The Island: Challenge III

   Sleep came to me as death follows a knife through the heart – fast, and with little pain. But, unlike death, sleep haunted me, even after I had been taken. The confines of my mind lost its limits, and sleep was able to haunt each corner of my being with whatever terrors it had to offer. It showed me dark and light, and the spaces in between; it offered creatures I couldn’t ever imagine, and creatures I have only recently encountered; it took my life and showed me every haunting mistake I couldn’t ever take back, my weaknesses, and my unwanted strengths; and it showed me shrieks and howls of creatures long extinct. It filled my mind with encounters and experiences and things I could tell I was yet to see, but wished would never come.

   Waking didn’t offer much relief. Though the images and the words dissipated, the shrieks of the dead continued to haunt me, not just in my head, but as though I could actually hear them.  Which is, of course, ridiculous, isn’t it? The living in this place is far from conventional, but they can’t have bloody dragons, can they?

   I pull my head from the pool, and shake the water free from my face, before pushing my hair back with my hands. My left thumb runs across its opposing hand, but, as I expected, the ring is still gone. I don’t know what happened to it, but it was gone when I awoke, and I want it back. As it turns out, the whole thing was a waste of time. Though, strictly speaking, that’s not entirely true, I think, right forearm catching my eyes, free of any previous injury, and darkened significantly in colour, despite the thick tree canopy which had kept the previous days in darkness.

   Stickiness from the humid air envelopes me, and my head’s throbbing, probably from dehydration, but that forsaken shrieking certainly isn’t helping. It’s not getting any better either – in fact, it might even be getting louder. I don’t even know what to do. About anything. I’m hungry and fed up and I want to leave. Let. Me. Go. I mutter to the greying sky above me, and crumple back against the flat cliff rocks, a safe distance from the forest behind me.

   I can’t decide whether I’d be safer in the open land, at the edges of the cliffs; or back in the forest, hidden, but also trapped. I’m pretty much doomed, either way. Cursing, I lift one of the loose rocks from beside me and throw it back against the ground. Its edges shatter, and the pieces fly up towards my eyes, but I hardly even notice, because I’m focussing on what’s still intact, still unsatisfactory. I take another, and throw it again, to no avail. Frustrated, I throw the third rock as hard as I can in the direction of the forest, and drop my face into my hands as it passes through the foliage, and causes a flock of birds to scatter through the canopy, startled.

   But the forest alarm continues, and I frown, because the rock’s gone, it did nothing but fly and fall. And I think, maybe, something else is setting off the alarm, because it can’t be me, can it? And then I’m wondering, if they’re all scared, then maybe I should be, too-

   I’m right.

   The shriek hits me at its loudest, and I open my mouth to scream back, but no sound escapes because I’m looking at the forest and it’s moving and something’s flying out, and it’s shrieking and I’m blinking because it’s no bird-

   It’s a dinosaur.

   Which isn’t even possible because they’re supposed to be bloody extinct, and what the heck?  But it’s heading for me, and whatever it is I need to move, but my legs are stuck to the ground and I am so damn confused because it-

   It hits me.

   And I’m screaming in silence, until I realise that’s a stupid idea, because it’s gripping tighter and tighter around my chest and if I can’t get out I’m not going to be able to breathe, and wasting my oxygen on soundless screams will get me nowhere. My stupid mouth shuts and my hands go to its talons and try to prise them open, but its muscles are set and I can’t even shift them. So I panic and start punching them, though I know it’ll do nothing to set me free, but I’m desperate, and then suddenly, I’m not. Because I’ve looked down and we’ve passed the edge of the cliff, so there’s only me and the air and an impossible dinosaur who wants to eat me.

   Which is not an ideal situation.

   I take a deep breath, and go back to screaming.

The pterodactyl swerves, making the wind take my screams and pull them away from me, so I’m terrified and can’t even hear it in the air. But I feel the monster descend, and I’m hearing something else – water.  I look down, and rocking subtly beneath me is ocean, hungry, as the dinosaur and I both are. And it keeps coming closer, until I fear that the pterodactyl will drown me, but then it stops its descent and just glides above the surface, like we’re hanging and the rest of the world is moving below us.

   And then it shrieks.

   And I shriek.

   And I’m turning because there’s something else approaching, and it’s huge. Like a colossal, towering wall that’s just consuming everything in its path. And then I realise – it actually is.

   The pterodactyl realises too, and it tries to turn and fly away but the great wave is drawing in far too fast, and we both scream as the wall of water looms over us, and then it crashes, and in the thunderous noise we are separated. And we are swallowed.

