The Atom Twins and The Mirror

If you've been reading this blog, you'll probably already have heard of the Atom Twins. They started life as a stupid idea in a bored moment at work, but came back years later when Underfire Comics conceived of a grand plan to write a ten issue superhero graphic novel that was also a story about a comic company falling apart. In classic style, we actually managed to write the entire thing, including making up an entire superhero universe to set it all in including fake back issues and story arcs, but in the course of it have so many arguments and tantrums and so on that not only did we not even manage to start drawing it, we basically stopped functioning as a comic publishing collective.

Actually, that's not really the reason we've basically stopped making comics as a collective, it's more that Underfire has actually succeeded in it's original goal, which was to be a springboard to real paid comic work (at least for some of us). Meanwhile, the small press scene has changed an awful lot in the last ten years and the publishing model we had, while never hugely successful, is now completely obsolete and there is much more value, traction and accessibility (to both readers and creators) in stand alone titles under your own name. Basically, when we started Ka-blam! didn't exist and a pirate copy of Photoshop took days to download and was just as likely to be a virus that trashed your computer as a functional piece of software. (I know, software piracy is a Bad Thing, but the small press as it is today probably wouldn't exist without it. The comics industry expects you to be able to use Photoshop etc., but they aren't about to pay for your copy to train with - they aren't about to pay you enough to live on for your first couple of jobs either.)

Anyway, enough of that. Have a read of the Atom Twins issue from that Superhero Graphic Novel. It's got lizardmen in it, although it's really about siblings and watching your life slip out of your control. As this is a working document, the first page is spoilery though.

(picture by Iain Buchanan)

The Atom Twins

And have another issue, The Mirror - which I am vaguely considering attempting to paint myself, but who knows if I'll ever manage to do that. This one is hugely over-ambitious, full of backwards narrative, tarot imagery and an attempt at a meta-narrative about the second generation immigrant experience (i.e. mine). God help me.

The Mirror

Marzipan 2 II-9

And so it ends, not with a bang but with a whimper. The manuscript for this story does actually go almost all the way to the end - I left out the final movement because I couldn't quite work out how to do it and I thought that going back and reviewing the story as I did the typing and the rewrite might fix it more clearly in my head. However, there were too many points earlier in the story that I had had the same idea about - that I could do them properly in the re-write - and so I ended up just stuttering to a halt. 

Marzipan 2 II-8

I really liked this chapter. its all about death and sex and self hatred and being unable to relate to your family. Basically things quite close to my heart.

Big Bad Wolf

The afternoon seemed endless. It had been formed of empty, searingly blue skies and featureless landscapes that seemed to feed into themselves, so that Nina could not be sure that she hadn’t walked in a giant circle, watched only by a static sun and the distant hovering hawks.

Nina felt the sun as a weight, bearing down on the heavy clothing that she wore. She refused to expose herself any further though, and just drank steady sips of water as she tramped the hours underfoot. Her reasoning was this – the air itself felt somehow chilled, so that if the sun were to pass behind a cloud then there would be nothing left but cold. The oppressing heat was a false jollity, one that would be crushed by ice she felt sure. It was a very peculiar feeling that, in sixteen years of adventures, of never stopping, she had felt only once before - or so the saying goes.

Except that she hadn’t, because it was the feeling that always came from inside, that - no matter where she was - swarmed up and invaded her muscles with heavy self awareness, with twitching incongruity. It was the memories that came first, unwanted and unrelated they brought the feeling with them and they crowded out her peripheral vision so that her eyes tunnelled forward and she had to be careful where she stepped. So that everything slowed down and speeded up at once and you had to stop to think about everything that you did from moment to moment. Because even when you were curled up against the shielding warmth of a frost giant in a bed of furs it’ll still course through you and you’ll have nothing to stop it.

She misses that frost giant, misses the frozen reaches in the far south where she had found him, although she realises that the affection is probably born as much from location as it was from true happiness. She was not happy there, she knows, because she had gone as far as she possibly could go from where she started but she was still herself. She doesn’t like to say his name, to even think it, because it upsets her – because she knows that she will never do better. Because, as far as she travelled, as protected as she could be, the memories crowded in, the feeling fuzzed through her nerves and she knew that she couldn’t stop, because stopping meant death, one way or another, by her own hand or by the weight of existence, and so she had had to leave.

