Rab Mosstooth felt as if he were falling asleep in front of the strange crowd. A guitar of slate and raptor’s quill chords rested across his broad frame. Palsied hands jerked across the chords, not quite able to make ‘em wail like the goblins in their cave raves. Red mana jumped along the length of the chords, grasping Mosstooth in a tingling euphoria. The red urged Mosstooth’s fingers on in a bastardization of a hymn to the days when the hunters were the masters of their own blades. As he played, reality met fantasy and leeched the magic from the tune. It left Mosstooth feeling as if he were a dried-out husk.

At the song’s end, the old black man wiped sweat from his brow. The crowd—all from some far off land called Vaqdro, come to Takjukeaux to establish an embassy—gave polite applause. Mosstooth forced a stoic expression despite his rising jealousy. These androgynous Vaqdroi glistened in the powerstone lighting, their skin and fat flayed to reveal musculature and their contracting leylines. Mosstooth’s gnarled hand went for one of the scarred patches where his inked replica of the underlying leylines had once been.

A Vaqdroi took the stage and offered a drink with a purse of coin. Mosstooth took the pay, tossed back the whiskey, and rolled on down the ramp. Vaqdroi parted for his wheeled passage. One of them laid a hand on his knee. Seaweedlike growths mottled the musculature of the Vaqdroi’s, oozing a clear excretion that formed an oily sheen over the striated muscle.

“Come back to my quarters. I could fix your legs for you.” A red grin and a masculine voice. “What is a crippling injury to masters of time and tide?”

Mosstooth rolled on through. I know enough about bargains to know ain’t none free.

“All I ask is one of your symbiotics!”

“Excuse me, sir,” another intercepted Mosstooth. “What my colleague means is those things your people stitch to your arms. I confess I find it a bit quaint and antiquated, but if the results are promising—sir! Sir!”

No. Mosstooth used the memories triggered by the ignorance of the academics to build a shield. Already made a mistake hunting with the satyr. No telling what the backwoods, backwards ijits in Fecund would think of these things.

Greetings and well-wishes to the bard went unheard. Mosstooth filed away their positivity and instead dug deep into his mental wellspring. He felt as if he were fifteen again, gripping the neck of a banjo he’d scavenged from a trash heap. The broken melody had drawn the druids like flies to a corpse. They confiscated the banjo and spoke of the dangers of glorifying the Uros by playing instruments not forged by their patron avatar. Them fly-vassals left maggots of fear within his mother and brother.

“I wasn’t angry at Daddy and brother.” Mosstooth muttered.

Beyond the confines of the lounge, Mosstooth passed strange beasts of burden, construction sites, and hatcheries of the seaweed-stuff these Vaqdroi seemed to wear piecemeal. He stopped his chair in the glow of the powerstone-studded enclosure, basking in the glow that flowed from dark blue to lime green and back. Mosstooth’s learned eyes took apart the spellcraft: the blue mana’s illusions tricked the green mana into thinking the enclosure was the digestive tract of a Vaqdro sea serpent. In response the green mana conjured up fleshy elementals resembling the stomach and intestines, providing a culture of the seaweed-stuff.

You gonna just weep about what you lost? Yep, it’s all I’ve got left. A nice injection of misery and woe to remind my audience that their lives are awesome! Mosstooth reached back for his guitar and started strumming it. The tingle of red mana arced from fingers to hand, heart, and brain. Warm, energizing, with an aftertaste of cinnamon that harkened back to Mama’s kitchen. He played faster, humming a song that triggered his anger. Build a big, ugly red fire. Pour a little Uros soul on it! Gonna need to be real convincing when I meet the Vital Ones.

No one paid old Mosstooth any mind as he wheeled himself down the boardwalk connecting the dwellers’ shacks to the economic heart of Fecund. Each jolt of a wheel over the uneven path sent pain knifing through old wounds. The guitar strapped to the back of his chair thumped him, and he fancied it was the ghost of his dead mama telling him that he was a dumb ass for offering up Fecund to the Vital Ones for his wode and his legs. She'd know all about being a dumb ass.

They didn’t hold you down and strip your life’s blood, Daddy. A memory came unbidden and unwelcomed, of Daddy being humiliated by Mama’s new lover. Mosstooth’s hand twitched toward the neck of his guitar. He stopped short and embraced the memory. Need all the fodder I can get.

Mosstooth’s exodus took him beyond Fecund and into the Green Mist Knees where the Vital Ones were rooted. Even then, Mama, you didn’t know a thing.

Appearing from the perpetually roiling mists that gave the cypress forest its name, Mosstooth marked a flat wooden face with glowing green slits for eyes and a tapering head. The Vital One’s voice had an echo and Mosstooth realized that it was wearing lacquered armor of ironwood.

