Magenta Monster

By the Severn turns of Hell how did I end up here? There is no way I can survive this, just no way, I’m gripping a slimy moss covered rock with precarious footing at the top of a white water channel with a rather nasty drop below into a plunge pull of jagged rocks!

Eeek it’s going to get me… and I’ve just gotten my sword stuck in the head of a savage semi human demi-god beast thing with the breath of a thousand rotting summers. It’s thrashing an awful lot, I don’t think that blow has killed it. I need to shift my weight and then, yes! Lets hope this works, and up we go! Oh my I am actually running up a monster with too many teeth to escape the water fall of doom, I bet my dance teacher wasn’t thinking of this sort of thing when she showed me how to use my own arm and pull and weight to flip myself regardless of what my partner was doing.

And breath. Yes it hurts, it burns and that funny fizzing sensation, damn I think I’ve fractured something – like a rib or three. Hmmm my arms and legs are bleeding in new places but I am pretty much out of clothing to rip into bandages, unless I want to prance around the country side naked and I think some how that will have it’s own dangers and I’ve gone and lost my sword, it’s still stuck in that deamon’s head. Still I do have that bow that nice man from the mountains help me make, I wonder which way home is, if only I had payed attention more I could have learned how to navigate, instead I know useless stuff about who ruled whom a thousand years ago.

Father must be so worried by now, I am surprised I haven’t been picked up by his Royal Guard, either I am outside of our Royal domain which was sort of where I was headed or… hmmm something horrible has happend to home. I think I’ll stick with the first option.

So it’s been what 2 weeks since my entourage was highjacked and in that time I have escaped from the bandits, slept in a bear cave narrowly escaping the bears when I awoke, found a mountain village and made a bow and stole some arrows after an unfortunate run in with that priest, been almost sacrificed by a weird death cult, the result of which was I ended up with a ceremonial sword which I have since lost in a part human demi-god demon on the water falls after a hair raising chase over rope bridges.

I am tired and I would like to go home to my nice soft bed and tutors who wrap your knuckles with a ruler when you do something stupid.

Everything they taught me is useless! Well except the poisons stuff that has been really useful like when that preist doped me and I knew to pouch the liquid in my cheeks and to get to his supplie of onnasts as quickly as possible and oh! the dancing of course. But I don’t know what’s edible, what’s not, the farmer taught me how to make a shelter and a fire but I don’t have the resources he had, this is different terrain.

I am also getting tired have I already said that? I need to rest and let the wounds heal. Father is not going to be pleased about those at all! I was supposed to be on my way to marry that Prince bet the deal will be off now, no one will want a scarred princess.

Is that a village? Cut into the hills? There are lights but I wonder how they will take a half naked, blood covered girl appearing? Hmmm well I will probably die out here on my own so I’d best find out.

Oh great it’s the skinny old guy with a beard you could hide a continent in, he’s all skin and bones and he’s grinning at me and rasping, oh that’s him talking? Well I missed the first bit, I’m what? prophesied?

‘No no I’m just lost!’

I have the bow of heaven? ‘But I just made this with a farmer I found,’ why is he nodding? Oh no he is getting up and he really isn’t wearing very much. Oh I’m to follow?

My what a big temple, I think this is bigger than the Palace’s. Where in the Sixth Circle of the Lesser Hells did those girls come from! Ah ladies in waiting, well I have missed those… bath? Did they say bath. Oh I like it here.

‘I need to find my way home…’ did he just say holy mission?

He did didn’t he, blood thirsty monsters? Perilous obstacles? Oh no how do I get out of this? I mean it sounds fun but I’m a Princess.

Oh my! Who is that? He really needs more clothing, I am blushing, no a fluttering, oh dear I will have to use the Princess voice to deal with this! I can’t possibly go haring off on holy missions. Oh the big guy he will be going with me?

‘Of course I will help you,’ did I really just say that?

