Writer's Journal

The mineshaft sank into the giant head below the swinging platform. The technician-priests sang chants and spun prayerwheels around the opening of the hole, trepaned into the side of the Dead God’s head.

The pulley above the platform sqeaked as they were lowered into the cavernous interior of the mountainous skull. Miniscule crystals studded the walls, and ichor dripped from pickaxe wounds.

The platform locked into position at the bottom of the shaft, and the miners wheeled out the cart, pushing it down the tracks laid through a dry artery the size of a palatial hallway. The blood had long ago been pumped out, the cappilaries tied off, the opening into the aorta dynamited and sealed off.

A separate hole had been drilled in so that the priests could set up a shrine and feed prayer and chants to the remaining spirit of the dead God. Drumming night and day to keep the God-body manifested and prevent it from rotting away.

They’d rebuilt the heart as best they could, sewing shut the gaping wound with cables as thick as a man’s thigh, and plastering over it from the inside.

The miners whistled as they pushed the cart along the tracks. The miners muttered token prayers with each strike of the pickaxe, ripping shards of congealed power from the walls and shoveling them into carts.

The city that sprang up at the foot of the mountain range that had been the rain god continued about its business, waiting for the daily infusion of the god’s ichor into the clouds. Many ignored the cannons raising, taking aim. Thirty degrees up. Thirty-five. Forty. Forty-five.

Fire.

Bolts of blue light arched upward, accompanied by the sound of thunder. Reflexively, the people halted their business, and waited for the last echo to die.

From the western horizon, the shot from the corpse of the Earth goddess, the lady of the forest, went up, green light suffusing the clouds, the crystaline green bits of ichor fragmenting high above and falling on the remaining fertile ground.

In the markets, people bartered over the staples: food, potable water, coal, fire ichor, lightning ichor.

One of the street urchins looked up, and listened, as the dead-but-not-gone corpse of the rain god groaned in his death-nightmares, moaned in his dreams of death. The god croaked, and rolled onto its back, ichor flowing from the hole in his head.

The blue fluid poured from the gaping wound, and turned into a fine mist.

People screamed, as the God’s geologically slow death throes uprooted foundations, but the urchin merely ran out into the street, to play in the sudden rain.

(Admittedly, this is influenced by two of my favorite dead white men, C.G. Jung and Roger Zelazny [specifically, his story "The Borgia Hand," check it out if you can.])

The boy was in the room when his younger brother died.  Edmund had had the measels.  Now he had nothing.  He was only eleven, at the time.

Two ravens, far from their southerly winter homes, perched on the windowsil.  One–the one on the left, the boy remembered–cawed, and pecked at the glass, before both flew off.  The boy told his parents and went to bed.

As Spring approached, the boy took to walking in the mountains around Leonding, no longer outgoing and confident, he thought of his brother and brooded.

One day, he happened upon a man who sat on a bit of rock emerging from a snowbank.  The man was tall and ancient, with a scar bisecting a vacant eyelid.  A wide-brimmed hat shaded his head, and pipesmoke curled around his face.

“Where are you coming from, boy?” the man asked in accented german, a raven alighting on the rock next to him with a scrap of paper in its mouth.

“Leonding, sir,” the boy replied.

“And where are you going?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do.  You just don’t know you know.”

“That doesn’t make much sense.”

The man laughed, revealing teeth like squares of pewter.

“Tell me, boy.  What trade will you ply when you are older?”

“My father wants me to send me to technical school, but if I had my choice…either a soldier or an artist.”

The grizzled old man put on a show of being impressed.

“Not a problem with any of the three.  Not a problem.  All fitting.  Though, of course, there is more honor in being a soldier than an artist or engineer.”

“Not to hear my father say it.”

“Well.  How about this, then?”

The old man removed a pouch and pulled out a rod of wood–ash, from the look of it–and handed it to the boy.  Turning it over in his hands, the boy saw the symbol of three interlocking triangles carved into t.

“Sleep with this under your pillow for three years.  On a day–you will know which one–in that final year, burn the rod, and dissolve the ashes in a cup of beer or mead, and drink it down before you go to sleep.  Your dreams will come true, exceeding all expectations.  But know this:  You will die by violence, on walpurgis night.”

So the boy slept with the rod beneath his pillow, and every night, he dreamed of the old man, flanked by two ravens, and astride a giant, eight-legged horse, with a spear resting in his stirrup.  And every night he was closer.  On the night his father died, the boy burnt the rod and drank it down.

He dreamt that night of the old man bleeding him out and pulling off his skin.  The old man climbed inside, as if the skin were a suit of finery, and burnt the boy’s remainder, before mixing him into a vat of well water churned by three ageless women, and drank it down.

In the morning, as he walked to school, he did not respond as readily when his friends called him by name, blinking, and confused, as if he did not remember that when they said “adolf” they meant him.

There is a dilapidated hospital in the north-east corner of Mozambique, built during the period of Portuguese colonization, and maintained off-and-on for the entirety of its life.

