The Crown of Weeds

B0RU

Hello!

I just joined boards to recieve and give some feedback on written works. I've written two books, although I haven't passed them out to anyone yet for feedback or tried to do anything with them just yet. One is literary fiction and the other is sci-fi/fantasy. This is the sci-fi/fantasy one. I know, I know, its such a stereotypical genre for an amateur to be writing in but give it a chance!

This is the first chapter (a prologue), a sort of introduction to the man that is the product of the first 200 pages of the book.

Thanks,
Looking forward to hearing from you and reading your works,
Dave

Prologue
The Shadows and the House with the Dead Light
480 AC (480 years after the Cataclysm)

A vagrant coughed in an alleyway at the edge of the known world.

A tendril of smoke rose from the embers of his barrel fire. Formless, it crept and wound its way upwards, snaking along the cracks in the wind blasted stone. High above the shivering vagrant, the plumes seeped through a shattered, blackened window pane.

Arna peered out through this window from inside. He scanned the view, his hard, glacial blue eyes observing intently; he took in the vagrant in his sphere of light, the buildings, the small sounds that came together to create nature’s cacophony…The wind carried no whisper or scent of a threat or disturbance. The only sounds were the creaking of the tin roofs and the scuttling of small, unseen animals and insects along the dusty road.

Grotty, ashen stains spattered across the webbed skeleton of glass and marred his view, but this posed little problem for a man who knew what he was looking for. Elegantly poised and regally erect, he pushed the long black hair that hung in vines across his sharp features back, fastening it into a pony tail using a length of knotted leather.

The fact that the glass hadn’t eroded or been removed was astounding – he hadn’t seen glass in years.

The wisp of smoke slipped through the cracks in the pane. It slithered across the floor, winding and purposeful, its staccato jerking and changes of direction appearing to be inexorably leading towards Arna’s mud caked riding boots.

A raven darted a beady eye around the room in which he stood, placid on its perch atop the window sill and unperturbed by Arna’s presence; the raven's attention was focused on something else.

The room was an ancient murder scene.

The shadow of a woman, the silhouette pointed in the opposite direction to Arna, was cast onto the wall beside him. It had no apparent origin in the small chamber. Legends told of old weapons before the cataclysm that could do such things – when used, they burned the image of the murdered onto the backdrop, their final pose blasted into the stone, the wallpaper, the bark of a tree… This female silhouette was trapped in a disappointingly menial pose, as if she had been taken unawares. Arna decided that it was probably the work of bandits; looting and killing in their fervour in the last desperate years before the imminent cataclysm devoured the earth. Although they had killed her, she and her mark had outlived the memory of her murderers by a millennium. Arna smirked. The irony of the murdered outliving the murderer appealed to him. It recalled some sense of universal justice.

Darkness descended like a translucent weight outside the chamber and cast her great veil over the village. It depressed the light and encroached upon the sparse dots of luminescence along the dirt road that ran through the last outpost. The barrel fire below created one such sputtering, spherical haven, into which the night pressed with a sinister density. It pressed upon the air itself, which stood stagnant and murky in its grasp.

The raven burst on the sill burst into flight unexpectedly. Arna flinched back from the sudden movement and cursed under his breath. As it rose in flight, it scanned the ground below; the outpost spread out haphazardly along the sides of the dirt track. The stone building in which Arna stood seemed to be the habitation's epicentre. The village looked like it had been flung at the earth from the heavens and been left exactly as it had fallen; broken, skeletal buildings seeped out from the core with a hideous asymmetry.

It was much older than the rest of the construction and the only one with two stories, a relic from an era long forgotten. There was little history here beyond hearsay, as with everywhere else.

The building in which he stood was covered in a thick curtain of dead Ivy, draped heavily over the walls as if the land was struggling to reclaim a violation of nature It was much older than the rest of the construction and towered above them, a commanding relic from an era long forgotten. The structure was cylindrical, tall and strong; Arna had never seen its likeness before he reached the last outpost but he had seen this scenario before; settlements gathered and spread like a pestilent growth around the few remaining skeletons and relics of the old world in desperation; maybe the stragglers believed that if a relic could have survived the shattering of the earth, that place could withstand further upheaval.

