Hello, this is a new feature I've been meaning to implement for some time, a regular update to my blog. I realize starting a regular blog again during one of the busiest seasons of my life heretofore might not be the best idea, but I think we can make it work.
I'm hoping to post something different every week. It might be a bit of fiction, a poem, an essay, etc. More often than not it'll probably be a school assignment. For now though, I thought I'd start with the first chapter of my new book Sovereign Night. This is a story eleven years in the making. I'm quite excited about it, but I've been working in a vacuum. No one else has read it yet. There are three narrators, and below I present to you the first chapter by the first narrator.
Sovereign Night
Chapter One:
Words For Binding
☞Narrated by Luke Orimar
In my dreams, I’m always dying.
It’s not just a recurring nightmare. It’s a haunting, and it’s
always different. I’ve been beheaded, drawn and quartered, hung, skewered, even
blown up. On the night that set all nights in motion, I saw myself being
poisoned.
There were four of us sitting around a table. My younger siblings,
Logen and Lorelai, and a man I could not recognize. His face was blurry somehow,
even though the rest of him looked perfectly normal. In the dream, there were
four tall, slender silver cups on the table before the stranger. He held one
out to Lorelai, and she drank it before I could stop her. The little girl’s
face turned blurry, and she dropped dead instantly.
When he held out a second cup to Logen, I snatched it from his
hands. Without knowing why I was doing what I was doing, I tipped it back to
down it myself. The gleaming edge of the vessel seemed to grow upward, black
liquid at the bottom suddenly as broad as an ocean. It swallowed me up, sending
me tumbling into darkness.
I awoke with a thump on the floor, legs still up in my bed,
awkwardly tangled in the covers. Sleepy and absentminded, I freed myself from
the blanket and began to straighten out my bedclothes.
This dream was different. That change was all I could think about.
After six years, the pattern to my dreams had become pretty
obvious. I was so used to the nightmares, they did not even bother me anymore.
But tonight was different. I was not the only one who’d died. I’d never seen
anyone else come to even the slightest harm before.
The prospect of sleep was already unlikely, and by the time I laid
down again, on top of my covers, it was even more remote. Today, assuming it
was past midnight, would be my shield day, as well as my seventeenth birthday.
Every knight forges a weapon on his thirteenth birthday, when he
begins advanced training. He’s given a shield on his seventeenth, when he
becomes a full-fledged soldier. Your shield is made for you, by your
instructors. A shield generally reflects the kind of man you’ve been, and how
hard you have worked.
Today would be a terribly hard day. Most of the time, your parents
attended your shield ceremony, but both of mine had been dead for a little over
six years. Lorelai and Logen were all the family I had. Giving up on sleep, I decided to go ahead and get up. I struck a
match against one of my boots, lighting a candle on the bureau beside my bed.
It’s cold,
I
thought as I put my feet to the icy hardwood floor The notion interrupted my
musings quite suddenly. It wasn’t just a little brisk, like any summer night.
This was a deep and wintry chill, almost bitter. In June? June in Tarn was never this cold, not in this part of
the world anyway.
And then the horror struck me.
My sword was gone.
I put it in the same place every night, leaned up carefully
against my bedside table where it was easy to reach. Call it a result of my
training, or my cautious mind, but I had to have it ready. The empty scabbard
was there, the blade gone. I picked up the sheath and turned it around in my
hands, momentarily stunned.
It could only mean one thing. Someone had stolen it. A deep sense
of dread came over me as I looked at that table. I was almost struck stupid by
the lack. Who would do such a thing?
I snapped into action, bursting from my room out into the
courtyard around which the barracks were arranged. My heart pounded heavily as
I fumbled with the doorknob. Something was wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on
it yet, but something was horribly wrong.
Before I could take in anything more than my breath misting in the
cold night air, I found myself swept off my feet, bowled over by a little boy.
I was about to curse at him, but I found I could not recall his name, so I
pushed him away impatiently and stood, putting my palms to the guardrail. My
room was on the third and highest floor, so I should have had a pretty good
view if the thief was still nearby.
Sure enough, I did not have to look for long.
Illuminated
in harsh white moonlight a cloaked shadow stood just twenty feet below. Pinned
by some mysterious force, my sister knelt before him. I made to scream, but the
words died in my throat. As I watched helplessly, my blade flashed through the
air and pierced her abdomen. Once again I tried to yell, but my throat was
sealed, to where I could barely breathe.