While one can drive to it in the dry season, in the wet season, the roads wash out, and the only way to make it to the hospital is to row there. Sitting by the door is a tin rowboat that has, in spite of all logic, begun to rust.

It has only one patient, kept sedated constantly, with an IV drip. One of the three nurses smokes when she makes her rounds, tossing the butts into the dead potted plants. The other two sit by the patient, and reads aloud in turns. One does the classics, the other reads magazines.

The doctor only shows up once a week to check on the patient. As his father did, and his father, and his father back to the time of colonisation, when they took over from the shaman who had handled the patient beforehand.

The patient was an effeminate young man—though the doctor had read in his great-grandfather’s notes that, at one point the patient had appeared as an old woman—and was never allowed to wake up.

Once, in mid 1914, they had run out of sedative. The Doctor’s grandfather had seen the whites of the patient’s eyes, and struck him over the head with a stone the size of a fist.

They did their best to make sure to have sedative on-hand, but they ran out in 1933, and again on the 6^th and 9^th of August in 1945.

They switched to a different sedative after that.

The smoking nurse stands in the door as the doctor checks the patient’s vitals.

“He’s been stirring lately,” the nurse rasps.

“That’s not good,” the doctor noted, “we might have to switch again.”

“Why not just euthanise him?”

The doctor shook his head, and looked at her. Two days later, she had been replaced by another nurse, who said that he was simply happy to be there.

The Doctor smiled, and left for the week, to go back to his practice in town and to his pregnant wife.

The Ong people lived in Indochina lived in Indochina, sandwiched between the Khmer people of Cambodia and the Lao. The last vestiges of thier civilization was destroyed by American bombing in the 1960s. They had their own language and style of architecture.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Ong was the fact that they achieved flight in the early 1400s. While it wasn’t powered flight, it was still a monumental achievement: their airships were an early form of the dirigible. On a frame of fire-hardened bamboo, they stretched several layers of silk and paper to form an envelope that was air-tight other than several ports in the bottom.

Lift was provided by several braziers of coals, which were suspended beneath openings of the envelope, with bone and ceramic handles tied to ropes and held in place. Forward motion was provided by sails.

The Ong traded with both the kingdoms of North-eastern India and the states of southern China until the 1700s, when a civil war destroyed most of the knowledge of the construction of the airships, the last surviving craftsmen sought refuge in isolated buddhist monasteries. No new ships were created after 1762, and the last one had to be dismantled in 1770, due to normal wear-and-tear.

Over time, they lost their ethnic identity, and were subsumed into the Lao and Khmer peoples. The last records of their secrets were discovered by a Vietnamese expedition in the late 1980s; the records were incomplete, due to a Cambodian farmer using their treated manuscripts for combustible fuel.

Currently, there is one surviving codex, kept in a museum in Hanoi.

(First flash fiction since I started NaNoWriMo…might not finish.  I’ll try, though.)

Atlantis didn’t sink.  The Good Doctor dropped an Ontology Bomb on it in 1994.

I know this, because I remember; no one else does.  The newspapers didn’t report it, and all of our history books changed.  It was one of the earlier attempts with the technology, so some of us still remember it.

In May of 1998, another O-Bomb was set off, this time in Mu.  The entire continent, gone.  Even fewer people remember it.  I saw news footage of it; one moment, I’m watching an obsidian sun rise over cities of crystal spires, with bamboo zeppelins drifting between them; the next I’m watching some boring tripe about some woman named Lewinsky.

The Good Doctor isn’t a terrorist.  The Good Doctor is a Wrecker; not interested in being known for any misdeeds, simply reveling in the changes wrought on history and the chaos engendered by it.

I manage to find a discussion board on the internet, in early 2001, populated by those who Remember.

>>Ultima Thule, Uncreated in April 1980.  I don’t know why I’m speaking French, and I go to Mass every Sunday, now.  All my early memories are in German, I remember drinking mead out of horns and offering sacrifices to Odin.

>>Cibola, Uncreated in June of 1976.  Now I live on a Reservation in Arizona, and my people didn’t know about metalworking until the anglos came.  I remember watching the moon landing when I was 8, back in 1954.  What happened?

>>My home town was Uncreated Last week.  I was away on business, at the time.  I had a wife and two children; I was a respected member of the community.  Now I sleep in public parks and have to use the Library computers.  I’m forgetting my hometown’s name, my wife’s face.  I don’t know what’s happening, please.

The Good Doctor takes everything away from us, learning to make clean amputations from the realm of causality.  Everytime a bomb is dropped, a black egg is left behind, an Inkstone.

The Good Doctor has eyes everywhere, men and women waiting, preparing to rush in an take the stones from the sites of destruction, and ship them to a P.O. Box.  Sometimes in Montana, sometimes in Marakesh, sometimes elsewhere.

It changes everyime a bomb is dropped.

