Friday, September 14, 2018

Short Story: Vampires of Light

Vampires of Light

She stands at the cusp of a gorge atop a mountain. It is the highest she has ever been, but that isn’t saying much. She knows from the magical dial on the cuff of her shirt that it is nearing noon. But the sky does not reflect it. Instead the sky is dark, filled with the artificial clouds of the vampires that had overtaken her world well before her birth. She was here at the highest point she had ever been to clear the sky and banish the vampires of light. The people had given up, but Atieno had grown up with knowledge, and that gave her hope.

She holds out a book and opens it to the first page.

“I call you out, Lords of the Night,” she says. Her voice barely wavers.

Atieno had been born in the basement of a bookstore, between the shelves for dusty books about history and less dusty books about magic. From the books she had read, most births in the past had been celebrated, filled with joy and hope. But she had been born in a dark world. As the light had gone out of the world so had hope. Of the dozen or so people who routinely lived in the dugout caverns under the bookstore, Atieno was the only child. She had been a fluke, a mistake, and the unwanted child of a passing traveller. The person who had been her birth mother had left Atieno in the care of the old book peddler Mūz.

This world had no time for children. It seemed as if everyone had given in to the hopelessness of the dark. And in the dark recesses of an old barely used bookstore, she had surrounded herself with her reading by the light of a candle and later, as she delved into the ancient manuscripts of magic, she created her own light.     

“To your dark, I am the light.” Atieno continues. The dark clouds above her head begin to ripple as water ripples at the breath of a soft wind. Each page of the book that she reads from is one she made herself.  

Old Mūz had taught her to read as soon as she could and let the young Atieno at anything she could read. Oftentimes when the patrols of vampires came through looking for fresh prey, Atieno was tucked away in the depths of the caverns below. Mūz was a gruff and foreboding person, but she wasn’t about to let her only charge be taken by the vampires. They preferred the younger over the older, and that was the only reason Old Mūz had survived as long as she had.

“Ignorance will not win, because knowledge is power.” Each cramped line that she reads, a carefully scripted fragment of a larger spell.

“I act like I don’t know anything, and they leave me alone,” Mūz would tell her every time a patrol came through. It was a subtle warning. Those who knew too much, and especially those who acted upon it were taken away, likely to be eaten or turned into the wicked, mindless sycophants of the vampires. The warnings never stopped Atieno from reading everything that she could in the bookstore or asking thousands of questions of the displaced pilgrims that passed through and stopped at the old store for a breather, fresh water, and a brief moment of safety behind walls.
Years later, on her twenty-fifth birthday, Old Mūz was on her deathbed and finally gave Atieno the one thing she had always wanted: to know how the world had ended up this way, with dark artificial clouds in the skies, vampires trawling the surface unhindered by the glow of a sun, destroying lives, and slowly sucking the world dry. It was a thing that had never been written into a book that she could read. And those that passed through never wanted to speak of it, or knew little.

“Ignorance,” Mūz had said. “Is a dark, endless pit.”

“Knowledge,” Atieno begins to whisper. “Is a candle in the dark.” She had bound the book with the fabric of Mūz’s favorite tunic. Wrapped in that dark blue fabric were the threads of a thousand memories from Mūz’s life and the things she knew and loved.

“When the vampires arrived, people couldn’t see how dangerous they were; they ignored the problems, because their hubris prevented them from believing their world was in danger. But in the shadows, in the dark of night, the vampires began to turn people into mindless sycophants. And then, in the bright of day, the darkened minds of the sycophants began to turn more people until there were too many to fight. No one was safe.”

When darkness fell over the world, the only light seen for miles around were the bonfires of thousands of books burning into embers, embers that rose into sky to replace the stars that were now hidden from view. The vampires knew the magic of the world, hidden in its books and its people, were the most dangerous things of all, so those were the first to go. What little survived was hoarded in old hidden places like Mūz’s bookstore. 

“Speak to me, darkness.” The ripples in the dark clouds above intensify as the spells that govern the darkness begin to reach for her.  