Finally
finding my legs, I raced down the nearest stairs, a choked off sob slipping
from my lips. I leaped down the steps five at a time, and took the final flight
in one go, nearly breaking my ankles. The murderous shadow was at the gate.
Escaping.
I had two
options. I could go to my sister, or I could pursue him.
Yet there
were no real options.
Nothing in me could run while my sister lay
bleeding to death at my feet. A haze of panic still flooded my mind. I knew I
should be calling for help before he got away, but still I seemed incapable of
words. My feet crunching in the dry grass seemed to be the only sound. My sword
lay a few feet off, abandoned now that the deed had been done. I dropped to the
ground and took Lorelai in my arms, only then realizing I was still holding my
scabbard. I let it fall to the ground. The spell seemed to vanish. Only a moan
escaped my lips.
She was
still breathing, I could feel her ribcage as I hugged her to me. Her hands
guarded a wound that was gushing blood all over both of us. I gasped. It felt
like I could only gawk while I lost this precious being, the one I’d sworn to
protect above all else.
“Luke…”
She murmured. I feebly attempted to occlude the massive wounds in her belly and
back, but she moved in equally flimsy measures to stop me. Her voice nearly
imperceptible, she began to whisper what sounded like nonsense.
“Between saltwater and cumulus cloud…
The ocean is rolled back into the sky…”
“Shhhh,” I whispered, trying to lay her down
so I could better dress her lacerations. “You don’t know what you’re saying.
Relax…” She fought me, clutching weakly to my wrists.
“The Void above the horizon swallows all
light,
Death crossed the Void to strike…”
And then,
just like that, as I stared into her eyes, they went flat. All the life within
her vanished, like smoke escaping an open bottle. I wanted to close her
eyelids, but as I reached to pull them down, rage overtook me.
Who could
do such a thing?
Who could
kill an innocent child?
What made
it even worse, I was certain I’d been framed. She’d died by my blade
after all. There was no motive, not when I loved her the way I did, but there
was also no evidence to support any other conclusion. Our barracks were
supposed to be impenetrable after all. Dizzy with anger, the night seemed to press in on
me, glaring through my skin. It suddenly became hot again. I rocked back on my
heels and roared with such ferocity that my throat was instantly raw.
“I swear I’ll kill you!” As soon as
I said the oath, I knew it was binding me. I could almost feel the air change
as the words came out. I would kill this murderer no matter what it cost me.
Even if I had to die, that beast would know vengeance, and he would know it on
the sword he had killed with.
The words
had echoed off the walls. The commotion was sure to bring knights running. I
realized belatedly the foolishness of what I’d done. If I had not been framed
before, I certainly was now. I had mere seconds to make an escape.
I swept up
my blade and its scabbard and dashed for the gateway, hoping that whatever ill
fortune had allowed him to come and go would allow me to escape as well. I
didn’t even have the time to clean off my little sister’s blood, my clothes and
sword stained with it. Hand over hand, I climbed the massive barracks gate as
quickly as I could, once again nearly shatter my feet as I came down for a
rough landing.
In the
guard tower, just to the left, I could hear a man fumbling around. He sounded
as though he’d just come out of some sort of stupor. Bathed in the milky
moonlight, the world suddenly spilled out before me. No trace of the murderer
lurked in the shadows. I realized I would be hunting blind for someone I’d
never seen.
I had made
it twenty feet when an arrow found me, digging into my shoulder with a meaty thwock sound. I staggered, one hand
touching grass wet with dew. Gritting my teeth, I reached up, broke off the
tail of the arrow, and forced myself to keep running.
Pure
adrenaline was the only thing keeping me on my feet. Behind me, I could hear
knights assembling. They would track me down and kill me outright. Murder
wasn’t tried among the knights. The penalty was usually instantaneous unless
there was strong circumstantial evidence. In an army as tightly wound as ours,
there was no margin for error, no room for dissent or crime. I would be
beheaded immediately, and everyone would go back to bed like nothing bad had
ever happened.
And my
little sister’s killer would go free.
A shiver
rolled down my spine as I contemplated my own head rolling across the damp
meadow grass. I sped up as best I could, till I was running faster than I ever
had in all my life. I tried to force myself to think on an escape plan, and to
recall every detail I could about the killer, but all I could think about as I ran
into the night was the life vanishing from Lorelai’s big, brown eyes.
