Little pressed for time today (the prompt appeared to be about half an hour late, which is long enough for me to have to start doing other things), so no real introduction.
Flight The three soldiers were sharing the last cigarette, found lost and tattered at the bottom of a pocket they were sure they'd already searched. Tiny fragments of tobacco slipped free from the ragged paper casing and fell to the ground, but the main cigarette burned brightly and fragrantly, and they cherished it all the more for being certainly the last one. They trudged across a flatter landscape now, heading towards a dark smudge on the horizon that should be the village of Narol. A thin line of silver off to their left, probably an hour's walk, should be the Tanew river, and there were birds circling over it. "Feels like running away," said one of the soldiers, the Polish words getting pulled apart by the wind almost before they reached his comrades ears. "Deserting," agreed the soldier on the far right. "Is not flight," said the solider in the middle, their de facto leader. "Is practical. One live soldier fights better than ten dead." "Philosopher...," murmured the right-most soldier. "Have you been reading books again, Jakov?" "I read a book once," said the left-most soldier. "Did it have lots of pictures?" "Those are the magazines, brother!" Laughter rang out, guttural and too brief. "Books are for officers," said Jakov quietly, and they let the matter drop. Narol was a little closer, but their feet still ached.
Memnith walked unhurriedly, but with his attention focused on the clouds of insects, to a patch of rock that looked no different to any other, but was where the entrance to the Enclave was. In theory the Power allowed you to enter and exit wherever you wanted, but the theory that said that was complicated and difficult and in practice mages used the simplest solutions and the easiest cases unless absolutely necessary. In London the easiest place to arrive and depart was occupied by Clock Tower, the building that housed the enormous bell called Big Ben. This was deliberate: William IV had ordered the tower constructed there to try and interrupt what he perceived as the constant, and dangerous, flow of mages from the continent to the island. This meant that anyone now travelling to London via the Power had to arrive elsewhere and had had the side-effect of guaranteeing that only mages with a certain minimum skill ever arrived that way. Memnith was certainly capable of opening a gate back to London as he chose, but any mistakes would most likely lead to him arriving in Clock Tower... and inside a complicated, lethal machine that incidentally told the time. As the insects swarmed overhead, creating sinuous black shapes in their pattern of flight, he gently gripped the Power and stepped a half-step across an invisible threshold. Now he was insubstantial in the Enclave and in his own office in London, but able to see both.
Around a circle of standing stones that looked like people stretched to impossible lengths and thinness, over which a brilliant blue sky poured down sunlight, the corpses of old men stirred slowly as the Power infiltrated them and reanimated them.
2 comments:
Little pressed for time today (the prompt appeared to be about half an hour late, which is long enough for me to have to start doing other things), so no real introduction.
Flight
The three soldiers were sharing the last cigarette, found lost and tattered at the bottom of a pocket they were sure they'd already searched. Tiny fragments of tobacco slipped free from the ragged paper casing and fell to the ground, but the main cigarette burned brightly and fragrantly, and they cherished it all the more for being certainly the last one. They trudged across a flatter landscape now, heading towards a dark smudge on the horizon that should be the village of Narol. A thin line of silver off to their left, probably an hour's walk, should be the Tanew river, and there were birds circling over it.
"Feels like running away," said one of the soldiers, the Polish words getting pulled apart by the wind almost before they reached his comrades ears.
"Deserting," agreed the soldier on the far right.
"Is not flight," said the solider in the middle, their de facto leader. "Is practical. One live soldier fights better than ten dead."
"Philosopher...," murmured the right-most soldier. "Have you been reading books again, Jakov?"
"I read a book once," said the left-most soldier.
"Did it have lots of pictures?"
"Those are the magazines, brother!"
Laughter rang out, guttural and too brief.
"Books are for officers," said Jakov quietly, and they let the matter drop. Narol was a little closer, but their feet still ached.
Memnith walked unhurriedly, but with his attention focused on the clouds of insects, to a patch of rock that looked no different to any other, but was where the entrance to the Enclave was. In theory the Power allowed you to enter and exit wherever you wanted, but the theory that said that was complicated and difficult and in practice mages used the simplest solutions and the easiest cases unless absolutely necessary. In London the easiest place to arrive and depart was occupied by Clock Tower, the building that housed the enormous bell called Big Ben. This was deliberate: William IV had ordered the tower constructed there to try and interrupt what he perceived as the constant, and dangerous, flow of mages from the continent to the island. This meant that anyone now travelling to London via the Power had to arrive elsewhere and had had the side-effect of guaranteeing that only mages with a certain minimum skill ever arrived that way. Memnith was certainly capable of opening a gate back to London as he chose, but any mistakes would most likely lead to him arriving in Clock Tower... and inside a complicated, lethal machine that incidentally told the time.
As the insects swarmed overhead, creating sinuous black shapes in their pattern of flight, he gently gripped the Power and stepped a half-step across an invisible threshold. Now he was insubstantial in the Enclave and in his own office in London, but able to see both.
Around a circle of standing stones that looked like people stretched to impossible lengths and thinness, over which a brilliant blue sky poured down sunlight, the corpses of old men stirred slowly as the Power infiltrated them and reanimated them.
Greg - yeah, I was running behind a bit. Apologies!
Gah. You keep leading me on and on with this tale. And I can never seem to get enough of it. I find it endlessly fascinating.
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