“The most successful are not always the strongest.” A rough hand felt along the raw patches where Mosstooth’s wode had been. The wode was the secret to the marsh folks’ ability to connect with the mana of the land. Spells had been crafted from that addictive stuff and turned against goblins and their merfolk allies that found common cause as gator rustlers.

“They broke faith.” Faith was all Mosstooth had. A façade of faith, the ghost folks’ faith, had let his people meet in secret to share one another’s pain and transform their hopes into hymn. Faith in the bargain with the Harlequin had been Mosstooth’s bedrock while serving in the forces. That faith was broken when they cut him off from his wode.

“Ah, and you are certainly not the strongest.” A chill ripped through Mosstooth. The Vital One had found his Uros charm.

“The Uros beast gods did fail us when we needed them most. Which of the Uros packs do you follow?”

“Satyr,” Mosstooth said, his words coming out with a rasp.

“The trickster and the hedonist. Yes, that fits your folk just fine.”

Anger spiked at the insult. One he’d heard before from the skinless folk that came down from their gatelands for the marsh dwellers’ alligator meats and fresh crawfish. Mosstooth smothered his anger with the memory of how it had gotten him stripped of his wode.

“You won’t need the charm or wode.” The Vital One pulled the charm from around Mosstooth’s neck and threw it into the roiling green mists that were the forests’ namesake. “We need your scent. Otherwise your territory is closed to us.”

Mosstooth felt them force a cup into his hand. He filled it, gave it to the Vital One. The Vital One dipped a finger in it and passed it to the others. The air became thick with the salty scent of Mosstooth’s urine. They’re like animals, he thought.

“We are all animals, Mosstooth. Your kind is the greatest of animals, and for that you owe us much. You recognize it and are giving us much.”

“I just want my life back. They tell me not to let this,” he gestured at his wheelchair “define me.” He slammed his fist into deadened legs. “**** them and their pretensions. Let try picking through other peoples’ refuse for their living.”

The green radiance in their masks betrayed no hint of emotion. “You got that?”

Mosstooth blinked. Turquoise fissures cracked the Vital Ones’ armor. He started wheeling himself around as the illusions fell away to reveal suits and masks of oily greens and browns. A cold sweat soaked his craggy face at the sound of them giving pursuit. The ground exploded, spewing a geyser of green mana that knitted itself into a scaly four-armed humanoid with a rounded head and flat, triangular snout. Red eyes with a black slashes of pupils sent an immobilizing bolt of nausea through Mosstooth.

They shackled Mosstooth and confiscated his guitar. Sickness, exhaustion, and his drink from earlier left him unable to fight his captors. While they went on about whatever, Mosstooth watched the thick green mists that perpetually clung to the forest. His eyes sought the signs and his ears the sounds of the satyr’s mossdogs rustling and hissing on his trail.

The serpentfolk and its handlers brought Mosstooth to a grove of trees carved in the likeness of Takjukeaux’s patron avatar. The old black man caught a whiff of brine and, from the corner of his eye (these fools had no idea of the huntmaster that stalked these woods) he saw bands of reddish-purple through rips in one of their suits. The vines of a cornered mossdog could do that, he thought as the masked man removed a sleeve and traced a mana-pattern on his leylines. The hand’s fingers jabbed at the air before the carven avatars. The grove fractured and shattered with a sound like the roaring surf. In its place lay an encampment awash in the seafoam glow of post-mounted powerstones infused with blue and green mana. A network of bars between each of the posts had the dull orange coloration indicative of an infusion of red mana.

Master time all y'all like, Mosstooth thought. They led him past huts, seaweed-stuff gardens, enclosures with their balothrays and fungizoas to a shack at the encampment’s edge. In the shack’s darkness they lifted Mosstooth, set him against a rough bench of stonelike material and handed him what felt like his guitar. A shriek announced the table pushed before him, a pleasant aroma the meal awaiting him. Then a quiet hiss, footsteps and silence.

I hope you got more to do with your red mana than make them bars out there all glowy. Mosstooth felt around for the utensils and began eating. No point wasting a free meal. Dying of poisoning here beats being jailed in Fecund or claimed by the satyr. After the meal, he leaned back, took his guitar and started strumming the chords. The satyr, the huntmaster and the mossdogs against these so-called Masters of Time, that’d be a might fine ballad.

Afterword:

I been lurking and seen where a few members prefer to see the plane and new character in a story instead of a great, big ole guide. So that's what I'm aiming to do here. Throw out a new plane and a new character that may or may not ascend. Depends on how ol'Mosstooth feels about putting himself in a position to ignite his spark.

