International Embarrass Yourself as an Artist Day: matociquala's

[hawkwing_lb]

matociquala has a dare going on:

Okay, I double-dog dare you. Go ahead and post the awfullest, grottiest, ancientest piece of juvenilia you still have a word processor that will open.

What a pity I moved computers last year. Such a terrible... pity.

However, here is something dreadful I wrote six months ago:



Breaker of Worlds, Spinner of Dreams

-----

"Kolomak!"

The heel of his boot crunches in the snow. He turns his back on the villagers clustered at the crossroads of their squalid mountain settlement and looks up at me. Snowflakes settle in the hair of his beard, cling. His eyes are dark hollows in his face, pained and bitter. Though his shoulders are stiff with barely-contained anger, his voice remains calm. "They won't help us."

"They're afraid," I say softly. My horse whuffles and stamps a hoof, tugging at the reins. Kolo doesn't ride. To keep up with him, I must. I shiver and resist the urge to pull my cloak closer around me. The cold is bitter.

I was born in a village like this. I understand their fears more clearly than
I desire to. I shared those fears, once.

Later, I became part of what they feared.

Snowflakes gust on the breeze. Ice stings my cheeks. I meet his eyes, hold them, look away. Jagged mountain peaks shadow the sky. "We should go," I say.

We cannot afford to tarry here.

He jerks a nod. I expect no words from him, and receive none. His long stride carries him forward, the valley road a trail of pristine snow waiting to receive his footprints.

I mount and follow.

#

Kolo is tireless. Another man might have lain down months ago. Given up, faced with the might of an empire that desired nothing better than to crush him utterly.

Some might say it succeeded.

Crucified corpses line the roads of the empire. From the foothills of the Spine to the shores of the Indigo Sea, the legions have exterminated rebellion wherever it raised its head. Kolo's rebellion, raised on the wings of prophecy and hope.

It is shattered, now. A sacrifice dismembered on the altar of the dark gods of slavery and suffering.

I do not know why we are still alive. Our pursuers have hounded us since spring. It is winter now, and there is nowhere left to run. Soon we will be brought to bay.

Kolo is tireless. Each step takes him one pace closer to a destination only he can know.

I follow. My horse's hoofs mark the snow between his footprints. I have followed him through two turnings of a year. I will follow him through this second winter, a winter of the soul as well as of the land, as the year turns to a close.

Death lies at the close of the year.

#

I had come to kill him.

It is winter then, in my memory. The coal-filled brazier at the centre of the hut does little to dispel the chill. My breath hangs in white puffs on the air.

He lies by the rear wall, alone beneath his blankets. I pick my way around the bundled, sleeping forms of the peasant family that has given him shelter with the silence of long training. In the morning they will wake, and he will be dead and I will be gone. The danger that this man's words of peace and the end of dominion pose to the Empire will be at an end.

I reach his side; draw a knife from its sheath. Only then do I realize his eyes are open, watching me. "You're an imperial." His voice is the barest breath of a whisper. He does not move, gaze unblinking as a raptor. I have the sudden, uncanny sensation that I am the prey here, not he. "And you're here to kill me."

I make no reply. He has not cried out, though within call are men who would give their life to preserve his. His wakefulness has jolted me; my fingers tighten around the hilt of the knife.

Before I can finish, he speaks again, eyes still calmly level. "And the others?"

That he should care for the fate of the family under whose roof he shelters surprises me. I know of no legate who would display a like concern. "I have no orders for any beyond you," I say quietly.

I do not know why I speak. Why he is not already dead. Something about him has stayed my hand. No assassin of the legions has ever failed to remove a target and lived to tell of it, but I find myself wanting to. Wanting to walk away and let this man live long enough to change the world.

"You can't do it, can you?"

His impossible calm challenges me. His question strikes uncomfortably close to the truth. "Your revolution cannot last," I say. Bitterness sours my tongue.

His eyes flash. For the first time I notice they are yellow, like a wolf's. "It cannot last," he agrees. His voice is soft. "And neither can I. But I tell you this, legionary. The Empire will not long outlast it, either."

Kolomak the Changer. A man to break the world.

I do not believe him. Yet I cannot kill him.

All I can do is try to keep him alive.

#

"You're a woman."

The first time, he spoke the words with surprise. Prickly with the aftershock of self-made decision, I remember that my reply was barely civil, but Kolo received it with calm.

I could have hated him then.

Weeks after that cold clean morning and my uneasy betrayal of the Empire, he said them again. This time in wonder, the first time we made love.

#

"You served them willingly."

We lie in a crevice in the rocks, wrapped round in our blankets. Tethered close, my horse is a shadowy form against the cold darkness of the sky.

I shift to look at Kolo's shadowed face. His is an old observation, oft-repeated. His hands trace my scars: old, faded marks of fetter and lash; newer, the multitude of scars from my time in the legions, ranging from long-healed and faded to fresh-closed, red, puckered flesh. The pattern of my life is laid out upon my skin. I cannot look at it without remembering.

