Olympus at Twilight

I know I've been posting a lot of creative writing lately. Just looking for some feedback, and I've been unable to find a forum that really gives me the interaction I'm striving for. Throwing what I can at the wall to see what sticks. Plan to return to Blogging in earnest soon.

This was part of a pitch for something I was working on. Turned into the opening of a pen and paper RPG campaign I ran but never had the chance to really conclude. Inspired in part by Frank Stratford's To Settle Mars

The great Prior Empire had peaked.

From grand cities to opulent cathedrals, monuments of their success rose from blackened earth into searing blue, brimming with the faithful.

The House of Drumar had tamed the world.

Less than a decade later, nine centuries of brittle prosperity began to show its age, turning first from decadence, then to boredom then finally to cruelty. Cult faiths from long purged religions were on the rise. Tolerated at first by the nobles as a fad of the lower classes and academics, they were a sign of times expected to pass that simply didn’t. The more the Priors tried to push them out, the more these fanatic sects grew in number. The more they grew in number, the more they threatened the interests of the houses royal. And with the battle lines of a second great purge being drawn, the dissenters were forced to band together across philosophical and political lines.

Calling themselves the Golden Dawn, the best among the newly unified independents campaigned for an audience with the quorum through protest. And when that failed their more fanatical elements in turn lashed out with insurgency.

Filled with the bodies of martyrs and children, the streets emptied as guerilla war brought the old home to its knees.

Police action ruled the day. While armies garrisoned in major cities against a civilian terror they could neither identify nor defeat; food stores began to dry up.  With hunger on the rise and resources on the decline, troops moved into the cities under the jackbooted decree of martial law.

In response, the Golden Dawn retaliated with an army of martyrs. Willing and able men and women strapped explosives to their chests and rushed at every crowded street corner in droves.

Blood and rust mucked the gutters, until there was only war filling the streets - devouring the innocent like a machine. From every corner of the empire, the Golden Dawn inched ever closer to the capitol.  They would either bring their message to the quorum floor – or die in heaps making the attempt.

With all of the Dawn’s attention focused on those inside the capitol ground, civilian life almost returned to normal. Not that the same could be said for the nobles. Behind the battlements of his stronghold, the prophet: Samuel Marius Drummar (Rex Deus) and the rest of his inner circle were slowly forced into a kind of house arrest. Stir crazy from eleven months under siege, Samuel would routinely spend unguarded hours walking the hanging gardens at the fortress’ center to escape the constant bickering of the noble council. And while a guard detail was always on post around the garden perimeter, they kept their distance from the prophet.

Outside young men and women detonated themselves into the afterlife.  But inside, behind untold layers of stone, mortar, and steel their sacrifice came as little more than distant pops. Here in the inner sanctum of the stronghold, tended to almost exclusively by servants, the prophet felt protected.

Safe.

During these long hours of introspection he became a complacent and predictable target. Calculating and terrible minds spent every moment of the last decade bent on a single murderous purpose, but infiltrating one of their own into Drumar’s ranks was not easy. Even among the lowest of the servant staff the task proved daunting. 

And on the mid–summer morning of June 29th in the year of their lord 2086 an insurgent armed with time and opportunity managed the impossible.  Samuel Marius Drummar (Rex Deus), the voice of God to over 7 billion souls, had finally been silenced.

Eager and ambitious for a seat on his father’s throne, Thomias, Samuel’s first born could not wait for what fate seemed eager to give him. He had been trading intel to the enemies of the state for some time waiting patiently for his moment to claim the crown… but fate, being fate remained a fickle bitch!

Samuel was still alive.

Trapped in a prison of flesh Samuel’s mind called out to those who had served him. They who could heed the call were few to start, barely a handful. But as time passed his mind grew louder and louder, calling every day into his wife Careanna’s mind until a door opened behind her eyes and he flooded in.

With his father continuing to rule the empire through a proxy, Thomias would not take the throne. And though his mother would direct the empire in his father’s name – she would never be the prophet.

The notion that she could hear the voice of a burned catatonic seemed more like madness than miracle to Thomias and his supporters. Even when those select among the Quorum claimed to hear his voice as well - Thomias called them crazed.

But the quorum was sympathetic to Careanna, crazy as it may have been, when she spoke she sounded so hauntingly like him that it was hard to believe the truth could be anything else. If Thomias was going to seize power, he would have to do it without trying to discredit his mother.

