The Dark Queen of Flaylen - Short Story

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.

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.