Inside, a spiral staircase rose up to another floor in the middle of the chamber. There was a huge device up there which no longer worked, covered in an inches thick, choking layer of dust that had lain undisturbed for centuries. It appeared to be a light which would have shone out onto the silt sea or whatever lay there before the cataclysm. He had no idea what it was for and frankly, it unnerved him. He glanced at the stairs and quickly returned his gaze to the window. In the absence of other stimulus, Arna had become an excellent observer.

The other buildings and constructions in the town were architectural monstrosities wrought from battered, uneven wood and tin. None seemed to stay here long enough to take root or develop the place. Arna had come across such places in the outland; there were no farms, no merchants and few signs of activity. No soul. Men came and went, their business unknown and remaining unasked.

As the raven rose higher, it could be seen that the village was situated at the end of a long dirt track that etched its way through a barren landscape. The road wound off into the horizon with little deviation or change in the bleak, arid surroundings; the earthen stroke of the road being the sole object cleaving the area's monotony. This skeletal outpost stood far in the south on the maw of the abyss, the last bastion and trace of civilisation before conditions grew so harsh that none could inhabit it.

Arna turned on his heel and made to walk back into the room. His worn leather riding boot stopped before it reached the floor. It hung in mid air for a moment, then retracted to its original position as Arna turned back.

A dog was loping into the outpost, its patched hide shimmering sickly as the glow from the vagrant's fire swept across it and crosshatched its form in morbid, flickering shadow. Arna knew all too well what it meant. He read far much into the occurrence. The mongrel was a reminder of a hunt he had forgotten; there was no other reason for such a creature and its inevitably following masters to travel to the end of the line. He had become lazy. It had been three years since he had last encountered anything to suggest the lands further north actively remembered his existence. He automatically flicked into alertness, readiness. His mind made snap decisions and paranoid calculations.

He turned sharply and walked down the spiral staircase, standing beside the exit until the dog was nearly outside.

There was a sign on the wall beside his head on the inside of the door, barely readable through a dense layer of grime. Not that it mattered; it was ancient, written in one of the forgotten tongues. There weren’t more than a handful of people in the land that could decipher the characters, and most of those were part of that damnable religion within the castle. Poking through the dust on a patch that had been wiped more recently than the rest were a few words which had been purposely exposed, although the curious hand could have disturbed the sign over three hundred years ago judging by the accumulation of dust; it was less thick in this patch certainly, but still impressively deep and aged. The arrangement of the characters was nonsensical, a riddle for someone else to crack. The glyphs were:

“Por el poder otorgado por el gobienro de Espana”

Moments later, Arna’s silhouette melted from the shadow of the doorway into the street. A rat scurried out across the track in front of him, distracting the dog for long enough for Arna to move.

He lunged with violent swiftness - The snapping of the dog's neck was accompanied by a whimper, which was carried softly toward the bleak south. Arna laid the dog on the ground and rose fluidly. He strode forward with confidence, his pace consistent.

The form and shape of a long, thin curved sword hung at his waist. His silhouette was tall, slender, graceful. The vagrant scuttled back into the recesses of the alley as he passed, seeking to make himself invisible and unobtrusive. Arna stalked silently down the track to the end of the village, unconcerned about the vagrant’s presence; fear and apprehension were normal welcomes for him since he dealt his first killing blow and escaped from a four year hell. Some outward change must have reflected this inner death. Some devil must have carved his features anew; deeper, destitute, more malignant. His thoughts were still firmly rooted in the myriad futures possible in the next ten minutes.

He melted back into the shadows underneath an overhanging tin roof at the edge of the outpost, his form again consumed by the opaque, lightless barrier.

A lurid calm hung over the village for drawn out moments, the creaking and yawning of the tin roofs the jarring and sole disturbance. The trapping loop of silence was finally broken by the distant crunch of boots along the track outside the settlement. The crunching felt like it was approaching for ever; sound travelled far over the still, arid plain.

Eventually, through the darkness he discerned three men approaching. Their purpose and profession obvious from their carriage and gait as they came closer - soldiers of fortune from the lands further North, beyond doubt. Their journey this far south could have but one purpose, of which Arna was all too aware. The familiar and feverish feeling of being hunted coursed through his veins, his heart beating rapidly in his chest as he waited to add this further tribulation to a multitude already overcome.

