Hi again, folks! It's finally Kickstarter time! Which means that this is the post I've been waiting to share with you. Without further ado, I give you Chapter 1 of The Unshorn Thread, Book 1 of the Tales Misforgotten trilogy:
Hi everyone! I told you I'd have big news soon, and here it is! The Unshorn Thread, book 1 of the Tales Misforgotten series is launching a Kickstarter! That means I'm closer than ever to realizing my dream of having this book out there for everyone to read! I've got special art rewards, limited editions of the book, and some very very cool special surprises in store for everyone, and it's all kicking (ugh, puns!) off in just 2 weeks!
To celebrate this announcement I'm uploading a little piece entitled "The Night Before", which is both a sequel to my previous entry "Eyes" as well as a precursor to Chapter 1 of the book, which I hope to share a part of with you during the course of the Kickstarter itself. So hooray Kickstarter and here it is, your final extended prologue to The Unshorn Thread:
"The Night Before"
Raw, crackling fingers of pitch snapped as they closed around Wart's neck. Scraping and scratching against his flesh, their tightening latticework slowly eclipsed the starlight. Instantly the boy's heart crushed itself against his ribs, beating in rapid, irregular rhythms in its attempts to escape his frame.
'No!' thought Wart. 'It's found me again. How can it keep finding me, night after night?' He could feel the dark bracken weaving its way through his hair, scratching his scalp. He felt at though it was trying to swallow him, to bury him in its black mass, never to be seen again. 'What will happen then?' he wondered. 'Will it take up root in my skull? Will it send roots down my throat and grow fat on my entrails?' The terror of these thoughts was too much for his young mind, and yet he could think of nothing to do to stop the slow encroachment of the thing's crackling, ashen presence upon him.
Feeling his muscles freeze from terror, the creature crashed against him, a wave of predatory ashen shards.
"Aaaaugh!"
Wart sat up with a shock. He was drenched in a cold sweat, and shivering from a place just behind his stomach. Lurching forward, he wrapped his little arm about his knees and stared hauntedly down at the straw and cloth that was his mattress. His eyes focusing on nothing in particular, Wart tried to regain his breath, tried to gulp down air or to expel it. Nothing worked. The giant lump of fear and strain which clogged his windpipe would not budge.
It had come back. That shambling, crackling thing from the night before, and the night before that. Even in his dream, he had recognized it, had known it to be the same faceless evil which had terrorized him each night this week. The lump of terror in his throat finally shifted, and Wart let loose a calling, fearful wail which had been stuck within his chest. Its brothers and sisters followed it in quick succession, and desperate tears pushed their way down his cheeks. His chest heaved, finally drawing in the breath he so needed.
As he heaved labored gulps of air in and out of his lungs, a little voice in his head told him that the creature had not really been there, that it had only been a dream. 'What had Bedwyn called it?' he thought, 'a particularly pernicious strain of nightmare?'
Be that as it may, he could not shake the creature's strange and wretched image from his mind. He had gone to bed fearful that of its return, and had been proven right to do so. He wished with all his being that he had been wrong, that it would have let him be tonight. He tried to blink, but his fear would not let him. 'The creature might be waiting,' whispered his fear, 'right behind your very eyelids.' His heart skipped about against his chest at the thought. Another great big sob forced its way out of his lungs, even as the boy tried to shake away his tears.
It was no use. The fear was too great for him to tackle alone, and so Wart stood. It was a difficult process, so tightly wound were his arms about his knees, but he managed it. Once standing, he felt exposed to the cold and dark of the night, and so, still wailing he darted out through the door of his bedchamber. He would find Bedwyn out by the fire, would find warmth there and safety as well -- and maybe, eventually, even a bit of sleep.
Hi there again ,folks! I've got a big announcement coming up soon regarding my book series, Tales Misforgotten! For now, though, here is some of my published writing, via DVICE.com, that is!
Forgotten Firearms
Li-Fi and how it will make your life better!
Post-Apocalyptic Mobile Homes
Robots already integrating into society
homesteading on Earth's final frontier
8-Bit Horror Games
Geek Caves
Tech Woody Allen Predicted
Winsor McCay's Legacy
14 Geekiest Bars
Internet Memes as Gifts NEW!
Gifts for the Dapper Geek NEW!
As promised, I have a new tale for you today. This one I thought up a while ago, but never wrote down until now. I hope you enjoy it. It's a bit longer than the last two!
Once upon a dreamy time, I found myself walking along the southern edge of Manhattan's Battery Park. In my company were a very large hare and an equally strange haberdasher, which is to say hatter. We strolled along the waterfront, gabbing about this and that, until my shoelace became untied and I began to float away into the sky. The haberdasher noticed my plight and, ever so casually - so as not to cause a stir - took hold of my untied shoelace. This fixed the problem perfectly, as we could now continue our perambulation, and myself with all the better view for it as well. We came, after a while, to a very long and dilapidated old dock which struck me as familiar.
