So, this is the first 1,500 words of the first chapter of the first act of my first story. Fell entirely free to read this or not. No obligations. It's dense, dark, foreboding, and not for everyone. This chapter was originally 7,500 words and incredibly weighty. It's down to about 4,400 now. I've resisted posting this up to now because (rather snobbishly) I always felt it should be read in one sitting all the way through and not broken into 1,500 word sections - in the same way classic albums should be played form start to finish, at the right time, in the right way, with the right sound system.
Alas, the forum rules (and, I imagine, understandable SFFer unwillingness to dedicate that much time) prevent me from doing so. That bugged me at the start, but I have definitely come to appreciate why that is the case now, and can certainly see this from other people's point of view about how much time they can dedicate to someone else's work.
Anyway, here it is. It's a definite red-herring in terms of what the rest of the Act is like (the last line of the Chapter - not included here - is a far better indicator). I just can't let it go. For how I see it in my head, for what this sets up, and the atmosphere it provokes, I am resolute that this is the right way to start of the story.
Feel free to read or not. Zero issues if no one has the time.
(Cue shameful tagging of @Guttersnipe, @Joshua Jones, @Jo Zebedee, @elvet, @Provincial & @jd73 (because, although we don't really know each other, we voted for the same 3 stories in the October 300, which I like to think means our tastes are aligned). Apologies also if I'm not allowed to tag this many people.
The Inexorable Rise
Act 1 - Cinereous
Chapter 1
I have weight.
I am of body, of dimension. I can feel the distance to my limbs, even if I cannot yet move. I am whole again, reconstituted... but how? And, where am I?
I see only darkness. What is this place? How long have I been here? Where was I before? I recall disembodiment, an untethered sensation. I was detached, floating. The memory feels proximal and I reach for it, but with every inch further I mentally extend, so too does an invisible spit lancing my soul. It is a sudden ominousness, like irons slung across my shoulders.
I grasp for the particulars of the memory and a picture forms in my mind: a room of grey-green stone, meticulously carved from ancient metamorphic rock, coated in a dark blanket of dust like rusting frost. There is a pale-yellow light filtering down from above through some indeterminable aperture.
Yes, the vestibule; I remember it now. I remember myself within it, as unified as I am now. I recall the harshness of the air, and its noxious edge. I recall the churning sound, somewhere beyond the walls or beneath those stone pavers. Or was it above? I recall wondering. I remember lifting my head, seeking the source of that noise…and as my memory avatar does so again, the shackles return, as does the searing needle to the heart.
As the image lifts, so too does a suffocating sickness at my core. Then the memory finally reassembles, but the associated emotion is not the wondrous satisfaction of a forgotten name recalled, nor glee at finally grasping the solution to an age-old puzzle. The feeling is akin to reconciling with the shadow of your darkest day. The reminiscence is like a blown-apart body reassembled with pins and mortar.
That chamber: it is where I ceased being whole. It is where the echoed sense of separation I awoke with stems from. My memory’s gaze fixes on the ceiling of the antechamber and the vision is clear: the source of the noise – that stirring, rushing agitation – hangs overhead, suspended from it, within...
…those pipes – Merciful Upholder, those pipes. How could I forget those infernal conduits?
This is not right. This cannot be. I cannot be here, wherever it is I now find myself, and I cannot be whole. This cold darkness around me; it is an illusion, the disembodied fantasy of an accursed soul, desperately picturing a place and a form of existence that is anything other than where and what they are. Remains: that is all I was and all that I am - the processed remnants of what was once a living soul.
Great Fountainhead, the memory is rancid as it rushes back to me now; standing on the stone floor of the vestibule one moment, levitating towards those pipes the next – of form and of body in the first instance, and torn asunder in the second. I was shredded, dissected. But there was no blade, no instrument at work. I was dismembered, disarticulated, as if by the very air itself. And every molecule of what remained was drawn through those pipes.
