HI-REZ Life: 01/01/2014

Monday, January 27, 2014

Animated Classic Paintings

Vote for your preferred opening on the book I'm working on - Option 1 or Option 2. Or a combo of both?

Option 1

Chapter One (Scrivener)

Alba

“When he is most powerful, nothing does he become.” – Dejan Stojanovic, The Sign and Its Children

July 29 /2212, Blackness

Now it is midmorning and just a few hours after his death the community of the House of the Wolf are gathered on a rocky mount. There is a skeletal crew manning the turrets of Blackness, but otherwise everyone covers the hillside. Two thousand souls are dressed in dark green Sinclair tartan. Even though Rata was my friend, at his funeral, my master speaks on his behalf. I am a decent writer and well educated. But I cannot match the elocution and preternatural knowledge of my master. In any event, I don’t listen to half of what he says. I am tired, and my teeth hurt from grinding them day and night.

I am troubled by the history that each day is lost to the world. Like this man. If I do not record his name, he will cease to have existed. Every exploit, every adventure, every heroic thrust, each foolish jest. Is it up to me to record these memories? Is it up to anyone?

The silver sun does not care. It rides the plumes above the funeral like it always does.

Instead of listening to my master, I make my own speech to this community. I pretend this community, these two thousand souls belong to me. They are mine, and I am their king. And thus the way a dead friend will be remembered will be through my words, not his.

What is there to say?

Desiderio Alcala was the world’s last Spaniard, and in the last low months of his life he was my closest friend. Tall, dark, and strong, I called him Desiderata when I was drunk, and Rata – which he hated – every other time. Rata and I were drinking buddies ever since an arrow sliced through his twin brother Didacus’ deep brown eye, cutting through his brain before the arrowhead smashed through the other side of his skull. Black gunk seeped from the mortal wound in the back of Dida’s head, into thick matts of long greasy black hair, and then – when he was near the end – into his brother’s sandy brown hands.

It was not a good death. What made it worse, Rata’s brother survived a few hours with the arrow wedged through his head in this deplorable condition. Blood and brain pulp oozed from his eye socket while word went out – find Rata, tell him Dida is dying. Dida didn’t want to die. But his head quickly swelled up, and soon blood was even seeping out of his ears and his undamaged eye. I saw him make two rash tugs at the shaft, and both times he seemed to short circuit himself and collapse. He screamed. He groaned. Those screams. Those groans. I will never forget them. No man should ever hear that. He yelled torrents of bloodcurdling Spanish that none but Rata and my master could comprehend. But my master – I glance at him still addressing the crowd (as I should) – was on the front lines, and the battle had just started.

Once, his hands fumbling with my shoulders, he shook me, and bellowed his bloody hot breath against my cheek: “I not want to die!”

What could I say? What could I do?

He stumbled away, grabbing onto those on the back of the battle lines, as if trying to find a secret, a clue to prolonging his life. But walking soon gave way to convulsive fits of twirling movement, then – when Rata finally appeared - ineffectual twitching. Then as he deteriorated even further, the worst of it came. A long, anguished, screaming farewell right into his brother’s bloodspattered face. Warburton, the Rider in charge of our company knew that after this despairing spectacle we would be useless in the field, and so once the screaming stopped, he sent a dozen of the closest witnesses back to Blackness to fight another day.

This morning whatever fight was left in Rata after that day is gone too, along with the remains of his race. I had spoken only a few days ere about chronicling the stories he knew of the country he called Spain. But Rata never got over the loss of his brother. His eyes blackened. His mood darkened. He insisted on transferring from Warburton’s forces to Ulysses (at the front). He developed a blood lust that we recognised as a death wish, but no matter how recklessly he leapt into the field, no enemy arrow could touch him. In the last few weeks of his life he turned to me, and mead, to change his luck. But even entering the field sloshed on one occasion and unarmed on another didn’t seem to hurt his chances, for Rata returned again and again unscathed.

Finally, after searching the whole fortress for me, and beer made from honey, Rata came up empty handed and yesterday, gave up his ghost. He stepped off the ramparts and so came to an end the legacy of the Iberian people.

