Suki's Weekly Story

Hi everyone! I hope you enjoy reading this exert from my longest, oldest running story. I wrote this section around a year and a half ago in one sitting. I hadn't read it in a long time, but, as I revisited it, I decided it was worthwhile to post. I'll be making several changes to it now that I've got the hang of doing hallucination/dream blurring better. I apologize for the length, but there really was no good place to split it up at. I've cut out a lot of information, including a prologue, so if you are really more curious about the setting and such just ask me to send you the missing parts. It's a fantasy/sci-fi story. Okay, okay, I'm done now.

Halcyon (part one of several, draft one of several)

Hylen awoke with a start. Sweat was dripping down his face and he felt his long limbs shaking. The dream had seemed so real, but as his eyes grew more focused the image of the burning city faded from his mind and he began to breathe easy. It was absurd, he thought, there were no cities on Halcyon. As he lie in his bed still trying to hold onto the shaky images that seemed so vibrant only moments ago, he could feel his eyes growing heavy once again. Soon all was black and he was safe.

The morning seemed to come too quickly. The light spilled in through his window and onto his dark face; in the distance a rooster could be heard crowing out, signaling the beginning of another day. Hylen let out a low groan as he pulled the covers of his bed over his face; “Paradise,” he thought as he snuggled down, trying to shut out the approaching day.

The door to his room opened, bring with it the smell of the morning baking from below. He could feel his stomach urging him to rise. “You can wait,” he thought.

“Yuri, you're going to be late again if you don't get up.”

He sighed. Here he was, a grown man by Halcyon standards, and his mother still called him by that ridiculous nickname. Recognizing defeat, Hylen sat up and stretched, yawning.

“Come on, Yuri, hurry up!” his mother called to him from the bottom of the stairs.

Hylen stood up, fighting the sweet gravitational pull his bed always seemed to develop whenever he tried to leave in the morning.

“YURI!”

“I'm up, I'm up!” he called.

Hylen stumbled down the small stair case that connected his room directly to the kitchen. As he took his usual seat at the table, his mother was busy instructing the cooks on how to prepare some sort of strange, bubbling, gravy-like liquid. He shuddered to think that he would have to eat it late that night. Not even the culinary adventure his mother was embarked on at the moment could curve the urging of his stomach.

“When is breakfast going to ready?” he asked his mother.

“Oh, I hadn't noticed you'd gotten out of bed. I assumed you fused to it.”

“A ha ha.”

“You know, Yuri--”

“Hylen.”

“You know, Hylen, you're life is going to fall to pieces when you move out of here,” she said as she placed a freshly baked apple strudel in front of her son.

“Then I don't have much incentive to leave, do I? Besides,” he said, taking a massive bite of strudel and swallowing in less than three chews, “if I leave, who will be left for you to nag?”

His mother leaned around him, clearing his vacant plate. She ruffled his already disheveled brown hair and leaned in to kiss him on the cheek. “Yuri, shut up,” she said, smacking him on the back of the head.

“Mom, you shouldn't get so angry; stress is bad for people your age.”

She sent another well-aimed slap, but Hylen was already out of his chair and headed toward the door. Still in his work clothes from the day before, he grabbed his cap from the hat rack and begrudgingly opened the door.

He was amazed by the fact that even though he had opened this door hundreds of times in his life, the onslaught of productivity from the outside world still took him off guard. The sudden rush of the smells from the daily market, the clear, bright click of heels on the pavement, the sweet taste of the ocean carried on the wind, the gentle caress of the wind on his cheeks—it all permeated him as he took his first steps from home.

As he walked down Ashbury Street, the street he had lived on his whole life, a peculiar feeling overcame him. The wind was now whipping past him, bringing with it the smell of soot from chimneys muddled with the dankness of the ocean. As he inhaled the scent of smoke, his vision became fuzzy, shapes came in and out of focus; the muscles in his body began to quiver and his knees buckled beneath him.

His vision must have failed completely because he found himself in darkness; the smell of wet earth flooded his nostrils and he could feel his legs struggling to push him upward. Screams, so many faceless screams, rang in his ears; this wasn't the normal cacophony of the markets. They were desperate pleas for help.

Suddenly, the smell of the smoke changed; it wasn't the familiar earthy smell of the trees on Halcyon or even the brine of the ocean. This smell was dark, putrid even; the reek of thousands of corpses being consumed in flames. He choked on the ashes of the dead. They scorched his throat as he called out frantically for help, fearing he too would become fuel for the blaze. When they entered his lungs, he could hear them calling out through his body, still hoping for rescue.

His eyes flickered open and saw the beautiful city glowing in the distance, lit up like a pyre. He was lying in the grass, too weak to stand or speak; someone must have saved him and carried him to this clearing. As his vision focused, he could make out the form of a woman lying next to him; she was weeping ad saying a prayer in a strange language he had never heard before.

