A New Danger - a short story, from the world of the Overlord!

Finding bits of what looked suspiciously like a limb inside the mouth of a notoriously temperamental kraken should not come as much of a surprise to anyone. Particularly if the kraken in question belonged to the most gleefully malicious overlord known to the world and its cat.

Perfidious Albion took a deep breath, straightened his hat, and tried not to feel intimidated. Opposite him, five and a half feet of condensed evil swung her warhammer lazily in time to the methodical crunching of the kraken's jaw.

"If there's no one to want it back," said the overlord, "I really struggle to see what all the fuss is about."

"With all due respect, Your Malevolence," said Perfidious, side-eyeing the kraken as it started pinging a femur off the walls of its tank, "it's not every day that flying limbs come crashing through peoples' parlour windows."

"You people must have very boring Tuesdays, then."

Perfidious decided not to press any further on that front - his imagination was already going to cry itself to sleep in a corner for the next month, it needed no more fuel today - and changed tack.

"But don't you think it a little odd, O Queen of the Seven Malaises, that you should find yourself in possession of a leg whose description exactly matches that of the one found in the capital today?"

"What's a few thousand miles and a mountain range against some good old-fashioned enthusiasm?"

The kraken, sensing that its unexpected mid-morning snack had become the focus of a discussion, paddled over to investigate. The Soul-Eater stretched idly, and reached over to tickle the end of an inquisitive tentacle, and Perfidious finally gave into the urge to take a half-step back as another tree-sized appendage began probing the ground around his left foot.

"To be quite honest," said the Defiler of Light, setting aside her warhammer to turn her full attention to teasing her collossal pet, "I don't know why you're so concerned. Last month we had three plagues, five kinslayings, a planetary alignmnent and the reappearance of at least seven Long Lost Objects of Untold Power, and you didn't so much as pop around for tea and a crumpet. But one drastically misplaced midsection has you camping outside my door for three days? The neighbours were threatening a noise complaint."

The Black Foe gave the kraken a final pat, and strode back toward Perfidious, head tilted a little to one side and a slither of tooth showing through her smirking lips.

"I'm beginning to wonder if you and your associate goody-two-limbs haven't come down with a terminal case of mental flatulence."

Perfidious sighed. There really was nothing else for it, was there? Slowly, keeping one eye on his hostess, he withdrew from his pocket a small flat disk. It was about the size of his palm, its white surface marked by evenly-spaced black symbols, with a pair of long silver wands ticking in a faintly sinister manner as they wandered in ever-decreasing circles around its face.

The Paragon's Bane furrowed her brows and leaned over to investigate. Then, with a shriek like a gnome with its foot in a waffle iron, she sprang backwards and nearly collided with face of her bemused pet. The kraken retracted its searching tentacles and made a piteous whining noise at its mistress' distress.

Perfidious let out a breath, and as his yellow eyes met her blue ones, he knew, at last, that they understood one another.

"Plot holes."

The Return of the Dark Lady - Part Two

Part Two of The Return of the Dark Lady - Part One.


You'd have screamed, too, if you'd seen the inside of that room.

When the minion finally calmed down enough to properly comprehend where its was, and remembered who was looking at it with a worryingly irritable expression on her face, it exchanged his screaming for whimpering.

The overlord gave it a disdainful look - evidently she was picking up on those faults the Professor for Submissive Behaviour had pointed out all too frequently during the minion's time at the Academy.

"M-My Apologies, O Foul One," the minion whined, ringing its hands so hard that, had it not been wearing the regulation mailed gloves, its hands might have fallen off.

"Neh," said the overlord, giving the quaking underling one last disdainful glance before sweeping across the room.

Or, rather, what was left of it. The walls were empty, but the floor was all-too-literally waist deep in ruins. The ruins of the walls, that is.

And the ruins of the minion might soon have been added to it, had its training not kicked in just in time to remind it to duck. A shield the size of a small horse whizzed through the air, its sharpened edges neatly removing two inches of hair from the top of the minion's head as it dived behind a sizable piece of rubble. Deeply-ingrained protocol shot to the forefront of the minion's mind - Rule number Twenty-Two, sub-section C, chapter ninety-nine of the Manual of Minionhood; in case of likely lethal projectiles, see Fig. A for correct course of appeasement . . . or was it Fig. B?

