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.”

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."

           

           

           

           

            

The Butcher and the Alchemist

       This is a little something I'm working on. The endgame is to get this particular piece published; where it finds a home I am less than picky about, save for the twin qualities of being in print and getting a little something for it. I am not sure where this is going, but the style reminded me half of a Xanth novel (By the peerless Piers Anthony) and half of The Witcher series (written by Andrzej Sapkowski). Wherever this leads, I like the two main characters and there is enough chemistry there to carry a short story.

           The Alchemist was known as Rah Gaffer Gospode, to some, but to most he went only by “Frith,” for reasons long since forgotten. The “Rah” was a sign of nobility, but he didn’t seem to have a family, or much of anything else, really. He drifted through the forest, mostly alone, occasionally popping into a town to buy or sell a few trifles. Sometimes strange fungi that seemed to twist towards the moon or little glass bulbs filled with blue liquid appeared in the markets after he had gone, but few could say whether he had brought them or not. He was a tallish, strangeish fellow with eyes that shifted color with the phases of the moon and a strong, angular jaw like a stone in a stream.

            He carried a bamboo pack tight-bound with iron bands and locked with two brass padlocks that clinked when he walked. A sword as long as a short man’s leg hung in a scabbard from the side of his pack, a long blue tassel affixed to the hilt. In winter he grew a beard, knotted and black and rambunctious like a briar thicket. Sometimes he did small favors for people in the town of Silverbone, blessing a gate so it never rusted, or creating some elixir that swelled pumpkins three times their normal size until they looked like fat orange sows in their furrows in back gardens. He never slept in a normal house, only in barns or hedgerows  or propped in the crook of a leaning tree eight paces from the road. He spoke little but smiled brightly and often, even if that smile was a touch too wide and a hair too sharp at times.

            Bufo DeLivre, the butcher, was completely different. Short and fat in the strong, sturdy manner of a boar or bulldog, he was loud and as often jovial as he was enraged, and he had thick brown arms like summer hams that he swung in great arcs when he talked. A broad cleaver swung on a leather thong at his belt, the handle polished from three generations of DeLivre hands. He swore it could slash a maple leaf as it fell but chop through a steer’s neck with one blow. No one ever saw him use it. No one ever saw him work, honestly. He sat in front of his shop and shouted orders through the open door at his niece or the orphan boy who was madly in love with his niece and did all the work she was supposed to. Bufo and Frith got along in the bickeringly friendly way fast friends did, with Bufo roaring insults between laughs punctuated by Frith’s quiet, sharp retorts and flashing smile.

            

WebRep

currentVote

noRating

noWeight

Touch

I don't really know where I was going with this, but my prose was on point for this excerpt. This is all I have. 

            Ulfric watched as they dragged the gambler to the stocks. The sky was slate grey over Edgewick, and leaves tumbled by like a dry tide as the wind tugged at the edge of his ragged overjacket, chilling him. He stuffed his hands into the large pockets and watched them force the man to his knees, shoving his throat against the rough wood. The blacksmith’s sons dropped the heavy elm yoke across his shoulders, dropping the corroded iron pins into it. The wind whipped the drying trees, tearing leaves from them as the invisible sunlight faded the charcoal sky, and the indigo feather in the gambler’s broad hat leapt from the band and danced a pirouette.

            The magistrate left in a swirl of purple robes, and the blacksmiths followed him, leaving only Ulfric and the gambler, staring at each other. With a trapped hand, he beckoned Ulfric closer. Ulfric walked closer, standing in front of the crude platform.

            “Can you help me?”

            “Why?”

            He seemed genuinely puzzled by the question.

            “What did I do wrong?”

            “It isn’t obvious by now?” Ulfric asked.

            “No, I mean, why is it illegal to gamble?”

            “It isn’t illegal to gamble,” Ulfric said. “It’s just illegal to win.”

            “Who was I playing?”

            “The magistrate’s son.”

            The gambler let out a sigh. A trickle of blood inched down his throat where a splinter had stabbed him, making a scarlet rivulet on his neck. “I have the worst luck with opponents.” He gave Ulfric a sharp look. “Well? Can you let me out?”

            “Why should I do that?”

            “I have something that could make you one of the most powerful men in the world.”

            “Why should I believe you?”

            “What do you have to lose? Look at yourself.”

            Ulfric had heard that more times than he cared to remember, but coming from the mouth of a complete stranger was like getting punched with a lead club.

            He wasn’t much to look at, that much he knew. A skinny, scraggly orphan, maybe fifteen, with fingers quick enough to get him into trouble; filthy hair knotted with dirt and over his old servant’s shift a once-colorful captain’s jacket, flowing sleeves a glory of torn and yellowed lace and cracked epaulets over the blue and red and gold. His eyes were the only thing that could trap one’s attention: green as an oak leaf, sparkling like a forest stream and deep as a well.

            “What can you give me?”

            “I can give you the ability to never fail.”

            “I can see it worked for you.”

            “It doesn’t work like that.” The man was getting exasperated. “I have a book in my pack. The pack is stored underneath this platform because your magistrate is stupid enough to not recognize it for what it is; he thought that it was a journal. Get it out for me.”

            Ulfric got on his knees in the icy mud and crawled underneath the girders of the stocks. Caterpillars and glowfairies fled before him as he grasped the hardened leather bag and pulled it free.

            “Open it and pull out the book.”

            The heavy volume was bound in leather, with an ivory plate on the front. An indigo sigil was painted on the white bone.

            “This book contains the secrets of Touch, the ability to finish any task, do anything successfully, and it’s all written in a language that only I can understand.”

            “Where did you get it?”

            The man winked. “I’ll tell that story when you let me out.”

            Ulfric thought for a moment, and then dropped the book back into the bag. “I like my life just fine right now, thanks.”

            Rather than getting angry, the man seemed to deflate.

            “Then go. Leave me to contemplate.”

            Ulfric turned and started to walk away. A few feet away, he paused and turned. “What do you call yourself?”

            “Stag.” The man said. “Now go.”