7 posts tagged “fiction”

Tarma crept with utmost care along the cave’s perimeter, staying tucked into the shadows like a silver coin in a sock.  Her favorite dagger in her right hand, she picked her way through nearly total darkness, sliding gracefully between loose boulders.  Tarma knew the Baruuk weren’t far behind; she could just hear them grunting and calling out to each other softly in their primitive tongue.  The rocks all around were slick with cold, seeping water and puddles dotted the floor.  Her situation was most precarious.

      Not long ago, there had been four of them.  The Baruuk had appeared out of nowhere, pouring out of the darkness.  Her party’s flickering torches had lit their tusked faces and crude, dark steel weapons as they fell upon the heroes in wave after bloody wave.  Franklin, stout Dwarven warrior of Everhold, had fallen first, his iron chest plate split evenly down the middle.  Only seconds later, the elven brothers Beoryn and Neylsh were overwhelmed, their prayers inadequate to meet the tide of ferocity that crashed upon them. 

      Only her familiarity with desperation had saved Tarma.  Though young, lithe and beautiful, life had never been easy on the rogue.  Her parents had been killed when she was only seven: she knew not why.  What she did know, even then, was that life in the care of lecherous priests or slavers was no life at all, and so she had taken to the streets with only a torn dress and sharp wit.  When she saw the elves fall, Tarma pushed the loss of her lovers down deep within and found a way to survive.  Falling, as though slipping in the blood of her fallen foemen and friends, she reached into her belt pouch and scooped a potion towards her mouth with almost supernatural quickness.  As she hit the ground her teeth bit the cork in half, in the very nick of time.  Just as the bitter but always welcome brew passed her lips, two heavy spearheads found their way deep into her back.

      The Baruuk ripped their weapons from her flesh and raised them over their heads, loosing a triumphant roar.  They did not see the wounds close just as they did not see their kill vanish as she slipped a ring onto her left small finger.

      She slid quietly away from the pile of fallen, stopping only to seize a key from Beoryn’s pouch.  By the time the Baruuk noticed her gone, she was hundreds of yards away, still unseen, creeping quickly but quietly onwards.

      Though exhausted and on the verge of tears, Tarma knew she had to press on.  She and the others, known to the Heroes’ Guild as The Children of Norrin’s Dream, had been given a heavy deed, some months ago at the guild complex in Ravennia.  They were to travel north to the Iceclaw Range, delve deep into the Underworld and locate a secret Baruuk enclave.  What they found there chilled their very souls, for they knew it meant a true horror was soon to be visited upon the free peoples of Ravenna.  There in a dank, filthy cave, they came upon a pool of blood, bubbling forth hot from the very earth.  And as they watched, a dozen Baruuk, adorned not in the usual leather armor, but instead in hooded robes of black entered into the cavern and began a terrible ritual. 

      But as the heroes moved to stop the dark magic, a man-like thing, with skin of ebon black and eyes red as the pool from which it emerged, stepped forth.  The Children of Norrin’s Dream knew not what they saw, but it was evident that it saw them.   It roared its rage at them as they fled, and the heroes felt it’s presence close on their heels as they tried for weeks to escape.  The Baruuk, however, always found them.  The party had no rest, no peace at all as stone orcs fell upon them in packs, always seeming to know where to find their prey. 

      There had been no time to prepare a report.

      And now it was left to poor, shaking little Tarma, all fiery hair and breath, but no real knowledge.  She could only barely read, much less write.  But she knew if she could somehow get onto parchment the story of her beloveds’ death, there would be vengeance.  She knew, also, that if she could not, the consequences would be dire indeed.

      Her ring only worked it’s magic for an hour each day, so she had conserved it, using it only when she saw no other way.  With its aid, her noteworthy skill and no little amount of sheer luck, Tarma had managed to gain distance from what she and her friends had come to call Blood Hold.  For eleven days she had fled alone, and she knew she was coming to the end of her strength.

      But she carried on, moving with as much stealth as her wearied and beaten frame could manage.  She could hear now that the voices of her hunters were fading; she was pulling ahead yet again.  This time she had to make it count.

      Three hours later, she finally stopped.  Activating her ring, Tarma gathered dried moss from the cave walls and pulled two sheets of parchment, ink and a bent quill from her pack.  She ate some dried fruit as well, chewing slowly to savor the rich flavor, and washing it down with fresh, cool water.  Then, Tarma cried.  She wept quietly, shaking a little by her unlit fire, knees drawn up against her chest.  Her tears flowed until her head felt ready to burst.  Just as the magic of her ring dampened away, she drew a deep, heaving breath and steadied herself. 

