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Codename Devices
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Let's hope this continues, and that I am persistent about writing. Add comments when it sucks, or let me know what is working in the discussion page. You obviously can't edit the content.
Contents |
Brainstorm
Story Progression
Forward
Introduction
Whispers Above a Planet
The Stormtail Coast
An Uncanny Resolve
Dreams
A Well-Accustomed Plunge Into Darkness
The Forest at the Mountain's Root
The Dweller in the Pool
A Fortunate Desolation
From Murky Depths of the Sea
Meetings
Toilings
The Storm
Vestiges of Braeth Ca'nonn
Progess
Whispers Above a Planet
High in the clouds sat a boy full grown, such that he might even be called a man. Above what it was that he sat, he was not sure; for whatever lay below his perch was too far down to tell. His perch, for lack of a more suitable term, hung suspended by strong cables from above, three tethers to be exact, and was further stabilized against any sideward motion by two fat ropes that shot outward, parallel to the surface far below.
Where the other ends of these five leashes were fastened to was only partially known to him, for although the thick ropes which balanced the perch laterally were both tied tightly about the same limb of a giant tree, the remaining three ran vertically upward about forty feet before dashing through a thick patch of wispy white clouds which moved always from the south. He only knew it was the south because in order to shield his face from the glaring sun in the morning, he lay on his back upon his perch, pointing the top of his head toward the blazing red spot, and in that position the clouds plumed in from his left hand side.
It seemed at one time funny that the clouds always moved in from that spot, but he rarely thought more about it.
There he stood this midday, the sun slowly making its climb as it always did.
And that was it: a strip of clouds above him, the endless blue of water sprawling everywhere but to the south—where his view was obstructed by one gargantuan tree whose roots gripped with an ancient strength into the side of the mountain—and a bit of featureless land directly below.
“Below,” he thought. “What was below?” He stepped to the edge of the perch and peered down, long and hard, as if he would will the water to rise and bring that pleasant looking green patch up so he could step off onto it and understand what it was that he had been above all of these years.
“Novel thought.” Sighing, the boy reminded himself of how many times he’d had the same thoughts. It was not sadness though, but a curiosity that drove such whims. He could barely remember why he’d been brought up here so long ago, and rarely wondered why. Had he ever actually known?
“This is the way it is,” was his most pervasive thought, and a true one. He’d known no family in a conventional sense, only the man and woman who brought him into this world. The memories concerning them, if he could recall at all, were vague. There had been no time to make connections or form bonds. He was familiar with what people were, and knew that he was one himself. In fact, he knew many things, for he’d been left with books, and lots of them: stories and histories spanning countless times and numerous subjects. Having been up here so long it was no wonder that he’d read every single one—some of which had fallen from the perch due to clumsiness or wind, floating down miles to the land beneath. Among the written books were several blank tomes. With nothing left to read, it was in these that he’d begun to scribe his own writings.
There was only one thing coming out of the clouds above him and to the south: several branches of the great tree, which had grown out to within reach. He did not consider the cables that held the perch to be coming out of the clouds, but to be going up into them. The perch was not hanging, had not been hung, and was not hung, for if it were, someone must have hung it on something. Surely, however, clouds alone are insubstantial for hanging anything on. Furthermore, there was surely nobody who had climbed above the clouds to hang him thusly, for the clouds were so thick that a man would lose his way, not be able to grasp at anything, and fall—just like his books had. You and I would not draw such conclusions, but such were the particularities of the boy’s intellect, for who was to have taught him otherwise?
He had been up to the place where the ropes dart away into the clouds, climbed right up to the spot, but had gone no further. He was an excellent climber, even by the standards of apes who live in trees in jungles far away. Strong and lithe was he, with crushing power in his hands and legs, yet lean were his muscles so that his size was no smaller or larger than an average human.
