And now, the Prelude to the all new and improved 3rd draft of my novel, "Blood Skies".
blood skies
steven montano
Across fields of broken sand and salt estuaries, nestled at the edge of a cold and frozen sea, standing opposite a forlorn tower of black metal and razor protrusions, stands a city of the living. It is unnatural – it doesn’t belong. It teeters at the edge of a frozen marsh. Transparent frost limes the outer walls; strange insects like cursive figures from an alien land lie frozen in ice colored amber by dirt and rust. The white and gray fields are illuminated by a frozen sun trapped in a sea of turgid clouds.
He sees it all. He feels, in a way, as if he has never seen it before. Cold bitter wind that curls off the surface of the frozen sea carries foreign substance: corrosive salt and the brine of alien fish, undine fog and arcane steam. The sky is striated into alternating layers of dark and light, as if a cross-section of some aerial soil, and the horizon is strangely split, simultaneously too far and too close, two dimensional, a flat screen of debris filled sky.
Nothing seems to belong. The world has been cleaved, and then refused by a blind hand. There is a sense of wrongness, a heavy and catastrophic air, a sense of temporary. He feels and sees it, can almost taste it, even though he is not really there. Is it a dream? A vision? Does it matter?
He sees into the heart of Thornn, its angled towers and iron catwalks, its crenellated domes and flying bunkers. Fields of half-built ships made to sail through the air. Fields bound in razor wire and protected by automaton gun turrets made of ancient steel, and that swivel on grinding arcane gears. Dirigibles piloted by lightweight Gol aeronauts, unpeople, dwarf and misshapen, bound by the shared knowledge that they have been changed but forever unaware of what was truly done to them. In a way, the Gol are representative of the entire world.
Things were different before The Black, and everyone knows it. But no one knows in what way.
He soars over the rooftops, cognizant of the fact that he is flying, unable to feel any real sensation of doing so. He is an intangible: he sees and feels and smells the world as if through some spiritual lens. He is a spiritual camera, a robot essence with no form. He is a medium.
He feels her with him. He is never alone, and he is glad for it. She presses against him, her ethereal skin laced to his like a warm and sticky sheet. Her thoughts penetrate him; her breath holds him like warm vapor. He wears her like armor, like skin. Her form corrodes, reforms, comes together once more in a shimmering rain that trails him through this aether, a spectral wake.
Twisted streets, narrow lanes, crooked houses. Architecture fused together by need. Ancient and medieval, but laced with things he knows are modern: streetlights powered by arcane batteries, hot dog vendors, percussive music created by programmable machines. Thick clouds of industrial smoke litter the sky, shot from tall brick factory chimneys; the black and red smoke fills the sky, creates an aerial wall that drifts in and out of his sight. Tall windows spill yellow light as the pale sun descends, as the glare of reflection that spills across the land slowly begins to ebb. He hears voices and wagon wheels, horses and steam whistles. He feels thaumaturgic current, the crackle of the arcane energies that provide warmth to the city. He smells warm bread and hot cider, alcohol and smoking artificial meat. He hears laughter, a baby crying, the clang of steel being hammered into armor or stakes.
There are crosses everywhere, all over the city, hanging over doorways, imprinted on buildings, drawn on the road in hexed chalk and blessed inks. They are iron and bronze, hammered and hand painted, tall and thin or fat and squat; some more resemble ankhs, some look like blades. None of them do any good: everyone knows it, and they are not concerned, for they are not there for practical purpose, but are just symbols of the ongoing conflict.
Across the fields of ice and salt, past the broken channels of sluggish dirt-filled water and shattered stone, stands the nearest Doomspire. It is a sliver from the city walls: a black spike, a malevolent needle surrounded by a nimbus of roaming shadow. It is only one of many, but it is from there that most of the attacks against the city of Thornn are launched.
He wants to dream of a world where none of this has happened: of a place without The Black, a place where his shattered memories of a peaceful childhood are untarnished. He wants to dream of a sky than doesn’t darken, of a world that doesn’t smell of rot, where he can lay down to sleep without fear of never waking. He doesn’t know why, instead, he dreams of this place, the world that he knows, the world that he wants to escape.
All he wants is to dream of something different: of a place where he is not afraid.