-

I noticed that I never did write an entry for Challenge Three of Gepard's Island. And since the Island helped me a lot in actually making me write, it seemed silly not to do the challenge that I missed. So, I wrote it. And now it exists (with little handfuls of help from Eldritch and Adra, when blockiness struck - Thanks. :3 ). And it was a lot of fun. Hopefully I'll get back into writing frequently, soon. Hopefully - enjoy~ :3 

Skul-FanFic - One. (For now, I'll just call it 'Deadbolt')

Just across the darkness, Darren Karl heard a lock click shut.

It wasn't an ordinary cylinder lock, nor was it a lever lock. It wasn't even digitally locked, and Darren had known this from the start. No, Darren’s escape was held from him not by any ordinary lock and key. It was held from him by an intricate series of complex magical systems, which Darren had been studying closely by ear and by sense as the weeks passed beside him.

Every time the cell was opened to deliver food and drink, for his captors would not have him starve, Darren would listen intently to every click and snap in the system, while retaining the apathetic expression on his face, so as not to give away his actions. Though they probably knew he was working on escape. All the more reason to work quickly, he thought to himself.

And when the cell remained locked, he would sit around the door and let his mind reach out to the systems, studying each imaginary spring, shaft and tumbler, slowly picking apart the code that confined him. Now, finally, Darren understood exactly how the lock systems work, and while such a structure shouldn't be caved in without the same specialist adept ability that set them, he also knew that the boundaries of magic can be stretched, and his ability lay just on the borderline. All he had to do was push.

Through the darkness, another click struck.

Darren’s breath caught.

He pushed again.

Click.

Whether it was his imagination or not, he wasn't certain, but Darren thought he could see the dark lift just a little with each level he reached, as the scarf of locks unravelled before him.

Thunk.

Darren’s heart hammered against his ribcage. He set his palm on the door handle, twisted and glanced around, though he knew he didn't need to. The guard would be halfway down the next corridor by now, as far away as his patrol led, and none of the other captives could see him through their cells.

The passage was empty. 

Darren kicked off from the concrete, and ran.

Refinement

Screams.

Can you hear them?

The cries and wails they let out as I tear them apart, drawing strings from their minds one by one, in a cruel, unforgiving pattern. Applying pressure to their framework weight by weight until one becomes too much and they just snap. It’s a beautiful sound, when minds snap. Like the crisp break of a dry twig, or the clicking of fingers, and it could make quite the beat, if music were my muse. But it is not.

And it is not the sound that I focus on, but the sensation. Boundless, it feels, as the chilling cold bolts down my spine to collide with the golden warmth of simple knowledge that what I am doing is good. I am helping them. I am helping everybody.

Yet they don’t understand. I am not sick, or twisted or evil, and I am neither unnatural nor ruthless. I am human. But I am a different kind of human, and I am helping them to be, too. Because they can’t see their own flaws, but I can. I can see everything wrong with what they are doing, and I am fixing them. This refinement will eliminate the sense of entitlement they think they have, and they will stand on the planet with grace, and equality. Real, limitless equality, with everything around them. It will bring them together, and it will bind them. Nobody will ever be alone, or ignored, or forgotten. Nobody will ever be broken. And nobody will ever need fixing.

I reach forward with my mind, and feel another, gentle, snap.

Arrival

A short excerpt from something I began writing last week.It's based, if loosely, on a dream I had (turns out I DO remember those things, occasionally), and the concept interested me a little. This needs rewriting, really, because it feels a little rough, and there's a couple of details I wanted to include but didn't. That, and I just like rewriting things. xDAnway, this thing is that thing. For now, I'll just call it 'Arrival'.

      It’s growing dark when I finally get out of the car and plant my feet on solid ground. Despite the unfamiliarity of the soil, it feels good to stand for the fleeting moment before I’m led into the building without even a ‘good-bye’ from my father. Perhaps he’ll be bringing my bags in, I decide, and will bid me farewell when he leaves. With slight reluctance, my attention turns back to the space around me.

     Even in the low light, I can see that the building’s exterior is colossal. Though surprisingly old, I muse as I climb the stone steps and enter an exquisitely decorated corridor, the smell of disinfectant lingers faintly in the air. Is that a good sign, or not?

     My struggles with these antique surroundings are cut short, though, when I am led to the left and into another room. It is exactly as I expected the centre to be. Completely pristine white. From the walls to the floors, to the ceiling and the lights which grip it, everything reeks with a bright, colourless gleam. Even the footsteps of white-coated staff-members ring with a colourless tone. It’s so unnerving, I have to fight a shiver which itches up my spine, and my escort, a young man with dark hair to match the black clothing he wears beneath his white lab coat, frowns at me as if I’m doing something wrong.