Arna waited; a silent sentinel in the dark as the three soldiers approached. They marched into the village and headed directly for the tall, cylindrical tower with the dead light and the shape of the dogs corpse that adorned the entryway like a door mat. They took little care in checking the surrounding buildings or alleyways for danger. He followed their movements as they walked past his concealed nook, so close to the soldier’s faces that they could almost feel his breath. The soldiers ambled onwards, their heads panning and scanning from side to side as they moved towards the building Arna had inhabited until moments before. Their pace quickened as they recognised the static lump of their dead hound.

They are far from Veterans, Arna mused, as he watched them proceed carelessly into the village. Bounty Hunters, he thought. Greedy and careless. When the hunters were a number of paces past the first assortment of tin structures, he stepped forward, a shadow leaking from a shadow. They are certainly no Jericho.

He quietly covered the distance between himself and the warriors in an instant, pivoting with the sword outstretched in his left hand at shoulder height as he closed his approach. The first hunter's head was sheared cleanly from his body, falling as Arna completed his rotation. The thud of his body connecting with the dirt was the first alarm that the remaining men were given. He reversed the spinning motion and stepped back as the second hunter turned and the third began to thrust a blade towards his chest, which he dextrously avoided. He clasped the hilt in both hands and cleaved the second opponent’s features at the zenith of a large arc. The guard screamed and fell to the ground clutching his face and twitching, sickening white hot agony gripping him and negating all his senses. Arna parried a further thrust from the remaining figure and ran the blade along the wrist of his sword hand. The man’s strength was instantly drained as his arms began to quiver. He was easily put down as Arna stretched forward and stabbed him in the throat, a painter adding the final stroke to his masterpiece. Arna turned and looked for further signs of guards approaching, knowing his cut to be fatal without needing to see the man fall. Screams of rage became choked and replaced with a gurgling murmur as the last obstacle fell beside his comrades.

The vagrant stared wild-eyed from the alley as Arna calmly cleaned the blade on one of the hunter’s waist coats and re-sheathed it with expert precision. He searched the corpses efficiently, discarding everything except an ornate dagger, a pair of leather gloves and a scroll. The other skulking, degenerate inhabitants of the outpost would pick the corpses dry with the coming of dawn.

Without missing a step, he stalked slowly back towards the tall building with the dead light, its gnarled wooden door panels long rotten and dissolved. As Arna came within reach of the threshold, the shadows seemed to emerge from the recesses. They appeared to reach out to him like a groping liquid from the interior and envelop him as he strode onward past its cracked steps, towards the lip of the cliff at the edge of the siltsea.

The raven alighted from atop a tin roof and swooped down to land beside a veritable banquet, kindly left behind by the man of shadow.

Arna sat down on the brink of the cliff and examined the dagger. He sniggered roughly to himself; it was undoubtedly Arken steel, the work of his old tribe, the work of his father’s people. He put it away quickly; it hurt him to think of those times, those places…the memories sliced into the walls of his reserves with a keenness similar to that of the Arken dagger.

He rolled open the scroll and cursed under his breath; it was just as he expected. The letter he held in his hand was a reward poster for him, complete with a crude likeness of Arna and a brief description. No name or other details were given, which provided him with a sliver of optimism. His pursuers didn’t want anyone to know his identity as desperately as he wanted to keep the secret himself. There were two signatures at the bottom of the scroll, condoning his murder in return for favour and material gain. The first signature was that of the Arch Prelate Kest, which he had expected. The old bastard would hopefully die along his quest to find him. The second signature was a hammering surprise, however. It bore the surname of Lyall.

I must have missed one of those bastards. ****.

He rolled up the scroll and flung in into the silt sea hundreds of feet below. His father had once told him that there used to be a great body of water here before the cataclysm. Now it was a deadly waste, a pit of wet and bubbling silt that stretched forever. It was reputed to be as deep as it was wide but no one was brave or stupid enough to find out. He had never even seen a bird fly over the silt sea. He wasn’t a superstitious man but even sitting here in its glare, he felt the place to be cursed. This was truly the edge of the known world. His father had said that it had once been called the Mediterranean; a great, unimaginable body of water like a thousand rivers put together side by side.

As Aran thought of his father and his tall tales, he was flung back to their last days together, to the beginning of everything – it had all begun more than ten years ago and conjuring up the vivid memories of his history made him wish he had died during that fateful raid.