This was certainly interesting. I'm not sure I have a very solid idea of what is going on here, although I can certainly imagine this plane is based on Louisiana/New Orleans culture, which could be interesting. I'm personally not a big fan of some of the modern terminology throughout this, like "guitar" and "awesome," but others may disagree with me on that point. You also throw out a lot of world-specific terms that I'm able to get a slight idea of what they mean, but so many in such quick succession leave it a little difficult to puzzle out exactly what is going on.

Likewise, I don't have a particularly clear image of Rab Mosstooth or his motivations. He's wheelchair-bound and apparently bitter, he's a musician who uses red mana (an issue I'll address in a moment) and he's got...something...attached to his arms. The whole thing about "hunting with the satyr" confuses me, too. I mean, in a Magic setting, that's a perfectly plausible thing to happen literally, someone going hunting with a satyr. I'm inclined to think you mean it more metaphorically, or that it has some sort of religious connotation on this plane, but I have no idea.

There is an issue with describing mana by it's colors in a story. Now, let me preface this by saying I personally don't have a problem with it. However, in modern Magic fiction, few if any characters in canon seem aware of the colors of magic. Typically, we just don't see mana described this way. Now, admittedly, I've done it myself, but you should be aware that it somewhat goes against contemporary convention.

So overall, while I found this an interesting piece, I have little to no idea of what is actually happening, and this story did not get me invested in this character or this plane. I'll have to see where things go from here to know how I feel about either.

Thanks for posting!

My pleasure! From my browsing I gather teaching keeps ya busy, so again thanks for the input. This point isn't some kinda twist that everything hinges on, so I'll go ahead and give it to you about Rab's hunting with the satyr

Welcome, Heartless, and many thanks for sharing this story with us! I'm really glad that you decided to post it.

So, I'm really kind of torn about this piece. On the one hand, I very much enjoyed reading it. Clearly, you've put a lot of thought into tone and voice here, and it shows. This story has a sound to it which is very, very unlike pretty much everything else in the M:EM. And, to be clear, I think that's a good and exciting thing. The effect is very, very evocative, and it helps to pique my interest in the setting that you've established.

But, on the other hand, I have to confess that, like Raven, I had a very difficult time following the action in this story. Because of the dialect, and the figurative language, and speed with which it seems like the story moves between several different settings, and the general scarcity of information about who these various characters are -- or, for that matter, what they are, in several cases -- I just never really was able to get my footing. Narratively speaking, it was like falling into the deep end of the pool, without first knowing how to swim.

To put it a different way, if you asked me to recap who did what in this story, and where, and when, then I don't think I'd be able to do it.

Now, a lot of the time, I like this sort of dive-right-in approach to new characters and worlds. But, in stories that use that technique, I think the reader needs at least some familiar reference points, or enough supplementary exposition, to give them something to hold on to while they try to unpack the rest of the story. And I just couldn't find enough of that here to help me. I had a rough grasp of who Rab was -- that he was a musician, that he was crippled, that he had made some sort of deal in his past which he regretted. But that wasn't quite enough to help me penetrate a world which is as thick with its own mythology as this one seems to be.

For example, your comments about the satyr, in response to Raven's question, revealed something very important about Rab which I don't think I could have intuited from the story alone. And that leads me to believe that, if that backstory is important for us to understand what's going on here, then we need a little more of it to be explicit inside this piece.

I'm really intrigued with what you're doing here, because I have a great affection for stories which hold some of their secrets close to the vest. But, for what it's worth, one of the benefits I get when other M:EMbers offer feedback on my own stories is that it gives me a much better sense for when I'm withholding information which, in service to the reader, I really have to parcel out. It also warns me when connections which seem obvious inside my own head aren't obvious to people who don't have the benefit of that inside knowledge.

So, for what it's worth, I feel like a little more exposition and a little more backstory would go a long way here. And that doesn't have to come at the expense of tone or voice. I'm sure that there are ways to work it in.

But, again, I really did enjoy reading this piece -- it was a wonderful read-aloud experience. And, again, thanks so much for sharing, and I'm looking forward to seeing whatever else you may post.

Here's a preview of my next chapter that might give some more insight into this new characters' motivation and background:

Digger converted fragments of her past into tools for her present. She held a couple of amber-colored bottles, mixing the brews for one of the locals’ favorites. There was something reassuring about getting just the right amount of one ingredient, mixing and seeing the satisfaction on the patrons’ faces. Just what it was eluded her, and had been ever since the duel with the thought-lasher. The beast had done with her as it had done with all Vaqdroi that were of the age: submission, sifting, and scything the chaff of her mind.

It’s a different permutation of digging, this, she thought as she loaded her tray and made the rounds. Digging for the truth within the folklore.