Again he turned to his silent partners among the Dawn. His mother would never be silenced and bound by law, and she couldn’t simply die in her sleep, it had to be public and brutal.

Within a week Careanna was dead, and with her gone, Thomias hoped to take the holy seat from beneath the shadow of his nearly martyred father.

Infuriated by his wife’s death and his recent imprisonment in a body that would not obey him, he called out with his mind. Those blessed with latent psionic ability not only heard the call, but replied.

They would wait.

Shuffled off to a well point facility Samuel marshaled his forces in quiet corners. His plans needed time to fruit.

In secret, supplies were diverted, and preparations made.  The ships he intended to take had been crewed by way of subtle shift rotation, and in a span of mere weeks 50,000 men women and children were ready. They just needed their moment and Samuel had something special in mind. He remembered the treaty of his ancestors and its impending conclusion.

In a few months, a 500 year old non-aggression pact with the Nahuatl Empire would come to a close. The beasts of the Americas would soon return their attention to the old world, and with all the unpleasantness of their original meeting, he did not expect this reunion to be a happy one.

For centuries the Nahuatl had been permitted to thrive; maybe not permitted, so much as ignored - and in that time, their empire of flesh and pain and sacrifice had undoubtedly made them mighty.

Samuel knew all of these red truths.

He knew the once and mighty Priors would taste nearly instantaneous warfare on a scale not known since the ancient times of the great purge. A precognition of tens of thousands crossing the Atlantic with more in reserve, and a hundred years of bloody madness reigning in the world bored its way into his mind. And when their ships landed, when the attention of those fatted generals was focused elsewhere, that’s when he and his supporters would make their move.

Terrified of what was to come, the Quorum of Elders broke into factions along political lines, as if politics could shield them from what was coming. To the left: peaceful negotiation with whispers of capitulation took to the tongue. To the right: the madness of war without end held sway, especially in the mouths of the eastern most baronies.

But in the center Thomias; son of the prophet remained silent.

Samuel only had one move to make. And so, as the Nahuatl invaders landed their forces, Samuel and his followers fled the old home, their number too great to deny; their weapons too dangerous to oppose. Aboard 5 great ships: The Solon, Critias, Sais, Socrates, and the Timaus; they disappeared into the night sky.

For the three year journey his body remained a prison; his mind shook at the bars. 

While most others slept dreamless in the cryo holds – Samuel was awake. Aware of his surroundings. In comatose silence, madness was born, creeping in through unwelcome cracks in his resolve. 

Maddening, Samuel traveled inward. Struggling to repair the damage, his consciousness split. Dividing and subdividing, until every cell was at his command. He would have to rebuild his mortal vessel one piece at a time.

While he took to the task, this story unfolded in the Solon’s cryo holds:

The first time through your teens passed much more clearly than the second. You were only eleven when you left the old home for the star filled darkness. You remember the three long years in the tanks; trapped and awake.

You couldn’t age, the stasis assured that much, but that doesn’t mean time didn’t pass. Even when the first drop ships set their gear on red rock you, like the rest of the children, remained in your embryonic cells.

It was here that the group mind first took shape. Young minds, overwhelmed by sadness and isolation called out to one another, until finally; there came an answer in the darkness… another mind struggling in silence, screaming to be heard. But this mind had been at it for much longer, edging on madness in a body that would not abide its own will. But he like you refused to stop calling out. You had reached the mind of the prophet and he reached back. Through the years of terra forming, he was there, and when he finally emerged from his palsied prison he came for you…Just as he promised he would - his little curia. A kindness that can never repay the debt of loyalty that overwhelms you: The unbreakable bond.  

The above may not be true of every soul born yet or since… but it is true of you.

7 months and they landed on the surface of the red planet. 27 months and the final gilding found purchase on the filigree of the great citadel. 77 months after that, in a hospital ward within the wellborn complex, reborn Samuel sat up suddenly, pulled the needles from his veins and planted both feet firmly on the cold tile.

Dexterity was slow to return as he fought for equilibrium. Muscles bulged and contracted, ringing the weakness from once dead meat. His skin tightened and renewed before an already terrified nursing staff. Muscles, toned from atrophy; as if it had never set in at all. The clock that had stolen age from him had been rebuked.

In the years after, Samuel would become the voice of the almighty to his people. Within a generation speech was obsolete. Eugenics had nearly weeded the non-gifted from the genetic swim.  Those born with the malady of normal were shipped off to the commons of Ashfield; to grow in the shade of the world whose only use for them was in backbreaking labor.

