The Reach

I was watching Julie & Julia tonight. A rare treat to watch a movie, alone and undisturbed. Which makes me sound like a social recluse, which I’m not. But I do love to get completely lost, every now and again. To be completely immersed in something. It got me thinking about writing and the beginning. It is a cruel master and a loving mistress, sometimes separately and sometimes together.

When I still had the luxury of perfectionism and before I realised that perfectionism was seriously beating the crap out of my self esteem, I wrote a prologue for my medieval fantasy trilogy. I only ever wrote the first draft of the first book. I don’t think I’ll ever finish it. 10 years has passed and I’m not sure that I have the desire to go back there and gut my creation to make it worthy enough. I must have written the prologue at least a hundred times over, and to me at the end of all of that it was completely, utterly perfect. No one could write a whole book that way, so the rest of the chapters were much more about getting everything out and on the page.

Although the perfectionism is long gone, and is not missed, what I do miss is writing something so carefully. Agonising over every word, the way the sentences meet, the way the images collide. And that is probably still something to aim for. To respect every word and sentence enough to give them the time they deserve.

The first time I tried my hand at writing a novel, it wrote me. Many ideas I had that I thought were set in stone had to be cast aside because the story or a character had an entirely different plan in mind. One character in particular forced me to change the entire construct of the story. Fictional characters have no respect for careful planning.

I haven’t given up on the story entirely yet, even if it has been hibernating for the best part of a decade. And so I thought I’d post the prologue here, to remind myself and my disrespectful fictional characters that I haven’t forgotten, not after all this time.

Prologue

Clouds screamed across a black sky, pounding down on an old battlefield, and on an old war. The sound of the dead was deafening, hurtling against the wind, as it wound its way through the fallen steel. Bodies tumbled over one another and were lost in the blood and dirt of another battle with no victor. An eagle’s cry pounded across the armour that littered the battlefield, falling into a sharp echo. Very few still fought on this field, and their strength had been sapped by the fallen.

A General called for retreat, but those left standing did not rejoice for there had been no victory. One stood taller than the others. The warrior walked through the dead, looking for survivors, but expecting to find none, and seemed not to notice when the others shrunk away from the field. She knelt down slowly; driving a dead mans sword deeply into the earth, and muttered a prayer for those who had been lost that day. But she did not mourn them. She rose knowing that these corpses were the lucky ones.

Dusk enveloped the warrior with its cool embrace, leaving the day behind and forgetting everything that had gone before. The warrior-woman stood motionless, remembering some dull memory, as though held in a prison. She did not rouse from it for some time, until startled by the rustle of the wind through the trees and the movement of the clouds as they flew across the dark moon. For an instant she forgot on which battlefield it was, that the dead now lay. Looking at the corpses strewn on the ground once more, the woman knew that they would all too soon be forgotten, just as she had forgotten all the others. She had known that of the soldiers who had left the field few would ever return to fight. She had ceased to care a long time ago. Everything led to dust and broken memories and somehow the path no longer seemed important. She had learnt that a long time ago as well. Turning away from the field now, the warrior began walking back towards the camp.

Rain pressed hard at her back, but the she seemed oblivious, maintaining a slow, deliberate speed. The night’s darkness consumed the earth and air in a thick blanket of emptiness and yet this too she ignored. In the blackness, the sometimes-rough terrain was navigated effortlessly. The wind began to howl, swirling around her in a seemingly endless dance. And still she paid no attention. The warrior had fought more battles than memory served to count, and seen more dead than memory served to recall, but today she had been reminded of another battle in which she had borne no arms, it was a fight that she continued to turn from, and yet was haunted, by at every step.

. . . . . . . . .

Smoke filled the air, billowing and spiralling, dancing with the morning mist, and everything was lost in grey and white. The air was no longer filled with the spring smells of lavender and dew, only burning stone. It seemed to have been burning for days, and it would not be tamed. The villagers had fled, leaving their homes and their dead behind. The cries of the half dead no longer tore at the hearts of the living, but had become background noise that was no longer even heard.

She stood between the flames; her green eyes the only visible feature through the layers of soot and dust. Her arms were taut with hope and desperation, and she did not move. Neither a woman nor a child, she stiffly began to walk her eyes and ears searching anxiously for the only faces and only voices that mattered.

Slowly and meticulously she searched each burnt body, sometimes retching over their maimed and disfigured forms. Every now and then the smoke would claim her, sending her to the ground with the dead, often waking to find her arms or legs touching burnt flesh or bone. She would rise in a blind panic, but would always return to her search.

On the third day she found her brother. On seeing his burnt body, she cried out and stifled the urge to retch. He was unrecognisable, his flesh blackened and wrinkled by fire. She would have passed him by, but out of the corner of her eye she saw the flash of silver. An armoured sheath on each finger of one hand identified him immediately. Gently she removed them from his shrivelled fingers and placed the rings on her own right hand, not surprised when they fit her perfectly. She wept next to his body for a long time. There was a hole within her that would not be filled and seemed only to grow as she sat, senselessly beside him.

As she woke the next morning she knew there would be no more tears, she wondered that she lived at all, that her heart had kept on beating. Silently she dragged his body away from the town and towards the forest and did not notice when the smoke and fumes no longer enveloped the sky. Having no tools, she dug on her hands and knees for hours, her hands soon became numb but she ignored them. As she lowered him into the earth a deep sob escaped her throat, but there were no tears. She covered him with earth and rocks carefully and deliberately and at dusk kissed his grave.

She whispered his name over and over as if the sounds of his own name would awaken him. Kneeling down, she placed both of her hands on the stones that covered him. “Half of myself will always lie here with you in this grave, and it will never live again”. She closed her eyes only for a moment and then rose, continuing through the forest, leaving the ghost town behind her, as if it had never existed at all.

. . . . . . . . .

The warrior shook herself, almost imperceptibly as if to extinguish the memory. Knowing full well that this was impossible, she merely clenched her jaw and pressed on. Each day she remembered Jakan, and each day she longed for numbness and for oblivion, but she could no sooner banish his memory than she could her own arm.

As she crossed the hill overlooking the camp, she stopped. In the darkness she was alone, despite the bustle of activity below her. She had first come to the army what seemed like an eternity ago, when everything was suddenly different, but in reality it had been little under seven years. Then she had been called Morgan, and it was the only name she had ever known. But now the world knew her by a different name, Morrigan. And as Morrigan stood there contemplating her half-heart, perhaps she hesitated, but it was impossible to tell as she slowly made her way to the camp and home.

Tagged as: morrigan, novel, perfectionism, Writing