With the image comes the recollection of the pain I felt. How can I possibly have forgotten it? Even now, the spectral echo of that pure, wicked agony coats me like a thick, burning tar, searing my every cell. It was suffering beyond that which could ever be comprehended by a mortal soul. I recall the scream; a vile, harrowing, inhuman shriek, incessant until my voice, too, was deconstructed. Even then, it continued, at an octave inaudible to all but the most fell of beasts – and that was to be merely the opening stanza of the atrocity.
Not even in death was I spared the torment. Just as I could still scream whilst devoid of voice, so too did I see all, even with my eyes extruded. By some ungodly bane, I witnessed every gruesome second of the ordeal. I beheld as my flesh was stripped, my limbs pulled apart, my organs extracted. I watched as the remnants of my body were siphoned into those rusted, decaying ducts like putrid offal, and as my fetid remains coursed across vast repositories, from my wretched vigil I was left in no doubt as to where this was. Merciful Upholder, to recall the horror of my realisation a second time is as if to suffer it anew; for it was not just any place.
It was that place: the eternal forge. Purgatory.
That I could have possibly forgotten about it even for a second is inconceivable. To witness such an edifice is to define the remainder of your existence by it. The sight of it is a tattoo, etched across the eyes in fire. To be there is to be anatomically rewritten from the inside out with its code.
I envy the blissful ignorance of the anaesthetized disconnected masses, so dismissive of the ancient, stone-scribed portents and their modern relevance, without even the vaguest impression of what it is like. I pity the devout, living out their lives with the knowledge that one day, no matter what; they would be destined for that place. Even then, no ancient texts, or apocryphal tales – nothing conveyed in ink or tongue could hope to portray it with any degree of authenticity. The manifestation of one’s worst waking fears cannot begin to capture the look, or the sound, or the smell of that place.
It was indescribable, unimaginable, unfathomable; a titanic foundry, so far-reaching in every direction as to be dimensionless, boundless, infinite – befitting of every conceivable hyperbole. But it was also a place of atrocious contradiction. On the one hand, it was frigid and black, as if all the heat and light that might ever have existed within or around it had been extinguished, eons past. On the other, it was scalding, and dazzlingly bright.
So, too, was the noise confounding; the deafening din of steam jetting from incalculable depths and the ungodly throbbing of a million abyssal furnaces. It sung with a cacophony that quaked every fibre of my being, yet, simultaneously, there was a layer of deathly silence hovering just below the dissonance, audible in equal measure. It was an explosion of noise and the absence of noise, all at the same time; and it was the absence of a great many more things besides.
If life as we would measure it had ever been there, it had been vaporised long ago. It was untouched and unseen, as if nothing sentient had ventured within leagues of the place since the last block in its walls had been set – which is assume it was actually built. It seemed more likely that it had simply existed since before the birth of time itself, as if it was always there and always would be there, untroubled by evolution, expansion, decay. It was aged and yet also ageless, beyond the concept of time – and for an eternity, or a scale akin, so too was my suffering.
With every second that ticked by, I remained lucid and sensitised, despite my disintegration, ablaze with the perception of a thousand burning spears, recurrently piercing my flesh. It was perpetual torture; a violent, execrable death, suffered a hundred times the same way in the same moment. And there would be no end to my sentence. The notion of a time when I would not be there – or a time when I had yet to arrive – was folly. Death had become all there was and all there would ever be; death and that place, orbiting one another in an abominable black abyss, an age before the spark of the first light.
And therein lay the paradox: if I could never leave – if my destiny was to remain inexorably tethered to that place for all time – how can it possibly be that I am not there still? How can I be here, in this new darkness, whole of body, devoid of pain, sensing almost tangible limits around me?
True, it was a realm of bewildering contradiction, but such incongruities were all aligned in their malignant design, retained within the walls of the forge. There was simply nothing else beyond its boundaries, if such limits could ever be located. It was the end of ends.
Even if by some miracle I have escaped, how I could possibly have been reconstituted after such unequivocal dissection. Recasting a man from his own ashes would be witchcraft of the highest order – witchcraft or the perverse whim of the ultimate power.
