Little bit of a different week this week. I didn’t get an opportunity to write a story this week because I’ve been quite busy, but fortunately for me, my friend Tim was more than willing to share a piece that he wanted to share with you guys. This is Tim’s second story that he’s published through STEED and is a little bit longer than the stories I’ve been pumping out in a weekend.
This will also be my first time reading the story so how it relates to the questions that I’ve put forward as the guiding principals of STEED, I’m not sure. I don’t know if it will match them. Tim said it would, and I trust the guy and I hope you will enjoy the story as I do in this first run through.
Encore-Outré
By Timothy Vincent, narr. Eric Westerlind
•
•
•
“We should wake him.”
“You wake him.”
“He’ll be mad.”
“He’ll be more than mad if it's her and we do nothing.”
“Alarmist.”
“Coward.”
The two figures in conversation turned as one to stare again at the green pool of water sitting in a raised basin. The smaller one, who the other considers an alarmist, pointed at a ripple in the murky surface.
“It draws nearer.”
The other stared at the image in the waters, his hog-nose wrinkled up like a squeezebox, his reflective eyes mirroring the pea-green of the pool.
“It is her,” he whispered, his fingers tightening on his companion’s shoulder.
“We must wake him,” said the first, pulling the other back from the water and freeing her shoulder.
“We must,” agreed the other. “You do it.”
“Why me?”
“I did it last time.”
“We’ll do it together.”
They turned again to the green pool.
“She looks mad.”
•
Across the cobalt sea, she came.
Dressed in overlapping silks of indigo and violet, her red tresses piled and wrapped in thin glimmering gold wire, she came, and with her came a host of calamities.
Empress of Illusion, Ruler of the Purple Isles, The Virgin Priestess, and Mother to a Hundred Souls, she was also the Archetype of Paradox. Her eyes, like her army, were fixed forward and determined. Her skin was the color of anemone.
She sat upon a throne of phoenix down, perched at the edge of the first of three inverted mountains plucked from the Northern wastes and made to serve her crossing. Behind her throne knelt the Colossus, his marbled mass braced against the mountain flooring like another living mountain, his broad back brushing the skyline. Naked, but for the thick bristles of hair along his head, face, and chest, he waited, a force of destruction stemmed only by the will of the one in front of him and the promise to be released.
To the Empress's right, on one mountain bottom, rode a horde of six-legged monsters the size of small horses which she called the hounds.
To her left, dressed in white leather tunics and black horned helms, stood the army of the dead. They carried their ill-tinted scythes of bronze in mottled hands of bone and the wind of their passage whispered along the edges of the curved blades and ruffled their hems and sleeves. But the dead did not notice.
In this way she came, the Purple Empress of Paradox and Illusion, with her host of destruction around her. She came with hard purpose and the means to back it up. She came for the Monarch of the Mountains, her old home.
•
The Monarch of Mountains sat like a giant drum among a field of lesser mountains. The Monarch once held a castle, a castle built by and over a font of tremendous power. The castle was now reduced to dust and ruins, its foundations and stone floor cracked and empty as a discarded beggar’s bowl. The castle was once the home of the Purple Empress.
Below the dust, below the ruins, below the cracked stone flooring and lifeless expanse, sat a hidden chamber. In this chamber lived the last two remaining occupants of the once great Monarch of Mountains.
The first of the two occupants shifted its perch on a basin’s rim and stared into the green water.
“She looks very angry,” he repeated. He hid his squeezebox nose behind a wrinkled wing and peaked above the edge with a bulbous and leery eye.
“Stalling won’t make things better,” replied the other.
The first cast a mournful look to its companion, then stretched its wings and launched into the air, sending a broom crashing to the floor. It raced down a crack in the secret chamber floor and its companion soon followed.
Deep, deep, deep they descended, arriving finally in a chamber dimly lit by glowing stones of amber. In the center of the chamber sat an altar. On the altar, rested a skeleton. The skeleton was covered in a robe of silk, possibly red but difficult to determine under several lifetimes of dust. Brown and brittle, the skeleton; several lost teeth resting along the back of the skull.
“Master,” said one of the flying creatures, bobbing slightly over the altar.
“Master,” echoed his companion.
They drifted closer to the fleshless pate.
“She comes, Master,” whispered the one.
“She comes now,” added the other.
They held taloned-hands and waited.
Time is relative to the given perspective. For the nervous companions, it moved with expected but still alarming alacrity.
