Four Fools Press: #Roksana

Showing posts with label #Roksana. Show all posts

Saturday, December 13, 2014

Brought to you by Four Fools Press: “Crazy Good Stories”

Light and heat coursed through her veins faster than blood. White filled her vision, a blindness made of sheer brightness. The cool water had burned the instant she submerged, but now was replaced by void, light, and power. All she could remember before the radiance was the frescoed ceiling above the pool, a serene shepherd cradling a sheep. A shaft of pure something had blazed like lightning from above, striking her in the chest. She felt suspended in a great emptiness that was somehow also ever filling and always full.

Her eyes adjusted to the intense glow. The pool had deepened and grown into an endless ocean. New lights separated from within the expanse of light, spheres of varied hues and colors. Wheels of fire danced far away, whirling to a tune which had been unheard by mortal ears for aeons. Luminous tendrils laced around her from the beam above, holding her in a gentle warmth. The brilliant shaft of light remained focused on her hovering form. Fear and confusion could not exist here, foreign as frost in the heart of a fire. Instead, a pleasant curiosity drew her gaze once more toward the cosmic gleam.

“Well done, my child.”

The words, if thunder can be called words, came from above, around, within. The orbs glow grew livelier, the water clearer, and the light cleaner as if in response. The power throbbing through this place, through her, grew exponentially in the echo. The rain-rinsed air from a thousand springs, filled with a myriad summers’ proud suns, joined with a century of venerable falls, coupled with a hundred winters’ freshest snows, could not have captured the essence of how pleasant, sweet, and strong this presence felt to her. She felt Life, and because of it she felt alive. Alive in a way she had not been in years. More alive than she had ever been.

“I…”

The sound seemed so frail after the thunder, tinged with the rain of joyful tears. She recognized the spoken syllable was her own. A hush had come upon her for...what? A second? A minute? A decade? A millennia? Both time and history fled here in a tempo that could not keep pace with the cadence of this new world around her. Her life seemed to be lost in the ages. All those battles, victories, tragedies, losses, romances, and joys had vanished. Even the shepherd, the pool, and the kind man who had helped her into the water; these things from her most recent past now appeared remote. Personal life felt like fable--a myth soon enough forgotten in the ether. Reality swallowed up her shadowy existence in its sudden encroachment. She blinked and spoke again.

“I am free…”

The wheels of light, the ceaseless waters, and the ever-burning radiance whirled and danced in laughter in response to a joke she had not heard. Then a rumbling voice shook the whole of the firmament and cast the entire sea into a frothing churn. The Voice spoke, and this time she caught something else in the tone. Something she had longed for ever since the shadow had lodged deep within her heart. In her dreams, she had thought she would relish the eradication of the oily whisper from within. Instead, the addition of the new voice filled the moment; her mind; her soul; her entire world. The other, even its memory, disappeared completely in the rumbling voice’s wake. It was a still, tender voice; a fatherly, lordly voice. The Voice many wild men and quiet sisters had spoken of in her now-distant life. Now, the Voice spoke to her. Tears burst forth, running down her pale cheeks into the endless mere below.

“Welcome Home, Roksana…”

***

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12-13-14 Writing Warm-up

3:11 PM

12-13-14 Writing Warm-up

#MMWW #Roksana #WritingExcercise #WritingWarmup mmww Roksana writing exercise writing warm-up

Saturday, December 6, 2014

12-6-14 Writing Warm-up

Brought to you by Four Fools Press: “Crazy Good Stories”

Dry, bleached stalks of brush raked across her calves as she trudged through the ever-undulating snow drifts. In places, the wind-blown snow was nearly as deep as her waist, dropping out beneath her with a suddenness that seemed almost perversely malicious. In others, the frigid powder barely covered the cold, packed earth of the Black Forest's sparse floor. The hem of her thick, winter over-skirt dripped with slush that stuck to her like clammy palms of dead men. She could not let these elements of the land slow her pace. She had to get out of the dark boughs as quickly as possible.

This was not a good place to be once the moon rose.

Her lantern sputtered feebly. Even the barest shutter over the lamp would have done so much to aid in keeping the flame intact. It did not matter. It had to be this way...it would be over soon enough, she supposed.

Almost as if on cue, she heard the howl split the freezing cold wind. No, this was no mere howl. She had grown up hearing howls. This sound was far more than just a call by some hungry forest predator. It was as though someone was disemboweling the wind itself: a shriek that turned even her guts to water and threatened to give her leave of all her senses. There was a latent madness wound up in that howl; it was a horrific sound from somewhere Beyond. It held a distinct quality that began unraveling the very reality into which the discordant intonation had been thrust.

She quickened her pace, her footfalls crunching through the flimsy ice which coated the deeper snow. She stumbled, thinking how her crunching steps mimicked the thing's arrival. It had broken through the flimsy Curtain that separated her world from it's own dark demesne.