Am I bowing to a scantily clad wizen mage and a muscle bound hero? Oh dear as long as I get some sleep and cloths and a new sword I suppose this is better than embroidery, though I quiet like stitching. Oh look a shiny sword! For me? Oh wow now that is pretty.

Oh and a big bed and… I am yawning. I will sleep and think on this in the morning.

One thing though there is no way they are calling me The Warrior Princess it just suggests leather to me… mind due I bet leather is better at deflecting sword strokes.

Blight (first published on Blue Monster)

The Blight struck due to it being the wettest August since 1912 and the young family surveyed their crops. The potatoes had gone first, the leaves mottled and dying with the fungus underneath. They had not taken heed of the warning due to the fact they were already plagued by burrowing creatures that had stripped most of the other root vegetables. They assumed it was the same thing.

Then came the caterpillars. No one had ever seen so many and they came and they consumed the brassica – all of the brassicas – the cabbage, and broccoli, the cauliflower and the brussels. Then the badgers had dug up the sweetcorn and the deer had eaten the lettuce and spinach.

The final blow came when they realised that the potatoes’ blight had knocked out the tomato crop also. Honey fungus had also wiped out the fruit trees, leaving the family with nothing to eat other than flax seeds, a few half chewed hazel nuts, and the Jerusalem artichokes which seemed resistant to everything but did give you horrendous wind.

Sadly the young family shook their heads and reassessed their food budget, taking their last £20 they went to the supermarket to stock up on tins of food.

The end

Spirally shells (first published on Blue Monster)

Deep in the mists of time lay the ammonites. These creatures swam or more accurately propelled themselves through a primordial time. Related to the modern day squid they were and they roamed, thinking little cephalopod thoughts.

Then wham bam mass extinction and bye bye little ammonites and bye bye big ammonites, in fact bye bye all ammonites with all their swirling patterns on their shells. The wiggly lines that mark the beginning of one shell chamber or another; all of it gone. No matter how simple or how complicated, just gone.

Well that is the fleshy alive part of them was gone but their intricate shells were preserved, at least some of them, and they were made into stone and then later into jewellery and paperweights or cut up for science.

But sometimes you can still hear their little squidy thoughts and when I hear their thoughts I hope that there is no such thing as reincarnation because they are vicious and are planning revenge.

With this post I will have posted 100 story starters 🙂 Use them to get the creative juices flowing 🙂

1) The clinic was a special one, a sort of orphanage for those things that had been created in desperation.

2) A fighting chance, that’s what they had promised her! Not that she had believed them but this was something else, there was no way this was even going to be entertaining for the average spectator

3) Since landing on the distant orbital strange things had been occurring

4) It was our habit on Sundays to always sit and await the meal that mother had provided, it had never occurred to us to ask how she did it, then one day we awoke and she wasn’t there.

5) Time ticked the beat and we skipped through our lives as fragile and meaningless as the moon beams on a passing asteroid

6) It all began as a kind of joke, putting strong electro magnets in each others cloths and switching them on and off

7) The trouble with mind benders is that they have to be formed into some sort of network or grid and if just one of the minds goes out of sync they are in trouble

8) There was an under current of hysteria and I felt the tremors of it through my very being and so I began to prepare for the worst

9) ‘Hello?’

‘Your mother is dead’

‘No she’s not she’s sitting right here with me’

‘Not her your real mother’

10) I had meant to leave the world with a glorious new future, what I left it was a legacy

When Aeolus was a young man, a real young man and not just the apparent youth he could always appear as, he decided to tour the lands and seas and heavens and deeps to see what was out there. He placed an opalescent cape around his shoulders, his blue eyes glinting to match the sapphire of the fastening pin, wrought in sliver geometry that somehow spoke of wings. His skin was powder white with pale pink lips, when he spoke the spring blossom blizzards seemed to breeze in the mind. His hair was a floppy spiked mess of platinum and he was beautiful.