A second horrible crunch made the minon's decision for it. Curling up into the smallest possible ball it could manage, it put its head between its knees and started, very slowly, to count to ten. It wondered if it could beat the current record of getting to seven before encountering the inevitable Horrifically Grisly Death.

"Sorry. Never was much good with DIY."

The minion stopped counting - two seconds short, just two seconds! - and uncurled itself.

"Horrific Lady, I . . . what are you doing?"

"Eeeeeep!" said the Day's Doom, grimacing with almost comic extravagance as she hoisted a ten-foot  length of spiked silver railing over her head. However, it seemed, the railing had more nerve than two thirds of known world, and gave the Blightbringer a good clonk alongside the head before falling heavily to the ground on her toes.

The minion waited for the recommended ten minutes for the storm of hopping, shrieking and defenestration of nearby objects to end, then scuttled out over the rubble to offer its employer a tube of arnica cream. After a moment's hesitation, it also held out a slightly fuzzy toffee that it had been keeping in its pocket to suppliment its afternoon cup of coffee.

"Ffffffs," said the Empress of the Night, rubbing her bare foot between her hands. Although it would never say it aloud, the minion thought its employer's feet looked incredibly peculiar sticking out below the ornate black steel of her armoured greaves. Although they were not half as grand as her battle-dress, even her casual daywear had a way of making her look a lot bigger from a distance than she was up close.

"Knew I should have burned the instruction manual," she muttered at her toes, "not that would have helped - it'd probably have confused the fire too much to burn."

The minion found the guilty manual, it spine halfway torn off and several pages showing signs of scorching (and drowning, and something that looked suspiciously like teeth marks). It flipped it open curiously, and glanced at a page.

"Ah."

The manual was the sort that proved a universal truth: never attempt to assemble furniture sent to you by an acquaintance that you have defeated in a game of Evil Scrabble within the past two millenia.

And so it was that, after a few more minutes of foot-rubbing and a quick trip down to the kitchens for a packet of chocolate biscuits, that the minion found itself sitting on a large chunk of rubble, nursing a cup of tea while its mistress explained the reason for her recent horrific mood.

Suffice to say the tale was long and engrossing, full of toil and struggle and ill-fated creative endeavour, but at the end of it all it simply boiled down to the Arch-Defiler's ineptitude at tasks involving anything more complicated than a screwdriver.

A peculiar parcel had arrived unexpectedly, early in the morning of the day before the first Day of Ugh had commenced. It was this parcel that contained the railing, as well as the curtain it was supposed to hold - the minion saw that it had since been relegated to a corner, underneath one patch of wall that was still standing. Within the first page of the assembly manual there had been a letter from Lord Snark -  a sour-faced Perpetrator of the Lesser Nasties who was still brave enough to inhabit the lands within a year's ride of the Dark Lady's fortress. He acceeded to her superiority at Evil Scrabble (a game she enjoyed inflicting on people whom she had to pretend to like an awful lot more than she did), but dared to offer her another challenge . . . assemble the curtain rail within the week, and send him a picture of proof. Surely, read heavily italicised closing paragraph, she could not fail to complete so easy a challenge as this? Especially, if she did, she had the option to send him a similar challenge in return.

The results of the challenge were obvious, and it did not take much creativity on the minion's part to work out how its mistress felt about the whole affair. Well, perhaps not the whole of it. She'd probably have set fire to something in that case.

"Well," said the minion cautiously, "I'm sure some of the catapult technicians might be able to help, and maybe if we bring up a couple of trolls to stand on . . ."

"Naaaaaah," the High Villainess flapped her hands dismissively at the desolation around her, "bored now."

And with that, she ordered the flabbergasted underling to take the railing down to the dungeons and have the rest repackaged and sent to somewhere where it could ellicit a suitably amusing reaction of panic from those who found it.

Then she declared she was going for a swim.

The minion finished its biscuit, waited until it could hear the shrieks of fear as the braver members of the domestic staff saw their employer emerging from her seclusion and stride off in the direction of the pools, and then made his way to the nearest telephone.

"Hello? Is this Lord Snark? Yes, she got the curtains - didn't break as much as we thought she would. Yeah, I know, it's really a bit disappointing. Ah well. Next time we'll definitely should go for the shelving units. You know what she's like about those."