The ancient skeleton stirred, a gosling’s shiver, a leaf’s tremble on an otherwise windless, summer day.
The companions looked to each other and then back to the improperly behaving pile of bones.
As dust slid from the spotted skull. As it lifted precariously from its resting space, the lost teeth rattling and tumbling like dice onto the altar. Bracing its browned-bones against the slab, the skeleton rose to a sitting position, dangling its legs over the altar’s edge.
The two potbellied creatures hovered closer, ready to assist. A piece of caked dust fell from the silk robe and erupted in a small cloud against the floor. Finger bones tightened slightly along the slab. The skeleton lowered its feet to the ground and stood, raising more pockets of exploding dust and revealing patches of crimson along the dangling robe.
It—and this was the only pronoun applicable at this time—took a step.
Time ignored its own rules and traditions. In the time it took for the foot to rise, transverse, and settle again, the skull brightened and the bones knit whole and supple.
It took another step, and another. With each step, the form shed time and age from its physical frame. When it neared the far wall, one of the companions flew down and gently turned it around. On the return trip, flesh and hair and lines of detail arose like lichen along a log, the eyes snapped to life in their hollow sockets, and the broad chest rose and fell.
The skeleton became a he, a living he, with a deep philosopher’s brow, high cheeks, and long brown hair touched with gray above the ears and along the edges of the beard.
One of the flying companions, anticipating his need, flew through a crack in the mountain wall and returned a moment later with a crystal goblet of water.
The man turned at the sound of wings. He took the goblet, sipped lightly at the clear water, coughed, and drank more deeply. He handed the empty crystal back, glancing briefly at the accordion-nosed imp, swayed slightly and reached a hand to the slab for support. He waved his worried attendants off.
“How long, Daisy?” he asked. His voice was a carefully turned withered, rotted page from a moldy book in a forgotten library.
Daisy, who had eyes the color of a winter sun, answered as the other went off for another cup of water. “Long.”
“Why did you wake me?” he asked, his voice, like his body growing stronger in time.
“She comes,” answered Daisy.
Daisy’s companion returned with a full goblet, and the man drank long, deep, and slow. When he finished, he put the cup on the altar and closed his eyes. The companions waited respectfully. After a time, he opened them again and nodded to Daisy.
“You told us to fetch you if she approached,” she said.
The man leaned his backside against the slab. He stared at the veins and muscles along the back of his hand.
“She comes alone?” he asked, breaking the silence.
“No,” said Daisy, with a flick of her pointed tail.
“Tell me.”
“She’s pulled three mountains from the earth,” said the other, “and turned them upside down. On each rides a piece of doom. Demon hounds, the dead, and the Colossus.”
The man pursed his thin lips. “All that, heh?”
“She looks very determined, master,” said Daisy.
•
Standing on the plain of the Monarch, he looked around the ruined rumbles of his home and considered the approaching hosts of destruction.
“You see, master?” said Harold, Daisy’s companion.
The man frowned at the approaching mountains. “She does look angry.”
The companions nodded together. “Very angry.”
The master knelt and ran a finger through the dust. Squatting on his haunches, he looked again to the approaching mountains, a line of worry running down the center of his broad forehead. He scratched his beard and looked to his worried companions, stood slowly and brushed the dust from his hands.
Where his foot touched, the decay retreated and life sprang anew. Meticulous lawns and small orchards of orange and pear replaced dust and detritus. More strides brought a pool of crystal blue water next to a trellis covered in purple, blue, and green ivy. Benches of green marble now offered a view of honeysuckle shrubs and pruned Hawthorne trees.
The flying companions noted the transformation and approved on an aesthetic level. Secretly, however, they worried at the lack of more militaristic efforts.
Particularly puzzling to Daisy and Harold were the butterflies. Every other step the master took lifted a cloud of flittering, fragile red, black, blue, silver, green, and purple butterflies. Daisy and Harold flicked their pointed tails nervously at the gentle chaos that flittered around them but said nothing.
The master finally stopped in the front courtyard, just before the newly risen gates that marked the only entrance to the home on the Monarch of Mountains.
“She’s almost here,” whispered Daisy, coming close to her master. She frowned as a yellow butterfly perched on his shoulder.
“How should we prepare, master?” asked Harold, joining them.
The master looked to the butterfly and smiled. “Let’s try civility first.”
