On Raven's Wings (chapter 1--part 2 of 2) 2500 words

[rankelidyek]

(I appreciate any and all comments. The first part of this is in another thread if interested. This is all first draft, so don't worry about my feelings. Thanks again!)

My name is Rennik. I chose the name carefully right before they took my soul, before my memories leeched out of my head and left me a barren place. Before the scars healed and the past faded, taken by the devils in this land. I am forgotten. I am an exile, and I have nothing, not even myself.

Names are god's fingerprints. The devils took mine so god wouldn't know me as his own. They scrubbed his mark clean off.

I chose my new name with purpose. I found it here by necessity, then understanding. Rennik: the trailing edge of a bird's wing.

A rudder. The old ones claimed a bird buoyed upon invisible waters, its feathers sails upon the wind. I like that, waters we cannot see. Waters only made for a bird. Birds, after all, possess sight much keener than any man's. I am a raven, and my feathers are black. And I see what other men do not.

I bear the Spark in a Candle. Its dark helix surrounds it like wax. In truth, it is a hollow onyx canister fashioned of hard alloy. The Candle will be shipped off, and it will remain unlit, waiting for another. Inside is my gold. I think of the Spark that way because I do not like the truth. I do not like picturing one flickering in the chamber, a kind of memory and life, a strange ember with tendrils and vapors. Somehow, the Candle binds it, wraps it up tight in some sort of spiral cage. Few know or ask how it really works. All I see and feel is a cold weight in my hands, a blank black cylinder.

Besides, now I have other worries.

Devils live in the land, and they still sell souls. That, I figure, is fine with me, as long as it is not my own being purchased. As long as the soul sits in a Candle and in my hand. Dangers litter this trade. Some devils are short of cash, and what we provide is expensive. Some turn. Some kill for it.

The devil I will meet is a man named Djinn. He has red eyes and pale skin.

I've never seen his horse.

In the distance spans the sunken heights of the Coven. It is one of many places my kind has built in this land, and the one I near they call Chasm. Its features drape black and oily, a hybrid material spreading nebulous beneath a sea of grey light, like some kind of seaweed in the ocean floor, gathering nutrients and photovoltaic energy, even molecules, catching them in clusters and expanding. The vine gives all we need. Power, warmth, shelter, even food. Chasm steeples, a vast canopy overhead, clotting the rubble around it, choking the old buildings like a withered vine.

The highest stretch of vine-canopy belongs to Djinn's trade kingdom. He stanchioned the Coven-growth above a broken cleft of building somehow surviving the centuries still. He sits in the highest spot of emptiness. Though, often, he walks other worlds than this.

My stomach twists.

At the edge of Chasm, stands Tjonesh Dath. He is an off-world killer. They say if he looks at you, then you're famous, and someone very high up wants you dead. I've always determined to avoid that sort of celebrity. I'll settle for quiet infamy instead. That way, the only pursuit you must avoid is your own conscience.

Tjonesh's face lays wrapped in Dorlish membrane framed by an iron-wrought helm. Its eyelets circle featureless folds and a face stirs beneath the living covering of floral tissue. He is a spectre, and many avoid him. As always, I wonder about his thoughts as I pass. Unlike many, I do not shrink near the man. If Tjonesh Dath wanted me dead, I would already smoke from a hole in my head.

Instead, his silent eyes watch me as I step past into the darkness of the Coven-growth covering. Few of us manage to scrape by long enough to earn our scars. Tjonesh knows I have my share, and even he would not take me lightly.

Through the long corridors, I smell the faint, mineral musk of the vine. Spots of grey bleach shadows above, translucent where the plant's fabric stretches thin. I walk through a bazaar, a tent full of busy merchants. Engenic devices glisten, half-alive and displayed like black fish dangling. Silhouettes mill beneath each pocket of shadow. The shifting lights sliding beneath the vine reveal wine-dark colors set beneath merchant's stands. Synthetic tapestries hang, consisting of living threads, changing colors with the seasons of Azimuth. Though I know it is an engenically implanted sequence timed to the celestial clockwork above more than any reaction to the environment.

Not far from Chasm lays a forest modified for ease of construction. Plants there bear more kinship to ceramics and metal than Old World trees and poppies. Engenic moss grows for insulation and fire protection, and a dry coral for cement. Anything we need we conjure from sunlight and atmosphere. Even oxygen—for long trips in the deep of space—concentrated and focused within sponge-like filters that secrete a chemical catalyst, like an amine, converting carbon monoxide and dioxide back into water and air. As long as molecules pinball around, methods to reshape them will continue to evolve. And somewhere along the way, we'll probably forget what it all looked like to begin with.