Mūz was a young mother at the time, and she hid herself and her children in the old storage areas while the world around them burned to the ground. Her eldest son had died trying to save people in the initial darkening. Her middle child died while wandering the world collecting taboo books for her mother’s illicit bookstore. And her youngest died while trying to fight the vampires on their turf, using the same dark magic they did. After all that, Mūz had little energy for saving the world anymore. She had given up, even though in the hidden corners of the world people knew to bring Mūz any book they could find.

“I am not like you, but I am not so unlike you!” Atieno called to the sky. The dark spells were used to meeting its own kind of magic and absorbing it. Or meeting something so unlike it and destroying it. But Atieno walked the thin line between the dark and the light, seeking acceptance from the dark while also keeping it at bay.

“The dark does not exist without the light,” she says and holds the book up in front of her that carried written amalgamations of dark and light spells.  

Mūz had little hope any more, the last glimmer of which was for someone to take the resources she had managed to gather and put them to use. But by the time Atieno had entered her life, even that was a fading light.

In the many halls of hoarded books, Atieno found that glimmer of hope and turned it into the flame that drove her. With every book that was dropped off, she learned as much about the world and found the point at which all things, even the dark spells that covered her world could find balance.
In her final moments Old Mūz had said, “darkness can’t drive out darkness; only light can do that. You have been the best light in my life for the past twenty-five years, and I hope you can bring that light to the rest of the world.”

She reaches out with her balanced inner light, the weight of knowledge behind her and grasps at the threads of the dark spells above her, and with the lightest of touches whispers magical words into them, bringing them into the light. Force would not do, threats would fail, and aggression would only be met with aggression. With gentle, firm, and steady pressure, she makes the spells her own. Unraveling three decades of darkness. At her back, the people she had called upon to help her see the break in the clouds and add their own versions of the spells into the world. Their conjoined strengths coalesces into a wave of light. The vampires do not see it coming. They too have fallen victim to their hubris that they were untouchable. Ignorance was dangerous, but the illusion of knowledge even more so.   


~Fin

Thursday, June 21, 2018

Poem: The Halls of the Sphinx


The Halls of the Sphinx

My beloved friend, my seeker of knowledge,
The answers you seek are beyond that ridge.
Nestled in a copse of willow trees
graced by a light and gentle breeze
Lies the greatest bookstore that ever was.
But to take a book you must follow its laws.
For if you don’t, if you ignore the only rule
A fate shall befall you that is ever so cruel.

It is called the Halls of the Sphinx,
And in its walls is a terrible jinx.
It’s tiny halls are filled to the brim
With books and rhymes of every whim.
There is no keeper or owner, because it owns itself,
But don’t begin to think it doesn’t know every bookshelf.

Once upon a time a man went in
And commited a treacherous sin.
Barter is the way of men, money the fuel
But to try to trade for coin you would be a fool.

To take a book from the store you must bring it one in exchange
Any topic, any look, any lore, it likes an extensive range.
This man took without giving the store something in return
He was a step out the door when his skin began to burn.
His life began to flash before his eyes
And he could not hide from his lies.
His life was laid before him naked and bare
With an inner fire everything began to flare
And each memory from his earliest days
Was ripped from him with increasing malaise
Until nothing was left but scattered pages in the wind.
The foolish man was no more for he had sinned.
Pages as white as bone, ink as red as blood
Began to fill a thick leathery cover in a flood.
The bookface, was his face, trapped in a gaze
That spoke volumes of his inner written essays.
Another man, tried to trade a single page
That was impossible to assuage
The needed balance for trade with the store.
A single page in exchange for a tome is to ask for war.  

So beware my seeker of knowledge
That you carry and acknowledge
A better trade than your breathing life
And avoid a death of everlasting strife.
For every man and woman that knowingly failed
To bring to the Sphinx a trade and was jailed
The Sphinx grows stronger.
And as the days grow longer
One day the Halls of the Sphinx
Shall have all the missing links.
Should we rue the day when the broad collection
of knowledge knows more than our recollection?
Until it knows us better than we know ourselves
Thousands of minds behind its countless shelves.

