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Viree Nocturne

Another one of my short stories, this time written to a song Virée Nocturne by Les Discrets

           The orange light slowly crept down the steps of the Findon Castle. Candlelight started seeping through the windows of houses, providing as much help for the nightly wanderer as it could.

           ‘You are to make a promise!’

           The figure stopped halfway between the last and penultimate step to the bottom of the stairs. A woman stood in the doorway with the light at her back. Two other silhouettes stood by her side, one clutching the woman’s dress tightly, other sternly watching, still like a statue.

     ‘What promise would you like me to make, Espe?’ a voice responded playfully from underneath the hood.

‘You are not to die before me or any other subjects of yours.’

     The hooded figure stepped into the mud below the stony steps, and turned around, now facing the trio in the doorway. He lowered one of his knees to the watery ground, put his left arm to his chest and raised the other above his head.

     ‘Enough with the theatrics Leo, I mean it.’

     ‘I swear it.’ The man’s voice, so unusually serious for his typical way-of-being dropped each word like a metal slab. One of his eyes, visible from underneath the hood, watched each silhouette standing in the doorway carefully.

     ‘Now, I’m terribly sorry, but I don’t have much time to spare.’

     In a single motion he got up on his feet and crossed the lightly threshold into the weakening moonlight. Three looks followed him along the road, as he appeared and reappeared by passing below the windows.

              The white wall of the academy stretched as far to the sides as the nightly wanderer could see. The ‘sickly’ guard provided him with a window of opportunity to get close enough to the academy grounds and do his work. His fingers now traced a large chalk circle on the wall. He then put one of his hands in the middle of the circle, and the other inside his bag. The insides of the drawing hissed, and its structure started falling apart. The marble split into miniature grains, that creeped up the arm of the caster and into his sleeve, and eventually winding up testing the limits of the bag.

He squeezed through the circle to the other side. With one quick glance an illusion appeared where the hole was supposed to be. The wizard took a deep breath in through his nose, closing his eyes, and before he completely exhaled, he turned completely invisible. Marks of shoes appeared on the soft carpet of the library. They moved quickly between the bookshelves, and then up the circular stairs leading into the astrolabe of the Director.

The guards collapsed to the ground as both of them felt extremely heavy and tired at the very same moment. Their armours and weapons clanked against the polished flooring, and thus the door to the astrolabe were unprotected. He opened the door, and immediately his eyes were fixated on the ceiling. He was looking at a nightly sky, which shifted and changed with accordance to a device laid on the table at the other end of the room. Each click of the gear, a change of the timepiece, called out skies from different planes, realms, perhaps even places unknown.

With his invisibility dispelled, he walked towards the device slowly with his side turned towards it. His head turned back a couple of times, but to his surprise no one showed up. The only sound he heard apart from the clicking of the device, and beating of his own heart was the snoring of the guards. After what felt like an eternity he finally reached the table, and snatched the artifact under his robes. The clicking stopped, and the image projected on the ceiling remained still, revealing the regular starry night. A foreign metallic smell filled his nostrils, planting a single idea of discovering new worlds in his mind, but he dismissed it quickly.

           He jumped over the bodies of unconscious guards and raced down the stairs, leaping a few steps at a time. He nearly crashed into a bookcase, and jumped headfirst into his hole, at the same time dispelling the illusion. He quickly gathered his wits on the other side, put one of his hands into the bag, and started building the marble back into its solid structure. The stone started pushing his hand out of the hole slowly. By the time it was done, the only sign of magic tampering with the marble was the chalk outline, barely visible in the whiteness.

           ‘So that’s what you’ve been up to this beautiful night.’

           The coldness of metal on his neck startled him almost as much as the voice behind his head. A moonlight pierced through the leaves right onto the blade that was uncomfortably close to him.

           ‘H-hey bud, I’m just – ‘

           ‘No just’s, we have a serious problem on our hands here “bud”’

           The warmness of the voice and the pretended disdain betrayed the true identity of the speaker. The wanderer realised that it couldn’t have been worse.

           ‘We can come to an agreement Os, just put the blade away.’

           ‘We already have an agreement archmage, and the terms are not negotiable. You take the Orrery away from this useless place and put it to good use. If you do so, I will forget about seeing you here.’

           The blade moved up and away from his neck, and as it did all muscles in the archmage’s body slowly relaxed.

           ‘I just hope you live up to your title, Faen gisir’

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Fantasy Trash Wave

A while back I started a creative writing group with a few of my uni friends.This is one of my favourite texts I wrote in this group. It was written to a song Fantasy Trash Wave by TOBACCO.

Fred often compared life to the conveyor belt. Maybe he wasn’t heading anywhere special, or set up any new norms, but at least he knew where he was going. Always the same road, the same place, and sometimes the same people. He could predict every minute of his following day and always return to the same home. This certainty made him happy, and not very willing when it came to taking risks. That’s why he spent only as much money as he absolutely needed, leaving him a very thin person, some could even say invisible. One day in the lockers, however, someone saw him, and Fred didn’t like what this person had to say.

‘Hey Fred, what’s that weird growth on your side?’

He looked behind, and noticed a reddish area around the height of his third rib. He pulled his shirt down and mumbled through his teeth.

‘You should get that looked at, for all I know this could spread through the entire factory.’

The man kept talking, but Fred left the locker room mid-sentence, and took his place by the belt. The constant movement of the items calmed him down somewhat, but the thought about his back kept creeping up at every opportunity. He didn’t find this day especially satisfying.

   He crossed out the third spot in the calendar in a row. Fred’s apartment never looked and smelled as good as it did for these past few days. In surplus of time, Fred found himself to be quite a good cook, and an even better cleaner. He had organized all his milk bottles in order of their expiry date, took out the long-overdue trash-bags, and even tried some older recipes from his notebook. However, no matter how hard he tried to occupy his mind or body, his soul still longed for the comforts of the factory. The clicking and humming of the machines was simply irreplaceable. The pale imitation of its greater cousins in the purring of the microwave only made him angry, and eventually pushed him to unplug it from the socket.

 ‘Listen Fred, we all appreciate your reliability and your input into this company’s livelihood, but you just can’t do things like these.’

‘I know, I just wanted to go back, listen for a while.’

‘Not a full week has passed since the start of your leave, you’re clearly not fully healed yet.’

‘I understand sir, but if I could stay for a little while longer I’d appreciate you even more.’

‘Fred, you need to go back home. Go and rest up, this is my last word.’

  Finally the humming of machines has returned! The order has been restored, all the pieces of the puzzle have finally found their place, and he felt like the world was finally complete. The conveyor belt moved the items close to him, yet something was off. The feeling wasn’t the same, the items moved between his hands but the satisfaction was gone. Instead, incessant beeping shook his ears. He extended his hands forward, and reached out above, beyond the conveyor belt, the machines and the factory. The whiteness of the ceiling annoyed him, and the beeping got faster. He tried to close his eyes, to remember the organized machines, the humming and the clicking. It worked, the white ceiling was gone. The beeping turned into an even note, constant note. He liked its stillness.