THE ADVENTURES OF THE AWESOME WANNABE WRITER

Sorry. Very tired. Busy and early day tomorrow. Busy day today too. Sorry, I stopped editing after he finds the deer dead. I just need to pass out. Sorry...Ugh. Night.

I'll have the next chapter in a few days. Read and rate and all that. Thanks... night again.
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Chapter 2

Aiden watched the city wall from the shadows of a closed smithy. A detail of bored guards tromped along the patrol points they had been assigned, occasionally peering out into the never-moving darkness before continuing on.

Aiden shook his head. What the council had let these guards, the cities first and most important line of defense against an attack, decay into these past few years was truly a sad thing to watch, though Aiden wasn’t complaining seeing as they had made his job all the easier. Spears were used more as walking sticks then as weapons. Bows were an instrument to be plucked and the braziers that were meant to put arrows alight during an night assault were used for warmth or as a cooking spit. The men had become a fat and scraggly bunch, their workout segments not being enforced with any type of real authority. Their uniforms seemed to have never seen a bucket of water and soap and the smell that Aiden’s nose was catching on the night breeze could only be that of cheap liquor, though not a bottle was to be seen. The men made sure of that.

Some day the piper’ll come to collect his dues. To bad they’ll all be to drunk and fat to notice the knife he’s got behind his back.

Aiden shoved it off. It wasn’t his problem to solve. He left that for the politicians to ruin. All he needed to do was get over that wall, and with a watch like this, that was no job at all.

He knelt to the dirt, running his hand across the trampled smooth earth until his fingers found it; a small stone the size of a small strawberry. He ran it between his fingers. Perfect.

He looked up at a small cluster of guards some hundred yards away. They stood huddled around a small fire, quietly laughing at jokes one of the younger men was telling. He scanned their faces. Unshaven and dirty. They were sure to have it.

Then it happened. A joke was told, the men laughed then after a few moments of dying silence one of the guards nudged his neighbor and said something to the rest of the group. The nudged man shrugged the other man off before he looked over his shoulder to see if anyone out of his group were near. Sure that they were alone, he reached into his coat pocket and produced a small bottle of clear liquid that gleamed in the light of the dying fire. The men, ‘ehhhhh’ed and jabbed each other and laughed in the gravely thick tones that only the moon seemed to bestow upon its people. They moved in closer to get a sooner chance at a swig of the spirits. It was a chance that would never come.

The man who had brought out the bottle pushed the closest away from him before uncorking the flask, taking a long appreciative sniff and raising it to his lips.

Crack!

Their was the sound like an arrow hissing and the bottled exploded into a thousand pieces, the liquor inside splashing down into the fire and causing a small fireball to erupt from it like a hungry demon.

Some of the more grizzled men who still retained a bit of the training that should have been instilled in all the watch, dropped like stones to the stone floor, not sure if they were under attack as they clutched their heads and yelled for the alarm to be sounded while the less experienced let panic take a hold of them as they began to scream and run in both directions up and down the wall, waving their arms and zigzagging along the path as if they were being pursued by a hive of angry hornets.

Aiden couldn’t help but smile as he walked to the wall. At least from his end of the spectrum it was painfully entertaining to watch. As he reached the looming wall he stretched out his right hand as high as it would reach and dipped it into the stone, watching as it sink through the wall as easy as if it were made of butter. He let it move in for about an inch before the stone turned hard again, surrounding his hand completely. With a heave he began to climb, creating hand and footholds where ever he needed them until he pulled himself over the edge of the wall, about fifty feet from where he had sent the stone flying.

Yes, that had been him. Aiden was an adept, if you hadn’t guessed by now, able to control anything relating back to the earth that he could touch. If he had had the skill, he might have just created a tunnel under the wall and walked right under the guards very noses whenever he liked, but such a thing was far past him. So he kept with what he knew – stone tossing. Simple and effective, as you’ve seen.

