A random chapter from a book I'm writing
Aug. 24th, 2008 04:16 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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writers_loftHi, I'm new, obviously. I started writing this book as a short story in about 2001 or '02 (which was actually based on a short story I wrote when I was thirteen), and then I wrote a sequel to it. The sequel kept getting longer and longer, so I decided to change some things about the end of the first story and the beginning of the second, and put them both together. When it kept getting still longer, I decided to cut the story up into chapters. I'm currently on chapter 16. I've decided to post chapter 5, which I think I wrote about four or five years ago, so I think I was about 24 or 25 when I wrote it. I uploaded what I had so far to fictionpress.com back in 2005, but I can't log into the site anymore.
Some background for context before the cut:
Genre: Fantasy fiction.
Vru and Emyll are from Mala'hek, a continent on an unnamed planet. Mala'hekians all have pale-blue skin (about sky color) and wings. I never imagined any particular kind of wing, so you can imagine whatever kind you want. They are also rather short; the average height of a Mala'hekian is about three and a half feet high. Emyll, the antagonist, killed Vru's lovemate, Gaira, and she stole Vru's sword to do so. For her crimes, she had her wings torn off and was banished to the planet Dalah and put in prison. Vru is currently traveling around his planet (despite his people's legends that the ocean surrounding Mala'hek would kill one instantly if one touches it; Vru finds out first-hand that it isn't true) looking for new lands; and the first one he comes across is the island of Poru, on which dwells a race of people who all have green skin and whitish-yellow hair. Vru quickly becomes friends with a Porun girl, Ika, and after Vru stays on Poru for several weeks (and teaches Ika his language), they travel across the ocean together. Raito Seylh is Mala'hekian for "Death Ocean" and Guga-ta-Rie is Porun for "Black Waters," but they are talking about the same ocean. (Rorru is Ika's sister and Kin-lat is their grandfather, and also the chief of the island of Poru.)
CHAPTER FIVE
One night when Ika, Rorru, and Kin-lat were all asleep, Vru's thoughts turned toward the banished Emyll. Was she still alive? She was, actually. She was in one of many cells reserved for those who had been banished to Dalah, having been found by the Dalahn jail guards not long after arriving there. And she had had her wings torn off, which did not make her blazing temper any cooler. On this particular day (or night, Emyll could never tell what time it was as her cell had no windows and everything was lit artificially), Emyll was feeling rather disgruntled, and she took the cup the guards poured water into when she wanted it, held it through the bars, and demanded water. When the guard just looked at her as if she'd said she wanted to go free, she clanged the cup against the side of the bars. This made the guard laugh as he came over to her.
"Aw, you look just like a blind beggar girl, Em," he said, calling Emyll by a hated nickname.
"Don't—call—me—Em," said Emyll passionately. "I want some water, NOW."
The guard grabbed the cup from her and said, "Well, aren't you the hoity-toity one. Well, just wait a minute—EmYLL." He took the cup and set it under a dripping ceiling—not exactly coincidentally, it was right below where the guards' bathroom was. "Would you like ice with that?" he mocked.
Emyll didn't say anything. She would get her revenge—Emyll loved that word—soon enough. When the cup had been filled with grayish water the guard thrust it back through the bars of the cell.
"Drink it all up," said the guard, laughing.
"I'm not going to drink this, you asshole," Emyll said through clenched teeth.
“You’d better,” said the guard. “You’re not getting anything else.”
Emyll groaned, and worried down the gray water. It tasted musty, and smelled worse. The guard watched her intently. “What are you staring at?” she snapped, pausing in the middle of a drink. Something in her voice—or eyes—cowed the guard, and he didn’t look at her after that.
After Emyll drank the water—with sundry grimaces and much spitting—an idea began to formulate in her head. She knew that guards were stupid. She knew that the time would come when they’d all fall asleep, and then—then she would make her escape.
Later that night, Emyll was sitting upright on her cot, waiting, listening for the telltale snores that would let her know when the guard at her cell was sleeping. But none came. Was he asleep? Emyll ventured to peek at him. No, dammit! He was still wide-awake. How was she going to escape tonight? Quickly she thought of a plan.
“Hey,” she said. The guard turned to look at her.
“Why aren’t you asleep yet?” the guard demanded.