I pass each stand with my hair on end. Traders, traitors, and killers all. Their wares bear more value than any lives we have to offer, and they speak in hushed tones as they barter amongst themselves.

Throughout scatter ruins of stone and steel. Both lost their value with the introduction of the vines. Now, they linger, obsolete and viewed with a quaint, condescending nostalgia. For some reason, the sight of such structures quiets me.

The slope of the canopy lifts grudgingly amid phosphorescent globes of light floating like icicle stars in the darkness. They siphon the photovoltaic energy stored from the vine and spit it outward in a white, ugly glare. The lights move, combing the underbelly of the canopy for ions and charge. I watch them skirt noiselessly in the depths.

Djinn's castle looms overhead. The covering takes a sudden incline, steepling as I stare into the height of darkness, finding the jagged edge of the building where it had broken so long ago, like the flat of a brittle blade. Mortar calcifies like bone amid a skin of glass and alloy.

A broad set of doors lay open before me.

Two large shapes stand before them, brandishing harpons. The weapons appear ornate, almost like pewter in the low light. They lower toward me like staffs with razored edges. Air, heated and ionized, curls upward from their tips. The two men leer at me with knowing smiles as they see the trepidation on my face. Harpons are nasty toys, and very few have the privilege of their use.

"Rennik, my son."

A voice, Djinn's, filters from the depths. Though those depths lay within my own skull. Devils speak in tongues and without them as well. I hear his thoughts in mine, and I dislike it. The two guards grin at my discomfort.

"I see you've brought something. Is it a bright one, your Spark?"

When dealing with a devil, deal carefully.

"It wasn't an easy find." I tell him.

"Nothing worth finding is." Djinn muses.

The stares of his guards raise my ire, "Call me in. I don't talk trade with floor-apes."

Djinn laughs, but I watch the duo carefully. They might be monkeys, but they have large teeth and I know it.

"Someday they might bite, I think."

"Then I'll know who let go of the leash."

The devil laughs again, but the sound pipes through from inside. It is a real sound. His teeth are daggers, and his laughter, the sound of a whetstone, sharpening.
"Good, then." Djinn says, pleased. "Let him in."

The harpons part and I step past.

In the distance I spy a lift. It looks like the gates of an old furnace, and I know it will bring me up to Djinn's private chamber. The one sitting atop the abyss. The corner office, the penthouse of this damned darkness. The highest point of hell.

I walk inside and let it take me.

******

Djinn's red eyes peer at me beneath his brow. His hair bristles, a ghostly white, wisped long and tenuous about his ascetic features. Sometimes I see a quiet flame in those eyes, but I know it is my imagination. Djinn altered himself long ago. He pulled the pigmentation from his skin, they say, to rid himself of his humanity. They go so far as to claim he removed his mortality with it. Standing here now, I find myself beginning to believe.

He slides a slender hand through his white, albino hair. His eyes crinkle in amusement. "You're the kind that always bangs on the cage, Rennik."

"Yeah, well I know I'm in it."

"Ah, that's a rejoinder. But you know that too, don't you? You're a clever monkey, and clever ones don't last in a place like this. You're the kind that fancies yourself a man just because you can walk."

"I know where I am, Djinn."

Real hatred worms past Djinn's eyes. "You never think there's a reason for the cage, monkeys like you. You just bang on it. Just maybe those bars are the only thing keeping you alive."

"What do you have me for?" I ask him.

Djinn stands, his skin glowing in the low light. The effect has me unsettled, but a part of me rebels. He spies it, and the grin returns.

"I have a new client."

I feel better now that things have turned to business. The business is something I know, and it is where I am valued.

"This client is very connected to his addiction. He's had his fill of Sparks. Says they talk to him in his sleep, and sometimes his waking as well. He thinks that enough of them will bring him close to a kind of godhood.

Djinn's eyes glaze a moment and he lifts his hand to teeth. Their sharpened tips sink into the flesh between his thumb and forefinger. I see blood pool and his gaze focuses again.

He lowers the hand as if nothing has happened. Blood drips to the floor. For some reason, it makes me think of time. Each drop turns to sand in my mind. Sand pooling at the bottom of an hourglass.

"He's an old man, a bit touched. He says he tried a new kind of Spark. Says it was a color. The ones he had before were all white."

"What does this have to do with me?"

Djinn laughs, a dry desiccated sound, "A Scavenger got it for him. He's willing to pay a very large price for another."

As Djinn says it, I think of the devil inside the room with me. I know what sort of sums devils require. A part of me feels a bit of sympathy for the crazy old man.

"I've never heard of such a thing."

Djinn's red eyes fix on my own, "No, you have not."

