It has been a very long while since I posted here. It's always felt to me that an author has a time and space that is to be occupied by their craft, and mine has been filled with other things for a very long time. I've been hatching some projects, but nothing has been completed, and the writing muscles have felt as if they were seized up for quite some time.
Today I finally worked them out, and did a very quick short story. It started as a simple stream of consciousness, but when I heard the bird singing outside my window I knew it was going somewhere else. The following draft is very visceral, as it sprang from my mind almost as a stream of consciousness, with no pausing to name places or direct the story. As such I kept my editing to a minimal level. A couple of spelling errors and the occasional run-on sentence are the only real corrections I've made. What remains are the thoughts that jumped from my fingertips.
Today I finally worked them out, and did a very quick short story. It started as a simple stream of consciousness, but when I heard the bird singing outside my window I knew it was going somewhere else. The following draft is very visceral, as it sprang from my mind almost as a stream of consciousness, with no pausing to name places or direct the story. As such I kept my editing to a minimal level. A couple of spelling errors and the occasional run-on sentence are the only real corrections I've made. What remains are the thoughts that jumped from my fingertips.
I hope you enjoy it.
The
Dark Queen of Flaylen
There
once was a bird that sat outside my writing room window. He sang a sweet song
for me as the sun went down in the late afternoon, and then he flew away. A
small part of my day, but I had no idea what impact that little bird might have
on the world.
You
see, there exists in the smallest of circumstances a tiny nook between our
world and another, and it was through this nook that the bird flew. Into the
world of Flaylen he went, a dark place of cinders and ash. Naturally our bird
panicked, but there was no way for him to reverse what he had done. What had
started as a casual return to the nest had become something more nightmarish,
and the bird’s first thought was to preserve the mother of its unborn young. Of
course the time he spent in Flaylen would not matter, for there time works
differently. No matter how many days he spent flapping about the ash-swirled
peaks of Montvyr and the shadowy forest that makes up the Echoes of a Thousand
Screams, his eggs and their mother sit in the exact same place in our world,
waiting for his return. I could assign a million years to the time he has spent
there already, but even that doesn’t account for the first shuffle of her wing
since his departure. Time is strange like that, when you move between dimensions.
Above
all else, it was hoped that the bird would find some way back, for this new
realm was a terrible place, and if he died there time in our own dimension
would be distorted forever, played on a continuous loop of the same terrible
day as the two systems continually attempt to realign themselves. Perhaps this
is why it feels like your bad days last forever. You have, in fact, been
trapped in that perpetual day since the bird first flew through that nook. To
assign it a number has no meaning, for time has no meaning in Flaylen. You are
in this day forever, no matter how you rail against it. Though it may seem that
the sun sets and that you rise on a new day, you will not age, and you will not
die, unless today was the day fate set for your demise.
Woe
to those who live death each and every day, but their fate is nothing compared
to what is to come! All that you think you remember is but a farcical notion,
something to occupy your mind as we sweep down, down through an endless age of
the physical and painful and real.
For
our bird never returned from that place, and he never will. He was consumed by
the shadow of a Nebat, a winged predator in that place, and in return this
Nebat was consumed by the bulging mass of a waiting Trulg. The Trulg in turn
was hunted by something too dark to give voice to, and his essence was imbibed
by the monstrous Queen of Flaylen. In its blood swirled something of our
unnamed bird, his torment long-since ceased. Through its essence, however, the
knowledge of our realm was made known.
It
is the way of Flaylen to take and to dominate and to persecute, subsuming the
realms of others into the timeless infinity of its own existence. Maybe this
could be considered a blessing, were Flaylen not the hellish landscape that it
is. Yet the end it brings is permanent, and inescapable, and absolute. I have
seen it in my dreams, as the Queen probes my mind for the shape and color of
the window in my writing room. It is through that innocuous portal of wood and
glass that she will one day make her entrance to this world. I try to hide from
her in my dreams, but it is of no use. Her hounds have my scent now, and she
will be here soon.
For
Flaylen is real, and our world can barely be said to exist. Its own extinction
has been assured, as the dark and terrible Queen seeks the nook that our bird
used to come here. Whether it takes her a day or ten thousand thousand
millennia, it matters not. She will find us a moment before that poor bird’s
mate ever flickers its wing again, and then permanent darkness will fall upon
our world. Our essence will burn, for no other reason than to bring a momentary
smile to the Queen’s parched and bleeding lips. The Queen is us, and we are the
Queen. And I am no other than you
yourself, or perhaps the voice of the Queen, tapping gently against the glass at the
edges of your sanity.
When
you hear the bird outside your window sing, pray that it never finds the way to
Flaylen. Perhaps it was your bird that doomed us all.