     I wonder if I should speak to him, ask a little bit about the centre, but it feels wrong to break such a perfectly undisturbed silence, so I keep my mouth shut and let the ground absorb my footsteps as I walk.

Damnesia

Forced from home by noise and alarm,
Unwanted intermissions induce fists full of harm,
Your workspace is packed up, transported away,
To a refuge of safety in words you could say,
Or write, or dictate, or just tumble around,
Specifics aren't something to worry about,
You reach your asylum, open your work,
Devastation clouds eyes like handfuls of dirt,
Between distraction and refuge something is lost,
Taken from homeland and bluntly forgot,
It will never be finished, an idea not explored,
You are left feeling hopeless and homeless and torn.

The Sentence On The Top Floor

The letters on the walls of the room on the top floor of the West End tenement building join together, to create one sentence:

Lest we forget the power in words

It is scrawled deep into the plaster, the same sentence, over and over again, filling every possible space, etching itself into your mind as you take it in.

Lest we forget the power in words

Once it’s there, it’s never going to leave you. Like a leech that’ll never let go, draining a little space of your memory which you won’t ever get back. The spidery etchings swallow you, carve you out and then leave you hollow and colder than stone, shivering and unable to think of anything but that one sentence.

Lest we forget the power in words

There is no escape. Don’t think you can just run, because you can’t; the words clutch you, stapling you painfully to the ground. And you can’t look away from it, at the floor, because it’s also there, engraved on the concrete. Or up, at the ceiling, because it’s somehow been written up there, too. Closing your eyes won’t help at all, because the image is still present, right at the front of your mind. Over and over,

Lest we forget the power in words

All that can be done is to take it in, reading the same seven words until somebody realises you’re missing and eventually finds you, by which time you could be half starved. Or worse.

The weirdest part, though, is that, although it throws its whole self at you, all at once, you still don’t know what it is. It’s like half of the sentence is missing; it doesn’t mean anything. There is no sense behind it. It has been there for longer than anyone has known. Contact had even been made with the original builders and decorators of the building, demanding to know why the top floor was flooded with words. Of course, they knew as little about it as the owners of the place did.

There have been attempts to remove it, cover it, hide it, but no such thing is possible if one cannot move from the spot in which he is stood. Therefore, the writing remains on the walls of the room, and even though it is now forbidden to enter, people are still stumbling inside on a relatively regular basis.

I, myself, am not excluded.

Seven times, now, I have found my way into that room. One visit for each word, as many individuals have begun to state. How exactly I ended up there each time, even I still struggle to completely understand. Twice, I was accompanying a group of friends, too busy daydreaming to realise where I was going; Once, I was told that it couldn’t have an effect on me again; Another time I was carried there by a group of peers while I slept, and upon waking up, was suddenly hit by a solid wave of words. Once I was drowsy from an anaesthetic, and managed to forget the way to the correct apartment, which was, above all, rather embarrassing. On another occasion, I went to rescue another person, but ended up stuck there with him, instead.  And the last time I entered, I was lonely. The most familiar thing I could be with at the time was the sentence which had lived inside my mind for so many years already, so I went up and let it wash over me, let the ocean of words swallow me whole. And though it hurt, as it always does, it was almost sort of enjoyable to feel so close to something, as I never have before. Or since.

Of course, it is dangerous. Of course, I could have died, had I not been found and saved, each time. I had plenty of people to remind me of that, each of the seven times I had been up there, and many more reminders aside.

But there is a danger in everything; we must just learn to live around it. And that is exactly what the people have done. We put up with the buzz of words at the back of our heads, do the best we can to ignore it, and to prevent others from having to suffer from it. The world continues to turn, people continue to work, to talk, to rest, the plants continue to grow, and the top floor remains a mystery which everybody tries their very best to avoid.

I turn the last corner of the fourth staircase and duck into the left corridor. I say corridor, but since there are only two doors, it’s really not worthy of such a title. I unclip a key from the belt loop of my jeans, slot it into the gold-coloured lock on the right door, twist my wrist and push forwards with my shoulder. With a little effort, the door swings open and I yank the key free before stepping inside and slamming it shut behind me.

“It’s force like that which makes it difficult to open in the first place, Andi.” An exasperated voice comes from across the room. I look, to see my mother sat at the table, not looking up from the A4 notebook in front of her.