*****

"This doesn't feel right." I look at Djinn, pointedly. Now we get to business. I know the possibility exists of us brokering a deal for my own soul. If that is the case, I want the going rate.

Djinn paces to the edge of a makeshift balcony. A ragged hole cuts through the Vine so he can peer above the Chasm. Below, a blue sun sinks upon Azimuth's horizon. The sky bruises, violet as it touches down. The folds and flaps of the Canopy glint in its waning light, a tarpaulin spread over the rubble.

I feel smothered at the moment, as if I am taking a final breath. Hope is just incense, masking the decay –and its scent is fading.

The devil tilts his head at the sunset, King of a dead land. Djinn's sense of pride at the ruins leaves a bitter taste on my teeth. My hand itches for my weapon, but reason prevails. I know gunmen hide behind the walls.

"I know why you are here, Rennik. But do you?"

Djinn stares with a twisted smile.

"I remember some of it. Enough of it, if that's what you mean," I tell him.

This amuses him, "It's a trick of the eye, Rennick. This world, this Azimuth, is who you are. Don't forget that."

"And you're immortal, aren't you? In your mind, that is."

"Oh, it is your mind that matters, Rennick."

"Then you are, Djinn. But you're not human. Not even close. The only souls you'll ever know are the ones you sell."

His red eyes flash at me, and fear swims beneath my anger.

In your mind, Rennick. It's where I lay my kingdom. It's where I claim godhood. Does it bother you?

"Nothing bothers me."

I stand close to the edge of the world. My frustrations bleed through as I pull away from the edge, the chasm. If only I could remember, but then again, I know those memories often serve as chains. I try to think of this as my chance at freedom. To chose my own name. But I cannot remember the one I used to bear. I cannot remember who I had been. They took that from me, men like Djinn. A part of me whispers vengeance in my ear.

Azimuth is a dead realm, a place of forgetting. But not forgiveness. Devils like Djinn don't believe in forgiveness. They put me here to languish in my cell. A cell the size of a barren world planted far from the heavens and closer to hell.

"If you are here, Rennick, then you know you must have done something very bad."

He hits a nerve and my mouth clamps shut.

"You're not the most qualified judge of humanity, my son." Djinn says. After a time, he turns to face the darkening horizon. "But I am not without pity. I will pay you to find this Spark."

A flap of canopy parts beside me as a servant moves forward. A golden goblet braces in his fingers, filled with a dark, enticing liquid.

My nostrils quiver at the sweetness. I ache for the taste of real wine. I have tired of drinking only the juices of Azimuth's canopies, of eating only what the black vine has to offer. Tired of the taste of algae and mineral on my tongue. Even the smallest luxuries hold an allure I cannot deny. Memories of those things they left intact.

"This was the first mistake. Men. They thought for themselves, and god abandoned them. They tasted the fruit of knowledge and defiled the purity of the garden. Of their own beings. And God was wroth, and cast them out."

He sees my expression and smiles, "Some fruits are only meant for god's lips, Rennick."

Djinn curls his white fingers about the chalice and drinks deep.

On a level I cannot explain, it teaches me more than any deliberate speech. I know then who I am in his eyes, and my place in the world.

Wine, from the heavens. My heart mourns at the loss. I know in my soul that devils like Djinn cannot taste the sweetness, nor know the truth it bears. I wonder if it is the same with gods. If they cast men down out of jealousy. If the bars they built weren't at all to keep the monkeys in, but to cast them out.

Djinn's expression softens, "But I can offer something else."

"What?" I ask.

"Not knowledge, Rennick. That is for me. But another fruit, just as precious."

"And what fruit is that?"

"Memory." Djinn says.

I feel a hole open in my chest.

*****

[Funngunner]

I like it. Actually, at first I kept wondering where I had read a narrative structure like this: the first-person, conversational, yet kinda poetic kind. Then it dawned on me: Neuromance and Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson.

If you haven't read em, check them out. I think you'd appreciate the stylistic choices there.

[rankelidyek]

Originally Posted by Funngunner

I like it. Actually, at first I kept wondering where I had read a narrative structure like this: the first-person, conversational, yet kinda poetic kind. Then it dawned on me: Neuromance and Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson.

If you haven't read em, check them out. I think you'd appreciate the stylistic choices there.

Thanks, I appreciate it. Someone mentioned Gibson to me on a short story I wrote. I need to pick up those books sometime. Though I don't read in the genre I'm writing until I finish because I don't want to be influenced. Another reader mentioned Milton, who I haven't read either. Let's just say that I have plenty of reading to do once this is finished!

I just finished my fantasy novel and it was nice to read in that genre again. I read The Darkness That Comes Before by. R Scott Bakker. Interesting novel. Worth reading, I say.

Thanks again!

Ranke