Month: November 2019

Chapter 15

They come upon the prison which is an offshoot of a large keep. The prison itself is a stone building on the side of the keep that looks like it could have once been a barracks with a single tower at one end and the rear facing the keep. The keep itself is at the top of a steep hill with solid sight lines to war off attackers. This is the truth that the baronness knew. There is no chance for direct attack and very very little chance for escape. The area near it is filled with old boulders and the group hides in the space eyeballing it.

There aren’t people around though there are sheep and cows roaming the area, likely being attended to by a shepherd. They can see the shepherd’s place in the distance but still no people around. They watch until the sky turns dark without once gaining footing on a plan.

Ikrivain is being really stubborn and says that in the morning he will march right up there and demand the release of their guy. This plan is very much hated.

Morning arrives and they see horsemen arriving and hide for their passing.

Chapter 14

So now we have the choice to be made. Do they turn back in hopes of finding medicine that can heal (I’ve been calling her Thea’s sister because a legit forgot her name… she’s a very flat character and that needs to be fixed), or do they go on in order to pursue the quest for the (baroness? Yah, also exceedingly flat)?

Thus far Ikrivain has been in charge of the resources and Thea navigation and Marek and his gal are the talkers and best equipped to deal with people. Yet with the pursestrings, Ikrivain is clearly in charge and he says they must continue. He casts doubt on the severity of her injuries, working to ignore the growing reality that something here is very wrong and it is likely that his first ever responsibilities as a man will result in failures (first his job as Signifier and now this special mission that will result in deaths beyond his control).

He refuses to turn back and it comes to blows with Marek, and that is when he realizes something. The magic that impacts him and gives him more strength and speed has been coursing through him at a low level for a long time. It was below his awareness but active. It is as if someone has been sustaining a spell for an extremely long time and the impact of that is on him. He stops the fight and tries to explain what he knows and what he is. He says that he fears this place is dangerous but it redoubles his efforts to get the man out of the prison. They are so close now he is unwilling to stop.

They begrudgingly agree when Thea’s sister agrees first, after sharing a look with Thea, and they move forward.

We are coming into the black moment where all hope is lost. The group doesn’t know if this is some infection or something else entirely, but they know that the person grievously injured by these things is dying and showing signs of becoming crazy. He rages and tries to lash out and attack them, blaming them for his condition and acting as though he is going to kill him. They put him down.

This leads them to a conversation about how they are going to get to the objective and even if they should still get to the objective or go home. They start to think about this strange place and this strange magic and the horrors here and Marek at least wants to turn back. Thea’s sister is deeply somber during this entire process and over the course of the conversation exhibits more weakness. She slumps back against a wall at one point and lets her hands fall away from her and we realize that she was bitten.

Now the team, having seen someone begin to rage from this (or so they think) are wondering if she has the sickness and what they need to do and Ikrivain is the only one who thinks that she should be killed though he is unwilling to say it.

Note: She is infected, but this is because she was bitten by someone and this is a normal infection. The zombie virus is magical in nature and should they choose to kill her it will be for a poor reason.

Some Thoughts:

1. Completely off the subject–football season over. More thoughts about that to follow. My youngest is still terribly out of shape despite the work, so we will be doing work on our own.

Chapter 12

Morning brings new opportunities and the team is back on the trail. They’ve figured out where they need to go and that path takes them through a village. It is quiet in the village. Too quiet. as they move through the small area they start to wonder why they are the only people moving. they are the only people around it seems. They start to question each other and their guide as to what happened. He doesn’t know. He knows the prison sits on the edge of a keep that this village feeds/belongs to. It isn’t terribly far and they can expect to be there by nightfall. He’d been hoping to stop here and get more ale (he’s a bit of a drunkard which has been a problem so far). He chooses to go inside the bar and sees a body just inside the door. He shouts and they join him. Marek is definintely on edge and advises the others to ready arrows. Ikrivain joins him inside and starts to look around. He’s getting a bad feeling about this situation and says they need to leave this place now.