Eventually I focus on my silver haired master. He is a tall, lanky young man with the grey eyes and guile of the snow leopard. To these idiots here he is like a grey wolf, but I know better. He is far more talented than a wild dog. Even standing in front of us in broad daylight he appears to fade again and again into the hoary setting. Like the snow leopard he is an incredible hunter, and his wit is similar – for he is supremely secretive. His stealth should not be confused with shyness, for this man is a cold killer, the coldest of us all. But though he can cut, he can also purr, and his warmth is undoubtedly charming.

Mark this, though he is the leader of these forces, few know much about him.

I listen.

He talks about the first modern men reaching Hesperia Ultima. “For great lengths of time the tribes knew it as a far western land, the land of the rabbits, the land where metals are forged and Iberia (as Spain was known in Roman times). People like Alcala, and like us, peopled that country around 35 000 years ago.”

My master reflects, briefly, on that 35 000 year history of those people. He talks about paintings in the Altamira Caves and then focuses in particular on the bloodlines that finally became the two brave brothers that found their way to us, and fought for so long, and with so much passion, beside us.

It’s funny, but while Christopher Ulysses speaks, all I can think about is my drinking companion’s name. He was more than just his name, much more, but as the smoke sways around me, the name that once belonged to the body now going up in smoke starts echoing in my still hungover head. Desiderio Alcala. Desiderata. The word means a list of books sought by a collector or library. And Alcala. According to my master the word is originally Arabic. It means ‘fortress’ or ‘citadel’. Only now, now that Rata is gone, do I think of it literally. For Blackness is indeed a fortress that holds a very sought after library. Given the ruin of this world, the library is at least as precious and idiosyncratic as the island of illumination that once survived in Alexandria. My master, Christopher Ulysses, is a collector of books. He has a list of books that he still wants found. With Rata’s death, I wonder, watching flames engulf his body, watching the tall circle of standing stones ripple in the heat waves of the pyre, will this fortress see its books burnt too, and the last reservoirs of human knowledge lost as well? Turned to smoke? Just as the last Spaniard, will our library, and I, be reduced to ash in the end?

Later on the same day I must remind myself each time I want to enjoy a wee dram with my friend, that he is dead.

Instead I venture high into the towers, and try to drown the ache in my heart by focusing on the ache in my mouth. Tooth decay in these medieval times do not end well. It started with one tooth. Infection, inflammation and pretty soon every tooth was set on edge, crowns jostling, roots writhing in their bloody magma. The infection did not go away. It got worse. Bone set to work at mashing gum. Like the ice that surrounds us, the tides underlying these teeth set about doing their inexorable grinding, gnawing work. The ache fills my head, so that even my skull wants to split apart. I spit blood into the air and it reaches the ground as a fine red snow.

Boiling water flung from a pot does the same. The moment it touches the air it turns to snow.

When I look at the flowery structure immediately transformed by the contact of cold air and warm blood, I realise it is not the ache in my mouth that hurts my head, but the sheer cold. My ears of freezing. It feels like rats are gnawing them, or their whorls are being compressed in a vice. My cheeks are burning, as though flames rather than the sigh of wind, sears the bruised red skin. The roof of my head and my eyeballs feel a perpetual prick of sharp needles.

Sobered by the heartless cold, I blink. I gaze at my monastic surroundings as if seeing them for the first time. From deep, unfathomable basements the ramparts of Blackness rocket outward. Towers climb into the sky like arrows drawing black flames behind them. Dark banners ripple in the high breeze like snakes, signalling to kin and foe, far and wide, that yes, this fortress remains.

The view from my perch between the Memory Towers is of creeping alabaster. The march of ice is obvious. Rata and his brother don’t have to worry about that any more. We who remain, must. For that great Ring tramples boreal forest and engulfs the hills in a great sweep that fills the northern horizon from end to end. In the other direction towards the derelict and deserted coastal town of Ayr, beyond the Standing Stones, the Dead Woods and the Rim are more frosted hills, and more towers. From here to Cape Wrath and everywhere in between lie towering graveyards piled high with the metal mounds of broken megamachines. Thin sheets of snow covers it all, all year round. Mile after mile of poisoned strand belch fuselages, dead whales and ruined rigs onto shores roaring and crackling with plastic and rust. Nothing green or good can endure these conditions. No my friend, you are not missing much.

Chapter Two (Scrivener)

Flight

I am distracted from the workings of my pencil by something bouncing in the air. Instinctively I duck, but instead of a drone I glimpse the flapping of a grey streaked creature, a solitary owl. Its movements are mute against the bruised Highland sky. It appears to be dodging a series of arrows. The last clips its tail but the Tawny nevertheless makes good her escape. She glides between the Standing Stones and disappears through the skeletal fringe of Mountain Ash and struggling Scots pine.

