R.L. Robinson's Blog
March 6, 2014
Variant (Preview)
I thought it was only fair to let people see what I'm working on.
The anthology is near completion, though there's still the editing process to go through.
Below is the unedited version of one story which will appear in the collection.
Comments are welcome.
Unbroken Chains
When Taeor, my father called the dragon by its true name, was brought to the pits, the fire season was just ending. We were readying to move north looking to follow the caravan trails, but the dragon’s capture would keep us in the south for a time. Already the air was growing chilly in the morning. Men and women bundled themselves up in furs despite the brightness of the suns.
Tame ogres pulled Taeor along on chains looped about their bodies. Imagine a bucking horse or cow, only far larger than a house or good sized hill, which is being pulled by six much smaller creatures, each straining into harness. Its wings were its forearms, folded back and striving to gouge the earth or else bat one of the ogres aside. The chains holding the ogres were long enough to keep them out of their sweep and they were trained well enough to know not to let themselves be pulled too close.
Taeor’s body was scaled in dull bronze, and his head, while eyeless, was thickly snouted, with nostrils which visibly flared as it grew near.
My father held his place, while some of the others backed away. Taeor looked in his direction, his sightless head fixing my father in place. Dragons do not need eyes to see, but understand the world with a sight of another kind.
Taeor grunted and snorted as though about to spit. Smoke escaped between his teeth, but the promised fire didn’t come. I glimpsed other figures near the ogres, the mancers I knew, chanting to keep the liquid fire stilled in its throat.
One of them, Lors I learned later, made the mistake of stepping too close. Taeor snatched him up inside his mouth and swallowed him down. He didn’t have time to scream, and like as not, never knew he’d been killed.
The mancers would redouble their chants, the language of the Neither holding much of the dragon’s real strength back.
Every several months between the end of the fire season and the start of winter, when the burn storms flared out, a dragon could be found wandering near the salt crags. Usually a young bull such as Taeor, pushed out of the shadow of its mother’s wing.
They were, to us, like gods. Albeit ones we’d driven from the sky and chained. The mothers, old ones we called them, were never seen.
In the Before, when the caravans stuck to the south, they’d come to bleed us. The power of their old language made slaves of the people who, my father said, offered up children to placate them.
Mothers cried themselves to sleep in those days.
How it was done was clear. It was not left to a mancer or wise woman to decide. It was not done by dint of crime, no matter how severe. It was done by the most rational means: the first born. The first blood is always the strongest and whether boy or girl, they were exposed at the edge of the sands to be plucked away.
Sometimes the father or mother or both of the anointed would follow after their children. Mournfully, they would traipse into the sands without looking back at their kin who’d commanded the sacrifice.
Perhaps people thought calling them anointed would soften the blow, but it didn’t. It was still sacrifice, no matter how much it was dressed up. The notion of a greater good gave them no solace.
They were no longer thought of as part of the caravan, so the story goes, the children given to the sky beasts. They served to keep the rest alive and life was, at least until the next season, as right as any could hope it to be.
Fysaal, just one of the caravan, just as any of us were or are. A father twice over, he’d given one son to the sands and watched his wife walk the same path after the child. Now he was a father again, a girl in the flush of new life. He would not do it a second time.
I suppose a better tale would be that he went alone into the sands and faced them down, but that would be a lie.
He took all of them. All the parents who’d given their blood to save the rest of us, three hundred in all, some say more, and led them over the dunes. Perhaps they were waiting for someone to say what they were all thinking. Perhaps they only needed a leader, someone to say that no more children would be offered up for the benefit of others.
The wise women foreswore them and the one hundred who returned took the name as their own. To this day the Foresworn are the breakers of dragons, my own ancestor among them.
They who came back left us as raven haired as the others, but returned with hair the colour of dragon fire. All the Foresworn are so kissed and the Neither was opened to them, from that day to this.
Where the others are dusky of skin, ours is like calf’s milk, but the suns do not burn us. Nor, it is said, can the breath of dragons. We have a touch of their own sight, seeing into the Neither as they do and are able to pluck fragments of their own language to use against them.
Whatever happened in the sands to bring about the change, none can say, for it was now long ago. The mancers, eager to accept their new situation and yet live, were granted the tidbits of knowledge allowed to them. They tell one story, but the wise women tell a different version and perhaps the truth is somewhere in between.
I’m not sure if it matters anymore.
A Foresworn can lie with any woman or man and the child born will be one of them. It is as certain as the rising of the suns. Thus unlike the mancers, we do not need to worry about the purity of our line and while their legacy withers, ours will endure against time.
Brought into the shadow of the standing rock, Taeor is anchored in place, the chains broken from the ogres and driven into the ground. My father, a firm hand on my shoulder, leads me forward.
The first breaking is the hardest, but as the first child was given to dragons, so must the first now confront them. I remember the words, our secret language known only to those of our blood, alien even to the mancers who know only the words of docility and contrition.