"Did not this pier once keep moored an old ferryboat?" I asked. "One with which, by use of a bit of punting skill, a person could reach the little islands across the way?"
"Ah, yes," replied the haberdasher, "but that was before the causeway!" He then pointed up to a very tall and distinctly impressive roadway high above us. The thing was suspended upon needle-like pylons which delved deep into the wild and frothy waters of the bay."The islands are hardly ever thought of now," the odd fellow continued, "what with the convenience of the causeway and the dangers of the Kelpie."
"The What?" asked the hare.
"The Kelpie," repeated my topper-wearing friend, "the water-horse who has taken up residence in the bay. Why you can see the evidence of his presence even now in the churning and crashing of the waters."
Indeed, the bay was quite ferocious that day. The waves crashed against both the battery and one another remorselessly, and the color of the water was nigh on black. Yet the idea of the old ferryman's punt had stuck in my brain. I yearned to take her out on the frothy chop and to visit the forlorn isles which had once delighted the city-folk so. It was then, owing either to chance or to my elevated vantage, that I espied her! The ferryman's punt was still there, floating ever so listlessly, just under the end of her little old pier.
"Oh, my!" I cried out, "look and see! The ferryboat waits there still! Let us all go and take her out again, as the city used to, to visit her fair little isles. What say you?"
"Seems a fine idea!" said the hare.
"But what of the Kelpie?" asked the haberdasher.
"Oh the voyage isn't far!" I said, getting caught up in the idea of the venture. "We shall only go to the nearest of the isles, if you are afeared, hatter, and I can quite easily see the pier that stretches from it already. Why - it mustn't be but a few hundred yards between the pair of peirs! We'd be across in an instant!"
The haberdasher looked queasily at me but accepted my proposal nonetheless. He plopped me down upon the ground again, upon my reaching of the which I promptly retied my shoelace. It wouldn't do, I thought, to go floating off into the air while punting my companions across the bay.
I set about readying the ferryboat for launch, which was a short affair, simple as the workings of such a vessel are.The hare fairly bounded into the craft, himself nearly as eager as I for a spot of adventure. The haberdasher, I will say this of him, was a far more reticent fellow, needing any and all sort of coaxing - short of threats of violence - to come aboard.
Though he protested, we did in the end get the haberdasher aboard. It was then the simple work of pushing off the dock and we were on our way. The distance was exactly as I had stated, a mere few hundred yards, though our voyage was decidedly less simple than I had either described or hoped. We had made only a few yards progress when there came such a violent thrashing about beneath the sea, that I at first thought some yet-undiscovered volcanic fissure had awakened beneath us! I was only able to hold this comparably benign thought in my head but a moment, before the grave truth asserted itself. Up from the deep came the Kelpie, thrashing and flailing about like a wrathful god! It was indeed partly equine in nature, though it seemed equally serpentine to my reckoning. Its head burst forth from the waves, a giant gnashing, snouted thing bedecked with row upon row of needle-like teeth. Behind this coiled and sprung the creature's thick and muscular anatomy. Innumerable hooves kicked forth from the waves as the beast breached, each attached in a pair of long lines to the thing's endless torso.
When the Kelpie returned crashing to the sea, all manner of turbulent motion was set about, so much so that I had a devil of a time in keeping the little punt afloat at all, let alone upon her determined course. Let me say at least that this event encouraged me to redouble my efforts in reaching the far shore. At most - well, that is not for mixed company. Suffice it to say that I was well motivated to punt as I had never done before, and that both the haberdasher and the hare were quite vocal in their goading me on.
The next we saw of the Kelpie was not so dramatic as its entrance into our midst, but was all the more damning nonetheless. There appeared just behind our little craft one and then two tips of a monstrous tail, akin to that of a tuna if my memory serves me correctly (and I dare say that it should, for never in my life have I been so afeared, before or since, as I was that day). Each tip appeared upon an opposing side of our stern, none of us noticing them until the haberdasher let out a yelp of the sort to startle even the steeliest of adventurers. By then each of the tips of the Kelpie's mighty tail were night on six feet out of the water, with no end in sight. And, though I was already punting along as quick as could be, I dare say I redoubled my efforts when I saw them.