Too young, she thinks, but Nina is not sure that those thoughts are Nina’s, are hers. She knew exactly what she was doing, which is the worst of the problems because it gives her no excuse. Others she could forgive, at that age, but she was aware – she knew that she was. And what s the worst thing that she could have done? Exactly what she did. Every time.

It comes up in her vision, swimming into hazy focus that darts from a solid gaze and remains present even in the cleansing glare of the sun. Closing her eyes is no proof. Fenris is there, all flesh and hands and touches that are almost still good to feel. Watching where she should have stepped in, where she should have stopped. She feels the crunch of bones that are not hers. She feels the touch of hands that are not hers. She feels the shapes her mouth made. She feels the stupidity of separate events intertwined irrevocably in her mind and she knows that she was wrong. Every time.

She should not have picked the fights that she picked. She should not have said the things that she said. She should not have let the fights that she didn’t pick go unpicked. She should not have let her sister climb trees. She should not have done with Fenris what she did with him. Despite everything.

Marzipan 2: II-7

I had great plans for this, but as usual they went nowhere. Sel remonstrations are as present in the original typescript. The Well of poison was the name of the ship that they were going to sail up from the depths.

The Well of Poison

The five sailors looked far worse than the captain did, but that was because their deaths had been more violent. They displayed limbs that had been chewed up and cracked, and crushed ribs under loose-hanging strips of flesh. Some had stomachs that had been eaten out, others trailed gore like pendants of favour, and one even had had his skull crushed by gigantic jaws so that he saw with only a single eye.

The captain took them across the seabed, countless leagues of shifting scenery filled with life. Shoals pulsed and startled when they drew near, larger fish took an interest in them in great passing sweeps, but nothing dwelled, for they were protected; a troop of sacred lepers, untouchable out of fear and respect. At times they even thought that they could make out a great bulk in the gloom ahead or to the side of them, but it was always gone as soon as they were aware of it, leaving only a faint pressure shadow in the vast currents that surrounded them.

description of mussel shore (why can’t I fucking do this already?)

The pain was intense, even to the dead. The salt tore at their bloodless flesh and bathed them with agony until there was nothing left of them that wasn’t bone or metal. They continued, though, because they had to. The ship must sail again, though it was an ill-named craft who’s previous had been distinguished by notoriety.

Stuff about the background of the ship?

Marzipan 2 II-6

Scratched Out

It had been a while since Nina found herself washed up upon that quiet and secluded shore and it should not be expected that she should still be found there. As, unvisited as it is by fishermen and other shore-huggers, and that for good reason, it is not privacy that Nina craves above all else, although it may sometimes seem to others to be so. It is stasis that is her worst enemy and biggest fear, however. She had not eaten any of the reeds that grew by the sand, which was a good move, but there was nothing else to be seen of her presence either. She was gone.

She had gone inland, specifically, away from the unbroken, terminal line that was the sea. She was headed toward civilisation, if she could find it – it was destination used in an abstract sense. She didn’t know if she was headed in the best direction, only that she was headed in the only direction she was prepared to head in. She would find civilisation eventually, it was always there in the end.

As she travelled Nina searched for a road, willing to make the cross-country hike until she found one and secure in the knowledge, or at least the working assumption, that roads were always connected to cities, or towns, or hamlets, or even individual houses. At the very least, someone who could tell her where she was and where she would have to go. It is hope, as they so often say, that keeps us going. Here, at least, they are wrong.

Nina was used to living in this manner, to grabbing what she could from the natural abundance that surrounded her. It was easy when you knew how, a trick as simple and as automatic as breathing. A root here, a berry there, you could almost forget that you were doing it, although it only seemed to work for one. But that was because one person could go hungry for days without noticing it. You just had to believe that the landscape you wandered through really was as magical, as replete with shifting mystery, as it seemed to your misfiring senses – you just had to let the hallucinations of starvation go unchallenged, so that they passed instead for clarity of vision.

It is only when others share your pain, when another’s suffering attempts to intrude upon your own that it becomes apparent for what it is, that it becomes noticeable as suffering. A companion will always remain steady, to remind you of their, and your, misfortune, with nothing more than their presence, their haggard expression and their sunken features. Their visions, different to your own, will therefore cancel yours out. Two together will see nothing but their own, shared, separate pain.