THE END

The Return of the Dark Lady!

Following on from A Day with the Dark Lady, we return to Her Evilness' fortress for more doom-laced hi-jinx. But this time, it seems, it'll take more than an agent of dim-witted derring-do to improve her mood. . .

* * *

There are very few times in life when it is vital to read the terms and conditions of an employment contract. Of course, everyone knows it's recommended - maybe even important - but even if you didn't it wouldn't be the end of the world.

The minion was beginning to wonder if any of its co-workers were aware that this was not one of those jobs. Though, to be fair, it didn't remember reading anything about the possibility of being run over by a throne.

As the aforementioned throne slowly finished its manic rotation, the minion crept out of its hiding place to proffer a bandage to his unfortunate companion. There would be some magnificent bruises, he thought, and luckily the invalid seemed to already be regarding them as a badge of honour. After all, there were relatively few - even among the senior staff - who could tell stories about the hazards of allowing evil overlords to combine their passions for imposing furniture and spinny office chairs.

The overlord herself, however, was not longer paying attention. Propelling her wheeled behemoth to the window, she hopped onto the windowsill and peered out over her fortress walls to the miles of desolation beyond - exactly two-point-five miles, actually, as specified by requirements of the fortress' status as a World Heritage Site.

The two minions waited apprehensively for any word, and were rewarded with an "ugh".

"Ugh" was the reason that not a single minion missed one of their daily physical fitness sessions. "Ugh" was at the top of the list (in capital letters, underlined) of Words Synonymous With Impending Doom That Are Ninety-Nine Percent Likely To Be Lethal.

"Ugh" was what turned a field of hardened, armoured warriors into an empty space full of discarded weaponry and distant cries of "Mummy!"

"Ugh" meant that Her Fearsomeness had something to do, and she really, really, really didn't want to do it.

Days of "Ugh", as the terrible occasions were known, were rare enough to have once been considered mere legends. There were plenty percolating, such one which claimed that the wellington boot embedded in the doorway above the sixth-storey dining room had been left there by the castle's previous owner (who, in actual fact, was a pretty considerable legend in their own right). Another of its ilk stipulated that Her Evilness' real name was so long that they hadn't invented a piece of paper big enough to hold it - although, technically, this wasn't so much a legend as a mangled truth that nobody had the energy to disentangle.

The last Day of "Ugh" had taken place just over three years ago, when Her Evilness had been confronted with a book of Sudoku puzzles by a rival overlord. Nobody knew what became of the Sudoku book, but as everybody knew what had become of its sender, the matter had never been brought up again.

For that reason, not a single minion went anywhere near the Shadowlady's private apartments for the rest of the week. The Head Henchman made sure everything went on as usual, answering the inevitable awkward questions as best he could and leaving those he couldn't on bright purple Post-It notes stuck to the foreheads of the askers.

It was only when the Bane of Righteousness' favourite dragon went down with colic (and no one could find the medication) that they turned to the eventuality of having to disturb her. There were myriad ways they could have decided this, and some of the bigger minions certainly had some very entertaining ideas about how to choose a nominee. And yet, even the more brutal among them couldn't bring themselves to condemn one of their number to an unfair end - not in the least because it went against the Rules, and anyone who knew anything knew that breaking even the least of the Rules would envy the fate of the one they had condemned by doing so.

So, instead, they turned to the oldest, most illustrious, and, alarmingly, fairest system of decision they knew.

Two thousand six hundred and fifty two fists rapped at the base of the door, and two thousand six hundred and fifty one voices let out squeaks of relief as they ran away to find the deepest darkest hole in the universe, dig deeper, and wait for the screaming to stop.

The screaming, of course, was coming from the one who didn't run away fast enough.

TO BE CONTINUED!

A Day with the Dark Lady - a short story

It was late morning, on a pleasant Sunday afternoon. Not that you could tell, of course, for the sky was thunderously black and brimming with thoughts of imminent thunderstorms. The thunderstorms themselves materialised on occasion, but today they, like just about everything else within a fifty mile radius, seemed to be doing their best to appear inconspicuous.

It was late morning, on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, and at one minute past three o'clock a large raven was sent from a high tower with an order for a new obsidian table attached to its leg.

