The Oracles on the Delphi Express

This short is based on the song “The Oracles on the Delphi Express” by The Dear Hunter

The carriage rocked gently from side to side, a soothing motion once you get used to the jolts of a train running over misaligned tracks. His compartment smelt of old wood that had been varnished too heavily. The brown leather seats were worn and faded from years of use. Outside the world rushed by, wreathed in smoke from the engine ahead.

He glanced at his hands – they still had dirt under the fingernails. Perhaps he should have washed himself, but something had driven him from that place. It had been his home for so many years, yet now it was nothing but an empty shell of a life once lived.

Where would the train take him, how far would he ride it? As far as possible, he figured. His mother had never told him about The City, but he knew it would be somewhere along the line. As soon as the green of the hills and trees turned to the grey of buildings and roads, he would know he was in the right place. She had told him never to go there, never to stray too far from the small piece of land they had called their own. She had forbidden him, but now she was dead.

Time and endless work had taken its toll on his mother, yet at the end she still smiled. She always had the saddest smile.

“Tickets please.”

The sound made him jump, not least because he had boarded the train without checking for a ticket desk. Reaching instinctively into his waistcoat, he mumbled his apologies. A sharp bark of a laugh caused him to look up. Stood at the sliding door to his compartment, a grin creasing her wrinkled face, was an old woman.

“Oh darling, you should have seen your face.” The woman, a shawl wrapped around her head, stepped into the carriage. “Don’t worry yourself, though, you won’t need a ticket. The inspector will forget to check this room.”

Two other figures followed the woman – one, tall, lithe and beautiful, was a girl around his age. She wore a tight dress around her midriff and a chequered scarf across her shoulders. Her face, hidden behind thick golden hair, was shadowed by a wide-brimmed straw hat. Behind the beauty shuffled a young girl – maybe four or five. The child kept her eyes on the floor, hands grasping at the young woman’s dress.

“Who-” he begun to say, before the old woman silenced him with an upheld palm.

“You don’t need to know, child. What does concern you, though, is where you are headed.”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“The City.” Squeeked the little girl, who had hoisted herself onto the seat opposite him, in between the old woman and the beauty. “Why do you want to go to The City?”

“He’s angry,” whispered the beauty. Her lips, full and red, appeared fleetingly between strands of blonde hair. “Confused. Distraight. So many emotions for such a young soul.”

He crossed his arms, leaning back against the seat. “Look, I don’t know who you are, but please find another carriage, I’d rather be alone, I-”

“Buried your mother today.” The girl interrupted. She looked up, tears in her eyes. “So sad. She was all you had.”

He felt his heart clench within his chest.

The old woman broke the silence. “Your luck is running thin, Hunter. There is nothing but pain in The City. No matter what you do, it will find you.” She leant forward, placing a wrinkled hand onto his knee. He felt instantly warm and comfortable, as if he were sat by a roaring fire on a winter’s night. The fact the woman had said his name passed over him like the lightest breeze. “Crimson hands will brandish masqueraded words. Your innocence will shatter.”

He brushed himself free of her grasp. “What are you saying?”

“Beware the man of duality,” replied the beauty, wringing her hands. “Prose with one face and pride with the other. A theatre of sin and a palace of hypocrisy.”

“She loved you,” sobbed the little girl, cuffing tears from her pink cheeks. “She loved you so much.”

“You’re stuck, Hunter,” continued the old woman, taking the beauty’s hands in hers. “You lust for some solidity, but your cryptic history will lead you down a dark path. Trust us. Do not go to The City.”

The beauty looked up. Her hair flew from her face. His gaze was suddenly trapped by her eyes of golden brown. “She is there. A rose among thorns, a flower among swine. A mislead heiress to mystery.”

“Stop this!” The old woman grasped at the beauty, but her hands were pushed away. The beauty lurched forward, pulling him into an embrace. The old woman raked at her dress, trying to drag her back. “Stop this now!”

With a whisper as light as cascading feathers, the beauty’s lips brushed his ears. “The mimic of the matriarch, the silver queen, her embrace is your salvation.” She fell back, panting.

“Do we have to go, nana?” The little girl asked the old woman, who was recovering her composure.

“Yes, dear,” the old woman smiled.

The child smiled sadly. She hopped from her seat, and crossed to tug at his shirtsleeve. “She loved you so much” she repeated.