The locals spoke of a pirate that had taken shelter somewhere on the southern coast of Takjukeaux while evading some privateer or another. His treasure was in honest to sea-serpent venom-fanged dragons, and they were reputedly hidden somewhere in these swamps. The trick was finding the common threads and following them to the source. Given that the privateers hailed from the northernmost continent Rairaka, it was likely they were hired by the Coldfire Company acting on the word of their minotaur-gods.

“Ey ghost lady! Less gaping and more serving, unless…” the patron made a gesture that doubled her companions over with hacking laughter.

Focus, Digger, she told herself. She delivered the drinks, chatted with the patrons, and spent the rest of the evening digging through the old books she’d taken as payment for the drinks.

“Digger.”

The voice was something between a coyote’s howl and a wildcat’s yowl. It brought a silence in the bar’s commotion and drew looks of fear and hate from the patrons. Its owner had taken a spot by the window and pushed aside the table and chairs. A tanned cloak draped the speaker—human skin, Digger saw as she approached; a kinked, oily tail of black and brown lay limp from the hides’ hem. Cured skins and hair, human, preserved different than those who’ve finished the Time Walk of Vaqdroblas.

Hey I'm one of the artfolk here! I mostly just toot around and doodle, but I like fantasy stories as well.
When I do read, I find enjoyment in trying to collaborate from a literary standpoint. Its a fun switcharoo!

Provided you are not handing in novels, I might read some of your stuff and try to collaborate! I'm also trying not to be too critical and give you the free edit of your life either, but I will say that I'm known to point out an grammatical foible or two! Which is entirely up to you!

I think you have a pretty good writing style! I enjoy the internal monologues, and you are quite good at describing things.

II

Digger


Digger converted fragments of her past into tools for her present. She held a couple of amber-colored bottles, mixing the brews for one of the locals’ favorites. There was something reassuring about getting just the right amount of one ingredient, mixing and seeing the satisfaction on the patrons’ faces. Just what it was eluded her, and had been ever since the duel with the thought-lasher. The beast had done with her as it had done with all Vaqdroi that were of the age: submission, sifting, and scything the chaff of her mind.

It’s a different permutation of digging, this, she thought as she loaded her tray and made the rounds. Digging for the truth within the folklore.

The locals spoke of the pirate Jean von Torsus that had taken shelter somewhere on the southern coast of Takjukeaux while evading some privateer or another. His treasure was in dragons, and they were reputedly hidden somewhere in these swamps. The trick was finding the common threads and following them to the source. Given that the privateers hailed from the northernmost continent Rairaka, it was likely they were hired by the Coldfire Company acting on the word of their patron Geist.

“Ey ghost lady! Less gaping and more serving, unless…” the patron made a gesture that doubled her companions over with hacking laughter.

Focus, Digger, she told herself. She delivered the drinks, chatted with the patrons, and spent the rest of the evening digging through the old books she’d taken as payment for the drinks. Filters are the order of the evening.

These Filters were the spools for a folklore-ensnaring web spun from the threads of her conversations with the patrons. Framing the strands like the branches of the marshland cypresses were the dragons of the pirate Jean von Torsus. I’m the fly that completes the metaphor, Digger marked pages and felt her hands beginning to shake. And Vaqdroblas is the spider.

A torrent of memories broke over Digger, dragging her back to the borderland between her home in Revnant and the sprawling industrial husk that was the Remnant. Amid Remnant’s smoking factories, barges and ships bound for every corner of the plane, and within one of the many industrial plants, she found it: Vaqdroblas with its triangular head, blunt snout and elongated body whose cavities purred with the flensing time-twister blades. Fins lining the serpent crackled with electricity that arced toward one of the many collecting spires in the rusted chamber.

Glistening golden eyes rolled in their sockets to better view the sooty scarecrow of a child draped in billowing rags. “You are at the threshold of our stark reality and the Dreamland. Have you your culture, child? Are you ready to join with the ranks of the Dreamers?”

Fear had the child on edge. The fulcrum of their society lay here, conversing with her as if she were its equal.

“We all come from the amnion as equals,” Vaqdroblas had said. “We are made equal by the universal truth of Dream, Reality and Illusion: The world around us is an Illusion of Reality. Our Dreams masquerade as Illusion when they are in truth our primal perception of Reality. The illusion pretending to Reality rejects this natural truth; and so Dream must cloak itself in Illusion.”

Throughout Vaqdroblas’s discourse into the obscure, the child detected strong odors wafting from the sea serpent. No doubt placing emphasis where emphasis was due, though the meaning darted from her seeking grasp. The smell and the confusing words reminded the child of her grandfather. He’d start smelling bad, babble like Vaqdroblas the Dreaming, and then hit the floor twitching. Courage built in the storm of her grandmother’s scatterbrained response to her shaking grandfather breathed fire into muscles locked by the chilling yet heady aura that began snaking from the Dreaming.