Sitting in the remnants of said table, a small minion was beginning to have serious regrets about its career choices.

"Your Evilness . . . if I may ask . . . what seems to be . . . the matter?"

The stammering was not deliberate on the minion's part - not that that would have been an issue, what with the strenuous 'equal opportunities' policy applied by its employer - but rather because it was frequently interrupted by the need to dart out of the way of the titanic black-headed mace as it continued its path of desecration around the room. By the looks of it, the minion thought, the antique fireplace was not going to last half as long as the table had.

In fact, just at that moment, the mace crashed through the aforementioned's mantlepiece and lodged fast in the thick stone beyond. A few sharp tugs and snarls later, and the minion finally plucked up enough courage to approach its fuming, but thankfully noodle-armed, wielder.

"My Dear Dread Lady," the minion said, tugging at the edges of its silky black cloak nervously, "what troubles you?"

The tugging on the mace ceased, and a pair of surprisingly non-threatening blue eyes whipped around the room before spotting the minion, who sighed. For all it was convenient being scarce knee-height to their employer (it certainly made it easier to avoid her occasional attempts to behead them), it did make it rather inconvenient when you wanted to get her attention.

The minion waited in half apprehensive silence as the eyes lingered on him. He kept his swallow as infinitessimal as he could when she pulled off her helmet - a very impressive thing, even Sauron had sent several very envious emails upon seeing a picture of it on Evil Overlords Anonymous - and set it on the remains of the desecrated mantlepiece.

"Three weeks," she said at long last, to nothing in particular, "three weeks."

The minion sighed and held out his hands apologetically. "Three weeks, two days and forty six hours, Oh Great and Terrible Mistress. We are keeping a close watch."

"But three weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeks."

The minion braced himself for a swift and painful death as his overlord (she insisted the title was gender neutral) threw her hands skyward and drove her steel-toed boots into the floor so hard that he heard the stone screech in protest. However, in a sudden swirl of cloak and armour, she stormed past him and flopped into her throne with such utter despondency that he began to wonder if he should call for an Emergency Chocolate Cake.

It had, indeed, been three weeks, two days and forty six hours since any heroes had assailed the fortress. In fact, it had been that long since anyone, heroic or otherwise, had come anywhere near the place. At first no-one had been overmuch worried - especially given the horror that was bound to spread through the land at the news of the terrible Death By Sausage that had befallen the last champion to brave the citadel's walls. A week had passed unremarkably, and the overlord had amused herself with extended games of charades with the denizens of her dungeon (those she liked, anyway) and teaching her kraken to 'play dead'.

By week two, she'd begun to get restless and had organised some minor Pillaging With Intent to Annoy across the borders of one of her tetchiest neighbouring principalities. As it turned out, its king was absent, fighting giants in the north, so instead she'd sent him a letter requesting an army to squish upon his return. Meanwhile, she'd caught wind of a champion coming from the west with a sword of fire, swearing upon the blood of his slaughtered family to bring down every stone of her fortress. She had giddily awaited his arrival for a full three hours before news reached her that he'd been eaten by rabid squirrels somewhere in the Insidious Forest. Though the news had caused widespread hysterical laughter, it hadn't solved the problem.

And this week . . . the minion shuddered. Three princesses kidnapped, twelve priceless artifacts stolen, ninety six false messages aiming at inciting civil war, two hundred and six towns and smaller cities burnt to the ground and six dragons down with flu after attempting to start a plague.

But still, not so much as a traveller with a faulty Sat-Nav had wandered by the castle. As the derth of entertainment persisted, Her Evilness' mood had steadily worsened until she had taken to attacking the furniture about six hours ago. When they dared to creep back into sight after a particularly nasty spree of catapult-related mishaps, minions had done their best to cheer her up, even volunteering for a paintball match (which, to anyone who knew anything about them, featured a large crossbow and several barrels of jelly). Yet still, with no Ye Anciente Prophecies scheduled to come to fruition within the next two years (give or take a planetary alignment), it seemed that nothing short of a disastrous miracle would save them all from an eternity of broken furniture and defenestrated lackeys.

