The Misforgotten Press

Hi again folks! One of the reasons that I've created this blog is to give myself a place, away from Facebook's awful proprietary content policy, to host some excerpts from my impending book series: Tales Misforgotten. The first book, The Unshorn Thread comes out later this year, and in light of that I've dug up a short little piece called "Eyes". It's one of the very first pieces I wrote concerning the stories that will be told in the book series, and it later informed my writing in The Unshorn Thread. Anyway here's the piece, and if you want more info on the book series, just follow the link.

          At first there was only darkness and clouds - clouds which flowed forth from twin wells as deep as time and as dark as the memories lost to it. They spilled forth in all directions, fading slowly into the black nothing that was all the rest of the world. The wells fed them outward ceaselessly, as if in some vain attempt to fill the void which was the world around them. First ash and then brimstone began to choke their way out from the bottomless pits. Then, as if galvanized by their creation of these things more corporeal, the wells themselves began, as the rhythmic beating of a heart, to throb. It was not begun suddenly, but was rather a sort of thing that crept up and, before it could be recognized, was there - as if the wells had been alive all along. Thump, thump, thump pulsed the wells, keeping perfect meter with one another. At every thumping beat the clouds and sulfurous ash surged forth all the more rapidly, as if even they could stand no more than they must of their foul creators' presence. Indeed their efforts were not wasted, for in the center of each gaping maw became visible a space made solely of pitch, a place from which even the foul clouds had escaped. In these twin spaces was hid a dark presence, a sort of looming intelligence that saw through its cloud-ringed pits of black. It peered out into the dark - and beheld that which had once been hidden beyond the world's edges. It peered with those two dark eyes into the worlds beyond its own, boring into the very souls of those foolish enough to look back.
           All the while the ash-encrusted clouds mounted, and all the while the heartbeat of the wells-turned-eyes grew stronger, as if in impatient expectation of the moment when the creature would break free from the world of the dark and roam those that lay beyond.