Describe an Imaginary Place

[Susan Boulton]

All the flotsam of human life bobbed and floated down the cobbled road between the buildings of Tap Street. A day that had started so bright with the lingering heat of summer had ended dark, wet and bitter for those that dwelt at the end of the street. A veil of pain hung over the workings of Wmffre Sadwrn. Sad lilting voices whispered in the dying embers of the hearths. The words spoken by the voices were echoed in the mass of liquid, which dripped off the lintel above the rear door.

“Forgive... Understand...” Each word became encased in the falling water as it flowed over the cobbled yard and cascaded into the millrace. Here the sorrow became almost tangible, a deep regret spinning towards the wooden wheel. The great beast sat with its skirts tucked up out the moving mass. A haughty dame caught in an act of scandalous behaviour, now shunned by all that knew her.

 

[Talysia]

At the top of the mountains, where no humans can reach, lies the griffin's nest. It sits in a gap just below the highest peak, sheltered from the worst of the weather on an outcropping of mica-rich rock. There are no delicate twigs here to make the griffin's nest, like the homes the woodland birds make for themselves. Here are dead branches, woven together and lined with a combination of multicoloured dried leaves and sheep's wool, probably left over from a meal. A small pile of bones sits below the nest, where the griffin has discarded that which it couldn't eat.

Snow has started to build up further up the mountain, a vast expanse of beautiful whiteness, whilst the valley below remains untouched; a green canvas bordered by a darker green forest. Bisecting the valley is a river, occasionally glinting as the sun reflects off the surface, and broken every now and again by salmon hoping for an insect to eat. Tranquility reigns here, where there are no humans to interfere.

 

[The Judge]

Another old thread I came to from Teresa's linking which I think ought to be resurrected.

I describe places marginally more often than I do people, but still not frequently and not at great length. Again, I'm too lazy to write something as an exercise, so this is culled from a WIP:

The broken spars [of the bridge] jutted over the river like the mutilated skeleton of some monstrous bird. Across the great stretch of water – a dark shimmer of mother-of-pearl at that hour – were the steep gradients and imposing buildings of High Town. Behind them, hidden, lay the low, heavy bulk of the Trooper compound and the prison, while beyond them the volcano loured over the colony.

 

[Erin99]

How did I miss this thread?

Like The Judge, this is one from my WIP:

"She could barely stand upright, so fevered was the wind. Gusts pummelled her from all sides, and she fought to keep her cloak from billowing and flapping against her legs. Around her, rows of snow-topped stone houses lined either side of the path into Bokenta, the only things motionless. The faint glow from a streetlamp flickered a few feet ahead as its lamp swung back and forth, its sways mirrored by the creaking signpost of a lively tavern. Drunken men filled the doorway, tankard in hand, some leaning dangerously on the wooden frame, others gulping great mouthfuls of ale while appearing quite jovial—and coherent. Through the welcoming orange light spilling from the window she saw hoards of people jostling over the tables nearest the fireside.

A sudden gust dulled the laughter and chatter from inside. The flurry obscured distant city spires and roofs, allowing only fleeting glimpses of the world beyond as the wind led the snow in a wild dance. Smoke puffed out from chimneys, immediately whisked away into the white skies. In fact, everything swayed, creaked, or moved, or so it seemed, barring wooden signs nailed to establishment doors."​

 

[J Riff]

The sagging clapboard shack sat well back from a secondary dirt road that led only to an abandoned garbage dump. Grey-green mold had crawled up the walls, blackness gaped where nails had torn through mushy wood. The moldering shack leaned as if trying to fall over, to break into component boards and shingles, and die, it's time already long past.
Ghosts of long-gone gamblers and harlots hovered invisibly in the weed-choked yard as a single crow glided past, then wheeled to perch on the crumbling chimney. The shack trembled once, and as the startled crow flapped aloft, the building quietly collapsed into a pile of useless rubble.
Grasshoppers swarmed briefly, then subsided. The sun-baked prairie stretched off to the horizon, and it was as if the shack had never been there at all.

 

[Toby Frost]

Venanti had a name and a street, and not much more. Most of the six houses had scruffy thatched roofs that were slowly turning green, like a drowned man's hair. A boy sat in the street, stirring the dirt with his fingertips. A woman watched him suspiciously from under the eaves, as though dirt-sifting was wild, rebellious stuff. As I walked past she said "Good morning" like a curse. It was the kind of place where you joined the local aristocracy by owning more than one pair of shoes. I kept on going.

 

[Chel]

From my work in progress:

The palace grounds of Astelor was like a city in itself. Valmarian was barely aware of the immensity of the wall encircling it, reaching all the way across the closest of the fortress isles on the far side of the elaborately decorated gate they passed through an hour later. He heard more than saw the deep, wide moat, one of the reasons Astelor was considered impenetrable.