He looked up at the old woman, who was adjusting her shawl. “Trust us, child. Do not go to The City. Go back to the lake, go back to the river. Your luck’s running thin.”

The train burst into a tunnel, plunging the carriage into darkness. Slumping back against the dusty seat, Hunter wiped the sweat from his forehead with a sleeve. He could feel his heart beating within his chest.

“Next stop, The City!” A train guard holding a small lantern passed down the car, holding the light up to scan for passengers. He stopped outside of the door for a moment. The guard shifted his weight, sniffed, and then set off again. “That’s The City, next stop!”

Light filled the carriage again, revealing it to be as empty as when Hunter had boarded. Outside, obscured by grey-black smoke, a great city stretched. Suddenly exhausted, Hunter leant forward, elbows resting on his knees. He glanced at his fingers – the nails were spotless.

[World-building] The Music of Creation

(A little too Tolkien for my liking so its been shelved for the time being – Alex).

Truly humans, of all beings gifted free will, are the blessed among us. Their voices began so very late in the song and yet they sung with such clarity.

The Oldest among us had been singing for aeons when the first human voice rose in crescendo. Deep and sonorous they were, so full of vigour and purpose, yet so short. What they call their curse, their short lives under the sky and stars, is in fact their most precious trait.

Their venerated seers and aged, lined deep with the toils of human mortality, tanned from the fields and worried with wisdom, are but mere pups to the even the youngest of our kin.

For man has no reckoning for how long the song has played; how long our voices have sung. Since the time of darkness, before the light of the sun burned away the shadow, has our harmony danced in the Song of the Spheres. We were the chosen: the conductors, the operators of all creation as we saw fit. That trust was misplaced.

Mortality is the curse against which man rails, he does not know the perpetual agony of millennial guilt.

The song was ours, gifted to us to harmonise life and death by the Creator himself. We were tasked to tune the land, shape the mountains and raise the great forests. The song was ours and we revelled in the responsibility.

Eventually amongst that sacred sonata new voices arose, those under the mountains and those spread across deserts; those beneath the waves and those in the skies. Beasts, birds and sentient beings appeared from the melody beautiful and wonderful in golden light.

Then harmony was shattered. Our arrogance sullied the song as some wished to take it for their own to use against the Creator and shape a world with us as its masters. After all, our empires spanned the land, why should it not be ours?

That arrogance was our end. The symmetry of the songs broke and warped and into the world all that is twisted and evil broke. Murder, war, pestilence, death – all escaped and thrived in the chaos.

His vengeance was swift and brutal. Cast down from favour we fought countless wars to repair the tune – to bring it back to its shining, golden conception – and we failed. In shame we withdrew from the Music, bloodied, beaten, our empire in ruins and our people dwindling in numbers. The world grew dark with shadow once again.

It was then that Man’s voice arose, birthed into a world of chaos and death. It broke like a wave upon the shore, filling the Music with the sound of redemption. Our redemption.

For decades we sought those voices, strode the world in search of a life force that we knew we needed to kindle and care for. From that very first verse did Humanity become our charge – so delicate yet capable of the greatest deeds. Theirs was the fortississimo the Oldest had sought to break the dark of the world.

Under our tutelage they flourished. From nomadic wanderers they grew to great kingdoms, powerful realms whose armies spread the Music to every corner of the world.

It was too late when we realised our mistake. The song, which had once belonged to all, became theirs. The Music of the Spheres rang with the crescendo of Man. Arrogance, vice, pride; hubris – all the traits the Oldest had sought to wipe from the song – began to emerge to sully it once more.

Man turned upon us, and we upon them. Allies of the closest kind fought terrible wars of genocide. Though few, we wrought terrible destruction upon humanity and its realms. Their golden age withered to nought, awash with the blood of its finest sons and daughters.

Now the song enters its final verse and we find ourselves in need of Man once more. What an irony it is that the fate of the Music lies at the feet of those cannot hear the song. Man is deaf to the harmony – in his rejection of us he rejected the truth of creation. Great kingdoms he has spread over our world, yet none will survive the coming darkness.

For the Music has a new voice. Ragged, torn, born of blood and ancient battle, foul of tune and filled with rage. The storm-voice shall break upon the world like a sonorous tempest and sweep all away to nothing.