      Tarma lit the fire quickly as she could, and laid a pair of broken arrows against it to char.  She smoothed the parchment out against the cavern’s rough floor and began laboriously to draw.  On the front of the first page, she scrawled her company’s symbol, a sword jutting downwards through a golden crown.  Her red hair fell in vexing curls around her eyes, and sweat dripped always from her pale face as she worked.  On the back, she wrote the names and birth dates of her companions, then the day of their deaths. Drops of sweat upon the page were joined by tears.  The second page was a crude map, showing as well as she was able the location of Blood Hold.  Upon the back of that leaf, she drew a picture of the chanting, dancing Baruuk, and the demon, or whatever it was, that rose from the pool as best as she was able. 

      She thought it a feeble effort indeed, but as she was considering another option, she heard them.  The Baruuk were coming fast around a bend not nearly far enough off,  straight toward her little fire. 

      In a speed born more of duty than terror, Tarma dug into her pouch and produced the key.  Turning it in the air as she knelt and saying quietly “Shindahl”, a chest appeared around it, emerging out of the very air.  She quickly pulled the lid open, threw her pages in atop the already present contents and slammed it shut again.  She turned the key back and repeated the word of power. 

Eric heaved the last of the vines down from the structure, his face aglow with exertion and excitement.  No one had been to this place in hundreds, maybe thousands of years.  Here, in the depths of the Brazilian rainforest, Eric Strauss had found the most important archeological find of the century.

It was a trilithon, standing some twenty-three feet high and more than eighteen feet wide.  It was covered in bizarre runic inscriptions, swirling patterns intersected by sharp lines, like some come-lately fusion of celtic knot-work and nordic runes.  If the signs of wear on the ancient stones were not so telling, he would have sworn the structure to be a fake.  He could hardly imagine how anyone would go through the effort to make such an immense and intricate forgery in the middle of nowhere.

He carefully measured the distance and took photographs of the newly uncovered section.  Boyishly, he rushed to his pack, pulled out his laptop and imported the pictures into the three dimensional interpreter application he had developed in his senior year at MIT.  He gulped from his water bottle as the program ran, issuing the occasional beep.  

It was taking too long, and the frustrated researcher jogged back over to the structure, running his fingers over its mysteries.  An hour later, a sing-song sequence of tones told him the program was done.   Grabbing the laptop, he stared in awe at the matrices that ran through his find, linking runes together in a an immensely complicated webwork.

He uploaded the sequencing file to his cell phone, and set about attempting the activation.  The afternoon faded into dark night, and still he worked, carefully tracing each rune in the sequence in his own blood.  His now lacerated left arm stung and ached, but still he held up his phone, lighting the work with its built-in light while tracing the symbols with the fingers of his right hand, which also held the knife.

Dawn came before he finished, but the light of the sun rising over the treeline was pale in comparison with the swirling portal that opened in the gaping maw of the trilithon when he finished the sequence.

He stood bathed in its eerily shifting light, backlit by the rising sun, and pondered.  The gate might lead to the distant, mythic past of mankind, or to the court of King Arthur, or to Faerie, or another world or dimension.

Forgetting his equipment, Eric stepped slowly, reverently through the shifting portal.  Its event horizon swallowed him up.  The passage took only seconds, but he was surprised by the sensations that coursed through him as he shifted through the fabric of reality.  The sense of rushing speed he had expected, but not the smell of rich soil, or the tactile spectacle of a hundred hands brushing lightly over every inch of his body, or the ethereal chanting that echoed along in his wake.

Finally, he emerged on the other side of the portal and stood, eyes closed, taking a moment to remember the wondrous passage.  Then he looked around.

"Damn," Eric said. "Akron."

Her fingers weave through the diamond gaps of the chain-link fence.  As they pull at her, pulling at her pants and shoes, the steel wire bends, giving out in advance of her desperate strength.  Eventually, she falls.  The men, all gray cloth and gas-masks gather her up, ignoring her kicking and screaming.

"Atlanta ain't what it used ta be," one of them says.  She kicks at him, receiving only an elbow in the ribs for her trouble.

"Easy!" says the other.  "Don't mark her up."