He brought himself over the wall and looked around. There was utter confusion among the guards. Some of them had regained a bit o their courage and were beginning to peer over the wall, trying to get a glimpse of where the missile had come from. Other were running with backs bent, so as not to be exposed, to find other guards. No one was noticing the eighteen year old boy who had just climbed their wall like a spider, nor did they notice it when he walked to the edge of the wall, grab the lip and flung himself over.

He hit the ground, but he didn’t crumple or cry out in pain or roll to his feet like anyone else might have. He sank. Sank nearly down to his waist in a type of fine sludge that seemed to have just appeared beneath him. It absorbed the shock of the fall like a soft cloud. It was a trick he’d learned after several broken bones and a few unsuccessful ‘get away’ attempts from what remained of the guard that took any pride in their position. He could have come down in an explosion of dust and chunks of compressed dirt but though it made for a better show a show was exactly what he was trying to avoid. The sludge was easy, didn’t take much energy and was most importantly eerily silent.

He pulled his legs out of the almost liquid dirt and cleaned his pants with a swipe of his hand, hardening the earth he’d fallen into with another.

He looked up at the wall. He was still safe, but his window of time was starting to running low. He needed to get a move on if he didn’t want to be seen. He picked up another handful of stone and sent them hovering in his palm. He scanned the dark land until he found what he was looking for. A massive boulder jutting up from the earth like a giant’s broken tooth. With a simple flick of his wrist the small missiles hissed into the night. A moment later they struck home, exploding in an awful clatter that cut through the night like an avalanche. The effect was wonderful.

The initial shock of the fire ball was beginning to wear off of the guards and they were beginning to become a little more brave as reinforcements were arriving but as Aiden had expected, as soon as his rocks struck, the guards quickly dropped fell back down to cover, shouting and praying and not giving a hoot to try and figure out what the noise actually was.

How easy they are to play. Aiden thought to himself as he took off at a steady jog towards the woods a half mile to the north. And the guards really were. A broken piece of granite on the wall to trip them up or an strange sound in the distance was normally all it took to allow him to slip by un-noticed but tonight he needed to make sure that there was no chance of that. There were people depending on this run.

He got to the woods without a problem. It took him a few moments to catch his breath. The night was cold and forbidding, the thick trunks and looming branches of the forest adding to the gloom of it all. He looked back at Corwell (name of the town, sorry, it’s a very loose draft so some things might not add up) and felt a small twinge of longing for his bed and the few books he kept near it in the drafty attic of an abandoned hovel in the south side. He didn’t much like this part of the job, the part where he actually had to work. He would have much rather been reading of knights and swords and dragons that could speak. But he needed to eat and the only way he could do that was with money and this was the only trade he knew – though tonight hadn’t been much in the field of success for his purse.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself and get to work.” He told himself and bitterly began to search for a small patch of cleared space to begin. After a few minutes he found what a little clearing that suited his needs and with a number of kicks with his boot he had cleared away two small spots of leaves and twigs to reveal the rich soil beneath. He knelt in the dirt and placed his hands against it, closing his eyes and opening the flood gates to his mind.

He felt his mind begin to soak into the earth, becoming part of it, like rain after a storm. Though the earth wasn’t alive in itself, millions of creatures and animals were and through the earth he could feel them. It wasn’t something he had ever...learned to do. It had just always been there, like talking or moving. It just...happened when he wanted it to.

Ants were as active as ever, building, tunneling and storing. The sleeping badger lay tucked deep back in his hole, his body twitching against the packed earth around him. The clever fox, stealing along the forest floor in search for a late catch, his earlier hours of hunting proven unsuccessful.

Suddenly he found what he was looking for. Ten to twelve deer lying in small clearing not to far from him to the north east. They were surrounded by a thick shrubbery which would alert them if anything were approaching since they would have to go through the plant, which would be just like them. Deer were confasticatingly smart creatures when it came to survival, seeming to do everything but vanish, though he wasn’t all together sure they couldn’t.

