by James on Wed Mar 23, 2011 1:42 am
I haven't finished off anything in particular for this, but here are some more or less fragmentary things, of varying age, from my computer. I've been trying to write something a bit more substantial recently but it's not at a good stage to share yet.....
SPACE JUICE
Who would have guessed that the appendix is the key to human destiny? That small abdominal organ, that vestigal artefact of an evolutionary dead end, once thought redundant since Man’s simian sires swang for the last time from the verdant limbs of jungle trees to dine on the carrion of the plains. What an abomination it now seems that the swift scalpels of generations of surgeons deprived so many of their Space Organ; that an act which now carries a capital sentence was once the most routine of hospital procedures.
The extraordinary revelation that the appendix facilitates interstellar travel was first made by Hermann Glock, the disgraced twenty-first century biochemist whose vivisection labs were mysteriously bulldozed soon after his shocking findings were unveiled. The torments Glock inflicted upon his fellow primates were reprehensible, but the resulting discovery of the enzyme H094211-X – colloquially known as Space Juice – ushered in a new age of hope and opportunity for a world still reeling from the fallout of the Nano War. With vast continental swathes rendered barren by virus bombs and psyplagues, the enzyme opened safe paths across the cold void between stars; extra-dimensional highways to strange unpeopled worlds orbiting alien Suns. Of course there were powers that attempted to harness this knowledge in secret, selfishly hoping to glean some military or technological advantage, but like all such schemes this could not last, and within a decade the global community was privy to all the astonishing facts.
Who can say what fate the first Exodites met? The courage of those early prospectors is still celebrated by the Colonies – sometimes to the point of worship - but no amount of veneration can mask the grim likelihood that most suffered a hellish demise as their prototype voidsuits ruptured under the immense energies they were designed to withstand. Soon though the technology was honed and perfected, and void-migration became a real possibility for citizens with sufficient wealth.
But what of those left behind? Rarely do Colonists have reason to return to the blighted mother planet, and nor is it thought wise to subject oneself to multiple void flights (though the Freighters exhibit only mild side-effects). None the less, numerous sources report that most of Earth’s once-great cities are now hives of criminality and backward tribalism, where gangs wage undying wars for control of galactic trade, and mad warlords strive to stockpile sufficient enzyme to blast dubious and untested craft into dimensions they cannot comprehend. Many are sceptical of such rumours, but I will relate one particular case which has become familiar folklore amongst new-worlders.
Jekyll the Harvester is said to be a particularly unsavoury character whose henchmen terrorize the streets of Old London searching for ‘zymers’ – people with intact appendices – whom they will brutishly kidnap and take to the sickening nerve centre of Jekyll’s operations known as ‘The Clinic’. In that secret lair the unfortunate captives will be locked in cells and periodically syphoned of their cosmic juices, until suicide or appendicitis finally provides a release. Presumably Jekyll has coerced certain engineers into constructing an exit shuttle of some sort for him and his lackeys, although the enzyme reserves such a vessel would require can only be guessed at. You may be forgiven for thinking that all citizens would be ‘zymers’ given the grave implications of appendectomy, but the threat of the harvesters has reportedly become so great that many willingly deprive themselves of the organ – either by risky and agonising self-operation or at unsanitary and illegal underground surgeries - knowing that they will never amass the funds to benefit from their own secretions. I have heard that, at the very least, people slice their own abdomens in the hope that the resulting scar will throw harvesters off the scent. But all this may be a horrible distortion of true affairs; one can only hope.
THE DREAMER FROM THE GRAVE
I had been dead for many centuries before my return. Do not believe those hollow guesses about the hereafter that cascade from the gilded pulpits; no divine judge awaited my spirit, no Elyssian fields or sulphurous pit. Instead I dreamed: long, fantastic dreams unlike the fleeting shades of mortal sleep. For decades my dream-self resided in a palace whose walls were hewn from cloud, where garish ceremonies were enacted daily to appease Isithith, Lord of the Winds. Life in that nebulous mansion was mostly serene, but there was ever a quiet anxiety that the angry breath of our god would sweep it all away, leaving us to plummit to the unhappy world below. In another cycle I was a pilgrim on the long road to Kuwatash, that desert home of the Six Temples where the last fragments of the Black Grail rest in venerable reliquaries. It was a troubled road I trod while the cold earth of the necropolis slowly reclaimed my coffin, and I fought off many outlaws and unsavoury creatures as I travelled. Yet another episode saw me leading a battalion of feathered tribesmen in a desperate rearguard action while our women and children fled to the mountains. There was no victory to be had against the marauders from the west, but we could at least slow their advance with our keen flint weaponry.