It sparked the child’s determination and guided her through the hydropon jungles colonizing the wrecks of Remnant. Within the dripping dark she found the lichenthropes from which others took their cultures. The Dreaming’s words haunted her throughout the excursion, growing in strength as she poised to dig into a cornered lichenthrope. She leaned over the threshold, a jittery little spider above the astral gulf of the Dreamers’ ranks.

Reality. Illusion. The answer lay beyond the realization of the Vaqdroi dream. What use in achieving the dream and becoming a flayed Dreamer, stripped of death’s mantle and the spell of incentive it cast over those it held in its sway?

Dig deep into the aether, the Dreamlands, and seek the Truth through its cloak of Illusion, Digger. She did not know if it was her internal voice or that of Vaqdroblas.

Digger’s hand knocked over one of the alcohol bottles. She saved most of its contents and toweled up her mess while a few patrons watched and made condescending remarks about her clumsiness. The weighty eyes of the patrons were nothing compared to the presence of the Dreaming or the expectations of one newly initiated into the Dreamers.

Truth hidden in Illusion fit the Filters. The multitude of tales created a chameleon’s camouflage that kindled the passion that earned Digger her name. So here she found herself in a backwater as a bartender while the Vaqdroi of her pod continued digging for the remnants of von Torsus’s dragons, applying her talents on an academic level. Digger made further rounds in an attempt to excavate a means of piercing the myriad illusions surrounding the Filters.

“The Filters? Anything for a fellow Dreamer.”

Digger broke off her conversation with a gnarled frog of an alcoholic. The speaker was a brass-skinned man with a matted red beard and a broad build cloaked in leathers and wolf fur. An axe as long as one of Digger’s legs with a head about the size of hers leaned against the wall behind the speaker’s chair. The forgotten alcoholic hiccupped a laugh.

“Don’ trus thus un, ee gointer chawp yah oop ana fetoo too deh grun frug mun, mon lover!” And the old frog fell forward, his forhead smacking the table.

Digger jumped, thinking of her grandfather and ran to the drunk’s side. A thick hand clamped her shoulder. She glared back, briefly seeing her grandmother whose look told her that her ministrations would be futile (though this dissipated), at the bearded face of the brass-skinned man.

“Leave him alone, Digger. This lout’s a devotee to the o-bakemono of Keigarei; he’d take you into the marsh and sell you to the rats from that distant continent. Patches stitched into his cloak of illusory comforts.” The brass man dropped some change beside the drunk’s bottles. “A man’s gotta have his vices, but they’re fools when they pretend that those vices can be won without being mindful of the old adage about the better hunter.”

“And why should I trust you?”

“I’m a Dreamer, same as you. I grew up in the ooze-and-bandit-riddled Revenant, heard about a radical among the Dreamers that turned down the time walk.” A cavity-ridden smile shone through his beard. “I don’t believe being a Dreamer is congruent with manipulating the will of those poor lichenthropes.” He shivered. “Digging in those things for good fungus to help one survive the time walk…it don’t seem like death’s mantle is really shed if you need that fungus to survive.”

The brass man took Digger’s hand and laid it against his greasy forehead. “Here, take a peak and see for yourself.”

Sifting through his mind brought Digger back to her distant homeland:this stranger running with the wolves of Revnant, fleeing Vaqdroi incensed by his interfering with their hunt for the lichenthropes and their culture-fungi. Something reached for the mental replay of the brass man leading lichenthrope in an attack on the Vaqdroi seeking their cultures.

This is wrong, Digger thought as she teased at the memory like a child determined to peel a dried scab. A dull roar like the sea heard through a seashell echoed in her ears. A physical sensation swept her from the brass man’s mind. Her view of the brass man’s hunt turned to one of a bemused brass man surrounded by the laughing faces of the bar-goers.

“The sooner we get our hunt underway, the sooner we stop feeding Fecund’s stereotype of the Vaqdroi as head-up-their-arse philosophers,” the brass man said. He helped steady Digger, lifted his ax and together they set out into the night.

“Clowns, actually,” Digger said as they left behind the boardwalk town of Fecund. “Most of them think we’re comedy performers come to offer our talents to the fungasaur barons along the Verdant-Bloodstained borderlands.”

This piece kinda plays like a dream that comes in and out of focus. I'm ever aware of the abstractness combined with being a removed onlooker that keeps it hazy, and then there are such life-like and loose dialogues cozied with great textures that keeps it solid.

The way it does that has me wracked with madness.

Its quite a surreal adventure.