Daisy sighed. “You always try to reason with her.”
“It never works,” added Harold, shaking his head.
“Well, maybe this time it will.” He paused, pursed his lips. “But you raise a good point. If things go poorly, you two deal with your cousin.”
Daisy and Harold blinked in rapid symmetry, their eyes growing wide with fear.
“Come now,” said the master encouragingly. “Let us greet our guests.”
With heavy hearts, Daisy and Harold followed him to open the gate.
•
He stood with his hands open in greeting and a smile on his face.
“Milly,” he called. “Welcome.”
Her limpid lavender eyes never left his face.
“I’ve come for what is mine,” she answered.
“The place has missed you,” he said. “I missed you. Come. I will put the kettle on and we can talk.”
“No need for that,” she said. “Turn over the keys and pack your bags. You have five minutes.”
“Milly…” he started.
“You will address me by my proper name. I am Milithxylanorpheous, Empress of Illusion, Ruler of the Purple Isles, The Virgin Priestess and rightful owner of this Keep.”
The man sighed. “What happened to us, Milly?”
“Time happened to us, Lucian. Time and philandering. It doesn’t matter. What’s mine is mine.”
“This is about that Dryad from the Lonely Forest, isn’t it? I told you, nothing happened.”
For just a moment, Milly’s limpid eyes grew hot. “Nothing happened? Do you take me for an idiot, Lucian?”
A moment later, the Empress regained herself. She stood taller, looked down the length of her fine nose, and said with a sniff, “Why should I care if you want to make a fool of yourself with some woodland tart? I am the Empress of Illusion, Ruler of the Purple Isles, The Virgin Priestess…”
“And mother to our children,” interrupted Lucian. “Neat trick that, for a virgin. For the record, we only had four, Mother to a Hundred Souls. That leaves a lot of unaccounted foolishness on your part, as well.”
“How dare you.”
“I’m just saying, don’t kick stones near the good crystal.”
“Enough! No more talk. If you won’t leave, then I will make you leave. Never say I didn’t give you a chance.”
She lifted her hand and pointed to the mountain of hounds now touching the edge of the Monarch, keeping one eye on Lucian standing in the courtyard. For a moment, she hesitated, waiting for his reaction. When none was forthcoming, she cut the air with her hand and sent the horde forward.
Released, the beasts of Hell raced across the intervening distance. As the front of the pack drew close, Lucian pursed his lips and called the butterflies. From every patch of muted grass, tree, and shrub, a flying splendor of light and color took wing.
The two forces came together in a collision of extremes: soft wing met hard claw; breathless flutter answering howling fury. The point of impact was as the kiss of a summer breeze against the hard bite of winter. With sheer numbers, the butterflies blinded the eyes of their enemy, choked open jaws, and made the ground slippery with their ruined dead, making the courtyard a palette of running reds, blues, greens, purple, and silver.
When it was over, a gory hill of twitching forms covered the field. Thousands of half wings fluttered in slow time upon a mound of red-fur, fang, and claw. Lucian looked over the mess and sighed. With a gesture, he called his companions closer.
“Clear that away,” he said.
Harold and Daisy raced forward. In surprisingly short order, the pile of dead began to disappear.
Lucian watched Milly as they worked. Across the distance, their eyes met. She pursed her lips and called on the army of the dead. That mountain bridged the gap and the dead, moving as one, stepped toward the gate.
Lucian, muttering under his breath, made a series of slow, arcane gestures, Milly watching him close.
When the vanguard of the dead reached the threshold of the gate, time again reversed its course and life returned to the dead, just as it had Lucian. Bone inherited flesh, flesh became living, and each knew awareness. The army of the dead, passing through the gates, became the army of the living.
“Harry,” said Lucian to the one of the men in front, now blinking in the light of the sun.
The other removed his helm and ran a hand through thick blonde hair. He stared around him as if waking from a dream.
“Am I alive?” he asked.
“You are.”
“How is this possible?” asked another man, touching his warm cheeks and meeting Lucian’s gaze with his bright eyes.
Lucian shrugged. “Does it matter, Frank? Welcome home.”
Harry turned to Frank with a raised eyebrow. A moment later they dropped their blades of bone and clasped each other with shouts of laughter. The courtyard erupted as the rest of the army joined in the celebration.
Lucian, who understood their joy, said nothing. He glanced to the Queen. She watched the revelry with clenched fists and a tight mouth.