They envy us in truth. My father told me about Noraan, the last mancer to threaten the Foresworn. Whether he was foolish or simply unable to accept the new order of things, his is a story for another time.
These men bow their heads as we pass, now forbidden to look into the eyes of those whom they would’ve carried to feed such as the beast huffing and snorting in front of us. We broke our old chains and now make them anew for a different purpose.
I remember the words. They are after all, a part of my blood.
Taeor shifts his head, rearing as if to spit flame and burn my father and I to ash. At the last moment he stops, head arched back. A tremble warbles the muscle of his thick neck, as though of something building and then guttering into nothing.
His nostrils suck and blow as we come closer, now more or less in his shadow. He knows our scent and something like a whine rises in his throat.
This close I can smell the oil dripping from between his scales and the harsh tang of his fire, secreted from the immense sac buried at the base of his neck. I have seen them removed from the dead; the smallest was as large as ten men standing one atop the other.
Another might feel pity to cow a beast such as this, but not I. Father gently nudges me forward, by old law he can go no further.
My eyes are closed. My hands link together in front of me as the first syllables forge the dragon’s chain. Once made it cannot be broken, linking me to the beast and us both to the past.
My eyes are closed, but I see as Taeor must see. Through the lens of the Neither he looks impressive, but the aura wrapping him shifts in colour and if I was not sure before, I know he is afraid.
There’s an absurdity there somewhere, a dragon afraid of a child. We are predators they did not expect, but then is that not always the case in life?
Someone always proves the stronger in the end.
These creatures are long in our mercy and their debt of blood can never be paid. It must be struck out, one stain at a time until only we are left standing. So my father said and his before him and so on and so on and so I will say to my children.
Through the Neither I feel Taeor’s pain for a moment, but only a moment. In its place I hear the wails of the children taken by those of his own bloodline. So many their cries merge into a discordant wail.
The wise women say we will find the old ones, the mothers, who have known their children lost to our care. They know, so the old women say, that life as they lived it cannot get any worse.
They are wrong. We have much still to teach them.
The anthology is near completion, though there's still the editing process to go through.
Below is the unedited version of one story which will appear in the collection.
Comments are welcome.
Unbroken Chains
When Taeor, my father called the dragon by its true name, was brought to the pits, the fire season was just ending. We were readying to move north looking to follow the caravan trails, but the dragon’s capture would keep us in the south for a time. Already the air was growing chilly in the morning. Men and women bundled themselves up in furs despite the brightness of the suns.
Tame ogres pulled Taeor along on chains looped about their bodies. Imagine a bucking horse or cow, only far larger than a house or good sized hill, which is being pulled by six much smaller creatures, each straining into harness. Its wings were its forearms, folded back and striving to gouge the earth or else bat one of the ogres aside. The chains holding the ogres were long enough to keep them out of their sweep and they were trained well enough to know not to let themselves be pulled too close.
Taeor’s body was scaled in dull bronze, and his head, while eyeless, was thickly snouted, with nostrils which visibly flared as it grew near.
My father held his place, while some of the others backed away. Taeor looked in his direction, his sightless head fixing my father in place. Dragons do not need eyes to see, but understand the world with a sight of another kind.
Taeor grunted and snorted as though about to spit. Smoke escaped between his teeth, but the promised fire didn’t come. I glimpsed other figures near the ogres, the mancers I knew, chanting to keep the liquid fire stilled in its throat.
One of them, Lors I learned later, made the mistake of stepping too close. Taeor snatched him up inside his mouth and swallowed him down. He didn’t have time to scream, and like as not, never knew he’d been killed.
The mancers would redouble their chants, the language of the Neither holding much of the dragon’s real strength back.
Every several months between the end of the fire season and the start of winter, when the burn storms flared out, a dragon could be found wandering near the salt crags. Usually a young bull such as Taeor, pushed out of the shadow of its mother’s wing.
They were, to us, like gods. Albeit ones we’d driven from the sky and chained. The mothers, old ones we called them, were never seen.
In the Before, when the caravans stuck to the south, they’d come to bleed us. The power of their old language made slaves of the people who, my father said, offered up children to placate them.
Mothers cried themselves to sleep in those days.
How it was done was clear. It was not left to a mancer or wise woman to decide. It was not done by dint of crime, no matter how severe. It was done by the most rational means: the first born. The first blood is always the strongest and whether boy or girl, they were exposed at the edge of the sands to be plucked away.
Sometimes the father or mother or both of the anointed would follow after their children. Mournfully, they would traipse into the sands without looking back at their kin who’d commanded the sacrifice.
Perhaps people thought calling them anointed would soften the blow, but it didn’t. It was still sacrifice, no matter how much it was dressed up. The notion of a greater good gave them no solace.
They were no longer thought of as part of the caravan, so the story goes, the children given to the sky beasts. They served to keep the rest alive and life was, at least until the next season, as right as any could hope it to be.
Fysaal, just one of the caravan, just as any of us were or are. A father twice over, he’d given one son to the sands and watched his wife walk the same path after the child. Now he was a father again, a girl in the flush of new life. He would not do it a second time.