Every few days, he would climb the branches protruding from the giant tree to the south, gathering the fruits that grew there. He would carry about enough for four days in one trip, and would usually take only one trip per day, so that he gathered every fourth day. On the days in between, he spoiled himself with a luscious variety from the gathered fruit, making juice with the water that collected in a wooden jug during light showers, and eating different cuts of the fruit garnished with tree leaves. It brought enjoyment to him tasting the subtle changes between fruit picked from deep within the branches, fruit on the exterior of the tree exposed directly to sunlight, and the ones high up near the edge of the misty clouds. Making these distinctions from one and the same type of fruit stems from the fact that it was all that he could remember eating. The weather remained fairly unchanging year round, and the fruits of the tree were always in season.
All said, his was a quiet life, but nonetheless, the boy was content.
Time went by as he observed the cycles of the land. Most readily apparent was that of night and day, and those smaller daily rituals hence controlled by the sun’s relentless wax and wane. By day, he could read and write, and gaze far across the horizon, imagining many things there which neither you nor I can conceive of. By night though, he would put his pen down, and lie on his back, feet now pointing at the moon, and stare out and around at the stars. He learned their cycles, naming a few. He watched other celestial bodies too: the several moons, meteors and comets, and great lights spanning the breadth of the entire night sky.
He would listen to the cool breeze. It was no more quiet at night than during any other time, only silence all around, yet it was a silence that he understood—broken only here and there by the rustling of a great branch from the tree blown by winds high above the earth.
Many things were whispered to the boy in the hollow silence of the night, so far above progress, change, and the struggles of men. Some he heard in the form of dreams or incorporeal voices, and wrote down when morning came. There were others though, which permeated his unconscious mind in the very deepest realms of sleep. These whisperings, too, were often recorded unknowingly to the boy, or kept in the manner of lost memories.
An Uncanny Resolve
Writing from one of his books...
He set his pen down, thinking only a bit longer, and retired his scribbling efforts for the morning.
"What a land that is... and I shall surely never see it. Isn't that right book? Damned lazy book..."
It was a damned lazy book. Most of these books were as the boy put it, in fact lazy.
They sat there piled on his perch, day and night , offering to the boy no more tales or learning than they had after being ruthlessly drained of their limited academic or entertaining vitality long ago by his hungry eyes.
"I want answers—and closure. The tales can't just stop where the books become insufficient with written leafs of paper... can they?"
He was right, too. No history simply ends. There is always continuation, even for the books written not factually, but from the imagination of authors who he only knew by names scratched onto cover pages.
"I may not know which of these are real, but even an author's mind does not stop. He may place down his pen, but the mind continues to dream. Perhaps even death cannot do any better; there are always readers and students to think on the worlds and stories created by a writer. At any rate, my writing surely knows no end."
At that, he set down the large book he'd been using to write in for the past year—maybe a bit too close to the edge of the perch—and stepped away.
These questions had not always puzzled him. The past had been a more complacent time. What he did not realize was the change occurring in him. A rightful contradiction in terms: so inquisitive, prying for answers more than some scholars, with merely his own intellect to decide what was sufficiently reasonable. The answers he fed himself—reasonable or foolish—mattered not, for the forces that built this world, a world that he was part of more than he realized, have eternally had their ways of smoothing out contradictions.
He paced back and forth across the surface of the perch, throwing around many possibilities—most of which involved unanswerable questions, yet others regarding simple daily routines.
“I swear that tree gets further away every time. What a bother...four days...grumble...my arms will scarcely be long enough. Maybe I can set up some sort of automated device, a chute like I read about, and funnel the fruit to myself...” he babbled in his head, then out loud, and went silent once more. “How am I to rearrange these stacks of trash I don’t ever read anymore, and what about [quote from italicized journal text above]?”
With nothing at all to do today that was different than any other, his meager concerns were facetious wanderings. The boy had only to realize one thing, to grasp in his head those possibilities that hadn’t prioritized themselves logically. He was so very close to the answers his constantly cycling brain demanded—in fact, he was one step away.
“Whoa—.” Thudcrack. A dull, low noise flicked through the air as if in confident reassurance that inanimate objects cannot be harmed, and thus there should be no concern for what would happened next; it was for the best. All sound in the boy's head, all mental toiling and mutterings ceased.