Prosperity dawned on the red planet while and age of blood took hold on Terra; strangling the heart of the system with war. 

Sproket for your thoughts?

This is the larval state of an idea that has been floating around in my head. No idea where it's going...

Call came in sometime after dawn; took us about an hour to arrive on the scene. The Cogswain was an easy on the outskirts of the eastern foundries,  a place where cogsman could come in from the rain after a long day’s work to trade their honest wages for a pint of spirits.  Its graveled lot was empty in the purple hours of morning, making the building’s outer structure of engraved wood seem immense in the surrounding emptiness. We didn’t get called out here much; places on the outskirts like this tended to police themselves, and given how inherent the cogsman were to our shared survival, the wider the birth their merriment received the better.

We spent a good twenty minutes popping flashbulbs in the lot trying to capture the scene in greater detail than it’s stark almost barren state seemed to allow our eyes. No avail. The place was swept clean – with not so much as a shoe print pressed into the loose rock.

Through the saloon doors, the barkeep, drunken and drifting pressed his forearms into the bar from a stool near the entrance. You could see it on his face, the room was clearly spinning;  his last sip of cognac swirled warm down his throat some time ago, and he had spent most of the minutes since trying to will his brain meats into making sense of it all. From the look on his face, he had been at it for some time with little positive effect.

Frozen and staring, entranced at the human debris, the tips of his shoes literally swimming in blood. Just beyond his grip, a half full glass slowly tipped its contents onto the floor.

Drip. Drip. Drip

I took little away from his attention, standing in the doorway eyeballing the scene. My partner however wasn’t so lucky. The second he crossed the arch of the doorjamb the barman’s expression hardened. Turning toward us with renewed liveliness on his previously vacant expression. My partner pretended not to notice as alcohol contaminated our crime scene, zeroing in on the man’s intense watery eyes.

“Ow’ can you stand it,” he asked.

“What’s that?” Swand replied never breaking the veneer of innocence on his face.

“Working wif’ unadem!” he sputtered.

Annoyed at the banter about to happen as if I wasn’t in the room, I twisted my head to face the barman.

“By all means continue ,” I said in as menacing a monotone as I could muster.

Something about the way my posture faced the crime scene while my head turned nearly all the way round must have unnerved the poor fellow a skosh. Gibbering, he pulled words from the desert in his throat, ignoring my question as he frantically tried to explain the scene.

The story he had to tell wasn’t of much use but went a little something like this:

Hours ago, just after set when the bodies were packed shoulder to shoulder the old man had excused himself to the back to pull stock from the fridge, leaving s small crew of barmaids and  busmen to keep everything running. He couldn’t have been back there for more than fifteen/twenty minutes when everything went down. So he finishes his inventory for the nightly restock and when he returned the place was still as a grave.

After he had sent the wire he had taken to perching in this very spot until we arrived.

Surveying the scene, the first thing I noticed was the state of the place. Every glass and bottle, every table and chair seated in its home as if the place was patroned by ghosts. The bar must’ve been packed to the gills given the number of body parts heaped in piles around the room. If it weren’t for the blood and bodies, the whole scene would have seemed altogether untouched…

That is with one exception.

 Behind the bar, two automata not unlike myself stood slumped, their arcane keys had been ripped out with a roughness that rent the metal from its housings. The cogs in my head began to hum as the apertures around my eyes narrowed. What on earth could disembody so many without causing a panic. Whatever it was it had to be fast Very fast. But why damage those that can be repaired? It’s not like these simple automata could’ve been a threat. Too many things weren’t adding up.  I turned to look at Detective Inspector Swand, only to find he had been staring at me since my braincase started to hum.

“What?” I asked.

“I know that sound, you have a theory,”  he said.

“What gave it away.”

“Your brain always hums and you do that thing with your eyes, when you have a theory,” he said, “so spit it out.”

“Swand, sometimes you have a dizzying intellect,” I replied. He smiled, as was his nature. Humoring the way my flat vocals passed for dry wit. “I’m not sure yet, but I don’t think our assailant was human.”

“Wow slow down, I should probably write this down,”  his reply, thick with unnoticed sarcasm.

I waited patiently for him to pull a pad and pen from his satchel, and after a time when he failed to produce them, I asked him to pull the horseless around. The Chief inspector would not be pleased.