It made no difference, in truth. The Kelpie's tail kept easy time with us as we made our way across those deadly waters, rising all the while. When the twin tips finally did come together, into one massive fin, they stood nigh on fifteen feet in the air. The Kelpie's tail was iridescent and gigantic, and was bedecked with the coarsest of horsehair imaginable. I would have marveled at the strength and potential use of such fibers, but alas I was too bent upon saving my own neck to muse upon such things. At any rate, the tail did not tarry at our stern so long as would have suited such a pursuit. it came crashing down again, with such utter ferocity that, had it done so upon us, we would have been obliterated man, hare, ferryboat and all. As it happened, the tail crashed down in the opposite direction; and this was doubly fortunate for us - as we were firstly not crushed, as I have already mentioned was possible, but were quite rapidly propelled forward by the eddies which were churned to life by this action.
Indeed the beast, it seemed for an instant, had actually aided us in reaching the far shore. Ah, if only that had been his intent. We were nearly upon the far pier, the haberdasher already beginning to alight his first careful toe upon the dock, when the creature struck! Crunch went our little craft, ripped asunder by the Kelpie's wretched needle-thatched jaws! Dash went the haberdasher, sprinting down the pier as if the wrath of many a god were upon his heels! Spring went the hare, for that is what hares do! And I? I who was not yet upon the pier and who does not go spring in the manner of hares? You might think that I was eaten all up that day - but in this you would be wrong! You see - at the very instant that the Kelpie had sundered our tiny vessel - my shoe had once more come untied! I was already in the usually unenviable predicament of floating off into the great wide yonder when the beast struck, and so was spared.
I made all progress that I could toward the little island in my skyward state, but alas it is harder to gain traction when one is upon the air than it is upon land, and so my progress was slow. Below me the Kelpie thrashed about, enraged at his having been eluded. Not only the ferryboat, but the pier itself became his prey. He shattered its seaward tip first, and then, whinnying and hissing, he took to dismantling it plank by plank.
The haberdasher and the hare were both upon the shore by then, and well out of harm's way, and oh! did I gain an earful more of their vulgar encouragements! I was gaining as much altitude as I was forward motion, which at a certain height begins to present a new set of problems, and so decided to take drastic measure. I tied my own shoelace there in the air. Immediately, as you may rightly assume, I plummeted back to earth, barely catching the remaining edge of the pier in doing so. The Kelpie saw me fall and was quick in striking. I - I am relieved to report - was faster. I sprinted along the pier, all the while its boards splintering in my wake, until I found solid ground, even then ceasing to halt my sprint until I was a fair few paces inland. The haberdasher and the hare cheered my arrival on dry land, and there we stood a while, marveling at the strength and fervor which the Kelpie employed in destroying the rest of the pier.
We then turned our gaze to the isle, our reaching of which had cost the ferryboat its timber. The place was truly a marvel to behold. General disuse had allowed the plant life of the isle to grow to gargantuan stature! The grass cam up to my chest, the ferns to my eyeballs!Trees thrust their branches skyward with utter abandon, scraping the very heavens! It was, in short, a place ripe for the exploring - and we just the three to delve into its secret places.
It was a short walk to the edges of the treeline, but a slower one than we would have liked, for even the roots of the grass were as fallen boughs, and easily tripped over. It was because of the combination of their size and the shade of the giant trees that a very strange thing then happened.
Blinded by the lack of sun, I did not see a particularly up-raised root and went tumbling over. There followed a series of somersaults on my part, for the ground sloped downward within the shady glen, and so carried me forward. There was also upon the forest floor a goodly amount of leaves, all of them slick with what seemed must be an ever-present dew. I ceased my tumbling, but continued to slide forward upon the slick, brown and red floor. I could hear the alarmed calls of my companions, now echoing from what seemed very far away indeed. I looked about, now able to at least maintain my perspective as I had stopped my tumbling. There loomed before me a vast wall of rock, of the sort that is indiscernible if tooled by man or nature herself. So sheer it was, and so tall, that it seemed as if the hand of the almighty had placed it there, a monolithic homage to the greatness of creation. And yet, the thing was not perfect. Here and there a shrub had found a way to take root upon the wall's sheer flank. Thin wisps of vine scrawled strange calligraphies along it at odd angles. And, most interesting of all, there was a great hole in its base. This hole, lined with stout little trees - which seemed as bonsai when compared to their gargantuan brothers overhead - looked to serve as a sort of cistern for the glade. All the little grooves upon the earth wound toward it, like rivers to the sea. Even I, sliding along one of these grooves upon my mattress of leaves, found myself being pulled toward it, as if by some magic.
In truth, the grade of the slope had likely increased in severity, but nonetheless the effect was mesmerizing. by the time I thought to try and slow myself it was already to late, my hand merely glancing off from the stout little trunk of one of the squat trees at the cistern's mouth. I spun upon my back as I flew through the open thing's mouth. Down past stone and root and wet earth I went. My last glimpse of the light that lay outside the chasm that was the traverse of the cistern was of a very fine hat and a pair of ears popping up from either side of the great hole's mouth, and though I could not see their faces, I could tell that my erstwhile companions were both quite bewildered.