I agree with Lunar that this second part is pretty surreal, mostly because it constantly jumps between past, present, dream, reality and philosophy. However, because the philosophy parts uses ambivalent and ill-defined terms like "reality", "illusion", and "dream", and because the part that is real and really happening uses so much world-specific terminology that I don't know, like the geographic locations, and because you jump back and forth between "Digger" and "the child" (who I assume are the same person? It's hard to tell.) I find myself once again getting lost in the narrative.

I think you've got an interesting world here, but I just can't get a hold on it. It's too slippery for me. I think maybe some more solid descriptions of things would help a lot. What do things look like here? What sorts of sounds and smells is Digger being exposed to? Anything to help bring this world to a more sharp focus I think would help. I also have very little conception of Digger herself and what her real motivations are. She's looking for Truth, I got that. But beyond that, I feel like I don't know much about her.

Nice drop-in with the lichenthropes.

Let me state my intent with Vaqdroblas and the Vaqdroi. First, I would like you to guess at Vaqdroblas's color identity.

Got it?

Good. Now check the tag below.

I like it.

Keep it up!

My most prolific comment:: "Bastardization" is not a fitting term for slaying.

Music has fathers.

III

Children

Voldrak Manor clings to the Cliffside overlooking Bloodstained, a baroque fortress of spires, arch-windows and jagged towers connected by arcing bridges. The foothills leading to the manor gates are turned graveyard by the overgrown ruins lurking in the shade of their cypresses and willows. Between the graves and the mire of red algae seething with unseen lifeforms, upon one of the manor’s many balconies, stands the Voldrak Mistress.

The Mistress of Voldrak Manor studies Bloodstained through a telescope imported from the northern continent Rairaka. A smile crosses her ashen face as she thinks of the multitudes fighting for their lives beneath the red murk: it’s a fine thing to let our charges have at it. A shiver runs up her spine at the implicit bending of the investiture that followed the Sarkzahak siege.

Her pleasure is snuffed by the pungent odor of oil and ozone wafting from the cavernous library. The Mistress rises from her telescope, giving it an affectionate pat (gently so as not to jostle it), and enters a room of excesses meant to distract the Mistress from her duty to the lurkers in the walls. Her vision begins to blur and she sees the ghosts drag themselves from the dark corners.

There is no unifying characteristic to the ghosts. Their forms are warped, broken and remolded creatures from races predating the Voldrak clan while others come from races snuffed while under the protection of the clan. The Mistress fights the desire to fill herself with another’s life, gathers herself and stands firm before the ghosts of apes, atogs, loxodon, nacatl, homarids, naga, and avens.

For a moment she is transported to the wooded foothills beyond the manor walls where the scarecrows keep their eternal vigil. Psychic decomposers eat away at their elven minds, devouring their recollections of life among their elf kin. Their elven use of transmogrification and decay turned against them in response to the wishes of humans that experienced their depredations. Now the scarecrows have an inkling of the horrors they inflicted on the human babes snatched from their cribs in the dead of night. They expend themselves in the futile struggle against their own magics and will not help the Mistress here.

Before she returns to the manor, the mistress marks the scarecrows as a warning: abandon your duty at your own peril. In the hills of rolling mist the air is humid and heavy with a heady aroma of loam. The cycle venerated by the elves that came to put their twisted forms upon the posts throughout the hills, tinged with something else: the warmth of hot-blooded anger seeping through the pores of the Mistress’s—call them what they are, you see the evidence of their dreadful tantrums here—children. Indignation at their suffering under the Dark Lord in the northern jungles.

All of that broken world begins to crack and peal like burning flesh, the sweetness of their rot tickling taste buds that have long grown numb to the things she once enjoyed. A great shriek and a panther’s howl fill her ears as she is swept back into the cold gray halls of Voldrak Manor. All on the dull beat of distant wings.

“I have not forgotten the family’s duty.” She steps through the first of the ghosts and flinches at the vision. She finds herself amid creatures whose inhibitions have been burned away, their base desires mingling with their old jealousies and hatreds. Similar visions hit with each ghost, sucking away at her resolve to face the things heralded by the odor of oil and ozone. At the heart of each vision is the rolling-thunder beat of ancient wings, the roar of lightning and the reek of fire and brimstone. “This room, this one room is my haven and you have violated its sanctity!”

Her voice echoes off the room’s vaulted ceiling where a mural sprawls in which orochi, naga, o-bakemono ogres participate in carnal oni worship that would make a nezumi blush. She glances up and takes strength from the eastern art. She knows how it incenses the cold, turgid blood of the lurkers in the walls. A warm summer wind blows in from the marsh, bringing with it a charnel perfume that evokes images of oni worship the Mistress encountered in her library’s myriad journals.