"There are worse lives, and worse sins, that a soldier's."

It is what I have always said in answer. He sighs, and I know that he does not understand. We are opaque to each other, he and I, drawn towards each other and simultaneously pulled apart. I cannot see the world through his eyes, though I wish to.

The sight is a cleaner one than the world viewed through mine.

Distant wolfsong carries on a gust of the breeze. I shiver, feeling his muscles stiffen, then go slack. I know he hears meaning in the eerie sound that I cannot. He is half-wolf, my Kolo, and not really mine at all.

The world would be better for it if we were all such wolves.

#

Morning brings us below the snowline, into a tree-spotted valley. Kolo halts at the foot of the slope. His shoulder is level with my stirrup. "Home," he says, and glances up at me. The pale sun casts shadows into the creases of his smile. The joy in his eyes is tangled with pain. "I remember this first of all the places I have been," he adds more quietly, looking around. "There is nothing before it in my mind. Only grayness and the smell of rain."

A shiver runs down my spine. Neither of us have ever spoken of our lives before that first winter night. An undeclared agreement, one that has underlain every word we have spoken since.

For the first time I wonder if any of the stories told about him are true.

My gelding shies underneath me. A wolf pads out of the trees. Its eyes are the same yellow as Kolo's. It regards us for a moment.

Kolo bows. The wolf dips its head, and in a flash of grey melts back into the trees.

He straightens and looks at me. In the thin light of the winter sun, his glance seems fey. "I go no farther," he says, and reaches for my hand. His thumb massages the palm. "When they come, the men the Empire sends will find me here."

That night, and the nights that follow, he leaves my side when the wolfsong sounds. He runs with wolves beneath the cold stars, and I wait, rubbing my thumb across the hilt of the sword that I carry where he will not, and wonder what will come.

#

A wolf's cry, attenuated by distance, echoes down the mountain slope. Perched on a rock in the wintry afternoon light, Kolo goes stiff.

I rise as he turns. Pain and calm resignation mingle in his eyes. His expression tells me all I need to know.

"Kolo --"

"The men of the legions are almost here." He speaks with the same steadfast calm he has always shown, with only the slightest tic at the corner of his mouth to reveal his effort. "I will meet them at the entrance to the valley: I refuse to be hunted down like an animal." His hand touches my shoulder. For him the brief brush is the equivalent of an embrace. His tone changes, becomes more urgent. "There are caves farther in. Find them, hide, survive."

"I won't have you die alone."

His yellow eyes flash. "And I would not have you die at all!" Calm again, he says more quietly, "It is the last thing I will ever ask of you. Please."

I go.

#

I know it when he dies, walking willingly into the arms of his executioners. The mountains ring with wolfsong. The eerie keening echoes among the softly-falling snow. My tears freeze on my cheeks. In the gathering dusk, I rub the hilt of my sword and feel ice harden in my soul.

Kolo never carried a sword.

Kolomak the Changer. A man who might have broken the world, had his compassion not been so great.

The Empire was more ruthless than he.

But not more ruthless than me.

I am a product of the legions, of blood and poverty and pain. I am a soldier and an assassin and a killer. The Empire formed me in its image, and without Kolo, I would never had known mercy, much less how to offer it.

I am what the Empire made me.

Kolo prophesized the Empire would not long survive him. I clench my fist around my swordhilt. I will see that it does not.

I owe it no loyalty. It only made me what I am. Kolo showed me that I could choose to be more.

Kolomak could not break the world. But I can.

And I will.



It's melodramatic, overblown and has only a quarter of the plot it needs to make sense. And that's just for starters. *g*

Still, I finished it.

Comments

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

I think we each fear our own harsh criticism far more than anyone else's. And to that end, I am eternally grateful that my worst scribblings predate the computer age. (shudder)

Your story, although you criticize it deeply, it has promise. It has the bones. That's something that many people struggle to attain and never reach, and believe me, I've seen many failing efforts -- I once read slush for Baen, for a while. Many of us volunteered. A few still trudge through the Pile Which Never Diminishes. ;-)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

My own earliest also predate the arrival of the PC in our household. Please the little gods of shame and embarrassment, none of the crap I ever wrote for school writing groups will come back to haunt me.

(If any of it does, especially the poetry - which I thought was clearly Deep and Insightful at the time - I'm changing my name and leaving the country. Seriously, it was baaad.)

Your story... has the bones.

You give it more credit than it deserves *g*. It's about two steps up from 'dreck', and at least one below 'adequate', IMO. It's gone into the ideas box, and may emerge as a novel - because, seriously, worldbuilding, plot, and backstory = definitely not there.

Although both Strange Horizons and Ideomancer were polite about rejecting it. *g*

People who read slush should be eligible for some sort of medal. 'Risked Having Eyes Bleed From Bad Prose So That Good Stories Might Find Homes' sort of thing. :-)