I'm starting off a new week with a little DOOM! Last week, fellow blogger Sierra McConnell, of
The Writer and the Resin Roommates, passed this lovely blog award on to me:
This is my kind of blog award! The idea is this:
1. When you receive the Blog Award of DOOM your task is to post a short selection of your writing, 100-300 words, in which your favorite character suffers a horrible fate. It can be your favorite character from your own writing or from something you've read, it can be from a finished manuscript, a WIP or something you just made up on the spot. Your choice, but it has to be full of DOOM!
2. Pass it on to one other blogger and let them know their DOOM has come.
3. Remember that the person who passed the award on to you also received it as well. Go back to their post to read and comment on their writing sample. Make sure to thank them for sending the DOOM your way.
4. Whenever you use the word DOOM in your post, you must capitalize the whole thing.
First off, I highly recommend checking out Sierra's DOOM selection. It's both beautifully written and tantalizing in its details.
Me, I'm going to break the letter of the rules but adhere to their spirit. Most of my real world friends know me more for my epic fantasy than my urban fantasy. When I received this award, I immediately thought of a passage I'd written a few years ago for an epic fantasy project I intend to go back and pick up someday. It doesn't include my favorite character (though I really like Kho, and one of my favorite villains ever makes an unnamed appearance on the rock outcropping at the end). It's also longer than suggested, about four pages, but it's the scene in total (and one of the few times I ever considered keeping a prologue). It also doesn't actually feature the word DOOM (okay, it has 'doomed'), though it is
all about the DOOM.
Oh, and
Claudie A, you are so tagged! Let's see you DOOM, baby!
So, my fellows, here is your first taste of my epic fantasy (though an older style), DOOM flavored:
The lilies gorged on blood.
Kho stomped with enraged glee through the knee-high thick of them. The pane of night above the writhing battlefield dyed the hungry white blossoms dark blue.
Black now, Kho thought and nodded as he jerked a limp Phoakwis body through the tangle.
Black-red now, as he painted the lilies with hard strokes, swinging his enemy’s spindly corpse. Its weight and the rage of his efforts tore dead ligaments and left only a hard onyx-black chest plate lined with gore dripping in Kho’s clawed hand. He flung the plate down where the rest of the Phoakwis warrior’s body lay piled like so much empty armor.
These were the best for battling each other, Kho’s kind and the insect-like Phoakwis, each born with their weapons and plates. No foe could disarm them or strip them of their armor without first making them dead, unlike the willowy, soft Qseivus with their string weapons or the Hyaphoa with their lyrical spells vulnerable to interruption. It had been a Phoakwis warrior who had cut down Kho’s sib, Shaln, lifeless in the maple vines beneath the tall woods just beyond the lily field. It had been Phoakwis and Hyaphoa that had set this battle and this war in motion like a wave of wildfire across the territories of the Many Races. Hyaphoa and Phoakwis . . .
Kho threw his horned head back and howled low and hard. The suffocating cry of grief and bloodlust burned his lungs and chest, an acidic ache. He felt no pain from the gashes around and beneath his own golden plates. No pain compared to burned villages and buried bairn.
A tiring Hyaphoa dipped too low over the field then. Kho sprang and clamped one claw around the winged mage’s slender ankle. Her sweat slicked her skin greasy and metallic, but he held her fast. The female gurgled part of some singsong chant. Though billowy silver wings beat strong, he ripped her from the sky. Her end was quick. More blood for the lilies, true black from Hyaphoa wounds. The blossoms churned in the wind, in coppery perfumed ecstasy. They seemed to gulp the lost life down. It almost seemed to Kho they gaped for more.
“Oko!”
The battle cry erupted from the distance. It was a screech of vindication cutting through the indistinct din of howl and scream, yelp and mew, chant and half-uttered prayer. With each kill, the name of their slain bairn was the curse from Kho’s mate, Ina. His gaze tracked the sound past half a dozen mortal struggles to the distinctive silhouette of the horned battle maiden with her own golden thorny plates. More wet lilies clung about her feet.
Kho propelled himself through the throng of warriors toward his mate as though swimming against a swift current. His arms stroked out strong beside him, clearing his path. He concentrated his gaze on Ina, only grimacing with the surge of satisfaction whenever his claws met yielding flesh. When he reached her in the fire-streaked darkness he saw the wet red stripes along her scales.
Ina collapsed against Kho, her natural armor clattering unnaturally against him where blades and pincers and claws had levered up and loosened her plates in search of flesh. He lowered her into the bed of lilies, their light eyes bound and steady on one another. She hissed a relieved greeting, but words were too soon beyond her. Kho shook his head in a moment’s sinking anguish. A knot of denial built in his chest, even after all this.
Then his heart and his mind stilled for her, banishing the chaos surrounding them. He pressed his soft, fine-scaled cheek to hers. She was cool, breathless. He cooed a lullaby, ancient even then, against Ina’s face, rolling and vibrating the wistful notes deep in his throat and his contracting chest. So came the hummer’s trance, the sensory memories: early morning on the quiet riverbank beside the village, the willows playing silvery music with leaves against the breeze, the tickle of water under their plates as they lazed in the shallows.
Ina felt nothing, and Kho cared nothing, when the lilies tangled them. Hungry petal mouths went hard to work feeding on the life free-flowing. Kho wrapped the hummer’s trance about Ina and himself as a blanket, sheltering them from the panic erupting on the field as proud combatants fell to delicate flowers and slaking vines. Nature, blood-gorged by war, blood-mad, closed over them all, binding, strangling, suckling.
As Ina slipped away, the same inner spiral path opened for Kho. He lingered long enough to survey the waves of savage, insane wilderness crashing over the shamed remnants of the doomed Many Races. In an ensouled land, what else could such slaughter have earned them?
On the far side of the field, a cluster of Hyaphoa mages alighted like so many jewel and metal butterflies on a rock outcropping above the vengeful vines. A male amidst them gestured with purpose. He maintained impossible grace on the outskirts of the horror that drowned out his poetic incantation.
Then the flash of utter black, like a lightning bolt of pure darkness, struck the rocky overlook. The clap as the stone fractured echoed out and up and through the field, through Kho. From the rock poured blackest bile into the bruised sky. Liquid hunger billowed up and rolled over them, and Kho praised his merciful ancestors that no member of his kith but he had lived long enough to touch the terrible devouring . . .
So fell the twilight of the Many Races, the First Races, when the Darkness surged over the face of the World, and She smiled no more.
Ah well. I sensed it coming. And it's been going around. I need to get some writing done, unwind, and repair/prepare for a major event coming up in my personal life. As of now, I am on Blog Vacation. My posts will appear on Wicked & Tricksy, but that's it. My participation on the Bransforum and Twitter will also be scaled back significantly.