The only thing he wasn’t sure of was the count since the deer were lying on a bed of thick vegetation, which made his sight of them restricted to more of a large indented blur where he could only guess at how many deer there were, but no matter the amount, one was better than none.

He pulled his hands from the dirt and chewed his lower lip. There was two ways he could go at this. First was to just charge in through the thicket as he sent stones flying in hopes that he might hit something, finishing off whatever deer he had injured to badly to escape. But with that there was always the risk that he wouldn’t hit anything and he would have to go back empty handed to that family who, without food, wouldn’t last more than a few days.

Then there was option two, which involved quite a bit more time, time which he wasn’t sure he could afford to spend, but guaranteed him food in the bag. He would get as close as he could without alerting the deer and do as he had done here, with his hands in the earth, but that wasn’t where it stopped. With the patience of a tree he would begin to pull and compact the dirt in small snake holes across where the deer slept until he had at least three dozen holes spread across the small clearing. Then he would charge through the thicket, spooking the animals into a confused escape where, unless all luck had abandoned him, at least one deer would catch a hoof and Aiden would have his kill.

It was a dirty business no matter what route he took, and he didn’t enjoy it, but there were certain things that just needed to be done and this was one of them.

Aiden took another look at the sky. It was still black, no hints of a sunrise on the clouds or mountain peaks, but he couldn’t be sure how much time he had left. Possibly three hours? Maybe four. The holes would take at least two hours of painstaking detail that left him feeling sick and sore from the concentration. The skinning would take another hour.

After several long minutes he eventually decided on the best plan he could think of. He would create as many holes as he could, constantly feeling for increased activity in the wildlife around him for a sense of when dawn was coming since once he began his work on the holes he couldn’t leave them unless he chance them collapsing, then he would go through with his first option, hoping that one of the two would allow him a kill. It was the best chance he had.

After re-checking the location of the deer, he began to run. It wasn’t long before he saw the thicket and he slowed to a trot, eventually coming to a complete halt. The brush stood broad and wide several hundred feet away. He took a breath.

“Heaven help me.”

He cracked his neck, rolled his sleeves back and got to work.

He knelt, planted his hands into the earth and let himself seep into the soil, his mind stretching to where the deer lay. So much closer it almost felt like he could feel their hearts throbbing against the ground, the twitches as even in sleep their instinctual senses searched for any changes in their surroundings, though not even the sharpest buck would have ever known what was beginning to happen just inches under from where he slept.

For hours Aiden lay crouched there, unmoving, eyes clenched as his fingers worked the delicate soil under his prey. He kept a piece of his mind free to set a small border around himself, concentrating on whatever animal or insect he knew to be diurnal. He also kept a multitude of thin tripwire veins spread out in all directions to catch increased movement wherever it happened.

For the most part there hadn’t been anything to cause concern but somewhere around his eighteenth prairie hole he began to feel a shift.

At first it was only the hints of life, a rabbit beginning to hop off its sleep or a yawn from a wild dog but soon he felt the brown bears running lumbering over to a tree for a quick hygiene check and a back scratch before the day began but most importantly were the deer. Noses began to catch scents and eyes were beginning to open.

Aiden needed to move. Now.

He pulled out of the dirt, the mental chords so long attached between him and the earth that he almost could feet them snap as he pulled away, causing him a nasty burst of pain in the back of his head that he knew would stay with him for the rest of the morning.

But he didn’t have time to feel sorry for himself. Without bothering to look he opened his hand and dozens of small rocks flew to hovering in his hand, far more than he would have been able to carry without his ability. He flexed his fingers and the stones split and cracked until a hundred little pieces of shrapnel hovered in his hand. He could almost feel the deer’s heads snap to his location, ears pricked.