Seeing the direction of Lucian’s gaze, Harry looked around. He noted the Queen and the giant form of the Colossus behind her, waved his men to silence.
“Trouble, my lord?” he asked.
“A family spat, Harry. Nothing to concern yourself with.”
Harry retrieved his sword, his eyes still fixed on the looming Colossus. “Are you sure, my lord?”
Lucian also looked to the Queen and the Colossus. “I am. You and your men can make yourselves comfortable in the bailey. I believe there are a few casks of that Ole Wipplepounder Ale still left in the cellar. With any luck, I’ll soon join you.”
The army retreated to the bailey and soon sounds of a celebration could be heard behind its stout walls.
Lucian turned back to Milly with a smile.
“Very clever,” she said.
“Foolish of you to bring the old staff, Milly.”
“They always liked you best,” she admitted with a sigh.
“You must have spent a long time gathering the men. They all died natural deaths I hope.”
She blinked slowly. “Define natural.”
Lucian looked down and shook his head.
“I’ve seen you do worse,” she said, her voice rising defensively.
Lucian considered this and shrugged.
The Queen sniffed.
“So,” she said, “this is how you’ve spent your time, learning how to conjure butterflies and turn back death. I’ll admit, the latter is impressive. But tell me, Lucian, did you leave any of the Monarch’s resources for the Colossus?”
Lucian glanced behind her and chewed his lip. “Darling,” he said, slowly returning his gaze to her and putting on a brave face, “let us put the bitter past behind us. The boys are home, thanks to you, and our house is once again in order. Let us join in the song and feast like of old. You remember? They were not all bad days.”
Milly’s eyes grew reflective. “No, not all.”
“Did I not love you? Did we not dance until the sun rose above the Monarch?”
“You could be charming when you wanted to,” she admitted with a small smile.
“Then come, my love, take my hand and all will be as it once was.”
For a moment, her heart wavered. For a moment, Milly considered the hand offered across the gateway, her eyes shining in the memory of happier times.
Then a shifting cloud sent the shadow of the Colossus across the Mistress of Illusion on her feathered throne. She shivered in the sudden chill and drew a deep breath, her eyes drawing close and glaring at Lucian.
“I won’t be swayed, Lucian,” she said.
“Pity,” he muttered.
With a gesture the Queen released the Colossus.
Lucian turned to his two servants with a grimace. “Well, I think that’s your cue.”
Daisy squealed. Harold cowered.
“Good luck!” shouted Lucian over his shoulder, running for the bailey.
The imps hugged one another briefly, then set their faces and raced toward the gate.
In the bailey, the now-living army raised a cheer.
The few remaining butterflies and birds hurriedly sought the shelter of tree, bush, and building.
The giant, standing at full height, a tower of destruction and fury, stepped over his Queen and onto the Monarch. He raised his fists like stones above the gates, his terrible brow a mask of fevered, merciless ruin.
The butterflies cowered in the shadow. Cheers died in suddenly tight throats in the bailey. Everywhere the dark shadow of the Colossus fell and terror filled the air.
The fist, like a hill rose… and stopped. The terrible head shook once, twice, then ducked. The deadly fist opened, the mighty arms waved in the air, that deep, ugly maw split to cry in frustration and pain.
The cousins were reunited.
Daisy and Harold darted like thunder flies, avoiding the slapping hands, settling briefly to tickle inner ears, pull at enormous nose hairs, and worry the sweat-filled brow. The Colossus raged, putting holes in the surrounding wall with boulder-sized toes, moving like a drunken calamity along the Monarch walls and rending the air with his roars. The Queen of Paradox retreated with her upside-down mountain, lest he bring those same heavy feet on her head.
Daisy bit the corner of a blood-filled eye; Harold stung the tender spot at the tip of the spine’s end.
Half-blinded with rage, the giant swatted uselessly against the air and his own body, knocking what little senses he had from his granite-filled head and tumbling off the Monarch’s edge with a wail.
A moment later an implosion, like the clap of thunder across a lonely dale, rolled from the base of the Monarch.
All was silent for a time.
Milly, Illusion’s Royal Mistress, raced to the edge of her mountain, her expression a mix of worry and frustration.
A dark shadow rose from the depths. The Colossus stood, feeling the tender parts of head and rump with sausage fingers and sandpaper palms.
Then, with renewed and devious intent, the imps struck again.
With a cry, their larger cousin broke.