Nina was better, much better, alone, carving tracks of her own volition and scratching out a path amongst the almost infinite possibilities that were available to her. The air, the earth and the woods, and the other secret places surrounding, were barren. They were free of magic and fairies, but laden only with the fruit and slow moving, active animal life of late summer. No mushroom rings beckoned with the promise of other worlds, nor did the sky oppress with strange winds and even stranger shadows. Instead, all was freshness and clearheaded beauty.

Far away from any cities, far out in the wild, there was peace and order and, of course, the old way of things. There was no difference. Because, although everyone is entitled to be who they are, difference can be disconcerting. Complicating. So unnecessary. Out here, it need not be an issue.

It should be noted that Nina does not think this way, does not think so badly of the complications that difference entails. Or at least, does not allow it, when these thoughts come unbidden and unstoppable into her mental fortress, to go unchallenged. Does not let the thoughts take root but instead she argues, as she often does, that this is not the right way to be.

There is often blood.

And let it not be forgotten that in these southern reaches, where the air is cool and the people pale, Nina is a beacon of difference in herself. But only when she is not on her own, wandering and starving, in the wilderness.

Marzipan 2 II-5

Lets keep going with this. Someone somewhere might want to know how it doesn't end.

Thriller Pacing

Cold, fresh water surged over Grey’s head, the current threatening to pull him down and away from life as he fought his way from the bank and into the central flow of the river’s course. He couldn’t see the others in the dark and the confusion of the rushing water, so he could only hope that they had followed his lead and in the mean time concentrate on reaching the other side safely.

Marzipan 2 II-4

Around about now the chapters got really short, this one because I think i was planning on writing a huge long passage where the dead captain treks across the bottom of the sea, but I just couldn't get it right. This is really bad writing, even by my standards.

Formula

Clouds of plankton shifted mystically, twisting in the heat currents like living silt. Their density in the already soupy water showed them up to the things that hunted them in the dark, a sonar block in the lightless depths.

Marzipan 2 II-3

What happens when you realise that you are not actually the lead character of your own story? I really need to start writing again, I'm getting the feeling that I get when I need to get something out of my head. I'm going to have to have another go at using Storybook and actually start putting down some prose, especially now that I don't have to do any studying right now.

A River Runs Through It

Gray took the lead, with T’Dore riding pillion and Robin following behind on the other horse. They trotted quietly out of the village but as soon as it was far enough behind, and despite the danger of doing so in the darkness, Gray took them up to a gallop for a mile or so. He said it was to put some distance between them and anyone that might try to follow them, and he might even have believed it too.

The air was still and the night was clear and moonlit and there was nothing but emptiness all around to take the frustration out on. It crowded around him, the more he tried to impose himself on it the more it took him away. No matter how far he rode, he was always still himself. For all that he wanted to scream, it was the night that brought screams to his ears instead.

All three of them turned their heads as the cries came wafting to their ears. They watched as the sky behind them took on a flickering reddish glow that had nothing to do with the dawn that they should have been riding into. ‘I think that we had better keep going,’ Robin warned.

‘Is there something we should be worried about?’ Gray asked innocently.

‘It smells like a raiding party,’ T’Dore intoned, although the other two could smell only the damp of the dewy grass around them. ‘We do not need to worry,’ he said, his voice a mixture of sadness and indifference. ‘If it is the Fightstar tribe, as I should think that it is, then they will spend the next day in the village. They will take what they can and do what they will with those that they have not killed.’

‘Then it is not our problem,’ Gray maintained. ‘You should be grateful that you are not among them any more,’ he said spitefully, aiming it at Robin behind him.

‘And you should be grateful too,’ she shot back, ‘that I got you away from there in time. You would not have made it so easily without me. Either way, it is our problem. How do you think that the Fightstar made it so far east? Can you not hear the horns?’

‘No,’ both boys replied together.

‘Exactly. If it were Fightstar warriors who had somehow made it past the Paladins who patrol our borders then we would surely have heard their war horns far before we heard the cries of the dying. It is not the Fightstar who follow us, and I have done a terrible thing. We must hurry now before we have no more time to do so.’

‘What do you mean?’ Gray asked. ‘What terrible thing?’

