A Hook, Overheard.

This is an elderly piece, constructed in 1992 or thereabouts. With it and others like it, I had a weak, weak plan for a compendium novel, or some kind of framed collection. I re-read it again recently and it showed some energy, but terrible, terrible execution. This snippet in itself is possibly the best executed, but still what’s missing is the visual imagery of the setting and the narrator that would be necessary to make it of further value.

© skrblr 2009

Umbhel! Fair jewel of dawn! An oasis of unconcern in a desert of parched self-interest. Let me take you there, though some may find the way unpleasant. If we start from here, this pit of a city, and if we go forth through the Ragged Gate we must journey for a matter of twelve turns before we come to the blasted land that marks the the start of the IronWorms domain.  

Uggghh, if you could hear that place, hot weaponrock screaming as it is tortured by huge mostrosities shaped from the same stuff, if you could smell it, as the peaked heaps of rotten matter ooze rainbows into the poisoned earth, if you could see it, with a ochre fog overlaying all, horrendously backlit with the vicious red fires of Urrn’s wrath, the biting blue flames of Grreii’s venom. Worst, worst of all, if you could fsllaan it, it is lanced through with skeins of skyparts, flying, bouncing, invading everything. Errhh, it makes me shudder to think of it.

Ummph, yes, Umbhel. On reaching the blasted place, we must turn towards the lightdown way until we find a Gate, no, not the little wooden things you have to keep the straallg out of your garden, this is made from Rock! And Huge! I don’t reckon myself to be small for my age and fifty of me could have walked abreast through this Gate! In appearance it is very plain, being made from that red-blue rock that you can find in the area of Denphod, although how it got there is a mystery. The shape is that of a square, and there are runes deep-graven about the Gate entrance on one side. This is the entry side. Walk in through here. Be careful of what you’re carrying. Giirtt tried to bring through a good luck piece that he had found in a ruin on one of the planets that the forked people used to own.  The skyparts were very angry on that world, and I hypothesised this was because the device he found held the skyparts’ companions in thrall. When we walked through the Gate, there was a brief period of wandering, where my senses appeared to change and move in a most unusual way, although I could feel nothing at all. I kept walking. Then I was somewhere else. I waited for Giirtt. He appeared, but he was wrong, his parts were not the same. As I perceived him, his parts…turned…and he was not there. So you can say that the gate is guarded, or there is at least something that can perceive your passage through it.

More beer, please.

Now I was in a place that felt very different, there was noise, and a different smell, and it was bright. The sky-light was not the same as it was before the Gate, so I assumed I had moved greatly in space. I was not aware of my removal in time.

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