This is the problem with working with unscrupulous types. Their guide decides to hop behind the bar and get himself a bottle.He is attacked by something undead and he screams. His screams enliven more of the creatures to the point where there are a few more rising out of nowhere outside including a young boy who scampers towards the group. Thea is frozen unable to take the shot and her sister is forced to take the shot for her. That change of target creates an opening for another of those things to grapple her sister to the floor and take a huge bite out of her arm. Thea recovers and stabs it through the nape of the neck as Marek and Ikrivain come outside dragging the nearly dead guide.

They escape the town after killing two more of the undead and flee further (east?) towards the prison.

This leads into the black moment but also forces me to make some more sense of the zombie thing. I think there is a sphere of safety around this prisoner. I feel like the area closest to him is safe and under the influence of whatever they are trying to make him do with his power. At the rim of that sphere is a larger sphere of decay in which power is drawn to create his effect and that power victimizes people, sapping them of their essence until they are the walking dead. It weakens as it distances from him, which is why only the girl was susceptible, but here so close his power raises the near dead (the guide will turn into a zombie and need to be put down) or turns people into such monsters to fuel the effect.

Pain is fuel for writers. We experience life and loss and trauma. We experience happiness and it’s awful twin despair. We use those energies to imagine lives and worlds in which people face these things and the outcomes can play out in ways that it didn’t for us and for the ones we’ve seen hurt. This is not why I write, but it is often how I write. It is what Author Barbara Abercrombie calls ‘Writing out the Storm’ and it is in fact how I tend to make sense of trauma. And make sense of it I will…

Chapter 11

The group is settled by the fire and they are with a man who is meant to take them to their destination. He was provided to them as a guide in payment for the actions they took on behalf of the syndicate. During those actions there was a surge of magic and Ikrivain was able to channel that energy but others were not so lucky. There is bad magic in this place and people are dying from it. Their guide knows something is not well in the land and this time by the fire is an opportunity for them to all discuss what is happening.

Over the course of the conversation we hear the twins discuss their childhood and it is like they lived two completely different lives. Thea bore a terrible burden as the sister who faced all of the bad and shielded her twin from the horrors of the world. Marek already knows this and often tries to shush his lady from bringing stuff up.

Sensing a moment of reality, Ikrivain talks about his childhood and how he first thought it was happiness but realized that his mother was feeling trapped in the home and his father was living two lives and had a second home outside of theirs with joys and responsibilities he needed to attend to. He still wonders if there was a second son he sent out into the world and that he trusted with more than numbers and being this kind of home born man.

There is a lot of angst released in this chapter, and I will enjoy writing it. The chapter ends with sounds of animals gathering nearby but frightened by the flames and perhaps even more firghtened by what else lurks in the darkness. They make the fire larger and allow themselves sleep for they expect to travel harder and farther the next day in order to avoid whatever darkness is building in these woods.

I am stepping away from the book today to sit down and write about what just happened, because at this specific hour this is the only emotional outlet that I have.

It is hard to even write the words, because it is about me and about family and about my failures as a father. A conversation about respect open the doors to a lot of what my kids have been feeling lately. While they say they look up to me and respect me they also confessed that they feel like a burden and they feel like I am trapped between two lives and that they are holding me back.

To hear your kids say that is a terrible thing. To hear your kids feel like you want a life without them is a terrible thing, but that is where things are right now and I don’t know how I got here. I don’t know where I go from here.

This post was accidentally written over on day 16. I am a man who leaves fat too many windows open and made a terrible mistake.

I lose a chapter–a good one–in the process.

So I am at the point where I really need to decide if this is a fantasy war lit piece (hint: it is not), fantasy zombie, or something else I have not discovered yet. Here is what I do know: I am trying to capture this very modern idea of feeling pointless and without value in a world where it is easier to slip away into the wilds of drug abuse than it is to get through a day sober. I’m grateful I don’t have that daily life but I feel it. and it is something I simply cannot avoid addressing in fiction.