A chained weapon is mounted over the library’s fireplace. The Mistress takes it, recalling the events wherein the Geist of Rairaka gifted her with the weapon, and her resolve is made firm by knowledge of the thing in the weapon. Spinning the weapon, she enters a hallway of bloodstone and marble veined in red; eyes accustomed to the darkness pierce the shadows lingering in the passage’s many alcoves.
The Mistress hears a low drone from further down the hallway. Then she sees the air rippling, colored bolts sparking across the distortion: green, black and red. Nausea sends the Mistress to her knees. Chills run up her limbs, a series of thunder-crack’s rip through her head, and a red haze begins to snake through the psychic fractures, filling her vision. Left blind to the world around her and deaf by the psychic storm, the Mistress’s sense of taste dissects the red haze with all the skill of the lurkers in the walls.

From within the weapon her companion whispers, “The worst is yet to come, child of ashes.” She sees the Dark Lord’s warriors hiding in plainclothes among her charges, conjuring their gods in secret. Talons rake through the screaming masses, tusks rend and gargantuan hammers spray the brains of those few old souls whose demons keep them vigilant. It is impossible to determine who does the least damage: the Dark Lord’s thralls or those whose ghosts have been set free by the gods’ carnage.

Amid the cycle of slaughter stands her companion: slender and androgynous in purple and blue leather that clash with the drabness of the marshland town. “Both sides are on the edge, Mistress. Your sorcery has stripped them of their defenses.” A smile cuts the companion’s face. “Now they’re easy prey. Find it in yourself to finish them.”

That’s not him, or her, talking, the Mistress thinks. Its anger at being bound to the weapon, a grave of this one's making that awaits its digger.
The companion’s lips move but the wingbeat swallows the words.

A sweat begins to drip from the Mistress. She feels fevered as the red haze departs, leaving her before the lurkers in the walls. They stand far above her in the darkness, not quite the height of a northern dragon but similarly built. Their scales shimmer in rainbow oil and they burn with a weak black fire akin to that of a plane being consumed by the Blind Eternities. Here stands the power that compelled her family into their chains of servitude.

Their black fires flare like a diloraptor’s hood at the sight of a greater predator; they fear the Dark Lord and his interest in the Hinges.
The Hinges await, she thinks and sends a summoning for her inhuman children. She feels her children stirring in the darkness of the manor as she makes her way to the grand hall. The click of their talons, the smell of iron and rot announce their presence. With them at her back she feels the lurkers slinking back into their dark defiles. Their excitement is evident in the waves of reptilian musk that wash over her as they exit the manor and enter the foothills. And amid the unstable terrain of the Hinges stalk the pleasures and thrills taken by her service to the lurkers.

@Vaqdroblas: Sorry it took me so long to address your question. To be perfectly honest, I forgot about it. Anyway, no, I did not get any sense that they were meant to be electric eel creatures, nor did I suspect their color. Primarily, I just don't think there was enough context in those first two parts to reveal that, at least to me. I was too busy trying to keep track of the various terms and work my way through the surreal descriptions. Sorry.

@Part III: I still don't think I know what's actually going on, because this section, like the others, seems to want to obscure the plot behind other things. That being said, I really like the descriptions on this piece. I do not think I have a strong grasp on the Mistress, because you really don't give us a whole lot about her. But I loved the descriptions of the ghosts and the grounds. That stuff was all great. But the Mistress, the Mistress's "companion," the Mistress's "children," all the stuff that I suspect is actually going to be relevant to the plot, all that stuff sort of falls by the wayside.

In general, I like your writing, and I think you have an interesting and engaging way of describing things, but I always feel like, as a reader, I'm being intentionally "left out" of the actual narrative, if that makes sense. Here's a good metaphor for my experience reading this. It's like I'm watching the Dagobah scenes from The Empire Strikes Back, but the camera never stops panning the swamp, and never focuses on Luke and Yoda. I can occasionally see them in the distance, maybe catch a few tiny snippets of conversation, but the scenes are only looking at the background. It's a very odd sensation, and not my personal style of writing.

I also need to object to the term "baroque," is it refers to a very specific period of real-life artistic history. Now, others might not have the same issue with it that I do, but it sort of took me out of the story right away.

The last note I'll make is that I feel this would be stronger in past tense as opposed to present.

Anyway, thanks for posting! It was certainly an interesting lead, even if it really wasn't my style.

So reading through this I have to agree with Raven and OL: you have a great voice, and you have a fascinating setting, and I have no idea what the heck is going on at just about any point in this narrative. The action itself and the context for that action is basically impenetrable, which is a shame because it seems like you've built quite an interesting world.

I don't think this is actually a problem necessarily with the more surreal aspects of the story. In fact, I think part of the problem comes from not leaning heavily enough on your experimental voice, which results in inconsistencies in the narration.