I suppose a better tale would be that he went alone into the sands and faced them down, but that would be a lie.
He took all of them. All the parents who’d given their blood to save the rest of us, three hundred in all, some say more, and led them over the dunes. Perhaps they were waiting for someone to say what they were all thinking. Perhaps they only needed a leader, someone to say that no more children would be offered up for the benefit of others.
The wise women foreswore them and the one hundred who returned took the name as their own. To this day the Foresworn are the breakers of dragons, my own ancestor among them.
They who came back left us as raven haired as the others, but returned with hair the colour of dragon fire. All the Foresworn are so kissed and the Neither was opened to them, from that day to this.
Where the others are dusky of skin, ours is like calf’s milk, but the suns do not burn us. Nor, it is said, can the breath of dragons. We have a touch of their own sight, seeing into the Neither as they do and are able to pluck fragments of their own language to use against them.
Whatever happened in the sands to bring about the change, none can say, for it was now long ago. The mancers, eager to accept their new situation and yet live, were granted the tidbits of knowledge allowed to them. They tell one story, but the wise women tell a different version and perhaps the truth is somewhere in between.
I’m not sure if it matters anymore.
A Foresworn can lie with any woman or man and the child born will be one of them. It is as certain as the rising of the suns. Thus unlike the mancers, we do not need to worry about the purity of our line and while their legacy withers, ours will endure against time.
Brought into the shadow of the standing rock, Taeor is anchored in place, the chains broken from the ogres and driven into the ground. My father, a firm hand on my shoulder, leads me forward.
The first breaking is the hardest, but as the first child was given to dragons, so must the first now confront them. I remember the words, our secret language known only to those of our blood, alien even to the mancers who know only the words of docility and contrition.
They envy us in truth. My father told me about Noraan, the last mancer to threaten the Foresworn. Whether he was foolish or simply unable to accept the new order of things, his is a story for another time.
These men bow their heads as we pass, now forbidden to look into the eyes of those whom they would’ve carried to feed such as the beast huffing and snorting in front of us. We broke our old chains and now make them anew for a different purpose.
I remember the words. They are after all, a part of my blood.
Taeor shifts his head, rearing as if to spit flame and burn my father and I to ash. At the last moment he stops, head arched back. A tremble warbles the muscle of his thick neck, as though of something building and then guttering into nothing.
His nostrils suck and blow as we come closer, now more or less in his shadow. He knows our scent and something like a whine rises in his throat.
This close I can smell the oil dripping from between his scales and the harsh tang of his fire, secreted from the immense sac buried at the base of his neck. I have seen them removed from the dead; the smallest was as large as ten men standing one atop the other.
Another might feel pity to cow a beast such as this, but not I. Father gently nudges me forward, by old law he can go no further.
My eyes are closed. My hands link together in front of me as the first syllables forge the dragon’s chain. Once made it cannot be broken, linking me to the beast and us both to the past.
My eyes are closed, but I see as Taeor must see. Through the lens of the Neither he looks impressive, but the aura wrapping him shifts in colour and if I was not sure before, I know he is afraid.
There’s an absurdity there somewhere, a dragon afraid of a child. We are predators they did not expect, but then is that not always the case in life?
Someone always proves the stronger in the end.
These creatures are long in our mercy and their debt of blood can never be paid. It must be struck out, one stain at a time until only we are left standing. So my father said and his before him and so on and so on and so I will say to my children.
Through the Neither I feel Taeor’s pain for a moment, but only a moment. In its place I hear the wails of the children taken by those of his own bloodline. So many their cries merge into a discordant wail.
The wise women say we will find the old ones, the mothers, who have known their children lost to our care. They know, so the old women say, that life as they lived it cannot get any worse.
They are wrong. We have much still to teach them.
Intro
Suppose I'd better write something, it's what I do after all...
I'm Scottish. I'm a teacher and a writer.
All my life I've tried to understand every part of myself. I accept that I'm capable of doing bad things, aren't we all.
I believe evil is as abstract a force as good. It does not die with those who do evil deeds.
Currently, I'm working on an anthology to be published by a small press for Kindle. It will feature a series of stories focusing on altered human beings.
Whether through genetic modification, technology and cybernetics or some mystical element, I want to explore how changing ourselves leads to both good and bad consequences.
I welcome any and all comments and I'll be updating this blog on a fairly regular basis.
I'm Scottish. I'm a teacher and a writer.
All my life I've tried to understand every part of myself. I accept that I'm capable of doing bad things, aren't we all.
I believe evil is as abstract a force as good. It does not die with those who do evil deeds.
Currently, I'm working on an anthology to be published by a small press for Kindle. It will feature a series of stories focusing on altered human beings.
Whether through genetic modification, technology and cybernetics or some mystical element, I want to explore how changing ourselves leads to both good and bad consequences.
I welcome any and all comments and I'll be updating this blog on a fairly regular basis.