He had sung many songs about the city and the palace. As they rode, he was quietly humming the melody of the song about Mikhil the assassin who swam around the walled isles onto the palace grounds, only to literally stumble upon the princess, fall madly in love with her there and then and give in to her pleads to spare her father the king's life. It was said that this incident had really taken place, gods knew how long a time ago, and that it resulted in the rowing guards that patrolled the waters around the walled isles even in this day.

In the darkness of the cloudy night Valmarian couldn't see much of the wondrous palace grounds. He was able to make out the black forms of immense trees and enormous buildings, but at this hour most of them were completely dark. Their way was lit by lanterns hanging in some sort of contraptions at regular intervals on both sides of the road. He wondered if they had been lit because of him, or if they were kept burning throughout every night.

 

[Erin99]

From my WIP, too, since I seem to post only those these days:

Inside the walls of the old Authoritarian Citadel, glistening buildings of limestone paid homage to the lustrous domed temple that commanded attention in honour of High Lord Braydon. A colossal pillared entranceway led up to its carved double doors, and inside the building, where once draped tapestries of the Great High Lord, the Council chambers resided. A circular arrangement of tables let Council members, garbed in robes of flowing white, discuss and pass laws here.​

 

[Scott R. Forshaw]

The sky appeared tortured and unnatural, as if it were bleeding, somehow. Blood red against the blackened earth which lay beneath it.

Charred, burnt, and ravaged buildings stretched out as far as the eye could see. Reaching upward with, twisted, decaying talons. Caressing crimson clouds which drifted low beneath the mutilated sky, floating sullenly above the lifeless plains below.

Civilisation had abandoned this place, long, long ago, and all that remained were the creatures which lived beneath it. Buried deep beneath the land, eating it from the inside.

 

[RKNINE]

wrote this at work...

Beneath their feet, the mountain ridge wrinkled down, spotted in snow, to the plains over which they towered. A choking mist extended from the horizon to the foot of the mountain. There, it reached up with smokey tentacles towards the travelers. The fresh green grass that carpeted the plains stopped where the mist stopped, the mountains sticking into the sky like a knife, silver and white.

 

[mixa]

Inside the factory, the low hum of the electric lights sung in discord with an electric beep of an faulty alarm system. Puddles of rainwater gathered in the uneven floor through the gaps of a broken roof. Yet, there was no life, no scuttling of rodents or flittering of moths, just the smell of rusty metal and what once was.

 

[The Ace]

The cold wind from the grey sea ruffled the rabbit-cropped grass.

Dominating this high headland stood the tower, smooth and white as bone with no sign of door or window.

The inhabitants of the village below were descendants of the wave, wanderers who'd claimed this empty land centuries ago, and their tales spoke much of the tower and naught of its builders, known only to eternity.

 

[R M Tobias]

The walls of the houses were all covered in sigils. Some old witchcraft painted in blood. Chicken blood, she hoped. She saw a coop but no birds, a well but no water, and a stable with only two grey roans and a wall of rusty horseshoes. She stopped in front of the taven, heard footsteps scurrying inside.

"Phadron," she called out, unsure what to expect. A wind gusted. A window rattled shut then shot open again, banging against wall.

"Phadron come out, or I'm coming in."

A purse of coin sailed from the depths of the tavern and landed with a chink at her feet. She picked it up. In her father's time, outlaws bought penance from the witch hunters with thirty pieces of eight. She hefted the bag. Phadron must have slipped a few more in for good measure.

"Too bad it ain't my father's time, Phadron" she said softly, stepping onto the porch. "Cause I sure as hell ain't nothing like my old man."

 

[ScrambleEggHead]

The environment, almost inchoate to the senses, Shetler's eyes took in endless mixtures of color and greyness, a random rainbow of fog in every direction, it would appear. If there was a source of light, it was indiscernible. Numbness was the only sensation in his feet, buried in the fog. A faint trickling reached his ears, distorted somehow, like slushed echoes. As he walked with no point of reference, a sliver of white at the periphery of his vision intensifed with his movement, and vanished when he stopped. He could breathe quite easily, but there was no real smell other than water vapor. It was a clean smell, as if the vapor was free of impurities. He touched the comm switch on the arm of his suit, and spoke. "You guys have to come down here. It's unbelievable."

 

[InfinitySquared]

Towers of glass and steel reached into the sky, lording over their domains like the monarchs that sat on thrones so many millennia ago. And like these monarchs, they were long dead. The wind whistled through the empty, ruined husks of skyscrapers. This used to be New Manila, a sprawling metropolis so like its namesake on Earth. It was one of the jewels of the local sector when Earth blanketed the entire planet with neutron radiation and scattered thousands upon thousands of mines around the planet. As far as anyone knew, everybody there was dead.
And then a gunshot rang through the empty streets.

 

[Star Girl]

Tell me what you think.

It wasn’t a ruin like any he’d seen before, it was ancient but yet it held itself in place as if time had stood still.
The marble walls curved around the room in an even circular motion. His eyes looked up to the high dome of lattice patterned glass, which made the sun shine down in rainbows. The smooth dusty brown and white laced rock road up with the high pillars which were fixed into the wall holding the strong multi-coloured window in place. He twisted and turned to see everything the room had to offer.