"Your Malignancy . . ." the minion crept up to the puddle of furry-cloaked apathy puddled in the middle of the throne, "We are trying everything . . . It can't be much longer, we're sure . . ."

The overlord merely shook her head and burrowed deeper into the crook of her elbows. She looked very small, thought the minion, sitting down in front of the throne in the midst of a terrible guilt trip, especially for a being of immeasurable malice and delight in terrorising the well-intentioned. She looked very sad, too, and to the minion's mind, that was terrible. Black-hearted and frequently violent as she was, he was very fond of his employer. Hadn't she taken great pains to ensure practicality and comfort in their uniform, and turned the cook into a petunia after he failed to account for dietary requriements in the lunch menu? Heck, she'd even given him a holiday once, for a whole half a minute.

Then, suddenly, the air was split by the ring of a horn. It was a great ring, high and pure and resounding with such a power that it set the tips of the minion's ears trembling. Out of the window, a great wind arose, and carried with it the sound of a sword singing as it was removed from its scabbard. The minion leapt to his feet.

"The Long-Lost Horn of the Third King!" he cried. "And the Singing Sword! Why, it's said only the mightiest arm and stoutest heart may lift them, and that their combined power is all in the entire world that can rival the might of the Dark One! Well," he bit his lip, "other than those fifty two other swords . . . and that magic spear . . . and possibly the Spork of Wrath, but only in conjunction with the Wellies of Determ-"

The minion was flat on his face before he could even think of the rest of the word. An avalanche of plaster crashed to the floor as the mace was wrenched from the wall, and he barely managed to scrabbled out of the way before being knocked to back to the floor as the Dark Lady of Doom bounced in fits of squeaking excitement down the corridor, calling for her dragon, her sword, her absolute wittiest hero-demoralising monologue.

And hard on her heels came the minion, trying to make himself heard beween the answering screeches and howls of delight coming from every crevice of the castle.

"Dreadful Lady!" he cried. "Defiler of Light! Bane of the Righteous! You forgot your helmet!"

~ Charley R

Tragedy - a short story

“A tragedy”, they say. Then again, a lot of things seem to be called “tragedies” these days. People pretend the word means something important, something heart-wrenchingly sad, when in actual fact it was nothing but a vaguely interesting event in their mundane, mortal lives. They don’t know what a tragedy really is. They know the stories, they watch the curtain fall, then they dust off their hands and walk away feeling thoroughly righteous, knowing that such a thing will never happen to them.

They see the dead lying in the ripples on the surface, but never what waits in the deep for the survivors.

Remember Benvolio? He was never terribly auspicious, was he – only the proverbial third musketeer, trailing along in the wake of his two friends as they wrought the special brand of havoc that can only be wrought by boys who think themselves men. Of course, it’s the other two that people weep for. Poor Mercutio, spitted for his loyalty and dying with a laugh on his lips, and dear Romeo, dear romantic Romeo, lying eternally in the arms of the woman he never truly got a chance to love.

At least they died quickly.

What they don’t tell you is that Benvolio never reconciled himself to the deaths.  Every day, week after week, year after year, he’d sit by their graves for hours on end, talking to them. He repeated every joke they ever told one another, relived every drink- and daring-fuelled misadventure. He even drank himself stupid in the graveyard on their birthdays, and ran home screaming in the dark. If you listened, you could hear their names amidst his tears.

He didn’t so much die as fade away, like ashes in the wind. 

Remember Horatio? Yes, that strange friend of Prince Hamlet’s, the one who was never there when you expected him to be. The one who stood about and looked shocked as half the court died on each other’s swords, remarked upon only in the mad ravings of a dying prince. The sight of all that death burned itself so deep into his mind that it was impossible to gauge out. 

He tried, though.

It seems that fate wasn't in the mood to indulge, for the knife didn’t go deep enough, and only succeeded in taking his eyes. Or maybe he tried too hard. The madness wasn’t long in settling itself where his eyes used to be.

He died screaming.

I could go on. 

I could tell you about how newly-crowned King Malcolm burned a thousand of his subjects on pyres of green wood on charges of witchcraft. 

I could tell you how Don Pedro hung himself, three months after he watched his treacherous brother swing from the very same tree. 

I could tell you how Sebastian wept when he discovered that the pirate Antonio, his many-time champion and saviour, had been executed on Duke Orsino’s orders the very day after the duke’s wedding to Sebastian’s own sister. 

