Snippet: Sand into Glass

I sit up and press my right ear against Aucra's sternum. Her heart is steady, unchanging. She is clockwork, but I wonder if her gears are made of glass or of metal. If she is glass, I can reshape her with just a little heat and stress. I feel the buzz of her voice in her chest. I have no idea what poison she whispers to me, and I don't care.

“You present yourself young and beautiful,” I say, “but you are neither. You are Time, as old as the universe, and as twisted and deceitful. You are responsible for far more murders than I am. You are the worst mass-murderer in all the universe. Every single living thing falls to you eventually, and you savor it, drink up every bit of that death and then piss on the next generation while waiting for it to come of age so you can drink again. While you're waiting, you take little sips and kill off the fragile young and the accident-prone and the infirm to keep your appetite from fading. You are a murderous abomination, and it's no wonder you have fallen in love with someone just a fraction as loathsome as yourself. I will leave your love unrequited, because I am better than you. I do not kill for my own entertainment. No matter what I am better than you, and I will win. Watch me win.”

-Sand into Glass

Snippet Sunday: Mayfly Requiem

Do you still remember that spring we found the nest of baby birds blown down by the wind? They died in our hands, naked, vulnerable, infinitely fragile. I cried for days. Such precious life, created and snuffed out in hardly an instant. When we were children, time ran by too fast, but now we are ancient and every day is a slow crawl toward an indeterminate finish line. Our neighbors, our friends, our lovers have become those baby birds. Their lives are fleeting, but that does not make them any less precious. They are meaningful and beautiful. We used to be, but now I am the living damned and you are a breathing, clouded myth. We have nearly faded from all memory, but here we are, alive and forgotten. I like it better that way. It is quiet, tranquil except for my remorse and the ticking, the constant reminder I have of my servitude. The quiescence gives us the opportunity to be... well, be a little bit human. I wouldn't exchange it for anything at all. Except, of course, the opportunity to undo my final mistake as a Time Child. What have I done? What horrors have I brought upon myself and the world? Dia, I'm just as terrified and bleak as those dying baby birds, and as fleetingly fragile.

-from Mayfly Requiem

Six-Sentence Sunday

Bethel was universally respected even as his sons were reduced to nightmares suffered by wayward children. It was the same for us everywhere and I never became acclimated to the automatic assumption that I was to be feared. I certainly was a fearful creature, but when you tell your children to stay away from the spindly little boy from the forest, you are working a little too hard at inciting the rage within that spindly little boy. I was just a kid, after all, no more mature or developed than a Drey or a human ten-year-old. I learned early I was something to be feared and those early whispers and rumors have clung to me through the years. People create their own monsters, and it's hard not to become what everyone wants you to be when they push your inner nature to overtake your mind.

- from Sand into Glass, Book 1 of the Emergence Trilogy (Book 6 of the Malora Series)

Aucra

I was going to post something yesterday for Snippet Sunday/Six Sentence Sunday, but I am perpetually time-lost and can never remember what day it is. This is a bit from my work-in-progress, Sand into Glass. Aucra is one of the central Elements, the deity Time. The narrator, Arden, is not immortal, but is from a long-lived race descended from Aulors. He is hearing-impaired (deaf on the left, and at this point in the story, only possesses partial hearing in his right). 

I wandered into the corner and out of the range of Ikuren's voice. Aucra sat on my cot. She wanted so horribly to see her prize tainted, to see his teetering foundation crumble under the tremendous weight of his own memories. I was no prize, no trophy, no champion for her. I couldn't redeem myself, but I could vex her until my end.

“You are going to lose this fight,” Aucra said. She smiled smugly and twirled a strand of hair between her fingers.

I flopped on the cot and laid my head on her lap. She stroked my hair and I smiled up at her. I whispered, “My life is a waste except for a single moment bracketed by two shimmering stars. Even if I only have one wonderful moment every four centuries, I will hold onto that and it will keep me safe. A spring rain, a desert night, a swinging pendulum, a ticklish child laughing as I try to put shoes on his feet. I focus on the light I can find, and if I can't find it, I create it. I created two tiny stars, and even the one who was short-lived burned far brighter than you ever will.”