Soon his eyes fell back down to him and he found the large lost painting which had been sort after for hundreds of years. It hung on the opposite side of the room as the light poured down shining colours over the Lady in the picture's perfect face.

 

[GreenKidx]

(So, now that I have near religiously avoided this thread for so long, I decided it was time. Time to face my fears and make public my weakest (in my opinion) point. Detailing the places my stories take place in. Let me know what you think!)

Ayalla, could hear gentle but steady inhale of breath from somewhere near her prone form. No, everywhere. The breath surrounded her, constantly inhaling, never exhaling. She shivered as her mind, still drowsy from a coma like sleep, pictured all manner of beast hovering just beyond her closed eyelids. Ayalla steeled her nerve and pried her still heavy lids open, just a hair at first. White. She forced her clear green eyes completely open, left panting from the effort. When the world around her settled into focus she rolled her eyes around slowly, and tried take stock of her current location. Bricks. There were hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of palm sized, pearl white bricks. Each brick a perfect square fit snugly against its neighbor. Ayalla's mind started to drift. She forced it back to the bricks. She studied them as best she could from where she laid. Walls, the thought finally came to her. All the small white bricks, formed four sqaure walls and a square ceiling and, most likely, the floor beneath her that she could not see. "Wurmaye?" Ayalla asked no one, in a tiny strained voice. With painstaking effort and after many long moments, she gathered her strength and lifted her leaded body into half a lying, half sitting position. Her breathing became ragged and desperate. The room spun in her vision from the exertion. Yet, she refused to close her emerald eyes, convinced she'd never be able to open them again. "Where... Am... I?" Ayalla asked again in a voice that was slightly more than a whisper. In an instant the white room exploded into a riot of colors and images. Each brick now displayed snippets of scenes and pictures. No two showed the same portrait. In one brick Ayalla saw the first ape leave the trees. In another, she saw many sun burned men and women worked tirelessly on a stone pyramid. In another a thin man in a tall black hat crumpled to a theater floor, dying. In yet another she saw a baby girl, with familiar green eyes being born. Tears welled in her own eyes as an overpowering voice boomed from the very walls "THIS PLACE, CHILD OF MAN, IS THE AKASHIC RECORD!"

(There it is. Not much physical description, but I felt the atmosphere of the place was more telling.)

 

[My Atomic Tales]

It was the place they came to die. A broken place, shorn of nobility. Much like their planet. They hadn't put up much resistance when we invaded, and they didn't put up any now as we ushered them beneath the glowering granite cliffs, the grey of the stone reflecting the uniform grey of their almond-shaped, alien eyes. The 'Realignment Centre' had been erected further along, just before the rock-strewn pathway gave way to shingle and finally to sand. Not that they'd ever gaze upon the blue-green vista beyond. That privilege was reserved for the conquerors. The only thing these poor saps would see was a gouge in the earth, twenty metres long, already half-filled with shapes which were recognisable enough even beneath the sand that had been bulldozed over them. This was the price of colonisation. This was the price of joining the Terran Federation. I shouldered my rifle and moved forward. There was work to be done.

 

[lucydavies01]

The sky appeared tortured and unnatural, as if it were bleeding, somehow. Blood red against the blackened earth which lay beneath it.

Charred, burnt, and ravaged buildings stretched out as far as the eye could see. Reaching upward with, twisted, decaying talons. Caressing crimson clouds which drifted low beneath the mutilated sky, floating sullenly above the lifeless plains below.

Civilisation had abandoned this place, long, long ago, and all that remained were the creatures which lived beneath it. Buried deep beneath the land, eating it from the inside.

This is wicked!!!!!!!

 

[My Atomic Tales]

There were trees.

There were always trees. It was par for the course. Where else could Elves exist except in wooded enclaves?

Danten stopped short, his fingers automatically reaching for his bow. "They're near," he murmured to his companions.

The one called Shott nodded curtly and brought his rifle to bear on the clearing. "Where?" he grunted curtly through his headset.

Danten stood still for a moment, eyes closed. "East," he breathed at last. "East."

Shott nodded and indicated to his men. They spread out in a wide arc, weapons ready should any foe emerge from the undergrowth.

Danten watched them slide between the flora, their armoured suits reflecting the background and making them almost invisible. To his left a faun sated its thirst at a puddle, its eyes fixed on him should he offer any threat. Overhead multi-winged birds flew between trees, disturbed by the activity beneath.

From the distance a shot came. Then another.

Before long there was a barrage. Then silence.

Danten walked slowly beneath the elms, grateful for their welcoming shade. Each pull of the trigger had produced a distinct sound, and at every moment he'd heard the word 'traitor, traitor, traitor.'

Collapsing beneath an oak, far older than he could hope to be, the Elf pondered his fate.