This post is something a little different… Some years ago, I wrote a short story about an interesting character who had been imprisoned and sentenced to death by torture for attempting to steal a book.
I still need to finish that story – a few excerpts of which appear here – but there’s an interesting aspect to the protagonist which made me think of the possibilities of starting some other short stories and inviting others to help finish them.
There are some interesting possibilities to do this using NFTs – which I look forward to exploring here on t2, and potentially on the emerging Lamina1 chain, and/or Base.
But before I get too deep into the technical end of things, I thought I’d test the waters and see what people think of this character – and whether they’d want to see (or help decide) where these beginnings lead and how these stories end.
But first, a bit of background.
We meet our hero (if such he can be called) in the dungeons of Okahandja, deep beneath the city itself – its alabaster minarets gleaming in the desert suns, its bustling markets and sparkling fountains, beneath the grand central plaza where, Thornaby tells us as he straightens his worn grey cloak, he will again be ritually tortured to death tomorrow.
In the meantime, he meets the Queen who has sentenced him to die for the crime of, well… let’s hear her tell it…
“You broke into my library, you thought to steal my story?”
“The story of a Queen, yes. But not your story.”
“They are all my stories!”
Thornaby made no reply, stood mutely with gaze lowered, waiting for the queen to go on.
“You are a Remembrancer, are you not?”
“Yes, your Majesty.”
“And you sought to steal my story to add to the collection of tales you tell?”
“Liberate it, your Majesty.”
“But your kind knows that some stories are not meant to be told.”
“I know all stories long to be free, just as all men –”
“Silence!”
A very strange conversation follows, but when the monarch departs, it is clear there will be no pardon for our condemned narrator – and no rest for the wicked. In the hours before his death, his fellow prisoners invoke a ritual request which a member of his profession cannot refuse.
In the wake of the Queen’s departure, the dead quiet of deep underground spaces.
Broken, at last, by the young man with the pale skin and dark eyes.
“What’s your name, friend?”
“Thornaby.”
“You are not of this city.”
“No.”
“Most strangers at the gates of Okahandja quickly find their way to the Mad Keep.”
“I am more learned than most human flotsam off the Dune Sea.”
“Well, friend, I would bid you welcome, but I am afraid you are not well come at all. But inshallah. Salam wah lay kum.” He pauses. “It means, ‘peace be upon you.’”
“Wah lay kum a salam,” replies Thornaby.
The youth smiles. “You know our ways.”
“I know many ways, but they are mostly the same, in the end. Courtesy and respect. Kindness and hospitality.”
The tension is gone from the air, mostly. A large figure shoulders his way from the back of the clustered men to the front. “You gonna ask ‘im, m’Lord?”
The youth turns to the brute, regards him calmly.
“There are no 'Lords' in here, my friend,” he says gently, as if not for the first time.
“Yes, m’Lord.”
The youth sighs.
“I will ask him.”
“Thank you, m’Lord.”
The beautiful youth turns back to the grey-cloaked man.
“Friend Thornaby, you have a long day ahead of you tomorrow, and if were just the two of us, I would leave you to rest and reflection. But…”
“But your friends desire entertainment.”
“Just so.”
“Very well. Do as you must.”
The dark eyes lower, the pale hands spread in mocking obeisance, and the ancient ritual words are spoken. “Tale-teller, tale-teller, tell us a tale.”
And so Thornaby tells his fellow inmates stories – not the sort that he is telling the Great Khan now, but stories of a very different world indeed (on rather like the one we live in today)
By the end of the my own tale, Thornaby and the queen’s story are free, with a bit of help from an unlikely partner in crime – the Black Orc Kid – who he had, apparently, met some time earlier…
…in an obscure tavern in a northern village, which had no name of its own, but was situated in that part of the world dominated by walled fortress cities bearing brutalitarian names like Rust and Ember, the preponderate terrain dark forests and fields gone fallow from too many years of war.
Even in that grim place the word orc held a dread power and the words “black orc” a greater sort of dread still. People did not want to speak of such creatures, but Thornaby did not need to hear the myths from their mouths for he had his own great store of such things, culled from more loquacious peoples, from silently voluble tomes in distant archives.
He had heard rumors of the Black Orc Kid a thousand miles from here, had followed the trail of rumor and nascent legend, and still knew too little about his target. Thief, assassin, warrior, healer, scholar, sorcerer – preternaturally strong and fast, elusive as smoke, cunning as a rat. So many attributes, but so little substance.
