The Chosen Two

I wanted to write the most cliché fantasy story possible as a writing exercise. The characters felt like they caught on a paragraph in. This actually has potential. 

            “The Vyrax have infiltrated four outposts at our southern border, my King.”

            The only sound in the room was the king’s heavy breathing and the sound of rattling swords here and there and the odd spell getting shot off in the wizard’s tower on the far side of the castle. The messenger stood for a moment before the mad king, waiting for his response. The throne room stood deathly silent, like a crypt or a church or a brothel on a Sunday.

            “How many knights remain in my employ?” The king rasped.

            “Only three, your highness,” the master at arms said. “Silver, Rhesus, and Mander.”

            “The rest?”

            The master-at-arms was quiet. “You had them executed for treason.”

            “I did no such thing!” The king leaped to his feet, face purple.

            “You said they were conspiring with the wizards to tame dragons and lay waste to your kingdom.”

            “That’s an absurd impossibility.” The king sat back down.

            “That’s what Vargas said when you had him executed.” The master-at-arms felt a little peevish. This was the third time someone—

            Without warning, there was a flash of light and the king’s head detonated, splattering gore across the throne room. The haggard courtiers, who had seen some pretty terrible things recently, reacted with amusement and boredom.

            “Well, this doesn’t solve our endemic problems,” the messenger said hesitantly.

            “Shut up, this isn’t all bad.” The Vizier was cleaning his nails, which were long and yellow and probably couldn’t be cleaned.

            “You shut up, you’re probably behind his assassination.”

            “I can’t do magic, you git.” The Vizier stood in a grand flourish of dark robes.

            “As if,” the master-at-arms scoffed, then suddenly looked terrified.

            “Well, we have only one choice for king.”

            “The chosen one!” The messenger looked proud.

            “Of course, the chosen one.” The master-at-arms was carefully trying to camouflage himself against a giant brocade tapestry with a female courtier’s wimple.

            “But there is a major problem,” the Vizier sneered. He really didn’t need to sneer, he thought. There’s really no major point in the character development to be sneering all the time. Perhaps he could smile next time? Wait, teeth. Sharp, rotten teeth are such a hassle to maintain. He satisfied himself by winking, which still felt predatory. “There are two possible chosen ones.”

            “Chosen two.”

            They all looked at who spoke. The Grand Wizard was mostly senile. He was thirty-two and had set off too many spells next to his head. Something about the thaumatic energy had melted something important in there. They didn’t know what, don’t ask. They aren’t brain surgeons; bones of Christ you’re inquisitive. Read the book. He spent most of his time rolling his wheelchair down spiral staircases on accident and telling people his name was Toe, so that’s what they called him.

            “Chosen two?”

            “We must send them on a quest. Possibly together.”

            The Vizier, master-at-arms, and messenger glanced at each other, questioning his sudden lucidity.

            “A quest?”

            “If they can stop the Vyrax threat, then we will have a real winner.”

            “Wait, won’t we have to have two kings if they stop it together?” The master-at-arms was having trouble processing all this. He glanced at the steaming stump of the king’s neck.

            “We could vote…” the messenger suggested.

            “Democracy.” The Vizier shuddered.

            “But then we wouldn’t have the benefit of a fantasy buddy-comedy,” Toe said.

            “Who are the chosen two?” the messenger asked.

            “The first is Mander, the knight.” The throne room visibly relaxed. Mander was sexy, strong, capable, well-rounded.

            “The second?” The Vizier was leaning forward.

            “His name is Jack the Petard.”

            “Jack the Retard?”

            “The Petard,” Toe said forcefully.

            “He blows stuff up,” the master-at-arms said, checking the king’s wrist for a pulse.

            “Well, why bother with the quest then?” the messenger asked. “Mander is our man.”

            “Rules are rules,” Toe said, before emitting a streamer of drool and lapsing back into silence.

            “Well,” sighed the Vizier. “Those Vyrax aren’t going to vanquish themselves.”

The Anatomy of God

I love the fury that leaks through the prose. 

            Sam kept flicking the radio between two stations that were both ads and if Louis had to hear the same ads one more time he was going to carve his initials in Sam’s corpse.

            “Eric, tell him to quit.” Louis snarled. Sam sniggered and flipped the radio back to the first channel.