I know you don’t believe me.  I know you don’t.  But please, believe this.  If you see people vanishing, if the mailman doesn’t come for more than two days at a time, if you don’t see your neighbor walking his dog for a week, if your husband or wife disappears without leaving a note:  Get the hell out of town.

Don’t believe me, but trust me.

(This is probably the product of reading way too much criticism on a particular author, lately.  Not going to go into who; some of you will be able to figure it out despite the text, the rest of you might be unfamiliar.)

I stand and watch the living thunderhead rise from the blackened, broken earth, seeping out of the cracks like oil.

Progenetoi. Something in the root of my mind screamed the name to me. One of Blake’s “giants who formed this world into sensuous existence” I knew it as.

The iron-black anvil-cloud stretches out an arm that reaches to the horizon. Another joins it in the opposite direction. I see it straining to pull free of its prison of stone and soil.

Countless eyes open, and a mouth gapes, its teeth like skyscrapers.

Progenetoi. Progenitors. Why do I name it thus?

My feet are rooted to the ground; what use is running from something that stands at the center of the world? That reaches to the edge of it?

I call it a thunderhead, but it is not insubstantial like the clouds that part around its great and shapeless head. Its shadow is heavy like lead, and the thing that casts it is more real than I.

The Giant stretched upward, planting one deceptively slender leg, so thin that it should not be able to stand.

Logic fails. The ground stands firm.

Each breath it draws is like a thunderclap, an earthquake, a hurricane-gust.

Yet, I can hear hooves.

Turning, I see a column of figures, lead by knights in armor; they are insubstantial, like mist in the morning sun.

Behind them, I see Shakespeare’s fairy host, and Marlowe’s demon horde; the gunslingers and Indian braves of American folklore; the citizen-soldiers and identical idealized workers of Soviet Agitprop; Zulu warriors with their spears gleaming in the sunlight, and countless others.

They march along the blacktop road, riding into a fateful, hopeless battle. The dreams of humankind streaming down the road towards the most material of enemies.

Unable to join them, I lay down in the dust by the side of the street, and close my eyes. I have a duty of my own, and in dreams begin all responsibility.

The destined hero climbed the steps, sword in hand.  He was a tall man with long, blond hair, recently a young farm boy, over the past few months, he had fought many battles.  Now, the end of the road was nearly in sight, the course was almost run.

He pushed open the heavy oak door at the top of the tower, and confronted the dark lord.

A thin man in a coarse black robe sat in front of him, at a table.  He put down the document he was reading, and stared at the Destined Hero over the rims of his pince-nez glasses.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

“Silence!” the Hero cried out, before growling, “your reign of terror has come to an end!”

“Reign of terror…?” the overlord asked, then, realizing the situation, grimaced, “not this bullshit, again.”

“Again?” the hero asked.

“You’re the second one this year.  I really do need to get better guards.  How did you get in?  The sewer?”

“Well…yes…”

“Need more rat-monsters, then,” the Overlord sighed.

He leaned back, and opened the cabinet.  Pulling out a glass flask of amber liquid and two wooden cups, he poured a drink for himself and his would-be assassin.

The Hero looked dubiously, and the overlord placed the cups side-by-side, equidistant from the hero.

“Which do you want?” he asked, “left or right?”

“L…Right,” the hero said.

The overlord picked up the left one, and drank.

“Let me guess.  Old man out in the desert, ate some mushrooms and told you to come kill me?”

“Yes,” the hero said, picking up his cup.

“Gave you a sword and sent you on your merry way?”

The Hero nodded.

“Think I’m some sort of baby-eating monster who willingly starves his subjects?” the Overlord asked, “army of monsters, et cetera?”

The Hero nodded, again.  A look of shock on his face.

“I don’t live in opulence, kid,” the Overlord said, “We happen to live in a country with soil to rocky to grow the proper staples.  Our only industry is monster production, and that’s a little hard to trade.  I don’t have time to explain the intricacies of our geopolitical situation, the international trade of grain, or anything like that.  Suffice to say that my subjects starve because the countries around us are lead by assholes who think that people who make monsters are evil.”

The Hero stared at him.

“But…the assassins?”

The Overlord sighed.

“The old man you met is my former chamberlaine.  He was caught stealing, and I exiled him.  You’re the nineteenth ‘destined hero’ he’s sent to kill me.  Of course I want him dead.  You lot keep killing my rat-monsters.”

“And the armies?” the Hero asked.

“We’ve had to turn to piracy and banditry to buy food and resources.  My forces have orders to not harm any prisoners, and they’re generally just stripped of valuables and released if no one will pay a ransom.”

The two sat in silence.  The hero drank his cup.

“So you’re not…”

“An evil overlord?” the Overlord asked, “Not really.  I mean, I guess you could make an argument for it, but I wouldn’t really call myself ‘evil,’ and ‘overlord’ is just my hereditary title.”

“So it’s all…”

“A misunderstanding,” the Overlord said, and turned back to his work, “you can leave by the front gate.  The guards will let you out, and can even direct you to a fairly comfortable inn.”