With a prayer to whatever gods existed, Aiden took a breath and began to run. As the distance closed down to what he guessed was something around a hundred feet he shouted as loud as he could and sent the shrapnel speeding away into the shrubbery before bursting through it a moment later, the branches catching and breaking against his clothes.

Thank the gods! Two bloody deer lay with twisted limbs, unmoving against the pressed foliage. Thankfully his stones had done the dirty work for him, puncturing holes in critical places like the neck, heart and head and killing the deer instantly. Blood led away from a trampled section of bush opposite of where Aiden had burst through. It looked like he had caught a few others with his stones, though not badly enough to kill. He felt a little guilty for it. He hated killing but killing without a benefit was infinitely worse. But there was nothing he could do about it. It was either that or let that family starve. His conscience could handle it.

He walked to the deer, reaching into his pack and pulling out a small torch. He lit it with a strike of his tinder box and stuck the sputtering torch into the ground beside the animals. It was still to dark to see anything except a basic shape. Dipping his hand into the earth and pulling out a thin skinning knife of stone that he sharpened by running his nail across the blade section and carving it into a razor edge, he began his dirty work.

A half hour later a skinned, gutted and butchered deer carcass hung from a tree with a bit of rope Aiden had brought with him. The second deer he left for the wolves. He would have liked to have been able to take all the meat but it would have taken him several trips back to the wall to haul all that meat. He was going to have trouble carrying what venison he had gotten from the first animal in one trip. The second would have been impossible without a horse and cart or more men. Best to just leave it.

With an aching breath he began to reach for the wrapped meats to stuff them in his pack when his fingers brushed against the earth as they scooped around the package. Maybe it was because he had been attached to the earth so long that his mind was still wanting for the connection or maybe it was just luck but whatever it was, it saved his life that cold morning.

All he had time to register was four heavy bodies at the edge of the thicket then like a pack of wild dogs they burst through, shouting and screaming war cries.

Without thinking Aiden threw himself back, thrusting his hands into the earth and tearing out two large pieces of earth, hurling them blindly.

He had no time to see if any had struck home, he just rolled to his feet and slammed his fists against the ground, clenching his eyes and dipping as deep into his energy pool as he could and breaking the dam, letting it burst from his hands like a flood.

There was a moment of nauseating nothingness before he felt his body tighten and the earth scream under him as it let tear from it dozens of thin and thick spikes.

Aiden collapsed into the dirt, his heart seeming to stop then burst against every vein in his body like an overloaded drain pipe. His breaths, unable to hold a full lungful, came in short gasps and his vision was fading from black to blurry to oversensitive to black again.

“Ahhhhghhhh...” He moaned as his muscles began to tense like one massive bruise. He sucked in a breath and rolled onto his side, curling into a ball. He had only ever used so much energy once before and he had always remembered it being the worst pain he had ever felt but this...this was so much worse.

B-breathe...He tried to think through the burning. Just-“aagh!”

The thinking thing wasn’t working.

He lay there for eternity, clasping everyplace of his body as if he could squeeze out the pain, when he heard the voice shout, “Hey, Durgo! Get yer lazy rump back here! The cap’n don’ like wa’in!” There was a few seconds pause. “Durgo?”

Gritting his teeth, Aiden slapped his hand against the soil, dipping into the puddle of energy that remained and felt. One man, walking towards the brush. Past that Aiden didn’t have the stomach to feel but he knew this much; he had to get out or else he was going to die.

Gathering whatever he could he began to crawl to the shrubbery. His fingers clawed at the cold, unresponsive earth. Every muscle strained, burned and tore, every joint popping and cracking as if he were made of the very stone he bent.

He had no idea how he did it but he got to the bush, pulling himself inside. Branches broke into his skin and leaves scratched his face as he pulled himself into the thicket and passed into blackness
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The Life of My Story

Wednesday, October 03, 2012

Writing.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

(3557 of 5327) Chapter 2.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Chapter 2

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