“Did I honestly not finish that dratted fruit last night? No. I thought I set it on top of the stack to my left...” were a few words that raced through his head, but this debate only lasted a fraction of a second, for his right foot had already slipped on the sweet, watery casing, kicking it in two, and continued its path dead into the thick, hardened spine of the book. He felt pain as the large, untrimmed toenail on his right foot split down the center, lightly tearing soft flesh beneath. The leg connected to that foot then climbed upward through the air, momentum arching the boy’s body backward, and dropping him on his back in the center of the platform. The book careened down, and the boy watched it fall until he could no longer pick out its spot against the green patch below. Even after that it plunged several times further still. The quaint little perch high above the world swung ever so slowly, while the world of the boy, and everything he knew, followed suit.
In a terrifying spout of realization, the boy came to his senses. Sure, he had watched the book fall as long as he could, saw everything that conspired, but it was not until the middle of that night, when voices once again came to him, that his wandering hands found nowhere to record their words. There had been two blank books on the perch; only ever two. He had filled one up already, such that if ink possessed significant mass, it would have either burst the seams or caused the old leather tome to double as a stunningly able bludgeoning weapon against wild panthers. This book sat somewhere near, with maybe a few histories and others resting on top of it.
The blank books were big. Broad and thick, and containing thousands of leafs of paper, the provider probably thought just two to be sufficient for whatever mysterious purpose they had been included with the rest of the small library. It was somewhat of an underestimation, and the boy was already nearly one hundred pages through the second. Now he was left with nothing to write in.
The following days proceeded, and the atmosphere around the perch, next to the gargantuan tree which clung to the side of the mountain, remained as constant as ever it had been. The boy began to go mad. He muttered even more to himself, splicing together random bits of things he had written in the past with more recent fragments wafted to his sleeping ears by the wind. This was a situation completely unforeseen. All he ever had were blank pages hazy white and welcoming. The inability to record his thoughts was absolutely unbearable.
The sun completed several more cycles, but the boy did not sleep. He crouched on his hands and knees, peering over the side once more, only this time he would not short himself for thinking about the surface far below.
“The book fell, and I have to get it back. Simple enough, right?” Shifting weight on his hand, he brushed against the course fibers twisting around one another to form the thick cable that ran up into the clouds above. “This is it,” he sighed a bit. “I take the cables when there is more light, right as the sun rises tomorrow morning.”
Morning came without question, though the boy had gained no rest during the remainder of the night. He sat with legs hanging over the edge of the platform, and no voices or dreams could work their influence. His eyes would trade moods every so often, glazing over one moment in deep thought, then focusing far into the land, imagining when he could see no further.
The sun came up slowly. From what he could tell it was a foggy morning on the surface, and the red rays were partially obscured in misty wisps that swirled in torrents this way and that. Without even a word to himself, he stood upright and turned to face the few material provisions that were his life. He tore strips of cloth from a spare shirt, and wrapped them tight around his hands. Performing only minute stretches—for he was well used to the rigors of climbing—he edged back a bit against a pile of books, took one step toward a corner of the platform, and bounded upward to latch onto the cable.
Thick clouds moved steadily above him. Each time he paused to look upwards, they, like silent clots of transparent dirt, had changed position ever so slightly.
What could dwell above here, concealed within curtains of white; maybe waiting all this time, wondering where these cables ran down to and if anyone would come up to visit? Imaginative thoughts surged from one side of the boy's consciousness to the other. He could hardly keep them from surfacing either. It was a lifetime spent without exposure to anything, or anyone. His understanding of what could be and what is impossible was very limited.
Am I welcome in this place?
The climb did not take terribly long, and within a few minutes he began to notice the air around him growing more opaque. Misty swirls began to play at his hands, and a few hefts later his body was enveloped. Still, he could see no further through the clouds than from his perch.
"I suppose this is the highest I've ever climbed isn't it?," he spoke aloud. His arms were beginning to feel a slight burn, but were far from fatigued. "How much further?"
