#Kals Katsaros

[hairasuntouchedaspartoftheamazon]

Okay Tumblr, I’m about to do a stupid thing and ask for validation on some of my original writing. I’ve been working on a novel for a while now, and while I don’t have nearly as much to show for it as I would like, I do have this prologue. 

The story it is is attached to is long and complicated and queer and magical and I love it. My question to you fine internet denizens is: after reading this prologue, would you keep reading this book? 

(If you have follow up questions about this story at all, please ask because I love blabbing about this and I’m considering making a side blog just about this story because I want to develop it and hopefully get it published one day)

My buds: @a-l-ias @madre-des-leones @books-andbiscuits @chihuahuapowersgo @oopstheregoesthatlifeofmine @ivneess @elissastillstands @i-am-triple-a @becca-becky @goddess-of-fluff (You are all under absolutely no obligation to read this, I just think you’ll get a kick out of it)

So, without any further ado, I give you the prologue to Cheshire Moon:

Prologue: In Which It’s The End of the World As We Know It

Here is the boy on his bicycle. It is a dark and stormy night, a strange night for a bike ride. A Monday night as it would happen. Just goes to show that even after the events collectively referred to as “the Apocalypse” have ravaged the Earth and destroyed the capitalist institutions such as bureaucratic schools and offices that made certain weekdays widely hated, Mondays are still, and will always be, awful.

So here is the boy on a bicycle twenty years after the Apocalypse. He is pedaling madly through woods that had once been somewhat tamed. The woods were made of pine and maple and oak, the staples of a Northeast American forest, but they were also more than that. See, when nature is left to its own devices, even forests once populated with such things as marked hiking trails and outdoor recreation areas can turn into something quite different. This forest, once a nature preserve belonging to the state of New York, was now a wildwood. Things not quite friendly and not quite mundane and things not evil but also certainly not kind to trespassers lived in the dark spaces between these trees.

So here is the boy on a bicycle, riding through a wildwood full of dangerous things not kind to humans on a stormy Monday night twenty years after the Apocalypse. This is odd for three reasons.

First, as previously mentioned, it was a rainy night. And not a little drizzle, May-Day morning kind of rain that you barely needed an umbrella for, but a sky-splitting, earth-shaking, world-flooding howler of a storm. Each bolt of lightning ripped the sky apart; every roll of thunder shook the ground; the howling wind threatened to send even the oldest trees crashing to the ground. Surrounded by all of this, beneath the trees and in the mud, was the boy on his bicycle. 

The bicycle was the second odd thing. Despite the absolute hell it’s rider was currently putting it through (he wasn’t biking on a path, you see, just careening through the underbrush as it suited him; scratching the paint, splattering it with mud, and getting half a forest worth of sticks stuck in the wheel spokes), it was a very nice bike. A ten-speed, all-terrain, for-serious-athletes-only sort of bicycle. In another life, it would have been the property of some over-achieving businesswoman, the sort who did triathlons on the weekends and polished it with special bicycle wax three times a week. In this lifetime it had been stolen from an abandoned sporting goods store and aggressively spray-painted black because its new owner had been in a mood that day. There was also a laptop precariously duct-taped to the handlebars. Surrounding the ancient laptop was a clear plastic container, which several hours earlier had been looted from an old Target store and taped over the handlebars with extreme prejudice to protect the computer from the coming rain. 

The third odd thing was what the rider of this bike was doing. He wasn’t just soaked to the bone while pedaling full speed through the dark and rain and underbrush, with no light to guide him other than the faint glow of the computer screen. He was also singing at the top of his lungs.

“It’s the end of the world as we know it! It’s the end of the world as we know!-oh!-” He swerves to avoid a tree- “Oh, it! It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I FEEEEEEL FINEEEE!” He had a deranged smile on his face, the kind adrenaline junkies get when they’re doing something supremely idiotic while enjoying themselves immensely, and couldn't be damned to care about the consequences. He was quite possibly insane, more likely sleep-deprived.

Just then, the computer started beeping. The boy quickly brought the bike to a stop, crashing through a puddle and narrowly missing a large rock that would have brought this story to an end much quicker. Still singing nonsensical lyrics to himself- “Lenny Bruce, Lester Bangs, birthday party, cheesecake”- he dismounted, taking something small and electrical out of the bag he wore over his shoulder.  He hit the device a few times, cursed twice, and hit it again before it finally turned on with a beep and a few flashing lights. The light illuminated his face, pale and tired and shivering. Splashes of mud on his face gave the appearance of more freckles than he actually had. He wiped his long, rain-drenched hair out of his eyes to peer at the computer screen before punching some coordinates into the handheld device. A map appeared on the smaller screen. Blue vector lines appear, joined by two small dots, one green, one red. As he moved, the red dot moved. “Excellent,” he whispered to himself before walking deeper into the woods, leaving his bike behind. It would be the last time he saw that bike.