            “—where prices are lower than ever! Parnell’s furniture, just south of—“ then the radio flipped and Louis nearly lost his mind.

            “Sam, stop irritating your brother.” Eric, their stepfather, had existed in that choked up emotional smog for the last two weeks. Mom was in her jar in the back seat, the lid on the urn taped down with hunting camouflage duct tape which struck Louis as classless because mom hated the country. She hated everything about it. The trees, the accents, the things you couldn’t buy and the places you couldn’t go. She’d grown up twenty minutes from Millennium Park in Chicago, after a birth in a town the size of a NASCAR pit stop just outside of Walton, Kansas. Louis hadn’t ever heard of Walton, Kansas but it sounded like perdition.

            “It’s still awfully damn selfish of grandma to put mom in Kansas,” Louis tried. It was far too late to even attempt something like this. They all knew it.

            “Lou. Shut up.” Eric’s eyes didn’t even leave the road. Louis felt heat flush through his face and neck and his hands shook as he gripped the handle on the back of the driver’s seat and stared out at the endless steppe of braes and trees that fleshed Missouri.

            One month before the tumor subsuming their mother’s brain had claimed her Eric had converted suddenly, joyously, to Mormonism at the hands of two Mormon elders too young to grow beards. He was a small and fussy little man that Louis didn’t have the energy to properly hate due to the ubiquity of his presence. He wore slender bolo ties the thickness of a pencil March through November and ironed all of his clothing poorly except for the stained, ancient denim jacket he constantly wore. It had a bullet hole in the hem, and was a story that for some reason Eric would only allude to as “the incident” as though he’d been captured by pirates or met the prime minister of Canada instead of being a victim of a desperation moped-hijacking by a felon who had recently robbed a pawn shop. The bullet was fired, surprisingly, by a police officer that did not realize Eric was not a willing passenger on the moped. You couldn’t even tell it was a bullet hole. It looked like a determined moth had had its way with the jacket during the summer, not a poorly aimed attack from a marshal while riding bitch on a vespa.

            Unable to find a temple in the immediate area Eric had taken to forcing them to go to a Baptist church. Their mother, even in her weakened state, had laughed at them, which made Eric the particular kind of angry where he nearly whispered and his voice shook a little and he firmly asked Mom to please not mock things she didn’t understand. Mom, in her infinite patience, forced Louis and Sam to go to the Baptist church though she was too weak herself to leave the hospital bed in their home. Flint River Missionary Baptist was where Louis found himself that vivid Sunday his mother passed to wherever she was going. Eric grew pale as she was and his hand trembled when he called the hospital.

            “I hate Missouri,” Sam announced. Sam was seven and Louis’ half-brother. Eric’s son. He spent much of his time honing his skills for infuriation. Louis had anger problems, the psychologist had said. He was “probably a sufferer of Antisocial Personality Disorder,” but it was “too early to tell”. Louis had heard his mother and the psychologist murmuring to each other. Louis wasn’t crazy, he knew he wasn’t. That was what he told himself when he found himself speechless with rage, white-faced and trembling and clutching some implement that had lain nearby.

            There was a sudden thundering sound and the car began to make a horrible grinding noise. Eric cursed briefly and passionately as he maneuvered the car to the shoulder. They’d left the trees behind some time ago. The earth was flat and spread like a picnic blanket for leagues in every direction. A little concrete smear stood on the horizon, some town or the other.

            Eric turned around to address Louis. Louis, specifically. “Stay in the car.”

            The hood choked out cloudy gray smoke when Eric lifted it. He returned to the window with the sort of sad dismay a priest might have had at the advent of astronomy.

            

Shaman

Tribal post-apocalypse? I don't know.

Fir, a young shaman and magical guide of a dying tribe must help their new leader, his brother Feral, guide them to Pantheon, the flying world that they had been taught was the heaven where their gods resided. The other members, Rory the outsider and wanderer, Jara the huntress, and Liss the captive, help them commit the ultimate heresy to find that the Lode is not heaven, but a tiny world filled with warring clans and struggling kings. As the beasts that roam the frozen darkness below grow bolder and begin to mount their assaults, Fir finds himself torn between justice, loyalty, and survival.