It’s eerily quiet. A noon song of cold fire singes my ears. For once even the diurnal wind has settled into a succession of deep sighs.

Frantic barking grates the silence.

What follows is a softer sound, like a pencil scratching on very old paper.

Scrrr scrrr scrr.

It is the sound of one man walking across crusts of fresh snow. The sound of approaching death.

Then more barking.

A thousand men – including me – scramble to turrets and gaps to catch a glimpse of him.

Sharp white stars in the snow make his dark figure difficult to behold. His grey cloak shakes like a flag behind him. A silver string of hair coils around his hood and over one shoulder. The wind whips up his sleeves, briefly exposing brilliant blue tape stretched over the muscles cabling down his outer forearms. The rest of the frame covered by the thin cloak is similarly powerful, a shell of skin and bone loaded with a deceptive potency, a form able to harden to rock or soften to fluid at will.

Under that faded hood eyes shine with the tears of the world, all the tears of time, and even mine, hardened to a pair of grey crystals. Even at great distances, those keen irises miss nothing.

I shift against the cold stone, and the burning cold air. He’s wearing no armor, which isn’t unusual, but no bow or quiver. Now that’s unusual.

“Fook’s he doing?” someone says, summing up the general vibe.

Behind his flowing cape the sheath of a long sword pokes like the stiff tail of a cat. Although it may seem incidental to his appearance, that sword he carries is one of the super weapons of this House. Few know the workings of its feral power, but I am the Scrivener here, and it is my business to know these things. With our leader’s lightning sword and an array of 4 similar swords, our clan has been able to harness and weaponise lightning. The titanium-platinum alloy of the blade, when it discharges, reaches temperatures three times the surface of the sun. When sufficiently loaded with plasma, the lightning sword – the most powerful of the five – is able to set fire to rain, slice boulders in two and reduce to ash a battlefield choked with fully armoured soldiers. The caveat of course is that in these cold climes we see thunderstorms less than we would like to. Thus timing is crucial. The discharge of that unearthly but limited power must be strategic. Of course only that man down there can wield the lightning sword’s incredible force. This makes us privileged to have our fates secured, but simultaneously (and some might suggest fatally) dependent on our Master, who, after all, is just a man. For this reason, none of us are too pleased at this latest recklessness.

But even that mighty weapon isn’t much use against a circling squadron of Skye’s killercopters. He’s our best archer, so why in hell isn’t he taking his bow?

My clansmen begin grumbling these very words (“Tek yer fookin bohr”) but all he does is stop and glance coolly at the black fortress soaring upwards at his back. In front of him is his destination – a southern point buried deep in the unmitigated cold. I alone know what calls to him now over miles of comatose landscape. The hairs on my neck prick up. I know what compels him, at this late hour, to cut through those cosmic swaths of snow. But what I do not know is why he chooses to venture through these feral lands alone?

So we line the walls above him, a bristling firing squad bubbling over with doubts and insecurities. He ignores all of us.

His delay we suddenly notice, is due to a voice. The words are too low to heed, but the tone is indicative of someone trying to reason with him.

The men shush each other which only makes it harder to hear.

He does not answer the special pleading, except to prolong his hesitation. But this gesture serves to embolden the protester, who soon steps forward.

At this unwelcome approach my Master half turns on the ball of one ankle.

“He’s reely rearing to gaw…” someone whispers.

I stretch to see who approaches him. It’s Heyerdahl, the dapper blacksmith who toils with a hammer (a man whom some here jokingly call ‘Thor’). He comes to stand below us, right alongside our leader. Thus juxtaposed, there is a brief and measured exchange between them. The hard man who can do wonders with a hammer seems stooped and slow beside the younger, elvish king. Heyerdahl departs only to reappear – we lean over ledges to see him – proffering a rope. Our leader considers for a moment the creature attached to it. It’s Bullet, of course, the king’s mongrel.

Another disembodied voice, this one coming from the entrance to the fortress, barks something about “protection.”

My Master seems at pains to consent to company of any sort on his imminent expedition, but rather than waste time discussing it, he quickly takes the leash from the smithy’s outstretched hand. The wolfhound barks excitedly. The mutt’s sharp yaps echo up the great walls and towers to us before floating out into the stillness.