I could tell you how pale Cassio turns at the mention of Cyprus, how he posts guards at every door and lies awake in the night, haunted by whispers and visions of handkerchiefs.

And I can tell you exactly why you'll believe me. Things are not always what they seem . . . and who knows it better than I?

I’m Iago. 

Honest.

Darkling - A Short Story

It’s quiet now. Somewhere beyond the confines of our stunted vision, somewhere in the teeth of the snarling darkness beyond the reach of our dying torches, in the cold, close air over our heads. 


In this silence, our breathing echoes like the dying gasps of an army. An army of frozen souls wandering in some cold, empty oblivion, fleeing in fear from they know not what. 


We dare not move for fear of tripping the air’s silver threads and shattering the glass ceiling of quiet above us. Though perhaps it would not be so bad. Blood, at least, is warm. And the pain, at least, would be brief.


The quiet burns with a fire made of icicles and knife edges.


It is said that dead men tell no tales, but here it is the living whose tongues blacken and shrivel in the cold. The kiss of the air is laced with trailing fingers and wandering souls. Down, down, six feet deep, their bodies lie in ashes, but here, among the last frigid bastion of the fearful, they walk among us.


Maybe they try to warn us. Or maybe they laugh. 


A cry, strangled before it can be heard. We cannot break our last defence; that last opaque wall, that last frozen comfort. Steel and stone and fire have failed us. Now we have only silence; blind-eyed silence, dancing on her blade’s edge, ‘till she shatters into dust and porcelain screams.


Dare we believe we are alone? In this nightmare fantasia it is all too easy to lose sight of the truth, or that which wears its face. Our vision dies with our torches, but still we scrabble in the black for phantom lights and promises. 


There are too many liars here.


The brave may mock the coward in the light, but when the night draws in and the grey death looms, he will cling to his dusty heels and mewl with the rest of us. There are no heroes here; there are no heroes anywhere when the darkness rips away our pantomime shadows and bares us, naked fools, as what we are. 


The last torch gasps its last. Now the reign of darkness is complete, as she takes hope in her arms and, with a last pointy-toothed kiss, tenderly snaps her neck. A black queen on a black throne, staring with her knowing eyes and empty, empty smile.


Down and down and down we go, watch the ebb and laughing flow, hear the silent sirens sing.


Hear the queen devour her king.

I'm An Author - A Published One!

Outside temperature:   -2 degrees Celsius (window open, room approx. same temperature)

Size of room:   Approximatedly 1.5 metres width by 2-3 metres long

Number of times run around squealing:  Innumerable.

Hey.

Hey.

Guess what guys?

Guess what?

.

..

...

I'm an author.

My fingers are shaking so much I can hardly type this without putting typos every which way. I feel like an over-caffienated Tribble. 

An over-caffienated Tribble whose dream just came true.

Words cannot describe how excited I am right now - one of my stories is currently out there, in the internet, alongside the professionals. I feel like there's a New Millenium party going in my tummy every time I see Charley Robson (Author) on the page, but somehow I can't quite bring myself to believe it's real. It's happening.

I'm an author.

Saffina Desforges Presents: The Kindle Coffee-break Collection, Volume Two

Note: the anthology should also be available on Amazon.com as well as Amazon.co.uk, for all you lovely readers from over the pond! Wouldn't want you feeling left out now, would we?

The proof is in the pudding (or the picture, as the case may be ... or hyperlink, if you want to get technical)

You'll find my name proudly attached to a story called Darkness To Light which I can only really describe as a spiritual fable. It's all about trust, and fear, and about standing up to the dark inside our heads, whatever form it comes in. It's a story about faith, written the day I found mine (or, perhaps, the day it found me!)

But, of course, there are plenty of other delights to be found in there - that's the best part of any collection, you know there'll be a little bit of everything. In Volume One, for example, there was everything from spine-chilling ghost stories to supernatural crime-thrillers and, my personal favourite, a truly hysterical take on a 21st Century French-style Revolution - complete with guillotine!

So ... who wants to jump first?

Oh, and did I forget to mention?

I'm an author.