About twenty feet after the clouds grew more consistent, the rope began to feel more damp. So too did his clothes. It was a refreshing feeling: rainwater still in its vapor form. Each droplet was an infant in a manner of speaking. When the clouds became significantly saturated, they would pour out their moisture, sprinkling at first, and sometimes utterly gushing. He had a passing thought, wondering which of these particular droplets would have given him drinking water over the next few days when they collected in the jug, resting far below now.
Within moments, he could see no further in front of him than he could in the dead of the night, when he would reach his hands out into the air. Then, grasping at the darkness in front of his face, there might as well have been an entire civilization ten feet away with people bustling in the streets and strange sites all around—though he could see nothing. So too was this sensation of blindness, only it was white. Just enough sun permeated the mists so that the bright energy illuminated the vapor and fended off what would otherwise be darkness. Though the rope was present, and he clung to it for the sake of his life, it was a sensation like none other. He was aware that only air separated him from the land miles below, and there was a possibility that nothing existed above him either. This line allowed him to defy physical laws and float like a creature of the skies.
But he was not a creature of the skies, and knew no more of them than any other man bound to the surface. Ever so faintly, he thought that he felt a moisture on his hands. Seeping through the cloths wrapped around them, the air was making his makeshift gloves moist.
What was that? His hand had slipped, just a bit. Ignoring it, he fixed his grip and reached high again. It was getting more difficult to hold on. He had to clench so much tighter now than during the first couple segments of the climb. Acting on instinct he had learned while climbing the giant tree to fetch fruit, he struggled to keep a hold. The cloths soaked even more, and were beginning to slide with every handhold.
Panicking, he held the rope with every bit of strength left. Not being able to see even his hands was now more of a terrifying sensation than a curious one. Making one last effort at gaining control, he thought of going down, and then realized this might be just as perilous if he were to fall. Then he had an idea. Latching onto the cable with his legs and one arm, he slowly began to unwrap his hands. He was going to try and adjust the wrappings, since they had bunched up during the climb, so that they would suffice despite their slickness.
There. One hand set, he thought, testing its grip and nodding slightly at the improvement. Now for the next. Adjusting again slightly, and shifting so that his other hand could be re wrapped, he reached for the cable, and did not find it.
All he thought is that somewhere during his last hasty toiling on the cable, he forgot to press his chest against the thick line before switching hands. His body tilted backwards a few degrees when the disconcerting feeling of falling erupted in his mind for the first time. It was a long fall, and for a brief second he regained vision and saw the clouds rocketing away from him—and then plummeted headlong into unconsciousness.
Dreams
A Well-Accustomed Plunge Into Darkness
Flat against the deck! Here it co— a desperate shout tore through the air and was utterly sundered by a mouthful of salty water. Incomprehensible noise surged all around, faded over the course of a second, and was rendered silent. Icy, stabbing fingers violently ripped at the man's skin and sent a breath-taking sensation through his body. All around was the feeling of little air pockets following every contour of his muscular build, starting at the lower torso and continuing from his neck and legs toward the surface. He could comprehend an eerie current lapping at his form; a sort of deathly caress that, without the slightest warning, began to carry him lower under its crushing force.
It was in that moment that Ralar Asthalis opened his eyes, red and burning from the water, and remembered that it was not the first time he'd been in a similar situation. In fact, things had often been worse. Rath, he was called by those in his close company, a difficult place for a man to find himself in, and by that same name was he cursed through bitterly clenched teeth after escaping advantageous from confrontations his opponents always regretted.
[more story shit] "Rath!" he heard a voice calling in his head, yet this time it was the voice of a friend. A blotted form writhed its way through dark water in front of his face. It began to thrash in the water, and sun burnt skin on a strong, stubby arm could be perceived. Its fingers were thrust open, grasping at the cloth covering Rath's chest.