In these worlds and a hundred others my dead mind quested while my earthly headstone crumbled and was forgotten, and I could fill a library with their recollection. Only now does it occur to me that all those characters I encountered must also have been in death’s embrace, which leads me to wonder what forsaken charnel pits and mausoleums house their dreaming bones. Perhaps in the cloud palace I mingled with souls whose dessicated remains lie within regal ziggurats; and maybe my pilgrim’s staff beat aside the vagabond spirits of god-emperors whose gold-encased sarcophagi will never be found.
In all of these death-dreams there was none of the uncertain haze that blurs the slumber of the living; each was as vivid and substantial as this brief phase called reality, and indeed I came to question the superior emphasis we place on the transient realm of flesh. Perhaps all of life is a long hallucination from which death finally rouses us, and we wake at last upon eternal planes unsullied by impossibility.
So it was back to mortality’s prison that I was summoned by I know not what force, to an alien era when furnaces consume the dead and few heed the rotten monuments of the past. Groggy with sleep I dragged myself from my damp grave, emerging into a wilderness which had once been a well-kept burial ground. I do not recall my former name – I had bourne it in fact for fewer years than some of my dreamed aliases – and it has long since eroded from the ruined masonry marking my repose. A great tiredness hangs upon my limbs, and I long to return to my silk-lined casket deep beneath the clammy soil. A restless ghoul am I now, severed from that lovely sleep-beyond-sleep in which we are truly alive.
If ever, reader, you have been woken prematurely by some sound or action and dragged unwilling into the stark light of consciousness, you may understand some small part of my anguish. So sleep now as I cannot, and journey across those midnight plateaus which are but a pale prelude to the dreamscapes that await your demise.
THE TIERS OF XULUB
Xulub was a city of many tiers. At the lowest level there dwelt those barely conscious servitors who toiled in the sewer systems and shovelled grave soil, oblivious to their impending metamorphosis. They were the ‘grimes’, loathed by the city’s higher beings as figments of their own dark genesis, now rendered little more than a distant nightmare by the deliverance of the First Waking. Above the grimes lived all those who had crawled from the cocoon chambers with eyes that saw and minds that understood. Many did not complete this first stage of transcendence – their liquefied remains nourished those they tried to leave behind – but the survivors emerged as sentient creatures who revelled in the liberation of consciousness, etching their existence on the fabric of reality through music, literature, and elegant temples of marble and bronze. Most lived out the remainder of their allotted span in this awakened state, artificially stratifying themselves into many further tiers founded purely on social status and wealth.
For some, however, a true Second Waking loomed. Very occasionally a citizen would be gripped with a compulsion as sudden as it was involuntary, and so begin an ascent to the topmost spire of the citadel, where a honeycomb of onyx corridors surrounded an atrium of unworldly scale. There they would spend an indefinite period meditating on all they had seen and heard in life, and then lower themselves into a great pool of jet-black water, its surface as still as glass, and be lost to the world forever. Some said that they slept submerged for many centuries, slowly dissolving within that final womb until at last their disembodied souls took flight like celestial mayflies, soaring on ethereal wings to sculpt new infinities amongst the stars. Others whispered that the water still held the full essences of all who had entered, and that at the End of Days it would evaporate into the cosmos and cascade as a dark rain upon some distant planet to seed a new civilisation of angelic beauty and wisdom.
Such were the tiers of long-lost Xulub.