Her quick, gasping breaths trailed behind her in long white streamers caught upon a pale wind. She knew what was out there. She'd heard the stories. She knew what hunted her this night.

A deep growl trickled and rippled over her shoulder, slipping into her ear like wet, wiry wool. It itched and tickled and dampened every other sound all at the same time. She turned, lifting her pitiful lantern. Again, almost as if preordained by some Higher Power, at that exact moment, a shaft of brumal moonlight stabbed through the leaf-stripped branches.

The moon's pallid glow joined with the flickering flame of her beacon, casting an odd mixture of fire and ice upon the creature that towered above her. If it had been able to stand to its full height, four times her own height and more it would have soared, but its musculature and physical structure denied it that privilege. It was not by any means a lesser creature, however, with limbs as thick as hundred-year-old oaks, weight greater than a massive stone bridge, and shoulders as wide as most barns were long. There could be little doubt that the vlkčlověk**** before her was a lord over all it encountered. She would not be surprised that the furred and fanged horror might even be the One True Lord of its own Kin in all the known worlds, so titanic and terrible was its form and might.

Again came the deep rumble that made her own teeth rattle. The resound was followed by words, spoken in English, old of form. "Thou hast chosen poorly, she-chattle. Thou hast lost thy way in my wood this eventide. Think thee not that I wilt spare thee merely for being a Daughter of Eve. Thine blood will slake my thirst, and thy flesh will ease my hunger, doltish wench!"

The massive wolf-demon lunged for her with a slavering, blood-curdling howl.

It was in that moment that Roksana let her ruse drop and whipped Scythe, her sliver-edged shamshir from beneath her peasant disguise into a wide, pain-dealing arc before her. In a voice empowered by the Eternal Foe of her Enemy, she trumpeted, "Tak pojďte! Dine a pak navždy spát, bestie."***

*** - From Czech: "Come then! Dine and then forever sleep, beast!"
**** - From Czech: wolf-man

***

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12-6-14 Writing Warm-up

7:31 PM

12-6-14 Writing Warm-up

#brannon #hollingsworth #MMWW #Roksana #Sectof7 #SectofSeven #WritingExcercise #WritingWarmup mmww Roksana writing exercise writing warm-up

Monday, November 24, 2014

11-24-14 Writing Warm-up

Brought to you by Four Fools Press: “Crazy Good Stories”

Hóng yī padded as quietly as he could through the Bramblewood. His red-and-white furred face pinched into a grimace. The boots stifled him, confining his lower paws, often causing him to stumble and misstep. He was not used to them, but he could not deny their usefulness. They masked his scent and left absolutely no trace of his passing. For them, and for the Sect of Seven, who had given him these wonderful gifts, he was eternally thankful.

It was now his job to use these gifts and the gifts the Crafter had instilled within him to rid this tangled forest of the plague which had befallen it. Hóng yī did not enjoy the taking of life. He was shēnghuó ménjiàng in his native tongue. The closest he could make it into the harsh-sounding language of his fellow Sect-members was: life keeper. But now, he had little choice. The Fallen had begun infecting and infesting the natural creatures of the forests of the Bramblewood. The creatures were no longer well, suffering from horrible diseases and mutations: massive pus-filled boils, horrible deformities, twisted growths of horn and bone jutting forth from their bodies, and more. These poor creatures had to be put down. They had to be culled from the Bramblewood's lines and herds, so that which was within them could no longer spread.

They had to be culled. Before it was too late.

Hóng yī spotted his quarry and froze like a statue before the Emerald Gate. It was as he'd suspected. The beast was large, with fearsome back-swept horns and deep, shaggy russet fur. Possibly a mutation of the Saola, what many of the Bolikhamxa natives in the near-by mountains still referred to as a 'unicorn'. Hóng yī grimaced for the second time this hunt: perverting and twisting a unicorn was by far and away a thing that would interest the Fallen. The poor thing barely resembled the creature that it once was.

The fire of vengeance burned in Hóng yī's furry belly. He wanted to make Them pay for what they had done to this fair creature. He wanted to make Them scream and beg for mercy. He wanted to twist Their forms and cause them pain and agony, just like what this poor creature was feeling now. Deft paws of white-tipped-red flew, and in the span of half-a-heartbeat, one of Hóng yī's red-fletched arrows (Roksana had called them cardinals) cut through the frosty air and slammed into the twisted creature's neck.

The beast turned towards Hóng yī and roared. It was the sound of a lion, out of the mouth of a lamb! Hóng yī's amber eyes widened with horror and realization. His haste--his lust for revenge--had made him hasty. He had missed! Now, the massive, enraged, and demonically-empowered beast was bearing down on him with murder in it's all-too-intelligent eyes.