‘It matters not,’ Robin said gravely. ‘Just know that those who have done this will not be held long, and when they find that they do not have that which they seek in their grasp, they will come after us with a swiftness that will be hard for us to match. And then we will have a fight that we may not be able to win on our hands.’ And with that she spurred her horse onwards once more and began to gallop ahead so that Gray and T’Dore had little choice but to follow her.

Marzipan 2 II-2

I have an exam in just over a week. It's starting to get real.

What are we Doing With our Lives

In the dark there was a great deal of noise. It came from insects mainly, but also from nocturnal mammals; foxes and bats and the white eyed albino apemen – degenerate abominations who lived below the ground – all hooted their rage at the dark. These mindless sounds came intermittently: eerie howls that drifted across the land, calls that could have been laughter or could have been the slaughter of innocents, that cut across the background chatter of crickets to chill the blood of those who are not expecting to hear it. But more about them later.

Marzipan 2 II-1

Across the underwater plains... A placeholder for the kind of epic, submarine adventure I just couldn't get out of my head and onto the  page. This kind of substitution gets more common from here on out.

Part 2

Jonah and the Whale

The dead captain sunk, the chains that bound his form dragging him far out into the ocean. After Scylla had taken her tribute his body had been deemed worthless by the black-robed agents of the emperor and he had been cast aside. This had been a mistake, to return him to the element he was bound and sworn to, and his enemies would know of it soon enough. It would have been far better to bury a man like him inland, far, far away from the call of the restless sea.

As the corpse drifted the sea bed fell ever further away until at last it bottomed out into an abyssal trench. The captain floated through darkening waters that swirled about him like great drapes, already tugging at his flesh to add it to their rich effluvium – food for squid and baleen whales and the other more misshapen inhabitants of the deep dark. And yet, as he sank further from the sun, further even from the memory of the sun, he seemed to be dragged towards another light; a strange and dreadful glowing that filtered up through the silent surge of the ocean depths.

Across the underwater plains...

At last he arrived at the city. A natural bowl, an ancient crater from the upheavals of the prehistoric world, that served as an audience chamber sat at its centre, and from it radiated spectacular boulevards of sediment and fossil, lined with waving anemone crowds. Down one of these festival streets the homecoming hero travelled, now joined by a welcome party of pilot fish, nibbling at his flesh and guiding him toward their master. Festival colours strained to fill the muted spectrum and glinting silver light flashed from the scales of his retinue. The water pulsed with their master’s heart beat and they fled, leaving the captain alone before the twisting bulk that filled the dark ahead.

‘You come before me, at last,’ the voice rumbled like a shockwave, pulling the captain ever closer to destruction.

You are my god. I must. It is my time to be judged. The captain spoke without speaking.

‘You have not failed,’ the god said. ‘But there is more that you must do. There is a lake, so far down and so poisoned by salt that it is death to all of my people. You must enter it and bring back what is there. Only you can, for you are already gone.’

I will do so, the captain grinned. He had to. His lips were already almost gone.

‘Good,’ and with that the leviathan was gone, his great wake forming new currents in the deep that would later be felt far away upon the surface of the sea.

Marzipan 2 I-10

This is the end of the first part. It all goes back in time, which is part of the structure of the thing, being all about regrets and things in the past that you cannot change, and how they affect the things that we try to do in the present.

The song is bad, but I'm ok with this; the songs in fantasy novels are always bad. It's a tradition, or an old charter or something.

Action vs Introspection

Mia sang to her daughter, a lullaby that her own mother had sung to her when she had been a troublesome baby herself. It was a quiet song with no real melody to it, and it went like this:

I’ll wrap you up in marzipan,
My little princess you will be,
Through the deepest forest,
Across the darkest sea,
I’ll wrap you up in marzipan,
Take you away from me.

Marzipan 2: I-9

Enough of this self-serving nostalgia. I have one more post about computer games that I was thinking of writing, but that will have to wait. And soon, I promise you, there will be a glorious return to the mistakes I've made and the ramifications thereof. 

Because some people's issues are just more important, you know?

Your Culture Does Not Belong to You, It Belongs to Us

Marzipan 2: I-8

Another week, another horrible cold. This chapter is about wanting to drown, but not being able to. This is apposite, because currently I feel like I'm drowning in life - there's so much going on and I can't quite get a handle on any of it. Then again, that's not surprising, because that's exactly how I felt back when I wrote this, so there you go.