Anyway,

I don’t have anything for chapter 9 tonight. I’m trying to get there, so better luck tomorrow with the words in general.

So on and down we go…

Chapter 8

As they drift away from the border they start to realize what life is like in this region. Something is terribly wrong. The people are living at different ends of a vast spectrum of health and poverty and it shows in their actions. They’ve been told a number of lies about this region of the world and this is revealing those lies.

Note: I am not sure what I want to do with this, though I am basing my thoughts largely on and around the concept that news only sources the teller. This is kind of a Fox News thing writ large where the perception of truth is based on what everyone hears. And what our people continue to hear is that the Horde comes from this and other regions and is actually a band of freedom fighters and this particular region is closer to the disparity that created it. This reinforces Ikrivain’s theory that the brother is being held improperly. We will soon discover exactly how wrong he is.

We can tell now that people in this region are corrupted and corruptable. To him it is no different than how it was at home but here folks are more interested in being up front about it and he likes that better.

Some B-story developing here as Mafrek and his lady are together again. They have grown closer in the wake of the death of the child. Thea is off–she’s not right anymore and clearly needs support, but with the others all distracted she is not getting the help she needs. She takes to drinking in bars and one particular night as they are seeking answers from the lower castes she crosses a man and he strikes her. The others jump to her defense but they need not. She stabs the man in the leg and nearly kills him. The authorities arrive on scene quickly.

I have two directions here.

1. That pull of magic kicks up and the adrenaline forces Ikrivain into action and they are about to have an altercation with the cops when the stabbed man goes after Thea and the cops pull him back only to be shocked at his wildness. He goes after them in a frenzied state and they are forced to put him down. others in the space react with shock except for one person who observes the group and once the action ends approaches them to suggest that he can help them in their quest.
2. The cops take Thea and she is put in a cell for the night. Ikrivain tries to save her but is also arrested and the two of them wind up in opposite cells but still with the ability to talk to eachother. That conversation triggers emotions but also creates a scenario where someone overhears and agrees to help them reach their destination.

Now that we’ve begun working out the kinks I can start falling into this story a little more. Here we go with…

Chapter 7

The death of the people of the caravan is both confusing and disheartening to the team. They don’t know what to think other than the caravan was attacked and ransacked. But it wasn’t. There is no evidence of theft anywhere. The group decides not to let the supplies go to waste and take what they can carry. Thea thinks it is a bad idea and that it will bring foul luck upon them. This starts a fight with Ikrivain because his mother was always on about luck and he is done hearing and having that conversation. Over the course of the argument he offends her and by default her sister, driving the three away from him slightly.

Marek and him have a sidebar conversation where he admits that he is not feeling the best and he is really shaken up by what he saw and he knows thea is even more disturbed by what she was forced to do to that child. He wants to go apologize but he is warned off of the action.

They choose not to sleep there for the night and gain as much distance as they can from the nightmare. He spends the evening thinking about the uncomfortable feeling and the last time he felt it, which is basically never until recently and now he has felt it twice.

They make it to a town by mid morning and use the gold they’ve stolen to arrange a room. They all stay together and they find space on the floor of the inn’s bedroom, hoping to save what little money they have. They all sleep through the night though at times both Ikrivain and Thea wake to find the other already up and staring out a window. It goes on like this for a while and neither chooses to speak to the other.

New morning breaks and the group decides to get moving. Here they begin to discuss the strategy for finding what sort of prison this guy could be held in. He avoids saying the guy’s name but makes it clear to people they meet that they are looking for a very special prison..

This leads to the line that if one is looking for a prison it is hard to believe they should not already be there–as a resident. People are talking less and local police are becoming more interested as the day moves forward. Before long the choice is made to leave the city before they are caught and made to answer questions they cannot.

Meanwhile people are talking about the war front and what is happening there, and that is how we learn about how horde is holding on. We also get an inkling that not everyone in this Barony (nation?) agrees with needing to stop the horde. There is more going on in that war than is told to the people and more still happening that the allies are not sharing with each other.