“I’m not sleepy,” snapped Emyll. “Hey—come here for a second, would you?” The guard ventured closer to the cell bars, and Emyll got up and walked to the bars as well. “You have something on your chin,” she said, with a small, sly smirk. “Here, let me get that for you.”
“I can get it my”— He never finished, as the last thing he saw was a flash of blue sailing toward his temple. The guard was knocked cold. After he slid down the bars, Emyll felt around his belt for the keys to her cell. Ah, there they were. She yanked them off his belt—tearing it in the process—and tried each key. Not that one—not that one—fuck! Which one was it? The eighth key was the one. Emyll opened her cell door and—was free.
No, not quite free. She was still on Dalah, and she still did not have her wings, which, of course, had been torn off following her trial on Mala’hek. But—wasn’t there a word that one could use to get off this god-forsaken planet? Emyll would have to do some spying. Sooner or later one of them would say it in her presence, and then…
*****
“What is beyond Guga-ta-Rie?” Ika inquired of Vru, who was eating a strange fruit that he could not pronounce the name of, but which tasted a bit like an apricot.
“There is the land that I come from, Mala’hek,” said Vru through a full mouth. “I don’t know what else there is. I didn’t even know this island existed.”
“I know about Mala’hek from my grandfather,” Ika said. “He taught me a few Mala’hekian words, but not much. I didn’t know much of the language until you arrived. And I’d never seen an inhabitant of Mala’hek before, either.”
Vru reflected. “Do you think there might be other lands, other … countries?” He swallowed the apricot-tasting fruit. “What do you call this thing again?”
“Ka’atz un fru,” said Ika glibly. “And I’m not sure about the other question you asked. “Maybe Kin-lat would know, or even Rorru. I don’t.”
Vru was silent for several seconds. “Why don’t we go look for some?” he said, meaning new lands.
Ika, who had fallen onto her back to be more comfortable, suddenly sat as upright as she could. “Are you crazy?” she shrieked. “Guga-ta-Rie … the Death Ocean … Raito—what do you call it again?—Seylh … you can’t … the waters are deadly!”
“They’re not,” Vru reassured her. “When traveling on my boat, the Golden Bird, I fell overboard. Nothing was hurt except my pride—and my suede boots,” he said, as an afterthought. “God dammit, I paid three hundred keiries for those things…”
“So the legends…”
“Are just that. Legends.”
“When you said we, did you mean…?” She faltered.
“Me and you. Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because…” It was Vru’s turn to falter. Because I’ve fallen in love with you, his brain said, but his mouth wouldn’t. “Because I need some company, and I know you the best of all the Poruns,” he semi-lied.
Ika reflected for a minute. “Well.” She twirled her white-blond hair around a lime-colored finger. “If you say it’s safe…”
CHAPTER SIX
Emyll was standing outside her cell, listening for the footsteps of guards. There were none—but that didn’t mean there weren’t guards around. The guard she’d knocked out and stolen the keys from was still unconscious. Around his shoulders was a dark-green cloak, which Emyll pulled off of him and wrapped around herself, making sure her entire body was covered. The blueness of her skin would surely attract unwanted attention. She traversed the labyrinth of halls, looking for a door. Wait! There was one! She ran toward it…
“Halt!” said a deep voice. “Who are you?”
“I am only a visitor, sir,” said Emyll, after thinking quickly. She knew she would probably have to disguise her voice, and she had decided on a deep rasp. “Only an old woman, visiting my son, who has been in this prison for thirty years.”
“Do you have a pass?” said the guard. Emyll panicked. Then she recalled that she was wearing a guard’s cloak, which probably had a pass in a pocket somewhere. She frantically searched the pockets, and her fingers curled around a small card. She lifted it out of the pocket and read it. “DALAH PRISON PASS,” it said, along with other things that Emyll had no time to read. Thankfully, there was no identifying photograph on the card. She handed it to the guard—making sure the cloak covered her hand.
“Well, all right,” said the guard, giving her back the card. “If you’re leaving, you can go through this door.”
“Thank you, sir,” rasped Emyll. She grinned under the “hood” of her cloak. Guards were stupid. That had been too easy.