So beware gentle seeker and learner,
To trade well and be a careful discerner
Or you may be there for more than forty winks
In the tiny, breathing, living Halls of the Sphinx  

Monday, June 11, 2018

Poem: River Poet

Speak to me your songs, o river poet
down the streams of life and unto death. 
Give to me the words to breathe anew
in this shuttered, drowning world. 
Every word, a drop of water that bleeds
into earth to feed the parched and dying.
Water as clear as sky, a clear as truth,
as clear as eyes that know the world.
Tell me song of the world, of the shape
of love, life, and everything in between.
Speak to me your songs, o river poet
before the streams take you away into forever.

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Updates

I'll be posting on here more. I've co-founded a writer's group with some coworkers and I've been writing more, so at the very least I'll be posting those things here too.

Book 2 is progressing well, and I think I'm within about two months of finishing it. There are definitely things that need to be worked on but I'm super confidant with what I've got. Some of the difficulties I'm running into right now are that there are three separate storylines in the book that have to twine around each other. In order to see the stories more clearly and give them their due, I'm having to look at each one individually and really focus in on the specifics.

I've also gotten a movie pass so I might as well start my movie reviews again. :)








The Rise and the Set


As the moon rises and the sun sets,
From the deepest dark, I sought you.
Embittered by loss, you fell naked.
As the sun rises and the moon sets,
From the brightest light, I found you.
Ensnared in love, I clothe you.
As the moon rises and the sun sets,
In a thousand broken pieces, you found me,
Embarrassed, I hid my face in shame.
As the sun rises and the moon sets,
You lovingly built a mosaic from the shards,
Emboldened, you showed me your scars
As the moon rises and the sun sets,
In the twilight of an old life, we find each other,
Enshrined by stars, we are united.
As the sun rises and the moon sets,
In the dawn of a new day, we walk together
Entwined, we are become one.

Victory, Death, or Some Kind of Hope

This is very much an Enemy Mine ripoff, but I had fun taking the idea and making it my own. I'd like to keep working on it at some point but for now here it is in all its terrible glory.
PART 1: DEPARTURE
REMI
No one could honestly tell you just how long the war with the Sailfins had been going on, longer than most had been alive, and almost longer than their parents had been alive. Time was meaningless out there above the planet Victory. Every day was defined by another skirmish, another defended beachhead, another ship crashing to the taboo surface of that disputed world. There were no discernible days, and except the slow roll of a clock that had begun to lose its meaning so many light-years from Earth. There was little concept of the passage of hours and minutes beyond the steady rotation of the planets around the foreign star.
Remi was a soldier. If asked she would tell you that she was a shoot first and ask questions later type of soldier. She was generally happy to follow orders and the loss of her parents to the Sailfins made the eradication of the the alien foothold around Victory a personal mission.

Am/Or (That's also another word for love)

Am I in love? 
Or am I just in love with the idea of love?
Love is water, it fills open spaces and changes shape,
the idea of water, like the idea of love, may not be the real thing,
It is a prelude.
Amor... it’s another word for love. Like water between your lips to give you life.
Am I happy?
Or is the illusion of happiness enough to keep me afloat?
It’s okay to just be afloat. Sometimes you have to fake it
until you make it.
Amor... it’s another word for love. Like the seeds of a vibrant flower, ready to burst.
Am I lost?
Or is it like that phrase that tells me I might be wandering?
Sometimes when we seem lost it is not loss, but a forging of a new path
It is discovery.
Amor... it’s another word for love. Like shuddering heartbeats in an empty room.
Am I alone?
Or is the desire for company just the echoes of my own emptiness?
You’re not alone, and you have nothing to prove to anyone
but yourself
Amor... it’s another word for love. Like seeing a reflection of yourself in another.
Am I here?
Or am I somewhere only birds and planes and people with untested jetpacks go?
I guess we'll never know. You think therefore you are, but if you don’t know
How can anyone?
Amor... it’s another word for love. Like finding air, it’s everywhere.