I sat up and pressed my right ear against Aucra's sternum. Her heart was steady, unchanging. She was clockwork, but I wondered if her gears were made of glass or of metal. If she was glass, I could reshape her. I felt the buzz of her voice in her chest. I had no idea what poison she whispered to me and I didn't care.

“You present yourself young and beautiful,but you are neither," I said calmly. "You are Time, as old as the universe, and as twisted and deceitful. You are responsible for far more murders than I am. You are the worst mass-murderer in all the universe. Every single living thing falls to you eventually, and you savor it, drink up every bit of that death and then piss on the next generation while waiting for it to come of age so you can drink again. While you're waiting, you take little sips and kill off the young and the infirm to keep your appetite from fading. You are a murderous abomination, and it's no wonder you have fallen in love with someone just a fraction as loathsome as yourself. I will leave your love unrequited, because I am better than you. I do not kill for my own entertainment. No matter what, I am better than you, and I will win. Watch me win.”

Aucra continued to stroke my hair and I fell asleep in her arms. She was still there when I woke from my nap, but she refused to speak with me. I appreciated that, and daresay, celebrated it. It is not often a mortal renders Time speechless.

Shadows of Absolution

I received my first proof of Shadows of Absolution a few minutes ago. The cover was mostly a placeholder so I could get it before I left for vacation and I need to rework it because it printed way too dark (it's darker in person than it is on the pictures below). I'll be working on it over the next week while the remainder of my beta readers finish up.

And, while you're waiting, here's an excerpt from Shadows of Absolution.

He abruptly stopped walking and Dacibrega ran into his elbow. Bethel smiled as he stared in the direction of a collection of flat, concrete walls gracing the village center. “Oh, a labyrinth.”

Some of the slabs had toppled over, but most still stood upright. Their jagged tops mirrored the rise of the Gana range to the north and west. I wondered if my grandfather used this very labyrinth as inspiration for his mountains. I made a note to ask him about it when I returned home. If I returned home. Maybe nature would finally claim me and I would never see any of them again. Maybe that would not be so bad.

I sat on a mossy stone bench near the labyrinth entrance while Bethel stepped into the maze. I closed my eyes and listened to the dry leaves rustle in the slightly salty wind. The sun stroked my face with a surprisingly intense heat, which parried the early evening chill for a short time. I ran my fingertips along the chips and grooves of the bench.

A great and richly thunderous boom rang out between the young trees. The sound did not rattle the branches as I expected. Instead it stroked them, caressed them. They shuddered under its growling vibration.

I slowly opened my eyes and watched Dacibrega swing a dried-out branch at the huge, empty water drum a second time. The drum was taller in diameter than he was and the sound it produced was gloriously deep and beautiful. I smiled at him and kicked at the pebbles around the bench.

“This place is dead?” Dacibrega asked. Or, maybe he stated. I could rarely distinguish questions from statements with him. He dropped the branch onto the cracked pavement.

“No, very much alive,” Bethel whispered. Leaves barely crunched under his feet as he reversed his path to escape the center of the little labyrinth.

“Haunted,” I said. I planted a strong kick on a jagged rock. It struck the water drum with a metallic ping.

“Nature is alive here, and so are we. It is never silent here. Listen to the wind, the little animals, the river. If you listen hard enough, you can hear the roar of Ara. This is not dead. Death is silent,” Bethel responded. He skipped over the last few low rows of the labyrinth and sat next to me.

“How would you know?” Dacibrega asked. “I don’t believe you will ever know death, not for a very long time. Not until she and I are dust under the ground and the stars shift to some unrecognizable sky.”

“I've seen enough death to have a good idea.”

“I do not think you have seen anything,” Dacibrega retorted.