- Charley R

"The Choice" - of Premise, Plotting and Poetry

The mother was a beauty,

They called her fairest maid,

The stars shone in her eyes as down

Upon her bed she laid.

The storm it heard her crying,

The thunder, and the flood,

It raged around the room as she,

She drenched the room in blood.

Her brother and her father,

Amidst her kindred’s cries,

Around her frozen corpse they saw

The child with bastard’s eyes.

A bastard born,

To purest Kin,

The star-child’s son,

A filthy sin.

A stain on fam’ly honour,

A plague, a curse, a blight,

To daughter of the morning born,

A thing of darkest night.

They honoured sweet Elithae,

Upon her death they cursed,

They did their utmost to conceal

The crossblood that she birthed.

They laid her down in starlight,

Among her kindred’s bones.

A false child buried, true son gi’vn

To a wizened crone.

They wanted him forgotten,

To help them soothe the pain,

They cast him out and cared not for

His future nor his name.

The stain on Mistlord honour,

The plague, the curse, the blight,

His name is Vidal, bastard-born,

Its meaning simply “spite”.

A bastard born

To purest Kin,

The star-child’s son,

A filthy sin.

A heartless scheming coward,

A traitor to the core,

The storm-born outcast who would forge

A legend from a war.

The poem that you have just had the pleasure of reading is, in fact, the premise to the first of the short stories that I am working on at the moment. It's not the story I was supposed to be working on, but as I'm in the opening stages of recovering from a nasty bout of Writer's Block, I'm not complaining. 

You may be seeing snippets of The Choice - the culprit responsible for spawning this poem - appearing on the blog before long, if you ask me nicely. So far, I have three stories properly mapped out: The Choice, The Flight and The Betrayal, but there are others just worming their way into the light. I'd ideally like to have seven stories (for reasons that would make more sense if you understood the symbolism of the number in the story's context), but we'll see how that goes.

In the meantime, read the poem, tell me what you think, and, if you desire, demand that I give you some snippets!

The End of an Era

She stood on the cliff edge, staring out over the pale horizon, and knew it was over. She could feel it in the air around her; in the whispering breeze and the shimmering voices of the ripples on the lake below her. She sat down and knotted her fingers into the wet grass, pushing dirt up under her nails as a pleasant dewy cool spread down her thighs. Perhaps jeans were not the wisest thing to wear today.

The breeze danced by, tugging at her fringe and the loose sleeves of her shirt, pulling her like an excited friend as it ran out over the lake, darting through the sunbeams and sending up plumes of soft white spray. A diving bird gave a warbling cry and ducked under the surface to avoid the wind's teasing, only to shoot upwards in a shower of spray with a tiny silver fish in its beak. She smiled and lay back in the grass, looking down between her grassy toes to the horizon. The sun was shedding its brilliant golden glow and settling into a comfortable ochre red as it nestled into the clouds, dimming the sky's light to a soft array of pastel pinks and blues, ready to sleep and rest, ready to light the sky again the next day. 

As the light faded away, the earth itself seemed to give a little sigh. It was the end; the end of a day of the past, of old thoughts and old fears and old duties, of things that were no longer necessary. But it was also the beginning of a new time, a new future of opportunities and excitements and adventures.

She looked up at the sky and smiled. She would never have to sit another Maths exam again.

The Golden Sponge Stick Competition

I don't know how many of you know of this competition, but basically it is a competition run by an author, sponsored by her old school (I think). The challenge is to write a short story, 1500 words or less, set in Roman times. It's completely open ended as to what you can write, and there are several age brackets for entrants. I entered in the Over Fourteen category, after my Latin teacher pointed the competition out to me. I entered my story a couple of days before the competition closed, and since then I have been wondering about the results.

Then, this afternoon, I received a strange parcel in the mail. Inside it was ...

That's right everyone, it's a Golden Sponge Stick! I won the competition! Yippee!

After bouncing around the room excitedly for several minutes, I opened up the card that came inside the parcel. It was a letter from Jenny Pine, the lady in charge of the competition, congratulating me on the win! Also inside was a £25 HMV voucher, and a request from her that I get my parents to give permission for her to publish my story on her website! Wheeeeee!

*sniffs* I'm so happy! I shall treasure this gold-painted sponge for years to come!

Wait until my mother hears about this one ...

-Spook