The stableman beyond my field of vision – Hook, I believe – calls Heyerdahl back. After a brief, unseen scuffle Heyerdahl emerges again with a big brown thing. It dips its heads towards the gloves gripping its talons. We call this feathery beast – a golden eagle –Vega.

My clansmen murmur “Aye…aye.” in support.

Vega’s large brown wings lift and open a little– for balance – as she is handed over. These creatures are the arch enemy of the Tawnies, whose enormous flocks haunt our towers and infest the cold fell. The Tawnies enjoy the warmth and safety that our ledges and chimneys provide. Their numbers in these parts are beyond count. Most of my clansmen have learnt to tolerate them because they make very good eating.

Sarah, our voluptuous kitchen maid, makes a wicked owl bolognaise. A few bored idiots sometimes try their luck even though they know uncollected carcasses attract scavenging wolves. Thousands of arrows have been lost by our younger archers who use the erratic flight patterns of these creatures for target practice. At night the birds act as a warning system for drones and alert us to enemy intruders. A loner crossing the wintry fells will disturb the Tawnies from their nests in the ground, and risk talons tearing at their cheeks as a result. But a circling golden eagle can more than mitigate the risks of personal injury.

Right then soft lips whisper in my ear: “Richard, what are you doing here?”

I turn so abruptly my nose brushes hers. I am suddenly faced with a pair of beautiful eyes, like liquid pebbles. Dagmar. She blinks innocently at me, then withdraws to reveal Teutonic features set in a perfect, porcelain white face.

“You’re on duty tonight. Richard, you should be sleeping.”

“I’ve slept enough.”

She smiles and shakes her head. “You’ve been my Protector for only a short time, but I don’t believe what I hear.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“C’mon Richard, you know how you love to sleep.”

In the space of no answer I hear someone behind me mutter under his breath: “Hey scumbag, who’s Snow White?” She suddenly notices the shadows are alive with entire companies of archers and guards lining just this side of the ramparts. Her eyes widen when she sees the extent of them, pressed to every window and crevice, and still as statues until now.

When her delicate white hand tightens around the grey hairs of my wrist, I turn to find two pairs of white eyes leering at my charge from a dark recess. When they see my disapproving gaze the lecher closest to me, Ragland, coughs, spits then turns his back so that his bow blocks my view of the other’s fractious face. Ossur, I believe, is his mate; a red-faced, touchy sort.

I turn back to face her, and find gratitude in her eyes.

“Well I hope you’ve prepared, Richard,” she whispers, patting her fingertips against my arm, “because there’s talk of a storm on its way.”

Sccrrr.

“So, what’s going on?” she motions to the window.

“I uh…” I poke my head through the opening.

The contrast between the dark interior and the white outside is painful, forcing me to squint.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” I whisper to the wind, for it has risen again, as if angered by something.

A dog pants.

The young wraith places a slim arm on my shoulder before leaning her light frame against me. Silky black curls press against my ear and tickle my neck as she tries to see what there is to see through the same narrow gap. The closeness of soft perfumes of skin and hair and lips is dizzying. I close my eyes to indulge in the moment. I’m the only man having relations around here, as far as I know, but I’d trade Sarah for this fine peach any day. And every other warrior is just as painfully aware of her.

Of course my job is to protect her, not fuck her.

Her body jerks. Alarm enters her face when she sees him remove his hood, revealing the silver head wanderings under our window. From his dress, and deliberate movements, Dagmar immediately sees what he’s about to do.

“Don’t let him do this,” Dagmar whispers to me. Like a conscience.

I consider it for a moment.

Let him?

“He can’t go out there…not alone…not with this storm coming.”

“What storm? How do you know about a storm?”

“Mr Darcy told me.”

I’m impressed, disquieted but impressed. After just days of taking up residence here Dagmar’s already making conversation at the highest levels. Soon her seductive beauty may be equal to my hibernating trickery. Mr Darcy is our resident scientist, meteorologist and more significantly, weapons designer. Aside from our leader and myself, Darcy’s the sharpest tool in this shed. That she has his ear so soon after her arrival is a concern.

“You can’t let him do this,” she insists.