Walking through the rain was much harder than biking through it. Every minute or so, he had to stop and pull his boots out of the shin-deep mud. Twice he slipped, spreading mud all over his front. He refused to think about the state of his hair, despite the fact that it smelled like some of the wet matter coating it might not be mud. He slipped a third time, and the device in his hand went flying off into the wet night, never to be seen again. He paused for a moment, staring pitifully at where his device had disappeared before proceeding to curse loudly and creatively in at least three languages; insulting not only the stupid forest and the gods-damned rain, but his own stupidity and the idiocy of his informant for failing to tell him about this job before it became a time-sensitive matter that resulted in him being covered in enough mud to pass as a very short golem……

He went on like that for awhile before continuing his walk. The past few days had been incredibly frustrating, and there was a lot of bottled up anger to be released. As absolutely no one listened, he cursed the Trader caravan who treated him worse than the dirt on their boots, the scavengers who’d stolen his good knife last week, and the state of his life in general, gods give him a sign that he shouldn’t end it all right now, just climb up a tree and get struck by lightning…

A particularly loud crack of thunder erupted just then, followed by a bright burst of lightning that was a bit too close for comfort. It seemed like the gods were calling him on his bluff. With a world-weary sigh, he shoved his frustrations back down and continued walking into the woods. First and foremost was the mission, he reminded himself. There would be time for pity parties later.

It seemed like the universe was mocking him at that moment; as he gathered his convictions, the storm worsened. He would have said it was impossible, but the rain came down harder, as if trying to tell him that just lying down in the mud forever was so much simpler than trying to be a hero, who was he anyway, to try and save the world…He began to sing again, attempting to combat the darkness of the weather and his mind. “Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn, world serves its own needs, don’t miserve your own needs…” He walks to the tune of the highly appropriate song, keeping his head up and eyes peeled for his destination.Finding anything in this weather would take nothing short of divine intervention, possibly by multiple gods, but find something he does. There, on his right, almost outside his field of vision, a faint glow in the darkness of the night. He smiled, a wild thing, before running full tilt towards the glow. 

As he got closer, it became clear that the glow was coming from the ground itself, a golden line stretching as far as the eye can see in either direction. The glow is slowly intensifying, but he’s arrived in time. He takes another device out of his bag, this one about the size of his head. It looked like if someone had melted down several computers, a tacky bachelor’s pad worth of chrome plating, and a rotary phone before mashing them all together and drenching the entire thing in white paint. That really wasn’t far off from the actual process used to create the gadget, which was of his own invention. He was rather proud of it, especially as it was one of a select few of his projects that had been completed without any magical assistance whatsoever.

With the golden glow lighting his way, he steps forward and gently places the SaviorBlob(that was what he had named the blobby thing) directly onto the line, aligning one of the sticky-outy metal bits towards magnetic north. Then he takes a carefully measured number of steps to the right, taking a second SaviorBlob out of his bag and placing it on the line. Again, he takes a carefully measured number of steps to the right, watching his feet while taking a third and final SaviorBlob out of his bag. He’s adjusting the magnetic alignment when he hears a loud grunt. He looks up. Then he starts running. 

A roar erupts from the massive creature straddling the line. Something vaguely resembling the idea of an arm erupts from the darkness, grabbing the boy by the back of his jacket and bringing him face to face with the rotting corpse of something that had never been properly alive. Desperate, he throws the remaining SaviorBlob at the creature’s face with surprising force, but it bounces off harmlessly. The creature roars again, throwing the boy up in the air only to snatch him up again, this time around the waist. With another arm, it sweeps the SaviorBlobs off the line, sending them flying into the night. 

Satisfied, it returns its attention to the boy trying to free himself, slowly pulling him closer as it opens it’s stinking maw wide. The boy watches, eyes wide, heart pounding. He waits. He waits. Then he strikes. A second before the darkness would swallow him whole, he pulls a knife from his boot and drives it deep into a mass of twisted flesh. 

As the creature flails, he rips off one of his many necklaces and shoves it down the creatures throat, kicking away at the same time and falling to the ground. His jacket is torn to pieces, tangling around the arm covered in dark acid from the creature’s mouth. 

The creature roars and lashes out, clawing at it’s wound with one arm and pinning the boy by his leg with another. The touch is dirty and so cold it burns, the antithesis of everything alive. The boy screams for the first time. Another twisted and corrupted limb is pressed to the glowing line, and the creature rears its head and sings, a single high piercing note a human could never hope to replicate. 

The boy struggles, trying to pull away from the pain, but he’s stuck fast. As the creature continues to sing, the light of the line grows brighter, turning from golden to white hot. The air itself is resonating with the impossibly high note, the whole world shaking as the boy tries to twist free and cover his ears from the onslaught of pure noise. With a final cry of pain, he escapes the creature’s hold, trying to run, trying to get as far away as possible...BOOM. The world goes white. He flies through the air, hitting a tree with a CRACK. Darkness falls immediately.

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I WILL TAKE ANY AND ALL CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM

I WANT TO MAKE THIS GOOD 

I WILL ALSO BLAB ABOUT THE CHARACTERS SO MUCH, SPOILER THEY”RE ALL QUEER AND MOST ARE POC.