Welcome to my blog, brought into existence because I believe in the power of stories. I hope you'll find a few things you like here. Let me know what you think and leave me any verdict, suggestion, challenge or request you want.
Author's note: Another one of my old poems, I'd say pre-17, maybe from my 18th, but I find that hard to believe. I really can't pinpoint the exact year for this one. And I didn't do drugs, but sometimes going through my older stuff makes me think I secretly did. Truth is I just go(/e)t carried away easily and went for the obvious. I'm cleaning out my virtual closet, so what the heck, I'm posting it anyway. It's there, I have to.
When love hurts
O treacherous heart,
so sweet,
so cruel,
torturing with desire.
Do not deceive my head,
do not betray my mind,
do not dare, to control,
do not force me to surrender.
Weakness, shall not overcome!
I paced around the empty room. The lights were out, a pale ghostly shine falling from the hall through the open door. It made the chairs into faded silhouettes. It was quiet. Unusually quiet. Normally at this hour, student-musicians were practicing their symphonies in the adjacent music rooms, which is my I even bother coming here in the first place, but not today. I turned to the shadows of the corner. The piano stood abandoned but with dignity in its smooth blackness. I caressed its keys longingly. Such a pity I never learned.
I ambled on, a final glance at the Steinway, in between the desk, the surface was dusty, and the blackboard, going over the lecture words forgotten on the canvas and lost in the green wilderness that was empty. ‘Antigone’ it said, with proud, hastily crooked letters, the first almost entirely wiped out by the lecturer’s fervent hand. Must have been interesting.
A glimmer in the dark caught my eye, next to the control panel for the auditory on the floor. It must’ve been a piece of equipment one of the students broke, a wire of sorts. I passed it, stopped, passed it again, retraced my steps and picked it up. It was an earring of coal with all the glimmer of diamonds, four ovals full of facets piled on top of each other, the lower always bigger than the next. I brought it up to the light of the hall and watched it sparkle.
And then stepped forward from the dark a creature fair with grace and ease. Emanating danger like a flame I was strapped to the wings of moths, unable to fly. She stood patiently, invitingly and smiled.
“Who are you?” I asked, my voice an echo that seemed strange to me in the void.
She smiled benignly and stepped closer.
“My name?” She said with a melodic voice that ringed with something foreign, a tone I’d only heard before in dreams of spring and dew and fairy bells. She strode elegantly around me in a circle and whispered in my ear. It made my head light and empty and filled it instead with the fragrance of midnight flowers and dewed green. “Most call me Luna.” She traced a finger along my shoulder bones and let out an amused chuckle. I slipped into the touch complacently and watched her every step. “Others Artemis, Diana, Hekate,...” She took a step back suggesting infinity with the mere casualness of her nimble lily hand. “I have so many names.” She smirked. “None really matter.”
With a melancholy expression, she slid through the shadows shining bright like the moon, a radiant beauty of silver shackled to the earth and doomed to forever more mourn the loss of flight, her crippled hoary wings hanging limp over her long snow-white gown of Greek folding. She returned my stare with a knowing smile, shrouding in mystery like she knew of some secret by grace of which she held me ensnared. And she did. I stood motionless, powerless, eagerly taking it all in. She threw me a predatory gaze, pleased like a kitten with her catch.
It felt as though there was no roof, no walls, only earth, water and sky overhead, a distant scent of sultry fire smouldering and suddenly the empty chairs were like the forest, the trees from which they came, and the night a deeper, thicker black than I had ever seen before.
She held out her hand. I returned the earring to her. She beamed graciously.
“Tell me, my sun-kissed child, have you ever wondered what it would feel like to catch the moon in your bare hands?” She said in that magnetic tone of hers and beckoned. I hesitated, but to her nodding encouragement, I rushed ahead and stepped eagerly into her embrace, content to perish in her arms. She gave a kiss so powerful it could rip a life away and licked the blood that oozed from my lips and left the taste of magic.
Then in a flash of bluish pure white light, the world had disappeared.
Author’s note
Goal: I trying to master a certain type of writing that’ll be important in later parts of the Svart-cycle, heavy on mood, touch and insinuation, something sultry and at the verge of being passionate.
In fact, I think I’m going to add this one as a dream (that can be attributed both to Darius and Alice) in that cycle (which is why I labelled it ‘episode’), I just don’t know what the best place to fit it in is yet. Most likely after the next episode.
Anecdote about the coming to be of this story
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned!