Scylla in Black

Just as she was about to hit the water, Nina lost her nerve and began to turn so that instead of a clean dive she burst into the murky underworld shoulder-blade first. She speared down backwards, hair streaming out before her face and eyes trained upwards at the shadow of the boat on the twilight-bright surface. Her breath was forced out in a stream of bubbles that mixed with those of the impact, her limbs were pulled firmly upwards, and with these streamers trailing Nina fought herself for control. For right then, it seemed quite right to be sinking, to keep sinking and to bid farewell to the sun and the sky forever.

She didn’t. She twisted round in the cold brine and struck out away and up. The water filled out her clothing into a dragging, baggy skin that held her back but Nina pushed anyway. Her lungs began to strain and she saw the wave chopped surface again, this time not as a romance of otherworldly shadows but as a final, fading hope. Her legs kicked harder and harder but for all the progress that she seemed to be making forward she could not counter the speed at which she sunk. She began to panic, to try to struggle free from the weight of fabric that was dragging her down, but the straps that where designed to keep her weapons on her person were too secure. Worse, the dried blood seemed to have attached the shirt she wore to her arm again, and in the horror of sinking and with the heavy force of the current that was dragging her she didn’t even have the strength to pull off the scab. She floundered.

Her limbs swept outwards, the jerking panic smoothed out by the sea’s fluidity, the burning became too much and at long last, descending gently, her mouth burst open and the salt water came streaming in. And then something strange happened. Nina was surprised to find that she could summersault in the water with ease, that she could move with a sudden assurance to her being. As long as she kept diving – this information came unbidden to her mind, a realisation as strange and encompassing as the taste of salt on her blood and skin – ignoring the sun and the light, then, in the darkness, she would be sustained. The sea filled her lungs and held her soul, and it did not let her die.

As long as she ignored the light then she was fine.

Nina dove further. She did not feel that her body was changing, she didn’t know if it was. She wasn’t sure that she cared. Some fish swam past her in a great silvery shoal and left her behind, flashing glimpses of an oily rainbow of disturbing colour in the murk. They were far freer in their element than she was. She did not belong there; she was just enclosed by it. She swam as best she could, and it was still better than she would have ever believed that she could have.

Marzipan 2: I-7

I am obsessed with the sea. I am convinced that it is going to kill me, eventually, but I love it. I am happy to be on it, but not to go in it. I will try and do a more interesting post soon, but I've been busy and ill the last few weeks so it just hasn't been happening. 

I had planned on writing a chapter or two to go between the last Gret/Gray chapter and this one, where they would go and investigate what caused the stampede, but of course they don't find anything because it was Gret who caused the stampede so that Gray could be a hero and have a Dogstar tribesman as his permanent travelling companion. Only they might have found something weird going on to link with the bigger plot. Partly the fact that I couldn't decide how to play it is how come I never wrote it.

I always found that trope in adventure stories (be they fantasy, sci-fi or whatever) really troubling - this idea that a person would have a companion with a life-debt that meant they would accompany them from then until forever. There is always a troubling sense that the western, or western analogue, hero might start to take this for granted, if they didn't already do so; that it made perfect sense for someone to follow them around, no matter how far from home that might take them, and that they wouldn't themselves have to give anything up for this, at best, 'noble' savage. It's like the way some guys still seem to think that a woman should give up her job, her hopes and her dreams and her family and follow him to wherever he wants to be as soon as or even before they get married.

So I decided to write a world in which it was not only taken for granted, but systematised. Where young nobles engineered tragedies as a way to get ahead in life. Where people's paths were set from birth, and that meant you didn't have to question the morals of what you were doing. I may have also been riffing off the way that the D&D class system has calcified fantasy worlds into careerist teleologies where actions are pre-justified rather than considered. Monsters are there to die and NPCs are there to join your party, their lives otherwise, by definition, cannot be important.Anyway, that's what was going on in those last few chapters, or was supposed to be going on at least.

Bridge Metal

The journey was swift and quiet. Each of them was wrapped in his own thoughts about their failure and what it meant, for they had left the Dogstar people without answers for their grief and now they rode instead onto new challenges, or at least to home for Gray and Gret before those new challenges were found and faced.