ZADON AND QALAT
The legions of Shazad Niraron were once renowned and feared throughout the world. No army could prevail against them, no fortress could withstand their bronze-clad onslaught. The vanguard alone had toppled many rival kingdoms, and dragged their conquered chieftains in chains before the great amber-studded throne at Narnuk. When not on campaign, the king’s phalanxes would drill on the plains of Kuwatash, and the surrounding hills resounded with the clash of metal and the pulse of war drums.
The legions were commanded by Shazad’s eldest son, Zadon. A brilliant charioteer and visionary tactician, Zadon was adored by his troops and the war-loving civilians of the city-states. His idealised image stood immortalised in basalt in market squares and shrines throughout the Empire, holding aloft his mace of imperium while treading dwarfed adversaries underfoot. Zadon was second only to Shazad Niraron himself, and sat by his right hand on all occasions of high ceremony.
Left of the amber throne sat the royal adviser Qalat, as dissimilar to his older brother Zadon as the crimson Moon is to the Sun. While Zadon excelled in feats of arms, Qalat shunned the parade ground, instead drilling his mind in the record rooms of his father’s palace. Just as Zadon studied maps and tactical manuals, so Qalat leafed through law suits and royal charters. The one was lord of the cavalry charge, the other was master of bribery and ambush. This contrast was also mirrored in the affections of the populace, who reviled the younger prince as a serpent hissing venomous counsel into the ear of their king.
Shazad Niraron adored his younger son however. Some said that he saw in Qalat’s dark complexion the memory of his late queen Neshtiki, who had tragically died in childbirth. Or perhaps it was Qalat’s unmatched wordplay that won his father’s devotion, being ever quick to nourish the old man’s vanity and minimise his failings.
The years passed, and eventually Shazad lay on his deathbed. Zadon was campaigning in the Vale of Four Rivers at this time, and rumours were rife that Qalat stalked the courtyards impatiently and held shadowy councils with swarthy and unfamiliar visitors. The amber throne was rightly Zadon’s to claim, but on the streets of Narnuk Qalat’s odious intentions were the stuff of much gossip. Such talk was initially disregarded by the city’s scholars and nobles, but the horrid truth of it soon revealed itself.
Qalat’s first step was to sever the army’s food supply. The grain caravans were recalled by imperial decree, and all new shipments were suspiciously intercepted by pirates from Lashtar. Hungry and demoralised by premature reports of the king’s death, Zadon’s personal legion broke off operations and began an urgent march back to the royal capital. It was on this return journey that the second phase of Qalat’s plot unfolded. The devious prince had spent some years grooming the chieftains of the mountain tribes, so that a once disparate network of factions was now united by a hunger for vengeance (which had been simmering ever since a youthful Shazad fired their farmsteads and drove them into the hills). When darkness came, the hillmen fell upon Zadon’s force like a furious avalanche, and although some semblance of an overnight fort had been erected, the half-starved imperial soldiers were easy pickings; few survived. Zadon himself was reportedly slain as he defended the final corner of his camp against the barbarous mountain reavers. Some later insisted that he escaped the fray with a crack division of his personal retinue, but these were invariably those prone to fantasy and warped rememberings of things that never were. To everyone else, that bloodstained valley became known simply as Ubol-Zadon: ‘the Grave of Zadon’.
At Narnuk, Qalat acted swiftly. Shazad had finally passed away, and his younger son announced a grand funerary festival, patently engineered to garner popularity for his own succession. Meanwhile runners were sent to the remaining legions promising them increased wages and generous pensions if they would flock to Qalat’s banner, and several of Zadon’s closest supporters met untimely ends either through spurious legal charges or the silent art of assassination.
The heavy lid of Shazad’s regal sarcophagus had hardly been closed when Qalat ascended in majesty to the amber-studded throne. Narnuk itself was renamed Qalatikir - ‘royal seat of Qalat’ – and the new king held complete control of the treasury and the imperial legions, whose numbers he swelled dramatically. Chroniclers remember his reign as the Age of Ash, during which countless subjects were dispossessed, exiled or killed, and the glorious days of Shazad Niraron became nought but a dimly remembered dream.
thrashduck wrote:And the internet was without uk thrash form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of James moved upon the face of the waters.
"No Hellscourger, I would not like a strawberry."