It is a conundrum; feeling free of that chaotic vortex, and yet still sensing the soul motion of being spirited around its service pipes. It is as if I am anchored to two places at once – spiritually rooted in one, physically detained in another. But still the question persists: where is here?
Alas, the forum rules (and, I imagine, understandable SFFer unwillingness to dedicate that much time) prevent me from doing so. That bugged me at the start, but I have definitely come to appreciate why that is the case now, and can certainly see this from other people's point of view about how much time they can dedicate to someone else's work.
Anyway, here it is. It's a definite red-herring in terms of what the rest of the Act is like (the last line of the Chapter - not included here - is a far better indicator). I just can't let it go. For how I see it in my head, for what this sets up, and the atmosphere it provokes, I am resolute that this is the right way to start of the story.
Feel free to read or not. Zero issues if no one has the time.
(Cue shameful tagging of @Guttersnipe, @Joshua Jones, @Jo Zebedee, @elvet, @Provincial & @jd73 (because, although we don't really know each other, we voted for the same 3 stories in the October 300, which I like to think means our tastes are aligned). Apologies also if I'm not allowed to tag this many people.
The Inexorable Rise
Act 1 - Cinereous
Chapter 1
I have weight.
I am of body, of dimension. I can feel the distance to my limbs, even if I cannot yet move. I am whole again, reconstituted... but how? And, where am I?
I see only darkness. What is this place? How long have I been here? Where was I before? I recall disembodiment, an untethered sensation. I was detached, floating. The memory feels proximal and I reach for it, but with every inch further I mentally extend, so too does an invisible spit lancing my soul. It is a sudden ominousness, like irons slung across my shoulders.
I grasp for the particulars of the memory and a picture forms in my mind: a room of grey-green stone, meticulously carved from ancient metamorphic rock, coated in a dark blanket of dust like rusting frost. There is a pale-yellow light filtering down from above through some indeterminable aperture.
Yes, the vestibule; I remember it now. I remember myself within it, as unified as I am now. I recall the harshness of the air, and its noxious edge. I recall the churning sound, somewhere beyond the walls or beneath those stone pavers. Or was it above? I recall wondering. I remember lifting my head, seeking the source of that noise…and as my memory avatar does so again, the shackles return, as does the searing needle to the heart.
As the image lifts, so too does a suffocating sickness at my core. Then the memory finally reassembles, but the associated emotion is not the wondrous satisfaction of a forgotten name recalled, nor glee at finally grasping the solution to an age-old puzzle. The feeling is akin to reconciling with the shadow of your darkest day. The reminiscence is like a blown-apart body reassembled with pins and mortar.
That chamber: it is where I ceased being whole. It is where the echoed sense of separation I awoke with stems from. My memory’s gaze fixes on the ceiling of the antechamber and the vision is clear: the source of the noise – that stirring, rushing agitation – hangs overhead, suspended from it, within...
…those pipes – Merciful Upholder, those pipes. How could I forget those infernal conduits?
This is not right. This cannot be. I cannot be here, wherever it is I now find myself, and I cannot be whole. This cold darkness around me; it is an illusion, the disembodied fantasy of an accursed soul, desperately picturing a place and a form of existence that is anything other than where and what they are. Remains: that is all I was and all that I am - the processed remnants of what was once a living soul.
Great Fountainhead, the memory is rancid as it rushes back to me now; standing on the stone floor of the vestibule one moment, levitating towards those pipes the next – of form and of body in the first instance, and torn asunder in the second. I was shredded, dissected. But there was no blade, no instrument at work. I was dismembered, disarticulated, as if by the very air itself. And every molecule of what remained was drawn through those pipes.
With the image comes the recollection of the pain I felt. How can I possibly have forgotten it? Even now, the spectral echo of that pure, wicked agony coats me like a thick, burning tar, searing my every cell. It was suffering beyond that which could ever be comprehended by a mortal soul. I recall the scream; a vile, harrowing, inhuman shriek, incessant until my voice, too, was deconstructed. Even then, it continued, at an octave inaudible to all but the most fell of beasts – and that was to be merely the opening stanza of the atrocity.