The forest welcomed them again, as of course it would. The Shard was not fussy and it spread itself thinly for miles before it gave up and relinquished control to the plains, its fingers thrusting north with a languid strength. The trees seemed to be friends, scenic expressions of a gentle verdant adventure that was both rich and childish in its appeal, but that was before they crowded in on you and began to cut out the sun in earnest. They could always have turned back, except that they couldn’t because that was the price of leaving like they had. They could have gone round the forest, but it had been too inviting and they had had no reason not to enter in the first place, except for a warning that they had already ignored. Gret and Gray felt fine about what they were doing. They felt fine about what they had done.

T’Dore followed them willingly.

As the path winded, sometimes becoming no more than deer tracks in the heavy clay and deadwood mulch, the three were forced at times to ride in single file. Gret chose to ride in front and the other two tried not to let their leader out of their sight, despite the trick played by the trees. There was at last a moment or relief from the claustrophobia as they crossed a small stream. The ancient wooden bridge that spanned the leafy trickle looked like it was going to disintegrate from the mould that enveloped it, but it was sturdy and remained intact as the three clip-clopped across. They breathed deep of the musky air.

There are places of power in the Shard, places where the beauty of the forest could steal your breath away. To the west there are valleys so thick with growth, where the contours of the land could not be seen directly but were translated exactly for the viewer into the tops of the trees that lined them. There are groves where the trees give way to clover, hidden from all but the birds but where the moon seems to pool on clear nights. There are lakes where the trees came up right to the water’s edge, where the water is so still and deep that it was a mirror of the sky and the worlds that are hidden there. And there are others still.

Gray lost sight of Gret around a sharp twist in the path and behind the bole of a massive oak.

And at the heart of the forest is growth, crawling out of death, mulch and decay, fed by the light of the sun. A never-ending generation of new tissue, knitted together from the earth and the air. Twining around itself as it spreads outwards and upwards. Dark and beautiful and secret and bathed with light. Unstoppable and uncaring. An expression of joy unbound.

When Gray turned the corner his brother was nowhere to be seen.

Marzipan 2: I-6

I had this idea that I could write fantasy stories that, while they involved people running around fighting things and having adventures and stuff it wouldn't really be about that stuff, but would be about something else. Specifically, in this case, it would be about siblings. There are two sets of siblings in the story, in two distinct situations, but both storylines follow the experience of losing touch with your siblings when you leave home and trying to re-connect to them again as adults.

Marzipan 2: I-5

Back when I thought that being a fantasy author was a genuinely possible option for me to make a living I used to come up with various author bios that I could use when I put my books out - already well aware of the branding aspects and meta-textual possibilities in the practise. I even wrote one for the book I did finish, which was a bit pre-emptive, because it's not like I properly edited it or anything. The angle I was going to go for was to play up the fact that as a city kid I didn't really know very much about animals or horses or living in the land, but that I did know about loneliness and fear and willpower. As if that's what it takes.

Short Attention Span

‘If I didn’t have such a headache, this would be a truly glorious day,’ Gray whispered to his brother.

‘Shut up,’ Gret hissed. ‘We’re not out of the woods yet. This is serious business.’

‘I was just saying,’ Gray shot back, hefting his saddle onto his horse. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’

‘Well, just. Don’t.’ Gret said. ‘I can’t believe how much you had to drink last night.’

‘Why, shouldn’t I have done so? Not even at my own party?’

‘If you had slipped up you could have gotten the both of us killed. Did you want that at your own party?’

‘I know what I’m doing, Gret,’ Gray insisted. ‘Oh, hi there T’Dore. Are you ready to go?’

‘I have said my goodbyes.’ T’Dore said. ‘Now, we must do our duties to the best of our abilities. We must discover what is wrong with the land and we must make it right if we can.’

‘Well said,’ said Gray. ‘Let’s do what we have to do, and give no more thought to what might have been.’

The three finished saddling up and wheeled the horses, stamping and snorting in the dust, to face the distant hills. As they did so a small group of Dogstar tribesmen came to watch them leave. Amongst the silent farewell party was T’Dore’s sister, who looked at Gret with a mixture of longing and satisfaction. He gave her a heroic, caddish smile and then he spurred his horse away and didn’t look back.