The tavern was a rough-hewn place, dark timber beams buttressing a low ceiling, above which there were rooms to rent for a handful of coin. There was little trade, and the owner was somewhere in the kitchen, rattling crockery and whistling to himself. Alone in the tavern, Thornaby was sitting with his back to the wall, watching the door with a half-cocked eye, and watering a mug of sour wine when his quarry caught up with him, and his first inkling that someone else was present was the edge of cold steel pressed up against his windpipe.
“Why do you haunt my footsteps, Gray Man?” The voice was muffled, as if a cloth obscured the speaker’s lips, but there was something –
“I seek only to talk,” said Thornaby, “nothing more.”
That of course, was a lie, but sometimes from inauspicious beginnings great adventures are born – or heinous crimes, depending on whom you ask.
One ought get the sense from the first story – and really, any of these beginnings might become the first – that Thornaby is not merely a storyteller, but one with an unfortunate propensity to wake up in very different times and places, there to make his was as best he can until, someday, he wakes up to find himself some otherwhere and otherwhen.
Here, then, are two of the times and places when he woke thus – my question to my readers is, which do you find the most interesting beginning? And to my fellow writers, how does Thornaby strike you as a character, and these fragments as starting points for a story?
I look forward to reading your answers in the comments!
Great Khan – you have asked me for word of your vassal Thornaby, gone these many years past. I have searched the known world, and with the aid of a sorceress from Abyssinia and a djinn from Arabiya, many other places as well. I cannot yet return in person, as I know it is death to appear before you without the Grey Man himself in chains, but I send these fragments of the reports I have discovered, which if pursued to their ends, should bring about the capture of the man you wish most to speak with during your final days.
Apologies for the brevity of this note, Sire – I pen it in haste, as I know your time is short, and that my days will end when yours do, should I fail in this task, which I assure you I will not.
Fragment the First
“Remembrancer, huh? ‘pears to me you don’t remember shit.”
Thornaby said nothing – he remembered many things, but he was pretty sure that none of what he could put into words would do him much good in this particular situation. As for shit, even broken, his nose told him he was lying in or very near some quantity of that – dog, he thought, or something very like it.
Another sharp blow to the ribs – Thornaby grunted and winced and opened his eyes.
The hard ground stretched away in front of him, framed by a pair of heavy boots, but it was not the large and apparently ill-tempered owner of the boots that caught his attention, but the ground itself.
It was paved – and not with cobbles, but asphalt. Huh.
How long had it been?
In the great span of the human experience over which he sometimes roamed and was more often tossed, there were a lot more centuries of bare dirt than there was pavement of any sort.
Sometimes that dirt was radioactive, more often it was frozen.
There was a lot of water, too, but that didn’t bear thinking about.
“Answer me, heretic!”
Thornaby wondered, not for the first time, what he was doing here – what he’d done in the darkness before waking that had earned him this beating. He’d hung around himself long enough to know that such treatment was rarely undeserved.
A softer voice. “Oh, come now, dear. That’s enough. I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it.”
The ground shook.
Thornaby resisted the impulse to look toward the second speaker, and stared instead at the distant horizon, where a dully gleaming ship was lifting skyward on a pillar of smoke and flame.
***
Fragment the Second
This, he supposed, was where his story ended, and where history began.
Some distant history, anyway – but most were very like the rest.
He crouched on the rough flagstones, leaned against the thick parapet behind which he sheltered – four large and crudely shaped blocks of sandstone, hewn from some quarry, hauled and stacked here by an earlier group of impressed men.
How much of the sum total of all human labor, he wondered, had gone toward digging up stones, piling up stones, and in trying to knock those stones down again?
It was beyond his ability to calculate, but he remembered a time when he could have asked that question of the greatest grandchildren of Babbage’s engines, but that was a long time ago, or maybe in a long time to come.
Hard to tell, when one had only been around in the world a short while.
Once, he thought, this place must have been the pride of some engineer, some petty despot. And some day, it would be a place where people would come to climb the tower stairs, to marvel at the effort that the ancients had used to carve and stack rocks – to capture in pencil and paint and pixels some essence of the place, of themselves framed momentarily against it.
It would be a place of historic interest – Thornaby could feel it – had been in enough times and places to be sure of it. But those future visitors, what would they, could they know of his story? Of the story of all the men and women who, like him, had crouched on stones much like these, and waited for the final assault?
Was that the story he’d come here to find?
Down below, a bellowed order, and moments later, the sibilant hiss of arrows through the damp air. A pair of shafts clattered off the stacked stones behind which Thornaby sheltered. Nearby, someone screamed in startled anguish.
***
And that’s the end of the beginnings – for now.
I look forward to reading your comments – let me know if you’d like to read the rest of these stories – or help to write them!
Warm regards,
Edward