Snippet Sunday: The Shattered Veil

"I dream of darkness, of an endless knot of mirrors and fire. Every time I try to unravel the knot, it twists tighter and tangles around my soul. All I see are paths, spiraling, meandering paths into the black haze of the void, but every path is wrong and every path leads to death. The reflections, the flames, all are spinning, all are twisting, and nowhere am I free from its embrace. I can only dance in the twilight, dance on the edge of the abyssal oblivion, with the dying sun laughing behind me and the withering darkness ahead. The darkness, the knot, unbinds for but a second, only to reach out and hand me a silver shell, a conch, yet another twisted spiral. All around, feathers drift on the fragile winds of nihility. There are no stars, no moon, only knots, only the promise of death. Drums cry out in the abyss and then fade with everything else. Even the shadows fade and all that is left is death. We are all dead, we just haven't figured it out yet.”

-Rhodren Briarwind, The Shattered Veil

Snippet Sunday, Mayfly Requiem

Little flame, are you still awake? I don't know anymore. I miss that the most, the simpleness of feeling your heartbeat against my soul. We had such wonder in us once, remember? It was so very long ago, before we knew what we were. Inside all of us is a light, but some beacons are darker than others, and some are so dark they never realize they are a form of light at all. Innocence has no place alongside immortality. You always knew it, but you never cared, did you? You held onto innocence anyways and made it your own. My innocence died the same day we learned what we were supposed to be. You forgave me, even for my errors that day. I don't want you to forgive me for what I did to you in the end, what I am still doing to you now. We still had our innocence in Meridian, but even Meridian is vile now. Ganebra consumed it and destroyed the birthplace of our light and wonder. The madness of Ganebra consumed our world. Memories of everything we lost consume me now.

~Mayfly Requiem

Snippet Sunday: Absolution

I finished rewrites on The Crystal Lattice last night, so now it is time to return to Absolution.  I can't publish the former until I publish the latter because of chronology, so I'm waiting to do my final edits until Absolution is published.

The following is a completely unedited passage from my draft of  Absolution.  The story takes place sixty years after the fall of Malora, a post-apocalyptic, dangerous world.  The narrator, a young woman named Isen, has joined the Aulor Bethel and gender-switching mage Dacibrega on a quest to find the last lost city of the Tenjeri.  

I felt Holly's presence well before I saw him. Fatigue, not overwhelming, but subtle, a malaise which begged me to lie down on the beach and allow the waves to crash me into submission. As I did with everything else in my life, I resisted and stumbled behind my companions. I had expected to feel Holly's aura after what Bethel told me, but I did not expect the accelerated ease with which despair tickled my psyche further into depression. The farther south we walked along the Aloran Bay, the more rampant my desperation became. I wanted nothing more than to turn around and run north, but my stubbornness kept me trudging ever forward.

The ocean was infinite and unforgiving, churning waters of an unrelenting elemental soul. I was lost in it and I was not even touching the water. Ara was its name, her name. At least in this manifestation. Omalara was the name of her spirit, the spirit of all oceans because there was only one ocean in all the world. Different names in different places, on different shores, but Omalara was the true name of her soul. There were fourteen elemental deities in the Web, but on that shore all I could see were Omalara and Rima, the ocean and the sky. Even the stars were diminished by the brightness of the full moon. My senses were ebbed by the roar of the water and the incessant pulse of what I assumed was Holly.

“Isen, are you all right?” Bethel asked. He was the color of the dunes, and walked barefoot in the shimmering grains of shattered quartz. 

“Fine,” I mumbled. It was not true. I was utterly hopeless. Why had I come here? I would never find what I was looking for. I did not even know what it was I was seeking. Nothing. Maybe nothing. Nothing would ever get better for me. I was unwanted, unloved, and I was certain no one in Jata missed me. They had forgotten about me, already I was only a wisp of a memory, intangible, and unnoticed.

“No, you are not fine,” Bethel said gently. He walked toward me and laid his hand on my shoulder. “I think I left him too long by himself. Whatever you are feeling now, it will pass. He doesn't want to hurt anyone, and he is learning to control his power, but he is still too strong for many people to tolerate. We must still find him. The despair you are feeling will subside once I have seen to him.”

“It is not so bad. You'll get used to it, though I do not think anything he can make you feel is as bad as what you have already done to yourself,” Dacibrega shouted. She had her back turned to us and continued walking down the shore. She had not spoken to me since we left the ruined city. It was better that way. I could not do anything right, and I especially could not be around people for any length of time without hurting them. Especially an anomaly like Dacibrega. I hurt her and the acknowledgment of my chaotic feelings forced hot acid to rise in my parched throat.