(no, I’m not that religious, and yes, I just stole that from ‘Coyote Ugly’)
I’ve stolen things before, sometimes for no urgent or apparent reason and often with no or little trace of remorse afterwards, but now it finally happened; for the first time, I committed theft for Art.
It isn’t quite that spectacular, especially not after how I made it sound in the introduction; last night I had some time before the next bus home. There’s an auditory I like to go to at times like that, I don’t really know why, probably out of nostalgia and to look for inspiration (there usually are musicians playing music that I’ve never heard before, and that you never hear on the radio, which is like the Fort Knox of inspiration for me). Anyway, the part of the story up to the picking up of earring, I just plucked out of my own experience. I picked the thing up and put on the table, so the owner would find it there the next day. However, I paced over and over, picked it up again, laid it back, scribbled some notes for the story, picked it up again... It just wouldn’t let me go and I felt like I needed to have it with me for the story. Having lost stuff before myself however, I kind of sympathise with whoever’s missing it. But, when it was time to go and I was at the door, I couldn’t go, so I went back, snatched the thing up and then I actually took it with me. It’s here next to me on the table right now as I’m typing this. I know, I KNOW, I feel horrible...
Anyway, in my defence, I do intend to put it back first thing on Monday though. Or after the book (but that would mean never...). So my intention was just to borrow rather than steal it from the start.
So, let’s make this thing interactive; what’s the worst thing you ever did for Art (or some other important Goal)? I’d love to know, please leave a relevant comment below.
(I’ll try to add a picture of the legendary earring. I suppose it’s rather plain in itself, but still, the way I found it, glimmering in complete darkness and all, it was just gripping)
There was a rumble in the distance, an earthquake or a thunderstorm. It made the ground below them quiver.
“What’s that?” Michael asked panicky.
“I don’t know.” She replied thoughtful, a sense of worry encroaching on her. It would not go away. “Are you going to be okay?” He nodded. She handed him over to another friend to support him. “You guys go straight home, alright?”
She turned around.
“Wait, where are you going?” He pulled her back.
She looked at him briefly and turned in the direction of the Order headquarters. “I have to go somewhere, check on something.” She hoped so desperately that she was wrong.
“Alice!” He cried after her. She ran off, into the darkness.
Just a block away from the club a desolate ghost world began. A blooming part of town just a few hours before, now had more likeness to a post-war wasteland. No lanterns were lit, a few flickered and went out with a pop. It sent shivers down her spine. The streets were empty, the shops deserted. They showed signs of struggle. Trash cans were kicked over, their insides spilled across the sidewalks, a few doors hung wobbly from their hinges, cars were scratched and dented, the shoes of their yanked out drivers left behind on the road. Something crunched. She looked down at the broken glass from cracked windows beneath her feet. Svarts raided here as well.
She strode through the lane, on her guard, the only sounds her own. Her heels were too loud on the pavement and her feet were killing her. She took the shoes off and tiptoed crouching through the streets barefoot – carefully across the debris – clinging to the walls and staying in the shadows. She bit her lip. A squadron of Svart troops passed by, she pressed against the damp side of a corner and held her breath, waiting for them to march on and rubbing a hand over her queasy stomach. She had a bad feeling.
They stamped on in rows of two, blabbering and laughing, the sound of their military boots trapped, echoing back and forth between the high brick walls of the alley. What were they up to? And why hadn’t she met a single knight around? Where were the others?
Once they were gone, she crossed the street and looked around the bend. All clear. Nervously, she broke into a sprint.
There it was, the street. She slowed down, coughing. The air was thick with dust, everything was grey and it was so unusually, so deafeningly quiet and empty. And then she saw it.
With a sigh as if her last breath was squeezed out of her, she sunk to the ground. She’d been right. It had happened. Before her lay the pile of rubble that was once their tall, proud office.
She got up and plummeted headfirst into the smouldering wreckage. A few bits of wall were still upright, their characteristic iron bars sticking out like fish-bones.
“No!” On her knees she clawed into the ruins to look for life, for bodies, anything among the ash and stone, but two arms clenched firmly around her. She pushed him away. “Let go, we have to...”
“Alice, don’t!” A soft voice whispered, resolutely helping her up. “You can’t help them, it’s too late.”
She looked at him, in tears, exasperated. “Uncle, what happened?”
He held her close. “The building, they blew it up, my child.”
She struggled against him to go back, but he wouldn’t let her. “No, Alice, it’s not safe.” There was a distant thudding on the ground, she paid it no mind. “We have to go, they’re coming.”