Sharvas died early in the morning; quietly, without waking me. He slipped away the way our dogs had left to die when the food grew scarce. I found his head turned at an odd angle in my lap, cold and crooked like a frozen tree branch.

            Feral woke next and saw me leaning my head against the wood-clad wall of our cavern. I flicked my eyes to see him and he seemed to understand intrinsically, instinctively, the way he always knew what to do. He stayed quiet, those wild golden eyes of his glittering through the darkness like an animal’s might. Without making a sound he rose and gently pulled the husk of what had been Sharvas off of me. I brushed my thick woolen overcoat as if death by old age was something that one could catch.

            Rory was crouched at the mouth of the cavern, just outside the thick leathers and furs we draped to keep the nail-sharp wind out. A pike leaned against the mouth of the cave nearby. He’d carried it with him since we found him broken at the foot of a bloody spire some of the outer tribes worshiped as sacred during the months-long night. He didn’t speak much, but when he did it was strangely accented and usually vitally important. I sat next to him and didn’t say anything.

            The sun was a russet globe lingering at the horizon. It would stay there for the next seventeen days, I knew.  I couldn’t say how I knew, any more than Sharvas had known I knew. He had always known things like that, and he trained me in the ways of the others like us: traditions reaching deep into the arcane past. It didn’t seem like dawn, but there wasn’t much way to tell either way. It was either dark or it was light, and that was about all there was to it.

            Pantheon wasn’t visible on the horizon. It had been a few days ago; a blue-green globe of stone and trees wickered with tunnels that glittered when the dying sun hit it. Heaven, I’d been taught, but no one had ever visited it, and no one had ever come from it. It flew like a vagrant moon over the mountains and through the tall spires of stone that decorated the hostile terrain we lived in, seemingly at random. If we followed the teachings of Sha-Serah; if we were kind, obedient, brave, honorable, and just, we’d go there when we died. Sharvas was there. Or his spirit. He’d been kind of fuzzy on the details about it.

            “Hey. Breakfast.” Jara’s voice cut through the silvered light. I turned and looked at her. She was lean and long, a panther-like woman only a year or so older than me. We were all young. The older, weaker ones had been killed or starved long ago. The children weren’t quick enough to keep up and were torn apart or lost in the darkness in any of our countless flights from cavern to cavern when the Bromidae had discovered us. We were all that were left.

            Liss was pulling salted salmon out of the leather packs that wilted against the wall. The ale and mead had run out a few months after we’d found the last grotto, so now there was only the water that we had to crack the ice on top to sip slowly. I took the piece she gave me and tore into the dry, pink flesh. Liss watched me the way she watched everyon, with those eyes the deep violet of hyacinths. She rarely smiled, but then again, few of us did. We’d taken her from the burned out shell of a Karth village deep in the south, but even years later she seemed to view us all with distrust, except for the fanatic, animal loyalty she showed Feral.

            Feral wasn’t one for speeches but he spoke the most. My older brother was harnessed in muscle and stood taller than the rest of us. His shaggy black hair was bound back in hemp twine, the ends touching his shoulders, and his beard sometimes betrayed the sharp white flash of his teeth when he spoke, which was often, or laughed, which was seldom. My own hair was shorn close to my head and my face beardless, my arms lacked the strength his possessed and my eyes were the green of cave moss.

            “Sharvas, as you noticed, has left us.” Feral took a bite of the salmon

            Unbidden, we each glanced to where the body lay near the wall.

            “What now? Sharvas was the one keeping us here but we can’t stay. Night’s coming and when it does the Bromidae will move again.” I fiddled with the bone charms hanging from the end of my staff to avoid looking Feral in the eye. I felt Feral read the group.

            “You’re right, Fir. We can’t stay.”

            “We can’t go either,” Jara said. “We’ll starve. Fir said night’s coming, how can you think we should run into the world only to be slaughtered by Bromidae when night comes?”

            “Or starve here until the Bromidae find us?” Rory’s blue gaze was unblinking.

            “I have a plan.” Feral took a bite of his salmon in that irritatingly unbothered way he had.

            “Well?” Jara spat.

            “Fir won’t like it.”

            “If I stay alive, I’ll like it.”

            “Oh?” Feral’s eyes glittered with something like malice. “We’re going to invade Pantheon."