Moments later, she is thrown into the back of the wagon. Doors slam closed, leaving steel bars and benches her only companions.  She sighs, drags herself up onto a bench and straightens her hair.  Her blouse is torn, and no matter how she tugs or tucks, it will not cover her bra.  Looking through the bars, she notes the passing buildings: the Midtown Hotel is close.  It had taken everything she had to make this escape.  She will not be given back to him.  She would die first. 

Steeling herself to this thought, solidifying it into fact, she bashes her head against the bars, hard.  It stings and aches all at once, but she does it again and again.  The wagon pulls over.  She doesn't stop until the doors open.  When the first soldier starts to climb in, she throws herself at him, toppling him back onto his partner.  They struggle against her and each other.  She rips the mask off his face, spitting and clawing at him.  His reply is a sharp blow to the stomach. 

With the breath driven from her, she slumps over.  They get to their feet, straighten themselves out.  She sees his vicious smile vanish under the mask, but she has a smile of her own.  As they come for her to return her to the mobile cell, she levels the pistol at him.

He stops dead, feels his empty holster.  Four ringing, echoing shots later, she has a weapon and a vehicle.

She might finally make it out of Atlanta tonight.  Tomorrow, she will watch it burn.

He leans against the side of her headstone, watching the sun, like a daisy in a sea of rose petals, sink toward the purple hills.

"It's perfect," he says. "I wish you could have seen it."  He rolls his head back, hair crunching against rough stone, and takes three deep breaths, steadying himself.  "I don't imagine you can ever understand, but I hope you'll forgive me in time."

He reaches out to her, strokes her hair, runs his fingertips over the threads that tie her eyes closed, frail and black like her lashes.  When he leans in to kiss her sewn lips, she moans and tries to scramble away.  With hands and feet bound in barbed wire, she fails, falls onto her side and weeps.

Kneeling beside her, he takes her elbows and levers her over.  She falls into the open grave with a thump and muffled scream.  Crying louder, she struggles against the wall of her grave, pushing herself up to stand.

He has crossed to the other side now, and taken up the shovel, loaded it with dense, black soil.  He watches her turn and stumble in the fading light.  When she realizes where she is, her mouth opens, the thread tearing through her perfect lips.  She screams, "No no no no no!" on and on until only ragged, bloody gasps escape her.

"I love you," he says.  She turns toward his voice, opens her mouth again to speak.  He throws the dirt from his shovel.  Covering her face, the earth mixes with blood in her mouth.  The sun vanishes behind the hills, leaving only a sky like a sea of rose petals.

copyright Logan L. Masterson

Stone

Logan L. Masterson

We met on the verge.The elevator doors slid open and I became a camera.  I followed direction: EXTREME CLOSE UP, HIGH ANGLE. 

She was beautiful like a country antique, like a turn-of-the-century brownstone, like me: used.  Her eyes were a well, deep and empty, brown like shadowed stone.  Her face was down-turned, her eyes up.  She was tiny, fragile, her sweater a shroud, her arms wrapped around her like a straight-jacket.

I could not tell if she pled or searched as our eyes locked.  I stepped out, she in; the moment drew out into eternity.  The depth of her eyes haunts me still.

Verge

Logan L. Masterson

The bathwater is hot; hot enough to redden her to lobster tones.  It's almost enough.  She sinks into the tub, letting her head slip under the event horizon of surface tension.  A sigh escapes her barely parted lips in bubbles .  Her eyes flutter open.

As she reemerges, the memory hits her again like the cold air undoing warm water's peace.  The moisture on her face becomes cut with salt.

She looks up at the shower-head, at the wrought iron rack that hangs there, at the razor blades resting on it.  They've just begun to rust, and she wonders if that will make it hurt more.

The hall is grimy, dingy, dank.  Yellowed lights spark off and on in their rusted cages overhead.  Something has leaked from the ceiling, leaving a thousand ochre-stained trails down peeling once-gold diamond and fleur wallpaper.

He hears them breathing through the paneled door, his ear against its rough red surface.  He breathes with them, in time.  His pulse slows.  His eyelids unclench, his brow smooths.  The corners of his lips curl up, but the smile is not anticipatory; just the opposite.

The lights flicker again, a slow, unsteady pulse.  They go out.  With his finger curling gently, almost lovingly around the trigger, his other hand finds the knob.

It turns without resistance.