Not even in death was I spared the torment. Just as I could still scream whilst devoid of voice, so too did I see all, even with my eyes extruded. By some ungodly bane, I witnessed every gruesome second of the ordeal. I beheld as my flesh was stripped, my limbs pulled apart, my organs extracted. I watched as the remnants of my body were siphoned into those rusted, decaying ducts like putrid offal, and as my fetid remains coursed across vast repositories, from my wretched vigil I was left in no doubt as to where this was. Merciful Upholder, to recall the horror of my realisation a second time is as if to suffer it anew; for it was not just any place.
It was that place: the eternal forge. Purgatory.
That I could have possibly forgotten about it even for a second is inconceivable. To witness such an edifice is to define the remainder of your existence by it. The sight of it is a tattoo, etched across the eyes in fire. To be there is to be anatomically rewritten from the inside out with its code.
I envy the blissful ignorance of the anaesthetized disconnected masses, so dismissive of the ancient, stone-scribed portents and their modern relevance, without even the vaguest impression of what it is like. I pity the devout, living out their lives with the knowledge that one day, no matter what; they would be destined for that place. Even then, no ancient texts, or apocryphal tales – nothing conveyed in ink or tongue could hope to portray it with any degree of authenticity. The manifestation of one’s worst waking fears cannot begin to capture the look, or the sound, or the smell of that place.
It was indescribable, unimaginable, unfathomable; a titanic foundry, so far-reaching in every direction as to be dimensionless, boundless, infinite – befitting of every conceivable hyperbole. But it was also a place of atrocious contradiction. On the one hand, it was frigid and black, as if all the heat and light that might ever have existed within or around it had been extinguished, eons past. On the other, it was scalding, and dazzlingly bright.
So, too, was the noise confounding; the deafening din of steam jetting from incalculable depths and the ungodly throbbing of a million abyssal furnaces. It sung with a cacophony that quaked every fibre of my being, yet, simultaneously, there was a layer of deathly silence hovering just below the dissonance, audible in equal measure. It was an explosion of noise and the absence of noise, all at the same time; and it was the absence of a great many more things besides.
If life as we would measure it had ever been there, it had been vaporised long ago. It was untouched and unseen, as if nothing sentient had ventured within leagues of the place since the last block in its walls had been set – which is assume it was actually built. It seemed more likely that it had simply existed since before the birth of time itself, as if it was always there and always would be there, untroubled by evolution, expansion, decay. It was aged and yet also ageless, beyond the concept of time – and for an eternity, or a scale akin, so too was my suffering.
With every second that ticked by, I remained lucid and sensitised, despite my disintegration, ablaze with the perception of a thousand burning spears, recurrently piercing my flesh. It was perpetual torture; a violent, execrable death, suffered a hundred times the same way in the same moment. And there would be no end to my sentence. The notion of a time when I would not be there – or a time when I had yet to arrive – was folly. Death had become all there was and all there would ever be; death and that place, orbiting one another in an abominable black abyss, an age before the spark of the first light.
And therein lay the paradox: if I could never leave – if my destiny was to remain inexorably tethered to that place for all time – how can it possibly be that I am not there still? How can I be here, in this new darkness, whole of body, devoid of pain, sensing almost tangible limits around me?
True, it was a realm of bewildering contradiction, but such incongruities were all aligned in their malignant design, retained within the walls of the forge. There was simply nothing else beyond its boundaries, if such limits could ever be located. It was the end of ends.
Even if by some miracle I have escaped, how I could possibly have been reconstituted after such unequivocal dissection. Recasting a man from his own ashes would be witchcraft of the highest order – witchcraft or the perverse whim of the ultimate power.
It is a conundrum; feeling free of that chaotic vortex, and yet still sensing the soul motion of being spirited around its service pipes. It is as if I am anchored to two places at once – spiritually rooted in one, physically detained in another. But still the question persists: where is here?