It pains me that this girl has no idea what I know in this matter. Even so, does she imagine that I should go down and simply talk to him? Explain the situation? One does not merely walk up to him, a man with far greater faculties than mine, and tell him he is out of his fucking skull. Of course, on this occasion he is. The worst part is that I alone am supremely culpable for what is about to happen. Even so, she’s right, I should do something. But what? Perhaps show him the letter? I look along the crowded ramparts. I look at Ragland and Ossur both leering at her again.

No, too risky. And…too late.

Dagmar nudges me.

We watch him removing the collars from both his wolfhound and the eagle.

Then he stands as though all this belongs to him, every man and beast, every rock and sword of this House.

“What is he doing?”

I squint.

He is wasting a lot of time.

Vega balances with half open wings on the king’s leather clad left arm. Then the ritual begins.

I sink back against the wall, folding my arms. I know what comes next. Our young leader’s grey eyes will meticulously scan the distance. He will systematically trace every detail in the field for signs of movement; he will pan very carefully to revisit every shape for something out of place, anything that shouldn’t be there. We all know these fields like we know our own bodies. A single rock out of place, a disturbed blade of grass, an impression in the snow can mean the difference between life and death. Once satisfied that the territory is clear he will cast a penetrating gaze at the sky. Vega too will trace a vigilant track through each quadrant of the grey heavens. Even the limited faculties of the wolfhound are alert, directed to a few moments of careful appraisal. Scents. Sounds.

At once even the thousands in the pavilions look towards the fell that is about to be crossed.

A thousand eyes, carefully watching the white page.

Then Bullet snorts at the painful wind.

Shakes himself.

All set.

“Do you see anything?” I ask Dagmar.

She shakes her head.

“Does he?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

It is obvious that there is something besides concern in her interest in him. I glance up at her from the floor…looking so intently at him. It’s obvious that there is more than admiration at work in this young girl’s heart. I may be her protector, but I burn with jealousy.

I pull myself up and press my face to the cold light.

I feel her light press against my side.

Hers is a delightful presence. The look of her, the feel of her but also, her spirit.

Indeed I clearly see that they would make a good match. Their shared youth and vigour would make a potent chemistry. But thus far he’s been too dumb to even notice her.

Just then – as though reading my thoughts – he glances quickly to this window. And then to towers above bristling with black-armoured archers. Beyond that, the light of the anodyne sun reveals no sign of Skye’s drones. Beside me Dagmar frowns at the scene below, obviously exasperated. Her breathing becomes agitated.

Then the Rider Boassen Hagen, roosting in the tallest tower, shouts in Dutch: “VROEG RIJP VROEG ROT!”

Our community freezes at this outrageous audacity. But my Master shows no reaction. Or wait...do I notice… a small smile? His fingers wrap around a nearby stone, black as coal. He stands to his full height, long silver hair concealing his face. We watch his fingers turn the stone over slowly. His fingertips calibrate the stone’s structure and its dimensions, especially its mass. A shiny facet flashes at us off the granitic surface. If there is a brief diamond- reflection in his unsympathetic grey eyes, none of us see it.

You’re too late. There’s no way you’ll reach her in time.

He turns. Looks again directly at this window.

He’s reading your fucking thoughts!

A sudden fluid motion follows, as quick and fleeting as a dream. A Phenomenal Dexterity casts the rock right by this very window. Then it rockets even higher, scoring a scratch on Boassen Hagen’s cheek before drifting into the heights beyond. A few owls scatter like fragments of torn paper. The tallest turrets become the briefest pricks of thorns beneath the ascending asteroid. It turns effortlessly, end over end against feeble coils of gravity. The eagle flaps once and shoots after it. Hundreds of Tawnies scatter, screaming kewick-kewick-kewick...

His deep grey eyes turn to the heavens now. It is said he can see clearly and up close the bloodstained face of human history. That in the depths of those sharp eyes are contained the history of the whole world. If that is true, is he burdened with the emotions of so many memories? Is he the paradox of feelings that comes from so much petrifying, unforgotten chaos? And I wonder, can he really see anything beyond the long, dark reflections of living memory. What view is there outside the shadows blotting out the suffering that is existence? Just the shadow of outstretched wings, perhaps. The great vaulting into space of an eagle that means to be free, each great beat of its wings drawing it higher into the Highland sky.

It is within this unfolding moment, of a stone rebelling against the basements and every other force that gave rise to it, that the man that is our king begins to run…

The fortress and a whole Highland world sink far below.