Bethel took my hand and urged me forward. I trudged slowly beside him through the sand, feeling nothing but the slight roughness of his skin and my own sedating remorse. I was tired, too tired. Why wouldn't he let me stop? All I wanted was to lie down on the sand and stare into the waves until I faded into nothingness. It would be better that way, to be nothing, to wane with the moon into an inky black and star-filled sky. I was ready to surrender what little sanity I had to the oblivion. I was resolutely fearless, but my soul was an abyss.

Bethel let go of my hand and the gloom brightened to a dim haze. There was still no cheer in the crashing of the whitecaps on the sand, but there was a sense of acceptance. The pain of my soul subsided and I finally saw my cousin, who lounged sleepily on a dune overlooking the sea.

The moonlight kissed Holly's golden hair with a glaze of silver fire and auric dust. Bethel walked away from me and knelt behind Holly. Bethel placed his fingertips on the young man's temples and the melancholy I was drowning in fully abated.

Dacibrega was smiling and whispering a greeting to Holly, but I could only stare at him. How could someone so beautiful have caused me so much despair? Holly's eyes were brilliantly blue, yet held an air of perpetual worry. His hair fell framed his eyes in short golden waves. With his prominent cheekbones and willowy frame, I realized had a significant resemblance to Bethel. I wasn't surprised, as my grandmother told me how much her brother Aridani looked like their father. Aridani had five children, and Holly was his youngest. According to Bethel, Holly was the most uncontrollably powerful of the five. He was several years younger than my father, but he did not appear any older than I did.

“How are you doing, Holly?” Bethel asked. I sat on the sand and watched them. I was a bit ashamed of myself for feeling so sorrowful, but was grateful the feelings were now diminished. I was only numb, and the sand was comfortable under my tired legs.

“Better now that you two are back, and you even brought a little friend,” Holly said. I snorted into my hands. Little friend? I was not certain I liked his condescending commentary. “I made a friend, too, but she won't come close enough for me to talk to her. She keeps writing me messages in the sand.”

“What friend?” Bethel asked. He spoke so softly I could hardly hear him above the rush of waves.

“You first,” Holly challenged.

Bethel smiled at me. “This is Isen and the lovely furball is her familiar Zade. She's your cousin Zoli's daughter, and will be helping us get to Trieskel. You were chewing on her energy on the way here. I was afraid she wouldn't make it without needing to be carried.”

“I made it,” I mumbled.

“Sorry about that,” Holly said. His teeth were just as even and white as Bethel's, though he had a more squared jaw. “I felt Bethel and Daci approach. I guess I was reaching for them a bit and didn't realize you were with them. I apologize. I'm not so scary, really. Sometimes my little inner turmoil decides to run off and play with others, that's all.”

“I am fine now,” I returned.

“I know you are. Hopefully it won't happen again,” Holly said. Hopefully? That did not sound promising. “My friend is down the beach a ways. I saw her hair through the rushes before it got dark. I think she's one of Solace's. They can't come near me, you know, never could.”

“Really?” Bethel asked hopefully. “You said she leaves you messages. What is she skulking around for?”

“Waiting for you, I assume. She won't let me close so I know she's not looking for me. Solace will never let me be with them. She saw to that years ago. It's too bad, really. The ocean is the only place that seems to welcome me anymore, even if her people are afraid. At least Omalara likes me, even if no one else does.”

“I like you,” Bethel said with a laugh.

“You like everyone,” Holly replied. “Even those you pretend not to.”

“Where is the boat?” Dacibrega asked.

“Didn't move it, it's still in the cove,” Holly chirped. “North. That's to my left, Daci.”

“I know north. It is warmer in the north,” Dacibrega said, and I could not hold back my laughter. She pretended to be so smart, but she obviously could not figure much of anything out and I doubted she was even capable of functioning without Bethel's help.

“That is southern hemisphere. We're north now. It's opposite,” Bethel said gently. I thought he was glaring at me, but it was difficult to tell in the dark. Holly's quizzical expression only made me laugh harder. “Be nice, or at least pretend to be.”