Gray and T’Dore fell in behind him. It was a rousing sight, and one which brought a few tears to the eyes of the older Dogstar tribespeople watching – the three of them silhouetted in the sharp noon light and transformed into more than themselves, into symbols of the fleeting glory of youth and all of the possibility inherent in the beginnings of journeys.

Even journeys that one undertakes while in a life debt to another.

Especially journeys that one undertakes while bound in a life debt to another, for there is nothing more noble than a reason for being that is not your own.

It was a lovely day, too. The sun was high in the sky and evil seemed a very great distance away. There were no ominous formations of birds in the sky, watching their passing and no strange lack of wildlife to be noticed at all. ‘We don’t even know what we’re going to fight, do we?’ T’Dore asked eventually, after they had been riding for half an hour or so in companionable silence.

‘Let’s hope that we’re not going to find anything to fight at all,’ Gret said seriously. ‘There is still the chance that this was a natural occurrence, though one that was uncommon and much to be grieved.’

‘We shall see,’ said T’dore. ‘There have been bad omens upon the land in recent months, and strange news coming down from the north, where the tribes under the Fightstar dwell.’

‘News of what?’ asked Gray. ‘I thought that the Fightstar were your sworn enemies.’

T’Dore took some time to take in the plain before answering. ‘Enemies, yes,’ he said, ‘but sworn – no. We have fought, and bitterly at times. Many of my kin have died at their hands, and many of their kin at ours. But we are not so filled with hatred that we do not pass knowledge between us.’ His manner became as expansive as his gaze for a moment, as he said, ‘that is the way of the plains.’

And the plains were beautiful, imposing and harsh. And in the distance before them the foothills began to rear. And on the wind there came the faint and distant smell of burning.

Marzipan 2: I-4

Deus Ex This Early?

Early morning cold drifted under the tent’s badly secured bottom and prodded nastily at Gray’s groggy head. He spent a while trying not to open his eyes, despite the thin light that played red upon his lids. Despite everything. The worst thing was that the draught, which was strong enough to get right under his clothes was still not enough to dislodge the raw animal smell that lingered nastily within the tent. Gray did his best to ignore that too.

His head was not the only thing that hurt. His legs were stiff from all the riding and his side ached from where he’d slept, or, more correctly, dropped into an alcoholic abyss, on nothing more than a bit of wildebeest leather stretched out across the bare soil. That was where some, but not all, of the smell had come from, at least. In fact, the tent itself was made of the same material, but it too hadn’t caused the full cocktail of aroma that Gray was trying not to think about in too much detail.

‘So, you’re awake, then?’ said a voice. It was a young, male voice. It was the voice of T’Dore, the tribesman that Gray had saved from death yesterday during the unseasonable stampede of the wildebeest.

Gray tried to shut it out, but T’Dore kept talking. ‘You can’t fool me, he said. ‘I know that you got up to quite a bit last night, but you’re under the Dogstar now. I can see what you’re hiding. I know that you’re awake.’

Gray didn’t like to think about what that meant, ‘under the Dogstar,’ just right now. He added it to the list of things to ignore. He had very little recollection of the hours before he must have been led, ratted, into this tent, other than a low level pervasive sense of shame. He assumed that that went hand in hand with his mouth tasting of mould and sour earth. And the headache. Gray turned over. ‘Where is my brother?’ he managed.

‘Up already’, T’Dore said. ‘Washed and dressed and talking with my father and my sister,’ finished with a smile.

Gray groaned and wondered how it was that he always managed to do things the wrong way round. He hoped that Gret was keeping to his side of the bargain.

‘Do not worry,’ the boy said politely. ‘You are our honoured guest. Today, you have the freedom of our campsite. You can do exactly as you wish. I...’ T’Dore paused for a moment. ‘We talked, a lot, if you remember,’ he said. ‘I was only here because I wished to watch over you, during the night.’

Gray managed to push himself onto his elbows and some slight way towards being upright.

‘As part of my duties.’

Gray had been thinking of him as a boy for most of yesterday, but with the unguarded mind of the hung-over Gray suddenly saw that they were pretty much of the same age. Gray tried very hard to feel manly.

‘And, when I got to the place where my brother had said that he would be, that was when I saw the carnage.’ Gret was speaking seriously with the Dogstar elder. ‘And I saw the great courage of my little brother.’