Hours later the horseless approached the depot with unbearable sloth. The batteries had been run pretty dry on our trip out to the skirts, causing Swand to measure his speed on the return very carefully; a behavior well outside the nature of his character. Swand was whistling for much of the drive, a sound I found soothing as I let the reaction engine in my skull pour over all of the new data it had collected.

Trifecta

This is the first thing I ever wrote that got printed etc. It’s 15 years old, and while I think it shows its age, it’s still good-ish. Regardless of some of the more cringe worthy moments for me reading it (even its original title: Entropy is a bit emo for my taste), I thought you might enjoy.

I often look back on this as what I call the trifecta as it was the first time I got recognized for something I liked to do, without feeling like I had to qualify the success. It got me the attention of the woman I am enagaed to, and it made a modest appearance in the outlaw which was a newspaper published by one of the JCs I was atending before I went to UCLA.

So here you are.

Darkness falls on yet another passing day. The once illuminating sun disappears, giving form to the vastness of star filled night.

Below the city pulses in the dark calm, a fresh breath of life filling its steel lungs while the monotone hum of man and machine, once again active, consumes the night air.

Oblivious in his nature, man leads his little life, unaware of the war that consumes the world around him. Behind every corner lies a shadowy other world. Battles play out like the plays of old both tragic and comedic. Characters take the stage with little time to mourn the passing of their predecessors. Driven in service to an age old struggle they wage war in the name of gods so afraid of their own mortality that they use humanity's remnants as pawns in their games of chance.

From these games a lone piece emerges. Stalwart, tragic, and yet driven by a love and faith, which rivals the power of the very gods, he fights for. As he comes into focus, we see his skimmer as it streaks fluidly through the back streets of the 'skirts. The sweet thunder of his engine roars as he darts between traffic.

Oblivious to the beauty of the world around him, his awareness is devoured by thoughts of recent events. His surroundings take a back seat to the events, which replay in his minds eye. He’s swept away by visions of the woman he loved just out of reach, her soft eyes begging for the salvation he could not provide. For the sake of those eyes he will wage a war that threatens to engulf the entire world of Aschera in conflict.

Revenge smolders in his belly.

The loss pours over him in waves in subtle, tactile ways at first. He would never know her touch again, and this failure eats away slowly at the core of him. Over and over again he sees her eyes, her sweet innocent eyes as the life drains slowly from her neck. And that image will be emblazoned in his memory forever.

Briefly, the memories fade as his attention returns to the pavement. He has reached his destination; the Temple of the Tiger's mouth. The silent solidarity of this sacred local washes over his melancholy, and for an instant he is contented in the sight of his god, reassured by his lingering faith that he is the chosen, and with such great honor comes great power.

And power is something he can use.

Assuredly he sets his skimmer down and slowly making his way to the temple. The raw power of the acolytes chanting is euphoric, their litanies filling him with unspoken hope that all may not be lost. His memories; relegated to the times of happiness she gave him. Contently resigned to the only physical memory he had; the tenderness of her touch.

Before that he was a cold hybrid of flesh and metal, unaware of the subtle joys of a woman's skin. The memory of her soft caress lingers in his mind for long moments on the way to the altar. Even as he slowly lowers himself to his knees in reverence to this place, she is with him. His long cloak billows as he bends himself; with bowed head and closed eyes silently begging the gods of the Coil to bestow upon him one more gift.

Over and over in his mind he says the words, but the longer they go unanswered the more he realizes that even the gods are limited in their ability to give in to the desires of their subjects, and this young man asks for something outside the scope of the very beings he prays to: forgiveness.

A tear runs silently down his cheek and pauses before gravity takes hold. His single tear is all he can bear. He remains kneeling for some time, lost in his lamentations. Duty tells him he is part of something larger than himself now, a sentiment he quickly ignores.

Duty be damned!

Darkness slowly forgoes its hold on light as the temple is back lit by the sun's rising. Long shadows give way to the golden sun as its warm embrace squeezes tightly against the metal monoliths of the naive world below.

Even as the rustle of nightlife dims and the pawns of this game return to the board, he remains in stillness.

Maybe tomorrow will be the day it all changes. Maybe tomorrow their losing streak against fate will be broken, maybe with this new day comes an untapped realm of possibility. Maybe tomorrow will bring forgiveness.

His attention is diverted upward; tomorrow is full of maybes… But today, today there is only war!