Excerpt from An Ever Climbing Stairway

I set my bag down beside the trunk of a weary gray oak and pulled my shoes off.


“Don’t burn your feet.” Tjeni had followed me. Her toes and soles of her feet were now aflame, and she spun idly in the movements of her dance, ignoring my inspection of the river.

“Thanks for the advice,” I muttered ironically, before standing on the edge of the river. I looked into the water, which was a little clearer than it had seemed from above on the sand dunes – though not much. A few tiny fish survived all odds in these waters. Gods, give me the knowledge and wisdom I have traveled here seeking. I prayed specifically to Lo’r, whose waters these were. Was something wrong in the world of the gods – or the world of the knowledge and wisdom, that such a revered river should dry up?

I stepped into the water, my toes first pressing into the strange, coarse mud caused by the sands here. A little further, rolling up the legs of my pants. I sank a few inches into the riverbed. I turned to see my companion setting an already doomed tree aflame. She was totally ignoring me, watching with wide eyes as the tree sparked to firey life.

I looked down, and found half my legs buried in the muddy water of the River Lo’r.

A shocked cry left my lips, though I heard my heart beating more fiercely in sudden fear of the forces of nature. Sure enough, I was sinking down into the water, my legs sucked in by the weight of the watery sands. I tried to yank my leg out and only succeeded in falling forward almost fully into the water with torso and arms.

“Tjeni!” I did not usually ask for help – but at this moment, I was desperate. The demon turned to me, her firey hand raised thoughtfully in the air, before darting over. Her feet sizzled and popped with the sudden change of temperature of the water. Her hand, no longer on fire but hardly cooled off, grasped mine. I winced as she struggled to yank me from the water.

“Gods, I’m sinking.” Almost quicker. It was a trap! Some scheming luring of the gods to bring mortals here to their doom. Eatae, weep for me…

“Shaejen, you’ve got to help me,” Tjeni snapped, her voice strained and stern. “Come on. Out you come.” She yanked on my arm, and I shouted angrily, sweat beading around my temples.

I shook my head. Panic was setting into my bones so thickly that I managed to mistake it for inevitability. “I can’t…” The sand was up to my hips, and the more I shook them to rid myself of it, the deeper I sank. “Tjeni…” I looked into her eyes, those firey violet eyes. It was the first time I had seen anything akin to fear on her face.

It seemed like only seconds before the sand was up to my neck. A few more moments and Tjeni’s eyes were brimming with salt water, though she did not cry. She never cried. She was not a woman; she was a demon.

I would have liked to see her cry for me.

“I…” But what was there to say? The end of my last and final journey had come. It was so sudden, so unexpected. Only one hand gripped hers above the surface of the sands, her leaning over and still trying to pull. Gods be kind to you, Tjeni. I love you. I have always loved you… Perhaps I would go to meet them, the gods. I laughed, and sand spilled in through the corners of my mouth. To go all this way, and meet them in death…

All went black. I felt my hand release Tjeni’s hand. I slid into darkness. There was pain, as I had always thought there might be at the end. The struggle of my body to survive against impossible odds hurt the most. But there was not much thought in it. I fell endlessly through the sands, tumbling on and on. The raw grains scraped at my skin, tearing it apart. How could I feel pain when I was already dead? I wondered.

Gods know how long I fell. I could have been hours. It could have been eons. But I awoke, my body aching and bleeding, on the floor of a cave. It was unutterably cold. Was it not supposed to be hot in the underworld? No, apparently not. Dark, too, until my eyes adjusted. There were a few dimly lit torches around me, barely able to penetrate the suffocating darkness. And it was tangible, the darkness, like cold fingers of fog twining themselves around and under skin. My breath rose in fleeting wisps as it froze.

I looked at my hands. They were scraped and bloody, but otherwise intact. The rest of my body seemed to be in a similar fashion, if I could ignore the laboring of my lungs. The air was thin here. Perhaps it was those curling cold fingers snatching breath from me…

A rattling noise, metal against stone, caught my attention. I turned, peering into the almost complete darkness. There was a human figure there, whose shape I barely made out. As I drew nearer, I heard labored breathing in time with my own.

“Hello?” I stepped closer, curious but on my guard. Then again – if this was death, what more did I have to worry about?

The labored breathing rasped a little more before quieting. I could see the figure more clearly now – a man, stretched wrists and ankles across the ragged stone wall. He smelled of bitter metal and cold rock. His eyes reflected the torchlight, and looked right at me. “If you are a god, leave this place.” The voice was hollow and weary. Warning. It echoed around the room, soft though it was.