‘His courage is truly exceptional,’ the elder intoned, ‘and we are grateful, very grateful for his acts. The clan of the Dogstar will always honour the brave, whoever they are, wherever they are from. That is our way. But this is bad news. Bad news indeed.’ He looked unhappily at the horizon, and Gret, glancing away from the old man’s pain, stole a smile from his fair daughter who sat to the side. For, despite the three graves that had been dug the night before the cycle of life must needs go on. And on. And so on.

‘Such unseasonal stampedes must have some cause,’ the elder continued. ‘Some upset in the natural way of things behind them. You say that you did not see what could have caused such behaviour when you arrived at your hunting ground? You say that you saw nothing to explain the way of things?’

‘I saw nothing concrete,’ Gret said. ‘But even above the disconcerting signs of the stampede I saw much that disturbed me. I may not have travelled this far west before, but I know enough of what the land should look like at this time in the year. And it should not have looked like that.’

As Gret was talking Gray emerged from his tent and came slowly over to the ashes of the Great Fire, the spiritual centre of the tribe as well as the physical centre of the encampment, around which the morning meeting was being held. On seeing him the elder broke his sombre mood and clapped his hands together, cutting off any further information that Gret might have had just for then. ‘A-ha!’ he laughed, somewhat too heartily. ‘Look who it is, at last. The hero has awoken. At last, at last. Come and sit with us and,’ and he fished a piece of bark from the pouch at his side and handed it to Gray as he came close,’ take this and chew on it for a while. It will clear your head,’ he said. ‘It will clear your head and your mouth of the fuzz that envelop them I am sure.’ He even grinned.

Gray took the bark gratefully and then slumped beside his brother where he began to chew with a mournful expression upon his face. The elder slapped him cheerfully on the back and said. ‘you will make a worthy life companion to my boy. I don’t doubt that you’ll give him plenty of opportunities to work off his life debt to you. The brave honour the Dogstar, and the Dogstar honours the brave. Yes. Yes yes.’

And so on.

Marzipan 2: I-3

Marzipan 2 Master Post 

While I decide whether or not to give GTA IV a second go, or just write about it I'll just be posting up another chapter of the fantasy novel.

This is the first point at which I knew that it was going wrong. I like some of the stuff I wrote here, but the chapter just doesn't work in any way. The problem is, while I knew it didn't work it set up some of the later plot. Re-writing it would mean working out a different way to either get all of the plot points in, or changing the way things went later on, neither of which I wanted to do. I just typed this chapter up and told myself I'd look at it again later, that this was a rough draft.

The problem was that later I still didn't know what to do with it, and I'd written more that sort of depended on some if this stuff happening. Yet, every time I re-read it I became more convinced that polishing still wasn't going to make it work, and that I would have to find another way of getting Nina where she needed to be.

Felicity Conditions

Bright morning sun glittered on the calm sea that surrounded the island, except for that which lay in the fat shadow of the dead volcano that rose up in its centre. In the streets of the capital remnants of last night’s festivities blew coldly about, hindered by sick. Nina awoke, not for the first time, grimy and stiff and hunched up in a backstreet behind a bar. The paving stone beneath her head was discoloured and had been etched with a strange filigree pattern, the action of the gallons of stomach acid that had been spilled upon it over the years.

Marzipan 2: I-2

Marzipan 2 Master Post
 
There's not much to say about this - I was actually relatively pleased with my attempts at channelling standard, classic fantasy tropes...

Roll Randomly for your Travelling Companions

Gray am Grien waited just below the crest of the hill. He had to be very careful that he chose the right moment to make himself visible to the valley below. It would take the most fortunate mixture of right-place and right-time for the plan to be a success, and that rested on him cresting the hill at the most opportune moment available. There was very little room for error.

Marzipan 2: I-1

Marzipan 2 Master Post 


Yet again the post I was planning to write this week has been delayed, this time due to a combination of going to operas, getting kept up by my neighbours having mid-week house parties and the ever-relentless grinding nature of work. Rather than yet again post up some pointless bit of meta-blogging, or two lines of notes on an idea I can't even remember enough about to discuss why I even started, let alone stopped pursuing it I thought of a better thing to do for now and in these situations in the future.