A brown predator streaks through wheeling space.

Towards the slowing rotations of a dark projectile.

Do something, she shouts.

She’s in love with him.

It reaches the end of its upward orbit.

Yellow talons circle the stone.

Now the fortress under its wings is a black square so small as to be almost invisible.

It resembles a floating speck, a small shadowy sailboat adrift on a sea of white seahorses.

Do somethinnngggg…

“No,” I say quietly, “there’s nothing any of us can do.”

A great pang stings my entire chest. His reckless departure, the projectile I thought aimed at me but worst of all the realisation that Dagmar’s warmth to me is no more than good natured, sexually neutral friendliness, all conspire to torment me. Due to my advanced age, to her I am a has-been, over-the-hill, a sexual nonentity. Well, in comparison to him she’s right.

I lift heavy lids from their self pity and cast out towards the middle distance. I spy the eagle. She drops out of a trembling sky until she floats above our leader’s galloping shoulder. Her talons release the block of Earth and it thuds inaudibly into a bank of snow.

A few more Tawnies scatter.

“Why must he go out there alone?”

Dagmar pulls at my sleeve, her face filled with alarm an inch from my own.

“Why is going out there at all? Why does no one follow him?” Dagmar cries. Her eyes shine with tears.

“Because,” I say gently, “he means to move unseen. The only way to do that is... his way.”

“What if something happens to him?”

“The Elf can take care of himself,” I say, without hesitation.

I do not have the fortitude to comfort her with anything more than words.

Soon my infatuated companion and dozens of archers resume their positions along the empty ramparts and corridors of this House. Dagmar settles on a stone step jutting below the enormous longitudinal slit that passes for a window. I pretend not to be a party to the burden she feels. Somehow the weight I know weighs on the rest of them weighs a little less on me.

I bite the soft woody helmet of my pencil, and become thoughtful. In a strange way all of us are like him. He runs alone through bitterly cold, completely empty lands, and yet he expects to come home to safety, to food and drink and warm fire. Perhaps it is his sword, or his family, or the peculiar memories he keeps, perhaps it is the eagle that floats over his shoulder that makes him think such a belief is credible. I realise that while it is not any of us out there in this moment, energetically advertising our limbs to the wolves…while none of us are waving the flag of Life vividly to the unseen enemies that stalk the dead woods…we don’t have to. We don’t have to be out there to be exposed. Our mere presence in this fortress is the exact same gesticulation. The black fortress itself and our existence in it is like a challenge that calls out soundlessly to the agglomerations of opposing elements rising around us. Can there be anything more eloquent to describe our weakness here and exposure than the still towers of Blackness awaiting the great Ring of Ice. The Ring is what marches upon us, the Ring that defines our age. We can already see it from here, creeping towards us.

I look at the long feathery trail in the snow left behind by our leader. I follow it to the blurry explosion of limbs making snow into a sort of white dust. I fold my arms. My chin settles on my slow heaving chest. Though we may survive each other, and wolves, and pestilence, and broken hearts…I think, spitting out small splinters of pencil wood, there is no outrunning, outgunning or out thinking the ice.

There is just no way we can survive the ice.

OPTION 2

Chapter One (Scrivener)

Alba

“When he is most powerful, nothing does he become.” – Dejan Stojanovic, The Sign and Its Children

July 29 /2212, Blackness

I pick my nose. I roll the yellow thing into a brown ball and flick the rubbery projectile at a rat. I miss the target.

I yawn.

The cold air seizes the inside of my mouth, so that I have to swallow hard to break the slight hold of frost that formed instantaneously in my mouth. I swallow hard again. Wrestle my tongue loose from the frost gluing it to my palate.

Below me, in the courtyard, I see an old washer woman toss out a bucket of boiling water. The silver water detaches from a large curtain of white steam, and then, achieving slow motion, drifts down as snow while the white curtain of warm air fades to nothing.

Someone else moves stiffly in the courtyard. It’s Sarah, the one I am fucking, a buxom kitchen girl. Look at her tits wobbling as she walks with her basket. She’s picking up the bodies of birds with her gloved hands. Each morning delivers another harvest of birds, and this morning’s is the biggest I have ever seen. They fall, frozen dead, out of the bitter sky and litter the grounds like feathery brown flowers.