She held her wrists up to the sky, as a criminal would when they are being shackled.

He wanted to ask her where they were, what had happened to them. But this woman, she seemed to be emitting so much pressure from her being that she was crushing him; her arms seemed to slump, as though a weight were attached to each one.

“Take them,” she whispered, tears streaking down her face.

She squirmed on the ground next to him, flailing her arms and legs wildly, as though she were a puppet being forced to dance. A ripple seemed to run through her body from her feet upward; as it reached her mouth she let out an agonizing scream. The sound of her bones breaking pierced his ears, drowning out even her pitiful cries. As her voice died away, so did the immense pressure.

She laughed, a brittle and hollow sound. “Aramia.”

He gasped. He was lying in the middle of the crowded street, people standing over him in fear.

“Hylen, are you okay?”

His eyes flickered open and he became distinctly aware of a warm liquid trickling down his face. His focus was still hazy and, as he tried to steady his breathing, he could still taste the burning bodies in his mouth...or was it smoke from the chimneys?

“Don't move; you're bleeding.”

“What?”

He touched his forehead and found a cut just above his left eyebrow.

“How did I get this?” he asked groggily.

“You just passed out a second ago.”

Hylen recognized the voice speaking to him. As he forced the crowd into focus, he found the familiar sun-tanned face of Daniel Baia, kneeling at his feet. Daniel's mopish blonde hair was, as always, hanging in front his deep green eyes.

“Danny, help the girl first; something crushed her.”

“What girl, Hylen?”

“The one right over there,” he said, trying to sit up. The sky dissolved and reformed with every turn of his head; he suddenly became aware of the searing pain of his wound. He put his arms out behind him, but they seemed unable to support his weight. He slid back to the ground.

“I swear, Danny, she was right there a minute ago. She's gotta be close by.”

“Hylen, do you know where we are?”

He thought about it a moment. “The street.”

Daniel stood up and walked to Hylen's head; he crouched down to examine the wound.

“This is rather deep. Surprisingly deep, actually. Leave it to you to find away to demolish your face on a street paved in marshmallows, Yuri.”

Hylen smiled. “Are you calling me accident prone?”

“No, Yuri; I am calling marshmallows dangerous.”

“Danny, am I losing a lot of blood? My eyes keep...swirling.”

“Head wounds tend to bleed a lot, but I’m afraid you may have fractured your skull…”

Daniel leaned over Hylen and worked some ointment into the still freely bleeding cut, his golden pendant of the Rod of Aesculapius dangling hypnotically in front of Hylen's eyes. As his friend treated his injury, the pendant twirled and danced with his movements and, despite his inability to keep a solid focus on anything, Hylen found himself unable to look away from it.

He knew it was impossible, he knew he was hallucinating from hitting his head, but the snake on the staff seemed to curl and twist to life with every rock of the pendant. As it coiled about the staff, Hylen could hear it hissing faintly, like a whisper in his ear. As it wrapped and twined, the snake's skin peeled off and clung to the staff and soon there were two snakes weaving together into a double helix. In his mind he could hear the serpent call to him: “Give yourself to us. We contain all life. Come to die.”

He could feel the fangs pierce his forehead; the searing throb of his veins as the poison entered his body was incapacitating.

“Geez, Yuri, I know that stuff stings, but you don't have to look like I'm torturing you.”

Hylen blinked his eyes. It was once again a single snake, stationary and lifeless on Daniel's necklace.

“Take me home, Danny. Please, get me home.”

“You are home, Yuri. I took you home before I treated your wounds. Don't you remember?”

“What?”

“You're in bed right now. You're safe. There's no fire. There's no woman. It's just us.”

“I...I don't understand what's happening to me.”

“It's alright, Hylen. You can sleep now; it's been twenty-four hours. Rest.”

“Twenty-four hours,” he thought. “How can it be the next day? I was just in the street, wasn't I?”

He furrowed his eyebrows in concentration. He could feel the tingling pull of his stitches. “When did I get stitches?” He tried to move his arms, but found them incredibly heavy and sore, as though he had been lying on them for some time. His legs were just as unresponsive.

“What's going on with me, Danny? I don't understand this.”

“You can't remember anything because I had to sedate you to treat your wounds. You were hallucinating pretty badly; you wouldn’t hold still. I was afraid you’d hurt yourself worse than you already did.”

“Oh, that makes sense.”

“It does?”

“Yeah; earlier I thought the snake on your necklace was trying to kill me.”

“What?”

“Well, it wanted to kill me after it shed its skin and made a second snake.”

“Maybe I gave you too much morphine.”

Hylen laughed. He could feel his consciousness slipping away from him. His whole body felt warm and light and as his eyes began to flicker, he could see the sun-tanned face of his once best friend pop into focus and he knew everything was going to be alright.