Emyll went outside. After scanning her surroundings and making sure no one was about, she threw off the cloak, but she kept hold of it in case she might need it again. She looked around. Ahead of her was a building—it looked like a barn of some sort. She ventured closer to it. It was a stable, in fact, and inside was one horse.
Emyll wondered if the horse could be ridden. There was a saddle and bridle nearby, so she surmised that it could be. She deftly fastened both saddle and bridle on the animal, who looked at her quizzically, but did nothing else. Emyll figured it would be safe to mount, and she put one foot in the stirrup and swung her other leg around. But there was one thing she didn’t know. The horse actually hadn’t ever been ridden before, and upon feeling the new weight on its back, it spooked. It whinnied and reared backwards. Emyll wasn’t prepared for this and was thrown off. While she was on the ground, the horse reared up again. Emyll tried to get out of the way, but she was literally two seconds too late. The horse’s hoof came plunging down, just under her shoulder blade. Emyll felt a shock of sharp pain, and then she spiraled downward into dizzying blackness.
Dark … where am I? It hurts…
…putated…
Emyll’s eyes opened, or she thought they did. She couldn’t see. She made a noise like a wounded animal. “Aahh—uuh…” Her shoulder hurt like hell, and she couldn’t feel her arm below that joint.
“It’ll have to be amputated,” she thought she heard someone say.
Amputated? What will have to be amputated?
“The arm is hanging by a thread,” someone else concurred. “Yes, amputation is definitely necessary.”
Emyll struggled to move, to wake, to do something. She could do nothing. The gray-black haze in front of her eyes cleared enough to let her see a pale-red-skinned man lift up a sword and bring it flashing down onto her shoulder. A shock of pain—and she slipped into unconsciousness again.
*****
“So what you’re saying is, there may be nothing out there?”
“Yes.”
Ika and Kin-lat were talking. Ika had just told him of Vru’s plan to leave Poru and take her with him, to find new lands. Kin-lat wasn’t too thrilled about letting his youngest granddaughter go. Vru was nice enough, but he was a foreigner, after all.
“Well…” Ika trailed off. She had to let Kin-lat know how much she really wanted to go. “You don’t really know that there’s nothing out there. Vru found us completely by accident. So why shouldn’t we be so lucky?”
Kin-lat meditated on this for several moments. Finally he spoke, and his words brought a smile to Ika’s grass-colored face.
“Alright,” he conceded. “But I warn you, there still may be no new land out there.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I have to go tell Vru.”
Vru was ecstatic. “That’s fantastic!” he exclaimed. “We’ll leave tomorrow.”
Some background for context before the cut:
Genre: Fantasy fiction.
Vru and Emyll are from Mala'hek, a continent on an unnamed planet. Mala'hekians all have pale-blue skin (about sky color) and wings. I never imagined any particular kind of wing, so you can imagine whatever kind you want. They are also rather short; the average height of a Mala'hekian is about three and a half feet high. Emyll, the antagonist, killed Vru's lovemate, Gaira, and she stole Vru's sword to do so. For her crimes, she had her wings torn off and was banished to the planet Dalah and put in prison. Vru is currently traveling around his planet (despite his people's legends that the ocean surrounding Mala'hek would kill one instantly if one touches it; Vru finds out first-hand that it isn't true) looking for new lands; and the first one he comes across is the island of Poru, on which dwells a race of people who all have green skin and whitish-yellow hair. Vru quickly becomes friends with a Porun girl, Ika, and after Vru stays on Poru for several weeks (and teaches Ika his language), they travel across the ocean together. Raito Seylh is Mala'hekian for "Death Ocean" and Guga-ta-Rie is Porun for "Black Waters," but they are talking about the same ocean. (Rorru is Ika's sister and Kin-lat is their grandfather, and also the chief of the island of Poru.)
CHAPTER FIVE
One night when Ika, Rorru, and Kin-lat were all asleep, Vru's thoughts turned toward the banished Emyll. Was she still alive? She was, actually. She was in one of many cells reserved for those who had been banished to Dalah, having been found by the Dalahn jail guards not long after arriving there. And she had had her wings torn off, which did not make her blazing temper any cooler. On this particular day (or night, Emyll could never tell what time it was as her cell had no windows and everything was lit artificially), Emyll was feeling rather disgruntled, and she took the cup the guards poured water into when she wanted it, held it through the bars, and demanded water. When the guard just looked at her as if she'd said she wanted to go free, she clanged the cup against the side of the bars. This made the guard laugh as he came over to her.