Deep below their bodies, from unfathomable basements that no feathers of birds or snow can reach, ramparts as ancient as the rocks they live in rocket outward. To our rival these towers are known as Blackness. To us who live here it is the House of the Wolf. Yes, it is an impressive structure. The brooding ramparts have remained resilient to all ravages of time and ordinary weather. But this is no ordinary weather, is it? And the ravages of these times are…well…they are not ordinary.

I glance up at the dark towers climbing effortlessly to poke at bruised bellies of cloud. Like arrows drawing black flames behind them, the towers cut through the high breeze. Our banners ripple like snakes, signalling to kin and foe, far and wide, that yes, despite everything this fortress remains.

The view from my perch between the Memory Towers is of creeping alabaster. Everywhere the breathless march of ice is palpable. Exposing bare skin to the air draws out the goose flesh and then burns it. First pink, then black. Each and every tree trunk that exists beyond these walls is split open, the phloem fibres exploded from within by sheer cold. The once resilient rock faces that have stood for an age as proud sentinels scattered throughout the Highlands crumble daily. Noses and ears cascade in a hail of brittle stones into rising blankets of permanent snow. What can men do under these conditions but find what warmth we can from the little blue flame of hope that lives in every heart. What can we do but watch the flame, in the face of so much icing, flutter to nothing. And in its place, the bright white heaving despair of unassailable doom.

My worried eyes jerk towards the great Ring. Once, twice, I cannot bear more than a glance. Even when I look away that sharp, splintering sweep of white haunts my head, and adds shivers beyond the Cold’s puppeting of our limbs. In the quiet of the dark in the middle of the night shivering gives way to trembling, and sometimes a breathless insomnia. For the night’s pillows are panic and starvation. Beneath our pain is that thing, always, day and night, trampling boreal forest and engulfing the hills. It is a slow army always marching never sleeping. Instead of a woman going to buy flowers, and hosting a party in some city’s suburbs, all that remains of the world is what remains beyond the marching ice.

I stare at my pencil. My purple fingertips. I sigh. I cannot help it. For over my one shoulder, as over the other, its great sweep fills the northern horizon from end to end.

If I lift these tired, hangdog eyes and gaze through these drooping, dirty grey hairs in the other direction, I am drawn towards the derelict and deserted coastal town of Ayr. The village – or what little remains of it - hides behind a range of low hills and ridges. Ayr is somewhere beyond the Standing Stones, and the Dead Woods. It is over and beyond the last boundaries of what we can see from these towers. On and on beyond the unfrozen Rim are more frosted hills and then, along the strand, an endless eruption of more towers. From wrecked ships, and aeroplanes and automobiles and containers and washed up skyscrapers. From here to Cape Wrath and everywhere in between lie towering graveyards piled high with metal mounds. Broken megamachines. Enormous craft, warships, missile tubes, fragments of wings and propellers as high as a hundred horses. Thin sheets of snow cover all of it year round. Mile after mile of poisoned strand belch fuselages and tractor tyres, dead whales and ruined rigs. The shores roar and groan, crackle and creak, squeal and hiss with every nagging tide. Plastic and rust race each other towards decay in the heaving salt. Poisons waft and glitter in the morning aurorae. Nothing green or good survives. Only a few black things, a few white things and infinite varieties of grey can endure these conditions.

Chapter Two (Scrivener)

Grey

It’s eerily quiet. A noon song of cold fire singes my ears. For once even the diurnal wind has settled into a succession of deep sighs.

And in that yawning space treacherous thoughts take wing.

Because here, at the end of it all, when time and place has run out on us, it’s all going to come down to just one man. If I can muster my wits on command, the man to inherit this battered planet may be me.

It’s obvious just how much I stand to gain out of this collective catastrophe. I get to create a new narrative of an entire world. I get to make a society in my image. And for saving one, for saving all, my name, my legacy will live forever. The world is always close to fracturing, as are men, yet somehow the world continues to spin and men – some men – continue with their lives while others succumb to the ordinary costs of living. Those who do only have to hang around quietly in dark corners for long enough to enjoy the pickings off the recently departed.

Frantic barking grates the silence.

What follows is a softer sound, like a pencil scratching on very old paper.

It is the sound of one man walking across crusts of fresh snow.

It’s him.

A thousand men – including me – scramble to turrets and gaps to catch a glimpse of Christopher Ulysses, the leader of this House.