his complexion and the glassiness of his eyes told the story for him. Almost everyone residing there had brown, black, or auburn hair with dark skin and eyes. While there are a rare few such as myself who have dirty-blond hair and gray-blue eyes, only the Nightland people are known for having that queer glassiness in their stares, and I’m sure you can see how keeping one’s skin so light is virtually impossible in a land where the sun never sets.

When Simon first came here he was incredibly sensitive to light and had to wear a strip of burlap sack over his eyes whenever he went out, and he was completely blind. Over time his vision improved and he became less sensitive to light, but no one believed he’d ever be deemed fit enough to work in the mines. If that was the case Simon would be cast out or sacrificed, depending on what the parents of the child wanted. Miraculously though, he passed the inspection of the priests and went to work at eight years old like the rest of his peers.

You would think someone so out of place would be an oddity and an outcast, but he turned out to be a likeable kid. An elderly couple adopted him soon after he arrived. He made friends easily, tolerated the questions of the curious, and turned a cold shoulder to the taunts of the bigoted. He was polite, patient, and did not give anyone a reason to not like him, so those who tried found themselves grasping at straws. On one of the few occasions when I went into the city, he actually smiled at me as I passed him instead of averting his gaze and busying himself with something like people usually do when they see me.

So it was with much regret when Simon was turned over to the priests and me. He did not fight or cower; he seemed to have been struck dumb by the news. As customary, I tied his hands behind his back with a piece of rope, slipped a loop around his neck, and tied it as well to ensure he wouldn’t escape my grasp. As I knotted his trembling hands together, I found it hard to imagine this man actually had the likeness of the sun as Morgen had said, unless you counted the fact you had to crane your neck to look him directly in the eye.

Once Simon was firmly secured in my grasp, Morgen saluted the crowd by stretching a clenched fist towards the cloudless sky. “Hollace-Eins!” he yelled.

The air wavered blisteringly as the crowd returned the salute and gave the cry back: “HOLLACE-EINS!!!”

Eins was our word for the number one, but it came to mean a lot more when the stun stopped. It was a tribute to Hollace for his power and might, and showed that we placed him above all other “minor” gods. Because our lives revolved around surviving the sun’s relentless strength, all our rituals and sacrifices were dedicated solely to Hollace.

The only ones who did not return the salute were Simon’s few close friends. They were the last of the assembly to disperse, hanging back to get a last glimpse of their good friend. There were a couple of tear-streaked faces and angry, indignant gazes. A look from me told them to get a move on, but they lingered longer than I would have liked them to.

After watching the crowd break up we went back into the Temple with Simon in tow. Inside the Temple there was a certain room at the very back. In this room there was a door built into the ground. The door opened to a stone staircase leading deep into the earth, to a small dungeon where we kept those whose names were on the list until the time came to sacrifice them. It was foul down there; the floor was coated with all manner of excrement from previous inmates, some of it years old. The smell was putrid enough to knock out gulls, birds who are unable to smell due to lives spent riding sandstorms. Some prisoners actually pleaded for death after only two days of imprisonment.

It was to this dungeon we took Simon. He was completely silent as we led him to the door, but as soon as we opened it and the smell enveloped him, he groaned and tried to take a step backwards. Three of the priests grabbed him in a second, but none of them hurt him – it was considered blasphemy to shed the blood of a sacrifice before his time had come. He started weeping then, pleading with us to free him, have mercy, but there was just one problem – the gods have no mercy, so therefore neither do we.

Thankfully, he did not put up much of a fight. When he realized there was no way he could avoid his fate, he became resigned and allowed us to lead him down the stairway. If it were not for a torch Morgen grabbed before we descended, we would have been as blind as the Nightland people. The room at the foot of the stairway was very small and the floor was completely encrusted with excrement, blood, sweat, and who knew what else. There were handcuffs dangling from one wall, and it was with these we chained Simon. Ordinarily a person would have been able to be chained by their hands as well as their feet, but he was too tall so we tied his feet together with a piece of rope and left him there. As Morgen was finishing the knot, Simon gave me such a pleading, helpless look I had to make myself glare at a dead rat lying in one corner. It must have been there for some time.

As we ascended the staircase, I asked Morgen how the sacrifice was to be performed.

“This will be a new one for you,” he said as if about to ask me a complicated riddle. “You know the old stone post out in the middle of the city square?”

I told him I did. It was the only bit of decoration in the whole city. There was nothing special about it except it was covered in graffiti and drawings.
“We are going to tie him to it, then you will have to shoot ten arrows into his body, but he must not die until the tenth one pierces him.”

This was new. I had never shot an arrow in my life, and here Morgen was asking me to shoot ten of them – ten! – into a single target, without missing or killing him. Give me a sword and I can kill a person without making him bleed. Give me a stone and I can kill him with as much bloodshed as you please. I had sent live bodies into the flames and closed my ears to their screams as they died; I even knew the secret to killing someone before they can utter a single gasp. But about archery, I knew nothing. Just as I opened my mouth to say this, Morgen spoke up again.
“You will learn, of course. It may take a while, but you have always been a fast learner.”

“Fine. But what will we do with him the whole time?” I made a gesture over my shoulder. “Previous sacrifices have come out of there half-dead after just three days. There is no way he can live the whole time.”
Morgen was silent as we climbed a few more stairs. “Do not think this has not occurred to us already,” he said slowly. “Because it has, and we have been thinking long and hard about it. It seems there is only one solution to this. We don’t like it, but it is the only way.”
“And that is…?”

“We keep him in your room.”

“Oh? And how do we keep him from escaping?”

“I doubt he can. There is a very strong lock on your door, and unless he can scale walls like a spider, he won’t be able to climb out. Even so, he wouldn’t dare as the jump would surely kill him.”

“Right.” At the moment I could think of nothing I hated more than the idea of sharing my room with anyone. “And why does it have to be my room?”

“I am surprised at you, Sonnestein. You know we need our room for rituals and meditation.”

“Oh, of course,” I agreed. “I forgot.” Turning away I muttered, “But that’s not all you people use it for.”

“What?” Morgen snapped.

“Nothing.”

“I thought so.”

And so my training in archery began.