He knew of his fate to be king of all the winds, of the complex weathers of the worlds and yet he sort to out run this, he traveled, roaming the world and seeing for himself what life could be. He roamed the windy ice wastes in the North feeling the bite upon his cheeks. There he met an ice queen who thought him lovely and offered him anything he wanted as long as he stayed by her side. He shook his head sadly at her and would have left but then she fashioned him a maiden out of the air and ice and sea, a lovely glowing being that was the soul of an ice dweller. His Enarete.

Aeolus touched her perfect face with his long slender fingers and knew he had found a strange sort of paradise for himself. They stayed in the Arctic realms and he sent great fronds of powdered ice into the a sky festooned with rainbow shimmers, inverted and muted echos of those he had know else where. His ice nymph would look on with awe and wonder but she was never happy, not truly no matter what tunes he wooed the wind to play for her through ice ravines he had carved.

The Ice Witch knew the heart of the being she had created and feared her uttering words that would rip the beauty of the young man away from her. And so she stole the young woman’s tongue and kept it on an enchanted chain around her own neck. Aeolus could not understand what had happened to the normally vocal Enarete, no longer would she hum at his side whilst spinning frost patterns. But still she bore him children and they knew happiness of a sort.

Until their eldest a singularly talented girl who taking after he grandfather and mother became the Great Circle Current, cold and dark and essential, found a strange pendent on the side of an inky pool. She carried it from the Ice Queen’s bathing spring and gave it too her mother, Enarete recognised the sculpted shape and placed it in it’s natural home. Her children danced to her voice for the first time in their lives and Aoelus asked what it was that had made her melancholy all those years.

Smiling she explained she wanted to see the sun in the sky with the firmament laid out before it. Relieved he took her hand and fashioned a cloud from the vapours in the air, they stepped aboard and rose above the world. It was everything the nymph had hoped, beauty and wonder and grace but she was carved from ice and the sun was not cool on her face, not there above the clouds sitting in the sky.

Aeolus saw what was to become of his wife and he screamed to the heavens, his plea was answered and the greater gods turned her to droplets, they fell but Aeolus could scoop them up reforming his love. But the ice queen grew angry on discovering their departure and when she saw Enarete reforming she sent a curse, and at the very moment of formation the nymph dissolved once more into a patter of droplets. Ever since the god Aeolus has driven the air before him seeking to see his beloved, sometimes she is almost there in the clouds before the droplets fall as tears to the earth below.

The Cactus (First published on Turquoise Monster)

In the desert at night it is cold
Ice in the crevices
The sky is clear and dark
Stars shine there
How do you see them?
For me time moves faster
I live longer
It is relative
My stars are streaks
I live in a blurred circle of white blue
My desert
My sky
All around me is silver glitter
I lift my limbs high

Story starters are a twitter meme were writers share first liners in the hope of helping fellow writers – write!

1) It seemed at first glance to be a case of boy meets girl but what with the time travelling, memory loss and sex changes it was nothing so simple

2) If there was one thing that should be a universal taboo it is the various types of undead and ghouls dating each other

3) The bull and the heifer were ancient

4) I was left guarding the gate, Paradise was lost and they were banished, what surprised me was how long it took them to try and get back in

5) The wine was ambrosia and I do not just mean the metaphor

6) Many enchanters get caught because they over reach themselves or are so blatant as to put peoples backs up.

7) They blamed it all on the bad influences, the friends she should not have had, the films that she watched at 3 am and of course the boyfriend

8) Playing the system is easy if you know how, of course playing it and not getting caught is a whole new level of difficulty, one which most players never seemed to appreciate.

9) The store room was virtually empty, and they were going to dye, they could eek out their existence for maybe two months on what was left.

10) He had been raised in darkness and taught that disobedience ment pain

Salty Solitude (First published on Turquoise Monster)

Footprints in a ribbon’s stream
Beads upon a string
Minute leaves upon a stem
They were made
By a pachyderm

Lifeless land this salt plain
Giant evaporation pans
Leaving just salt
Where once sea
Now desert
Shimmers in reflected heat

Nothing but the footprints
Alone in the heat
Nomadic outcast
In a land
Of sporadic water
Bounding the land in green
What are you thinking?