She looked in the direction of the marching sound. “I don’t care. Some may have survived. We have to get them out.”
He clenched her wrists and made her look at him as he articulated the words carefully. “None survived, Alice.” He pulled his hair with a frustrated wave of his hand. “The collapse was just a cover-up, they gassed them first, there was a leak and...” He puffed. “No one even noticed what was happening.” He scuffed his foot over the concrete, unable to look her in the eyes. “I was just outside in the garden, I saw the whole thing through the glass door. Once it got through to me what was wrong, I rushed in, but it was already too late.”
“No! No!” She moaned, pulling her hair.
“Alice, please, we have to leave.” He said desperately. “If they spot us...”
“No, no, I won’t go.” She wiggled around for a way out of his grasp and back into the rubble, but he tightened his grip. He dragged her back into an alley and clasped his hand firmly over her mouth and his arm around her waist. She struggled like crazy and uttered suppressed screams, but he did not let go.
“Shht!” He whispered in her ear. “Be quiet. They can’t find us. You owe them that.”
She calmed down and nodded, so incredibly tired and so she hung limp in his grasp, watching through dulled eyes with tears pouring down as a dozen of the Svart task force went through the rubbish. They were looking for something, kicking rocks aside like it mattered nothing, be it stone or flesh.
“Captain!” One of them cried. Three of his companions rushed in to help and they shoved boulders until one pulled out the prize from its unbreakable titanium container in the ground where the front desk had been.
“The security system.” She whispered. “What do they want with that?”
Author's note: hi there, hope you're enjoying the novel. I know I sure love writing it. However, there might be slow progression with the project for the next month or so. The last weeks have been terribly busy, next week will be worse and after that, it's examination time again till end of July, and you probably know how that turned out last time... Yes, disastrous. So, be warned. It's very frustrating, because now I have to delay getting Alice to the point and place where it really starts getting exciting, I'm anxious to get there, which results in not rewriting each separate chapter for a hundred times over before posting. Sorry.
She nipped her drink by the bar and watched the others dancing. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but something made her feel very nervous. Maybe it was just that she could not shake the truth. She was the only one around who knew what was going on, what was going to happen, that everyone in the club was really in danger.
She held onto the bar to steady herself against the upcoming faintness and took a deep breath.
“Come on, girl.” She muttered to herself, downing the drink in one gulp. “You can do this. Just think of it as a game.” Looking back, her friend Michael was waving at her, motioning to come back already. She forced her lips into a convincing smile and set her foot forward to make her way back to her group on the dance floor.
Then a loud noise drowned out the music and froze her in her tracks. The sturdy door caved in. A squad of soldiers in all black suits, helmets and machine guns stormed through the gaping hole screaming ‘move, move!’
The DJ stopped playing, people stepped aside. She stumbled back into the bar. The place had a reputation for drug dealing, was it a raid?
They fired five warning shots in the dark, they lit up and echoed loud through the silence. This wasn’t a raid. Glass breaking, people screaming, scattering into the corners, tugging at each other and the horrible sound of so many heavy boots stamping along the floor after them. “Everybody out!” The commander yelled and they went about grabbing at arms, shoulders, elbows, pulling at hair and motioning the guests onward with their guns. Alice saw one haul Michael over the floor, thick with broken glass, by his clothes and rushed to help him.
“You’re hurting him!” She prised the man’s claw open, allowing Michael to scramble up, rubbing his sores. The soldier pushed her away so hard she fell backwards and took off his helmet. As soon as she saw his curiously gleaming eyes, she knew this wasn’t a raid but an invasion. They were Svarts. She gasped.
“Go home!” He spat at her and clutched the next victim. Michael helped her up.
“Michael, you’re limping.”
“It’s nothing, let’s just get out of here.”
Leaning on each other, they got out. The streets were full of Svart troops, going door to door in public places, hurling everybody out.
“What the hell are they doing?” Michael asked her, coughing.
Alice watched them for a moment. As it turned out, they hadn’t paused. Either that, or enough of them were already here in the first place. They had been fooled. “Establishing a curfew.” She said, feeling as if all life had drained out of her. “They’re taking over the city.” She looked up at the horizon. It would be many hours until the break of day. She should go look for the other knights and round them up for battle.
With a sigh, she whispered to herself. “So it begins.”
And that was the day they invaded our world.
(video that has a lot of screaming in it, but parts of it might give you a good idea of what is going on in this episode, so it is kind of appropriate and may have influenced this part of the story in a latent fashion)