You've got sort of a weird merger here of stream of consciousness and third person limited. And you aren't necessarily consistent with that:



Even with the italicization here I think this is sort of disruptive... it made me wonder, though, what would happen if you just went full first person interior monologue. Like I said, you've got sort of a weird merger here of two narration styles because what we see as readers is highly dictated by the characters' internal thought process, but the rest of the story sort of signals that we should be reading this as a traditional fantasy story, if that makes sense.

I'm going to recommend revising things to be fully first person interior monologue. You're basically already there; might as well go all the way.

I think you also need to look at the tense inconsistencies... you probably shouldn't be changing tenses from chapter to chapter, and if you do revise the narrator's voice to be more consistent you'll want to be sure the verb tenses are coherent as well.

Additionally, you really do need more exposition and description. There's parts that are quite good about this, actually, that if used as a model could greatly help the rest of the piece. I'm thinking of the beginning in particular:



There's some problems even here (what is a "leyline?" it seems like you're using the terminology very differently from how it's usually used in Magic, but without context it's hard to know whether or not it's a correct usage for a Magic story or what exactly you mean by the term here) but there's other elements where I think you're hitting the right notes of context--we've got a description of the Vaqdroi, we know why they're there, we don't know why Rab is there but that's not a terrible thing at this point and isn't necessarily information we desperately need right now compared to the more alien audience which begs clarification.

Basically I think the major strength here is your voice as a writer, and I think going a little more experimental while also pumping up the descriptions and exposition could result in a really, really solid piece. I think you want to strive for a work that's difficult in a rewarding way, whereas right now it's just difficult in a frustrating way, if that makes sense at all... it's ok to be a little bewildering, but too bewildering and you just lose the audience.

Basically I have all the same criticisms as Keeper on this, which I came to before I read that post. I have only read part 1 because I think this is need of a major revision, though it is a fantastic start.

You have a fantastic sense of theme throughout the narration, but I feel it's not consistent enough to capitalize on it. On the contrary, I think you're actually hurting your theme by the inconsistencies the narration. To show you what I mean, consider the opening paragraph of the first part:



For the most part, this is a wonderfully magenta prose (by which I mean it is kind of purple but not overly so to become impenetrable). "A guitar of slate and raptor's quill cords" is a fantastic description that instantly clues you in to the nature of what is going on in the moment (that he's playing music) and of the fantastical nature of the setting. But then you immediately go extremely informal with the "not quite able to make 'em wail like the goblins in the cave raves". This wouldn't be too bad if you kept the informality in the way that the narration is focusing on Rab Mosstooth himself, but the entire rest of the paragraph is much more formal and typical of fantasy writing than that line.

That isn't the only example, either, as it seems whenever you try to get us into Rab's headspace you go for the informal, almost first-person style, only to return to the more purple style afterwords. This is probably the second-greatest failing of the work -- the greatest failing I'll get to in a moment.

While I'm still in the opening paragraphs, though, I want to point out this line:



Keep in mind this is my personal opinion, but I don't think calling him a "black man" is the best call here. For one, it kind of immediately has some connotations that might not be best for the story, but in addition with the way the rest of part 1 plays out, I'm not even sure Rab is human (not that you would need to specify that he's a human). Personally, I'd rather see the line changed to something like "the dark-skinned old human" (again you don't have to say his race if you feel it's better without).

Moving on, I initially got really confused by the term "wode", because like others have pointed out, you have a metric **** of world-specific terms without ever establishing what they are. I'm all for cutting out bad exposition (after all, most people don't have to explain concepts to themselves that they're already familiar with), but without any exposition you leave your audience floundering for a foothold against the sheer vertical cliff-face that's made up of all the unfamiliar terms you've piled up in front of them.

What I'm saying is, this is the greatest failing of your piece. Without the proper context, most of these evocative terms confuse the reader rather than draw them in. It's one thing to leave breadcrumbs to lead a reader down the dark forest of a story; but it's quite another to lead them straight into the heart of Lost Woods and then leave them there without directions. And personally, I don't think that it's only your terminology that is an issue here. Consider these two excerpts:





In the first, you say that Mosstooth "filled the cup", but you don't say with what until several lines later. I was imagining he maybe filled it with blood until you actually used the word "urine". In the second, I have no real context for what is happening because, as far as I know, Rab was not running. Not to mention Rab can't run because he's geriatric and paraplegic. The issue of what the Vital Ones or the Vaqdro are in relation to Magic races is an entirely separate issue but still compounds the problem of not being able to follow along with anything.

Again, I want to say that you have a fantastic sense of theme going, but as I said to begin with I think this needs a major revision in order to capitalize on it. Maybe then I can address more metaphysical issues like "how Magic is this piece", which I couldn't get a feel for when I read it.