“Sorry,” I sigh, slinging my bag into a corner and setting all navigation targets for the fridge. I pull the electronic plugs from my ears and hit the off switch on the device in my pocket, before swinging open the fridge door and peering at the contents. I frown at the lack of food, and pull an orange juice carton from a shelf in the lower door, setting it aside on the worktop. I turn around, letting the door swing shut of its own accord, and, taking a glass from the rack by the sink, I turn back, just in time to see the orange carton tip over the edge of the worktop, and hit the ground with an unsatisfactory thud. Hurriedly, I whip a cloth from the surface and replace it with the glass, which spins uncontrollably and almost tips, too. Cursing under my breath, I catch the glass and steady it on the worktop, before lowering myself to the ground, lifting the upset carton and mopping up the orange mess on the floor. Behind me, the tap drips slowly, and I stand up, dropping the cloth beside the sink and pushing the tap to halt, wondering how long it had been like that.

Letting out another sigh, I pour the remaining orange juice into the glass, leave the empty carton on the counter and walk over to the table where my mother is still sat, gazing down at the notebook. As I approach her, I look at the notebook to see that it is blank, without so much as a dot of ink on it.

“Not going too well?” I ask, taking a swig from the glass in my hand, and walking towards some cupboards at the far end of the room.

“No,” She sighs, in reply, “Not too well at all, Andi...”

I open the doors of one of the cupboards and retrieve a large, leather-bound book, cringing slightly as the other volumes on the shelf topple sideways into the gap I’d left.

My mother sighs to herself, tapping her pen against the paper, and I return to the table, sliding the book across the oak surface towards her.

At this, she looks up and frowns for a second, before her furrowed eyebrows rise and the skin beside her eyes crinkle with the smile her lips curl into.

It’s an old story, the dictionary. Once, way back when Matthaios was no taller than this table, I only a little taller than that, my mother was sitting in a chair, watching the fire burn away, and sighing every so often, until eventually Thaios quietly asked her what was the matter. Our mother had sighed quietly and gave him a weak smile, before replying,

"I've run out of words, Math." She'd said, "It's like there's not another one left in me." And she looked back to the fire again, shaking her head sadly.

The days following this, Matthaios fell as quiet as mother had, and I'd begun to worry about both of them, when Matt came to me with a request.

He asked me to take him out to the town, the next day, and I'd asked him why, because it's not easy to get to town, and would any of the smaller shops closer to the flat do, instead? But he insisted that the shops nearby didn't have what he needed.

"Well, what is it that you need?" I'd replied, but he wouldn't say a thing but that 'it's for mother'.

Eventually, that weekend, I took him out on the hour-long walk into the town, and asked him where it was he wanted to go. He led me into a bookshop, and spent a long time at the back of the shop, while I looked through art supplies and gift cards and pens and pencils and notebooks.

Eventually, he emerged from the back, walking slowly and obviously struggling to hold up a huge, black, leather-bound book.

 I frowned at him but he just frowned back. "It's for mother," he said, and I gave a little sigh, but the expression on his face swept that away, and I shot him a grin. "Oh, alright, then.” I said, taking the book from his arms. It was heavy. "And I suppose you'll be wanting me to carry this all the way back, for you too, eh?" The grin spread on my face, teasingly, but he just shook his head, eyes wide.

"No."

I frowned again, but said nothing, carried the book to the till, and paid for it with the money I'd earned from my first week of tending the tenement library. As soon as we'd left the shop, Thaios had taken the book from me, and struggled with it the whole walk back, refusing to let me take it when I offered. By the time we arrived home, evening had set and mother was working slowly and silently in the kitchen.

Matthaios disappeared into his own room with the book, and didn't come out until the midway through the next day, except to eat. When he finally emerged, mother was sat on a chair, with a pencil and a notebook untouched on the low table in front of her. Thaios approached her, slowly, and held out the book with both hands. She looked down at him, lips slightly parted, brow furrowed a little, and eyes moist.

"It's a dictionary," He'd said, "To help you find more words."

And she smiled, then, a real smile, for the first time in days.  She took the book from him, turned it over in her hands, opened it up and flicked through the pages, taking it in, before setting it down on her lap, and pulling her arms around Thaios, embracing him in a hug.

And then, she picked the notebook and the pencil from the table, put one to the other, and began to write in slow, graceful loops and folds, each letter flowing into the next, in the elegant fashion of beauty and the flat filled slowly with the heart-warming sensation that can only be felt by watching her write, watching those letters join to words which flow into sentences, separated by paragraphs and eventually all joining together to become a story.

And that's just what she does now, taking her pen and spilling the ink out of it in beautiful patterns and perfectly executed letters, the words suddenly coming straight back to her, and as she finds her flow of writing again, I turn and walk into the next room, sipping my orange juice contentedly.