Yet there is one who can stop the crash, one whose voice shall awaken the hidden potential of man. The legacy of kings lies within him, mixed with the song of the Oldest.

He must awaken.

(Picture credit: Underwater Creation by KPEKEP)

Short: Heartbeat

A strange thing, a heartbeat.

Something so steady, so pervasive, that we ignore its rhythms for all our lives. It’s such a continuous feature of existence that it only becomes noticeable when it finally stops.

Frank and I had been friends since high-school. He was always the funny man, playing his jokes off of me. I never minded, though, it was how we were. We graduated together, moved into the same city, joined the police together. This was back in the day when policing was a people business, you could walk down the street and people would say hello to you, ask you how the day was going. You don’t see any of that anymore.

He would always get into trouble with the higher-ups, Frank. He was something of a social pioneer – it was a trait that I greatly admired in him. In a time when people of different backgrounds, different skin colours, were being unfairly treated, wronged at every turn, Frank would be there to set things right. I made Sergeant, he didn’t.

That never bothered him though: he enjoyed the beat, walking amongst the people he protected. In many ways he was the cliche of a cop, abiding by every law and rule and never straying from what he saw as justice.

It was down to him that I met my wife. We used to drink at a bar in town called Mallory’s. It was an Irish place, which suit Frank just right, his grandfather being from Derry after all. I was stood at the bar my eyes glued on this stunning woman when Frank clocks me and just strides right up to her.

“Come and meet my buddy,” he says. “He’s a little on the short side but he’s a real charmer.”

We’ve been married for 34 years, and he brought up that story at every anniversary.

“It’s a good thing I wasn’t on my game that night,” he’d chuckle at every get-together. “Or we’d be celebrating my marriage!”

Frank never did settle down. Some women did steal his heart, but more often then not they would disappear as soon as they had appeared. One girl, Mel was her name, really put him through the wringer. She made all these plans with Frank, about settling down, having kids, the whole package. He fell for it hook, line and sinker, right up until she ran out on him with most of his money. I don’t think he ever really recovered from that – he took to drinking a lot more than usual after her.

Slowly but surely our work became more about filing forms and paperwork than being out on the street. I had by this time become a lieutenant. There had been overtures for me to make detective but I had turned it all down to keep an eye on Frank, who was becoming like an old dog in the station. He would arrive at five in the morning and not leave until ten or eleven at night. That station was his life, and when he retired it took something out of him.

I’ll always remember one night at Mallory’s, he had been retired for about five years – I had already been out for longer after a shootout left me with a bullet in the hip – when I think something in him snapped.

Mallory’s had, by then, come under new ownership and had been overlapped by an urban sprawl that had turned quite a nice suburb into a “shady” area. We still took the trip every week or because the place had such a history with us, but there was no mistaking it had gone downhill.

We had been sat there for around an hour or so when someone jabbed Frank in the ribs.

“That’s my seat,” he had said, in that way that told you what he really cared about wasn’t some bar stool in a dive bar.

Now, ever since Frank has asserted that what he had jabbed him with was the muzzle of a gun. I don;t want to dispute that, but Frank hated seeing his neighborhood, his patrol, his beat, being degraded year by year. It may have been a gun, it may have been an excuse. Either way, his reaction was instantaneous and incredible for a man pushing 60. In one swift movement he span on the stool, beer bottle in hand, to smash it against the man’s temple.

As the glass shattered and the gruff-looking patron toppled over, one of his colleagues evidently decided to lunge for me, as I was one of two old men who seemingly didn’t look crazy.

They say that your instincts from old days as a cop never die, and I suppose I can attest for that. With speed that I would pay for when I woke up the next day, I dismounted my stool, caught the man’s neck in my hand and drew my pistol. Frank had never liked guns but having been disabled by one I had resolved to always carry my own in defence.

The appearance of my firearm cooled the situation somewhat and Frank and I made our getaway, two old pensioners giggling like schoolchildren after almost being assaulted.

That was the last time we saw Mallory’s. Someone burnt it down about a year after. It was about that time that Frank began to get sick, too. It was as if the last remnant of his old beat disappearing finally took its toll on him.

Cancer is an awful disease. I had to watch a man who had looked as alive at 60 as he had at 18 wither away in front of me. There were no more jokes, no more beers, no more anniversary anecdotes. Just a hospital bed, some tubes, and the steady beat of a heart monitor.