I drew closer, and saw the man to be clothed in the tatters of plain robes, such as I had seen at the library in Azandes. They were edged in blood. His head was bald, and wrinkles sagged at his gaunt face. “Who are you?” I dared to ask.

“Lo’r.” He strained against his chains, which I imagined he had done a thousand times before. I didn’t know how I knew, but I was aware he had been here for a very long time. Decades even, or millenea…

“Lo’r,” I repeated. “The God of Wisdom. Why are you chained here?”

“Are you a fool?” he asked, though it was not unkindly. His voice was weary, and made even my callous heart drag in sympathy. “Get out of this place, before your fate becomes mine.”

“Answer me.” I was suddenly, wrathfully anxious. The injustice to this, the greatest of gods, seemed to me as if it were an injustice against me, who had no relation to him.

He coughed. “I am in punishable exile, for… for my love of the mortals…”

“Is that not what gods are supposed to love?” I asked, bewildered. Somewhere, deep inside me, I felt the gravity and truth of his words.

The eyes of the god flashed again at me. They were weary and unspeakably sad. “Supposed to? The gods have no obligation to anything. It is because of my sacrifice that you – “

The low, resonant howl of a hunting hound reverberated around the cavern. I turned, and Lo’r strained against the chains bolted to the rock wall again. I saw weary, resigned fear on his face.

“You must go now.”

His words were urgent and insistent, and not a second had passed before the object of the howl appeared. It was a great wolf hound, sleek and hairless, with a big head and eyes blazing with firey wrath. It leapt toward me, and I cried out, the sound tearing from my lungs which labored to breathe. The beast leapt through me, never seeing or touching me, and sank its hideous teeth into Lo’r’s belly. The god screamed awfully, rending my eardrums asunder, and I felt rather than heard myself screaming too. The cold grip of the tangible air flooded into my lungs, and I couldn’t breathe. I screamed now not because I could, but because I had to.

What Came Out of NaNo?

A hint: What comes out of a clogged brain is usually better whan what comes out of a clogged drain.

First year winning nano (Look at the fancy stickers on the side). I was a rebel of course and worked with the novel I have been writing for the past year (11 months: 20000 words. 1 month of November: 50000 words. Total: about 73000 words so far). Novel is called An Ever Climbing Stairway. Turned out pretty good. I put all the scenes in the correct order today and am going to be working on transitions, revising, and editing until I publish :D

In other news -
As you've probably noticed, a bunch of my poetry was stolen for Images, the campus lit magazine. Don't panic! This is a good thing. The magazine will come out mid-January. Let me know if you want one and I will pick you up a copy!

Prophets

1.      He stood at the murky, oily, smoky dock, his hand raised to shield his eyes from the morning sun. The men he had tried to warn were getting on the ship anyway. He shook his head at the fools, and gave it into the hands of God. Nothing more he could do. Whoever heard of a white whale anyway?

2.      I told you if you left your milk glass on the counter it was going to fall and spill. Nobody ever listens to me.

3.      “You are the one,” he said, his sage tone serious. A score fit for the movies played in the background. “The one to pull the sword from the stone and become a great and powerful king!”

The little boy’s first few dollars crumpled in his hand in his pocket, anxious to spend it on something to worthwhile. He frowned at the bewhiskered man, thoughtfully rolling a piece of candy in his mouth. After a long moment he pulled out the set of three wrinkled dollars and dropped them into the dirty hat at the sage’s feet, flashing a smile before turning and going on down the street.

4.      “No man of woman born.”

A detail. Hah! A riddle! I bet he’ll never even get it.

5.      “You have a great future ahead of you,” my chemistry teacher said, nodding decisively as he looked over the lab report I had turned in the day before. “A great future. I want to see you winning the Nobel Peace Prize, or working like on one of those shows - CSI.” He smiled, and for once I felt good for something other than the minimum wage employee and the C-average student I was. He was right about that great future. Twenty years later the newspaper read “Investigator solves mystery: Illicit drug maker finally caught.” What can I say? That chemistry came in handy.

6.      The wind blew through the white, stringy hair that did not move. Ancient eyes squinted, deepening the myriad of wrinkles on her face. She knew that morning she was going to die. Could feel it in her bones. But on she walked, singular and sacred, across the flat of the desert into her last sunrise.

7.      “Seven is my lucky number,” she informed him, pouring tequila into seven shot glasses which used to be a set of eight.