My ensuing death (first published on Turquoise Monster)

My ensuing death
Barks at my heels
Demarnding to go for walks
Asking for water
With languid eyes

My ensuing death
Packs itself neatly
Into my luguage
Hoping to holiday
In the sun

My ensuing death
Follows me to the bath
Popping the bubbles
Leaving a hard
To clean scum

My ensuing death
hovers whilst I hoover
Reminding me of the times
We have already
Seen together

Why they did it I do know but the weather war was very one sided, some said it was fear of immigration others a jealousy of resources. What ever the reason I grew up in a snow dome in a remnant of the peoples of Europe. Life was hard in the domes but I knew nothing else, I had no comparison, those around me were not so fortunate – they had seen their world obliterated – wiped out in a flurry of white soft down that did not stop nor cease for two whole years.

The dome was big enough to hold twenty people comfortably – there were 40 odd of us by the time I was ten – many children but some waifs and strays found out on the packed hard ice. We mined the ice sometimes, making little tunnels that glowed blue even in the yellowest flame. Sometimes we found people frozen into perpetual fear or just seemingly asleep. We always took them back to the dome for the death ritual and a feast was held that night.

Bellies full we would dream of the world our parents spoke of, green grass and a yellow sun that cut through the haze of silver that had always marred my skies.

Granny, not sure she was actually anybodies granny but she was Granny to all of us, would sit and tell us stories and do number rhymes so we would know how to tally supplies when we were old enough. She taught us how to repair even the most frail of old clothing and we all had patchwork jackets made by her.

My 21st birthday saw me hunting the bears that had come from the North and walked over ice bridges that had not been there before, this was dangerous work, it was essential work, the bears could devastate whole ice domes plus they were good eating and the fur made good thick flooring and lined the baby cots. I was trained to use the precious guns and the tube weapons rendered out of old building materials we had mined from the snow banks.

We dug tunnels down into the old sewers and train networks, into old basements and natural caves, we found wonders and lost friends in cave ins, we moaned the loss of their flesh bruised and rotten on the bone.

It was hard but it was home. Then the fire began to wash at out piecemeal population, targeting the domes and obliterating us, those that ran in panic were bound to die on the ice. Fear welled up and pushed us to retreat into the tunnels we had built, stalactites of orange pink seemed to ooze into being around us.

I was harsh and they followed. The young and the old hid with supplies, and we scavenged what would could from the shattered domes across our wasteland.

I knew that soon we would grow hungry and thin, I took a party out onto the surface, camouflaged in old sheeting we crept near a camp, the metal birds I knew as planes from old half eaten story books, sat parked around us. The creatures that had slaughtered my world not once but twice were laughing and drinking around a fire so large and wasteful we could feel the heat from our lonely perimeter.

Their weaponry was far superior to what we had, we waited and they drank themselves into a stupor. We attacked, or at least attempted too – I lost five snow hardened warriors to the lasers net, we collected what we could of them for the death ritual and then slunk back to plan. The solution was obvious and so we climbed into our tunnels once more. We calculated using Granny’s numbers and oozed our way out of a small opening into the midsts of their camp, to do so we had spent four hour hacking our way through packed ice.

I worried that they would by now be awaking from their slumber but they were not, they were not creatures like I had supposed, the impression had been given by the protective hats they wore, we bound them with nylon rope we found in the crates littering their camp. We carried them to our entrance whole and squeezed them through one at a time. We took down the laser net and carried away the crates and ripped out the electronics of the planes and syphoned the fuel from their tanks, their hauls were not made of anything I knew how to scavenge though and so we left them thereto rot.

We would eat well for weeks.

I began planning how to attract more of these people and their bumper load of goods, I had my people build an ice dome within the tunnels safe from the sky fire and we put fakes out on the surface. We would feast well when ever their greed over came them and they came to purge our land. Our death ritual was an honor, now I made a new one – a curse upon those that tried to take form us – we took their lives to sustain us, besides we all agreed ememies tasted better.