Hóng yī slung his bow over his head and quickly scampered up one of the ubiquitous tangles of roots and branches all around him. His booted foot hit a well-worn spot (likely from the rubbing of the Saola) and shot out from under him. The Life Keeper felt his claws reflexively extend within his boot, but to no avail--he was falling!

With a tiny, but fierce, growl, Hóng yī slammed his front, right paw into the branch upon which he'd just been climbing. A thunderous roar and a titanic shudder wracked the entire tree and he nearly fell, again--

Right into the awaiting, needle-filled maw of the possessed unicorn beneath him. The creature howled again, the reverberating bellow rattling snow from the trees all around, and pounded it's horned head into the trunk of the tree again. It was trying to knock the Life Keeper from his precarious perch!

Hóng yī had to do something, and quickly. He could not hold on forever. Then, a light dawned behind his amber eyes. Pulling with one paw, he strained, trying to gain purchase with the other. No sooner had his ebony claws sunk into the wood than the Fallen-infused Saola slammed into the tree's trunk again, breaking his hold. Dangling by one paw, the small Xióngmāo gritted his pointy teeth and began kicking off his boots.

Sensing that something was afoot, the foul beast beneath him howled again, ramming its thick, antlered skull against the tree over and over again.

'Like a thing possessed,' thought Hóng yī.

Each shuddering blow, however, only helped the tiny Life Keeper with his task: removing those constraining boots! If he could just hold on for a few more moments...

THUD! THUD! THUD!

Suddenly, off came the first boot, and Hóng yī chittered - a sound of joy and excitement. It elicited an enraged howl from the Fallen creature below. Using his prehensile toes, the red-and-white-furred member of the Sect of Seven quickly removed the other. Then using his free left paw, Hóng yī unslung his bow (oh thank the Maker it was over his left arm) and dropped it, catching it with his left, now un-booted paw.

THUD! THUD! THUD!

The entire forest seemed to be vibrating now. Snow was falling in cascading sheets from the trees. Hóng yī's small black claws were slipping...

Out came a red-tipped cardinal and using his front paw and two now-no-longer-booted rear paws, Hóng yī nocked and fired his bow...

A scream that flattened the Life Keeper's fuzzy tufted ears ripped through the Bramblewood. The red arrow had found it's mark. Hóng yī dropped to the ground, adrenaline pulsing through his tiny frame like the massive beat of a war drum. He replaced his boots, praying a silent prayer of thanks and realizing the massive truth found in the Crafter's words: "Vengeance is mine..."

Hóng yī prayed that he would not forget again.

***

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11-24-14 Writing Warm-up

1:00 PM

11-24-14 Writing Warm-up

#MMWW #Roksana #Sectof7 #SectofSeven #WritingExcercise #WritingWarmup mmww Roksana writing exercise writing warm-up

Friday, November 21, 2014

11-21-14 Writing Warm-up

Brought to you by Four Fools Press: “Crazy Good Stories”

'I don't expect them to understand. After all, I am a living...well, technically, unliving...contradiction.'

Roksana shifted ever-so-slightly, feeling the stirring of the cold winter wind, but not sensing its bite. She stared down the length of the arrow's shaft, still--even after all these years--expecting to see the ever-so slight quaver in the arrow's tip. She'd not dealt with muscle fatigue for a long, long time. Being a 'vampir' (as the Germans were calling her kind now) did have its benefits, she mused.

But there was still part of her that was stubbornly--

'Alive and willful,' would have been Deacon's words.

She missed her mentor. Lost to the Ravages, now, she supposed. The thought of her dearest friend and teacher in their twisted claws, suffering, steeled her resolve all the more. She would stand and guard this church until Doomsday if need be. Michael himself would need to sound his silver trump in her undead face before she would drop her arrow's point. She woul--

"S-s-s-shoot him in the face!", the Fallen hissed in her ear, words dissolving into slithering laughter. She flinched, and her stín-šipka, her ebony-shafted shadow arrow, whisked into the darkness.

"Shush, Idzi!" Roksana spat the words through gritted teeth that were far too long and sharp to be human. She coiled her will, like unyielding leaden chains, around the demonic presence inside her. The will flowed into words, spoken and living with a Power all their own: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

Idzi screamed and hissed and fought, as he always did. But he was no match for the Word of God when applied through the will of one of His children.

Even if she was a vampir.

She knew she had to control herself. Self-control was one of the Fruits. Only through them could the Light be manifested. And these people in this village--the same people who hated her, spat upon her, and tried to kill her--they needed her control, her powers. They needed her to be what she was, even if they hated her; for they needed her protection this night, if they wanted to see the dawn that she herself could no longer behold.

It was then that Roksana heard the howls. The živá mrtvola vlkodlaci (zombie werewolves) were coming...and they would be hungry. An ebon arrow slapped against her bow, and with the battle against the spirit won, the battle against the flesh began.

***

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11-21-14 Writing Warm-up

12:01 PM