I tumbled on for an indeterminable while, the only sights to mark my way fleeting glimpses of the sprigs of root which had found their way down to the cistern's chute. Then, like a crash of thunder and a flash of lightning, out I popped from the hole. A thick curtain of moss had hung down from the hole's back end, entirely eclipsing its approach from my view.
Moss in my hair and about my face, I began to tumble once again, for here there was no bed of leaves upon which to slide, but only a greenish sort of something (which I took to be grass, but could not be entirely sure of the validity of my analysis of) which flew by at an alarming rate. I was only ever stopped (as I feel I might have tumbled on for the remainder of my years, so fast was I going) by the presence of an enormous elephant's-ear fern, nearly twice the size of my chintz armchair back home.
I remember lying there, the world whirling about me upon my giant leafy chair and believing that I had never before beheld a forest of such innate beauty. If the glade beyond the wall had been grand, this place was unfathomable. For hundreds of feet above there was nothing but green, green in all its shades and sorts. a speck of cloud or a hint of cloud was all that could be seen of the sky, and I was loathe to see even that, so beautiful was the forest. It seemed a shame for it to not have capitalized upon those last vestiges of light, to have robbed me of even the slightest bit of its own grandeur.
My head spinning less, I was suddenly aware of a sort of snuffling sound and a scratching about. I looked up, which was actually down, and beheld a new sort of wonder. There before me stood a great lump of a porcupine. He stood upon his haunches, as men do, and was wearing a very dapper sort of leaf atop his head - the which was affixed by judicious perforation upon his quills. he sniffed at me in a sort of down-ones-nose sort of way, beckoning me as he did so to turn myself over and to act civilized. All this he communicated wordlessly, excepting a few well-utilized grunts which one would have understood no matter what language they were conveyed in.
I could not disagree with him, for if I were to find a strange creature - for so I was to him - lying downside-up in my garden, I might have treated it much the same. He bade me follow him, which I did, and after a little while brought me to an interesting village, carved into the very backside of the great wall which I had unceremoniously traversed. There stood a number of little burrows, carved into the side of the wall, some with little gardens out front, others a little ways up the wall, and led to by way of earthen stairways.
I followed the creature into the mouth of one of the largest of these dwellings, which I, immediately upon entering, saw the appeal of. The floor of the hole was layered with broad banana leaves, sewn together as a charming sort of rug, and in the corner there stood an inglenook, carved into the earth. A small fire crackled and popped away in the hearth there, lending a warm orange hue to the interior.
As I had been busy enjoying the quaint beauty of the place, so too had my prickly host been. He emerged from a small pantry, partitioned from the main room by a hanging curtain of moss similar to that which was likely still entangled in my hair. In his paws was a wooden plate bearing a great assortment of what I assumed passed for cakes on the deep of the forest. One was as a pea-pod, but held within it what looked to be lemon custard. Another was wrapped in leaves, the shape of a small shipping parcel, and smelled of rhubarb. A third looked as spiny as my host, but was a fabulous Kelly green, and when turned over by careful hands, exposed a pink underbelly the color of strawberry. Both the dangerous nature of the thing, as well as the enticing pinkness of it, lured me to have a go at it. I was just about to take my first lick of the thing's soft strawberry underbelly when there came a loud crashing from outside.
I turned around, startled by the sound of it, but my prickly host merely sighed, put down his tray, and scurried to the doorway to see what was the matter. I followed him, myself very curious as to what might have happened, and beheld a marvelous sight. There, piled upon the elephants-ear, were my friends the haberdasher and the hare.
I tell you - once they had been righted and welcomed in by our good-natured, quill-ridden host, there followed a tea the likes I shall not soon forget.
How we returned from that strange isle, and how indeed we shall ever go back, is a story for another day, I am afraid, for the kettle is on and already beginning to whine, and I shall be expecting company soon. It is the hare, you see, and a new friend of his - a mouse of some sort, I believe - who is, I am told, quite the riot to have to tea. Cheers and all the best, until the next time - which I hope shall be very soon.
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.
Welcome to The Misforgotten Press, my depository for all writings creative and whimsical. My name is Colin, and I will be your host.
For now, here is a little musing of a poem to whet your appetites. It's something that has been buried in my writing journals for some time now, languishing in obscurity. If you asked me what it was about I could have told you, but I wouldn't have remembered the details. So here it is, a poem misforgotten:
The Introspect Fool
To dance, To sing, To shine
of all vocations, mine
My tools of trade
The masque, The mirror, The charade
Some laugh, others poke fun
I hear each and every one
I babble and cavort
'Fore the touted members of The Court