[rescues] "Dratted, bloody skunk-assed bastard!" The sturdy creature, eyes fiery as a furnace, swore aloud. "Ye being captain wouldn't be enough, were it not for the fact that yer also my beloved friend." Looking Rath straight in the eyes, his scowling features softened. The other men standing nearby on the deck might have even been inclined to make a clever remark regarding a suspicious fondness in the dwarf's smile, were that action alone not sufficient to gain them two heavy boots in the hind parts and a toss over the railing. "After all, Rath, I don't exactly have the build of a mermaid now do I?"
The knowledge that Rath had a knack for falling overboard was not an elusive secret whatsoever. It had been the most dangerous part of this entire sea voyage for his men. Sure there were thunderous storms here and there, turning the ship into a barely buoyant play thing its crew scrambling to maintain control, but such weather was expected in waters such as the ones they’d been in for the past month. Several of the men had taken a plunge but once, and learned from it, but regardless of the precautions anyone took, their captain somehow managed to find himself in violent water.
“It’s more than a bit o’ luck that we pulled ya out just now, captain. Seems like the end of the spout, god knows you’d have fallen back end given enough time!”
"Aye, seems that it might have gone that way, huh?" said Rath, if not a bit ashamedly. The boat was still heaving massively with each blast from the sea. Visibility had improved—the main reason Grashnor had been able to see Rath and dive in after him.
"What of the rest? I'd estimate there stand five less of you than before," stated the captain, with regret in his voice. This guess was no estimate, for he knew his crew well.
"Exactly five, captain."
"The usual?"
"For three, yes. Last anyone saw, Gellshad and Eyerd stood clutching to the rail, there was a gust, and not a trace remained. Nobody quite remembers when Cormay went, though."
"And the remaining two?"
"Felyir sunk caught on a hunk of debris blasted from the upper cargo hold on the main deck, and Svaerin, well..."
"Well what?"
"He's, he's right there." Pointing but moving his head in the direction reluctantly, Grashnor's thick index finger lead Rath's eyes a bit across weather scarred planks toward the stern. Lying there mangled in a pool of his own blood was a sailor robbed of his life by peculiar misfortune.
"Seems one of the lance bolters went off during the swell. Spitted the poor bastard like a fish."
"Gods be gracious," sighed Rath.
"Often they're not. I Guess that's what he gets being so afraid of drowning ever since we left port. Maybe this is a wish deceitfully granted."
"Heh—" Rath was still solemn, yet stood barely a minute longer. Raising his eyes toward the men, they could see a familiar fire still alive. He took a breath, crossed his arms and nodded. "Let's keep this stump properly afloat now, shall we?"
The crew hesitated not, shouting alterations of "aye, captain," and acted as one body; they did exactly what was required in the most efficient fashion. Rath needed not issue further orders, although he did: keeping steady the guise hierarchy of captain and crew, though all knew sailing with Rath was more akin to campaigning alongside a beloved leader to one's last battle than fighting scurvy aboard a trading ship. Now Rath was not a king, and some would argue brilliant strategist against clever and overly lucky fool. But even without these traits, his crew always felt utterly compelled to press on regardless of what goal their captain had set on the brink of sight when the clouds were black and the sun was setting.
It took nearly the whole night to get matters on deck back to acceptable condition. Most of the water had been drained, debris thrown overboard and the sail raised once again with sheets drawn tight and knots hard as stone. Regardless, the moon was still high enough to warrant sleep, and the men retired to their quarters hoping to gain what little rest was still available before the winds were tame enough to permit safe passage.
Two hundred yards or so from the ship floated a man horribly pale and stretched over a sodden hunk of wood from the hull of a ship he once manned. The wind whipped his emotionless face while rain drops patted shriveled skin. With each cycle of the waves, he was tossed up and pulled down; sometimes he was rolled under the water, but his eyes did not burn from its saltiness. Neither did his lungs ache for the sake of air. He was dead—yet another taken by the mighty sea. Fish would soon begin to nibble his flesh, and nastier things yet would consume his form once the depths called in their claim. Lifeless eyes stared ahead, hoping for nothing now, and by the light of the moon reflected a dark landmass, giving way to an impossibly tall spire that jutted defiantly from the sea.