It’s a strange thing, a heartbeat. Something that can represent an entire being, and entire life, condensed into a staccato of pips on a machine.

The silence it leaves behind is deafening. Deafening and lonely.

Short: “Quizzical”

Writing Prompt Response

In an alternate universe, all decisions are made via the results of a Buzzfeed quiz

“You don’t understand, my favourite drink is actually Pepsi! PEPSI!”

She kicked and screamed as two burly men, suited and imposing, dragged her down the hallway. The waiting lines of people watched her apathetically. I sighed, shuffling some paperwork before slotting it into a file.

“Next?”

People ask me how I sleep at night, how I can sit there as people dreams are crushed over the results of a six-question survey. Most of the time I simply shrug: it’s a job after all, you just do what you can to get by.

The Buzzfeed Bureau of Quiz Complaints (BBQC) is by far the busiest building in the central London. That’s not even an exaggeration. You’ll only find larger crowds and queues on the underground and possibly around Trafalgar Square. The sheer amount of foot traffic we receive is mind-boggling – last year they had to install flagstones throughout the building due to how regularly the carpets were ruined.

A man steps up to my window, looking wild-eyed and frightened despite his attempt to dress up in a crumpled suit. We’re divided into long hallways in the BBQC, each teller assigned around two hundred people with complaints over their results.

“Yes?” I ask, already reaching for the REJECTED stamp.

“I… I want to change my celebrity BFF.”

My eyebrows rose. “Who were you assigned, and who would you prefer?” As he stuttered I glanced at his papers, quickly bringin up his details on my terminal.

“I got Kanye West, and I’d prefer, well, anyone else to be honest.”

“Okay Mr… Coleman?” He nodded. “Good. Well, it says here that your favourite fast food restaurant is Burger King. Is that correct?”

“Well, yes, but-“

“NEXT!”

“But he keeps calling me!” The man slammed a palm against the glass of the booth in desperation. “HE WON’T STOP TALKING!”

As if my clockwork two more burly men appeared to manhandle him away. They are certainly efficient, BBQC security. They operate in shifts, teams rotating back to the front of the queue to drag the next helpless plaintiff away.

Another man, slightly taller, strode up to the window.

“You people are scum, you know that?”

He’d been waiting an hour or so and the summer heat (and the broken air conditioning) had obviously rendered his manners obsolete.

I sighed. Three years I’d been working this job and not once had I gone home feeling like I’ve made a difference. I was assigned the job, just like everyone else did. My sister did the same quiz as me, now she’s a marine biologist.

If only I hadn’t said my favourite Disney movie was Hercules.

Short: “Unbound”

Writing Prompt Response

Write a story based upon this image

 

“It’s better than a rock.”

I sat, one toe dipped in the water, staring into the expanses of an endless blue sky. Solitude had its upsides sometimes, and one of the best was the ability to just lie still and listen to the waves lap against the shore.

Granted, the “shore” was composed mostly of flotsam and refuse, but it was my shore. I’d even managed to craft myself a small hut in the middle. It was rickety, smelly and felt like it might collapse at every gust of wind, but it was home.

There have definitely been worse punishments in history. I was quite pleasantly surprised when I was moved. Humanity has always piqued my interest, and I have ever been their benefactor and now their continuous expansion has forced me from my previous prison.

Some might say that I caused it all. I gave them that one gift that allowed man, huddled, freezing and dim-witted, to emerge and to conquer the natural world around him. I counter, however, that any creature that can take one little spark, one little flame, and rise to dominate the planet deserves far more lip service than that.

So Olympus became crowded – jet-powered aircraft and space stations make it very difficult to hide from the prying eyes of humanity. I have to say I am very proud of them, though.

Now my solitude is my prison and the endless seas my chains.

A shadow flitted across the water, large and imposing. In a flap of great wings the eagle landed upon my shack, eyes fixed upon my torso.

“You’re early,” I mumbled, shielding my eyes from the sun.

The eagle said nothing, hopping down onto my island in the curious way all raptors do. It was probably exhausted, it’s flights were, after all, far longer now.

“Fine, fine,” I unbuttoned my shirt, motioning for the bird to do its work. “It’s the least I can do since you came all this way. Just don’t block my tan too much.”

The bird set to his painful work. Tomorrow he would do it all again.

It’s still far better than a rock.