"Aw, you look just like a blind beggar girl, Em," he said, calling Emyll by a hated nickname.
"Don't—call—me—Em," said Emyll passionately. "I want some water, NOW."
The guard grabbed the cup from her and said, "Well, aren't you the hoity-toity one. Well, just wait a minute—EmYLL." He took the cup and set it under a dripping ceiling—not exactly coincidentally, it was right below where the guards' bathroom was. "Would you like ice with that?" he mocked.
Emyll didn't say anything. She would get her revenge—Emyll loved that word—soon enough. When the cup had been filled with grayish water the guard thrust it back through the bars of the cell.
"Drink it all up," said the guard, laughing.
"I'm not going to drink this, you asshole," Emyll said through clenched teeth.
“You’d better,” said the guard. “You’re not getting anything else.”
Emyll groaned, and worried down the gray water. It tasted musty, and smelled worse. The guard watched her intently. “What are you staring at?” she snapped, pausing in the middle of a drink. Something in her voice—or eyes—cowed the guard, and he didn’t look at her after that.
After Emyll drank the water—with sundry grimaces and much spitting—an idea began to formulate in her head. She knew that guards were stupid. She knew that the time would come when they’d all fall asleep, and then—then she would make her escape.
Later that night, Emyll was sitting upright on her cot, waiting, listening for the telltale snores that would let her know when the guard at her cell was sleeping. But none came. Was he asleep? Emyll ventured to peek at him. No, dammit! He was still wide-awake. How was she going to escape tonight? Quickly she thought of a plan.
“Hey,” she said. The guard turned to look at her.
“Why aren’t you asleep yet?” the guard demanded.
“I’m not sleepy,” snapped Emyll. “Hey—come here for a second, would you?” The guard ventured closer to the cell bars, and Emyll got up and walked to the bars as well. “You have something on your chin,” she said, with a small, sly smirk. “Here, let me get that for you.”
“I can get it my”— He never finished, as the last thing he saw was a flash of blue sailing toward his temple. The guard was knocked cold. After he slid down the bars, Emyll felt around his belt for the keys to her cell. Ah, there they were. She yanked them off his belt—tearing it in the process—and tried each key. Not that one—not that one—fuck! Which one was it? The eighth key was the one. Emyll opened her cell door and—was free.
No, not quite free. She was still on Dalah, and she still did not have her wings, which, of course, had been torn off following her trial on Mala’hek. But—wasn’t there a word that one could use to get off this god-forsaken planet? Emyll would have to do some spying. Sooner or later one of them would say it in her presence, and then…
*****
“What is beyond Guga-ta-Rie?” Ika inquired of Vru, who was eating a strange fruit that he could not pronounce the name of, but which tasted a bit like an apricot.
“There is the land that I come from, Mala’hek,” said Vru through a full mouth. “I don’t know what else there is. I didn’t even know this island existed.”
“I know about Mala’hek from my grandfather,” Ika said. “He taught me a few Mala’hekian words, but not much. I didn’t know much of the language until you arrived. And I’d never seen an inhabitant of Mala’hek before, either.”
Vru reflected. “Do you think there might be other lands, other … countries?” He swallowed the apricot-tasting fruit. “What do you call this thing again?”
“Ka’atz un fru,” said Ika glibly. “And I’m not sure about the other question you asked. “Maybe Kin-lat would know, or even Rorru. I don’t.”
Vru was silent for several seconds. “Why don’t we go look for some?” he said, meaning new lands.
Ika, who had fallen onto her back to be more comfortable, suddenly sat as upright as she could. “Are you crazy?” she shrieked. “Guga-ta-Rie … the Death Ocean … Raito—what do you call it again?—Seylh … you can’t … the waters are deadly!”
“They’re not,” Vru reassured her. “When traveling on my boat, the Golden Bird, I fell overboard. Nothing was hurt except my pride—and my suede boots,” he said, as an afterthought. “God dammit, I paid three hundred keiries for those things…”
“So the legends…”
“Are just that. Legends.”
“When you said we, did you mean…?” She faltered.