Turning from the Keep, he raced across the sand and hills, seeking the sheltering waters of the sea, and plunging into the depths like a millstone.
A great cheer went up in the bailey.
The butterflies took wing.
The sun found its way out of the clouds, the air grew clean and full of soft spring birdsong.
•
“Well done,” said Lucian to the two returning heroes.
Daisy sank to the cool grass of the garden and Harold rubbed his knobby brow. “Not much chance we’re invited for holidays next year,” he mumbled.
All three turned as a tall shadow fell at their feet.
“Well,” said Milly with a bitter sigh. “It appears you have won again, Lucian. Congratulations.” She looked to Daisy and Harold nestled against one another. “Foiled by the house pets. Who could imagine?”
“To be fair,” said Lucian, “they have their papers.”
She met his eyes with a grim frown.
“Come, dear,” said Lucian, reaching across to take her hand. “All is not lost. Say you will stay, if only for a brief time, just to see how it goes.”
Milly looked to the hand holding her own. “You trust me to share the same roof with you, even now?”
“I do.”
A butterfly settled on Milly’s hand, a living red sapphire against the purple skin.
“I might,” she said slowly, gently blowing the butterfly away. “For a time. Just to see how it goes.”
“My love.”
She smiled, but it soon fell away as she met his eyes. “And when our heart turns, as you also know they will, Lucian, what then?”
He opened his mouth to speak, then stopped. He looked to the Queen of Illusions floating mountains, glanced to his spent servants, and listened for a time to the army, once dead, now living, celebrating in the bailey.
“Ours was always an affair of extremes,” he said finally, with a shrug. “It gives life a bit of spice, don’t you think?”
She considered this for a time with hooded-eyes, then smiled.
So it was that the Empress of Illusion, Ruler of the Purple Isles, The Virgin Priestess and Mother to a Hundred Souls (she was also the Archetype of Paradox), came to stay again for a time on the Monarch of Mountains.
The two faithful servants were given a promotion and a new home in the livery stalls. These, they were told, were private apartments, so that’s what called them.
The army of now living resumed its residence and role as keepers of the Queen and King of the Monarch. With the Queen’s permission, Lucian soon called forth the Sylvan warriors so the army of the dead, now living, would not be lonely.
The courtyard gardens were repaired and improved and were noted for their butterflies.
Peace and love, good fires, strong drink, and hearty laughter were the watchwords, and no one laughed more sweetly than the Queen.
Of course, peace is as relative as time, and the human heart a fickle engine. Fire must always burn, and some memories do not fade.
The Dryad of the Lonely Forest is, by almost all accounts, most beautiful, and not quickly forgotten.
•
•
•
Some quiet thoughts after reading Tim’s piece.
The visual effect of everything was startling. Upside down mountains. The Colossus. Reminds me very much of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds’ Unearthed Man [actually: ‘God Warrior’], the butterflies and the hounds coming into one another and turning into a field of fur and spent wings. There’s a mythic quality to everything that’s impossible to ignore but coupled with a very … modern? air. There’s something like a Terry Pratchett to the character’s engagement with one another.
I would recommend a film if this suited you, Only Lovers Left Alive is a vampire story set in Algiers? and Detroit, I believe. And it tells the story of two lovers who have been alive for thousands of years and can’t, at this point in that long of a relationship, live with one another any longer. And, who are fundamentally more powerful than the world around them and sort-of serve up an almost comedic engagement in which they also seem to be … the way that they act is just an exaggerated version of the way that we already act with such a short time in relationships, the bickering and the melancholy. I think Tim’s piece fits that mold neatly in that despite being powerful sorcerers who can summon clouds of butterflies or bring the dead back to life, these two have a small dispute, a small lovers dispute over a tryst, we assume
Tim did a very nice job of bringing it back in the end because so much of the readers tension, so much of my tension, really revolved around whether or not I believe that Milly could be brought back into the monarch of mountains. she’s brought out this entire army; of the dead; she’s lifted this Atlassian Colossus character who shakes the earth as he walks, and these hell hounds, and is more or less turned aside and then brought back into the home and I think the saving moment for Tim’s story, because I was doubtful about whether I believed that, was that the Dryad was not forgotten. We always, or I always, at least as a reader, didn’t really feel like Milly was doing more than lip service to Lucian’s efforts at convincing her that after all this time that he was good for her in some way.
What do you think?