“Me and you. Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because…” It was Vru’s turn to falter. Because I’ve fallen in love with you, his brain said, but his mouth wouldn’t. “Because I need some company, and I know you the best of all the Poruns,” he semi-lied.
Ika reflected for a minute. “Well.” She twirled her white-blond hair around a lime-colored finger. “If you say it’s safe…”
CHAPTER SIX
Emyll was standing outside her cell, listening for the footsteps of guards. There were none—but that didn’t mean there weren’t guards around. The guard she’d knocked out and stolen the keys from was still unconscious. Around his shoulders was a dark-green cloak, which Emyll pulled off of him and wrapped around herself, making sure her entire body was covered. The blueness of her skin would surely attract unwanted attention. She traversed the labyrinth of halls, looking for a door. Wait! There was one! She ran toward it…
“Halt!” said a deep voice. “Who are you?”
“I am only a visitor, sir,” said Emyll, after thinking quickly. She knew she would probably have to disguise her voice, and she had decided on a deep rasp. “Only an old woman, visiting my son, who has been in this prison for thirty years.”
“Do you have a pass?” said the guard. Emyll panicked. Then she recalled that she was wearing a guard’s cloak, which probably had a pass in a pocket somewhere. She frantically searched the pockets, and her fingers curled around a small card. She lifted it out of the pocket and read it. “DALAH PRISON PASS,” it said, along with other things that Emyll had no time to read. Thankfully, there was no identifying photograph on the card. She handed it to the guard—making sure the cloak covered her hand.
“Well, all right,” said the guard, giving her back the card. “If you’re leaving, you can go through this door.”
“Thank you, sir,” rasped Emyll. She grinned under the “hood” of her cloak. Guards were stupid. That had been too easy.
Emyll went outside. After scanning her surroundings and making sure no one was about, she threw off the cloak, but she kept hold of it in case she might need it again. She looked around. Ahead of her was a building—it looked like a barn of some sort. She ventured closer to it. It was a stable, in fact, and inside was one horse.
Emyll wondered if the horse could be ridden. There was a saddle and bridle nearby, so she surmised that it could be. She deftly fastened both saddle and bridle on the animal, who looked at her quizzically, but did nothing else. Emyll figured it would be safe to mount, and she put one foot in the stirrup and swung her other leg around. But there was one thing she didn’t know. The horse actually hadn’t ever been ridden before, and upon feeling the new weight on its back, it spooked. It whinnied and reared backwards. Emyll wasn’t prepared for this and was thrown off. While she was on the ground, the horse reared up again. Emyll tried to get out of the way, but she was literally two seconds too late. The horse’s hoof came plunging down, just under her shoulder blade. Emyll felt a shock of sharp pain, and then she spiraled downward into dizzying blackness.
Dark … where am I? It hurts…
…putated…
Emyll’s eyes opened, or she thought they did. She couldn’t see. She made a noise like a wounded animal. “Aahh—uuh…” Her shoulder hurt like hell, and she couldn’t feel her arm below that joint.
“It’ll have to be amputated,” she thought she heard someone say.
Amputated? What will have to be amputated?
“The arm is hanging by a thread,” someone else concurred. “Yes, amputation is definitely necessary.”
Emyll struggled to move, to wake, to do something. She could do nothing. The gray-black haze in front of her eyes cleared enough to let her see a pale-red-skinned man lift up a sword and bring it flashing down onto her shoulder. A shock of pain—and she slipped into unconsciousness again.
*****
“So what you’re saying is, there may be nothing out there?”
“Yes.”
Ika and Kin-lat were talking. Ika had just told him of Vru’s plan to leave Poru and take her with him, to find new lands. Kin-lat wasn’t too thrilled about letting his youngest granddaughter go. Vru was nice enough, but he was a foreigner, after all.
“Well…” Ika trailed off. She had to let Kin-lat know how much she really wanted to go. “You don’t really know that there’s nothing out there. Vru found us completely by accident. So why shouldn’t we be so lucky?”
Kin-lat meditated on this for several moments. Finally he spoke, and his words brought a smile to Ika’s grass-colored face.
“Alright,” he conceded. “But I warn you, there still may be no new land out there.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I have to go tell Vru.”
Vru was ecstatic. “That’s fantastic!” he exclaimed. “We’ll leave tomorrow.”
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