Speak

I want to do more. To be more. I lie and lie and that is wicked for how dare I strive to be better than my shambling reality? How dare I grasp and strive for the immortal blinding avatar: my ideal self. I want to do more than string arbitrary metaphors together. To tangle meaningless syntax into aesthetic shapes. I want to do more than orphan alcoholic edgelords being devoured by monsters. More than a Wizard in a dungeon being destroyed by great knowledge. I want to speak: to shoot out innumerable truths that scream like meteors down into the dust of the unconscious. I want to Speak, to make real the whirling waves and wind around the mountains. To make the stones rupture through the skin of the page in their stony undeniability. I want to have the energy to put in the effort. I want to speak. I want to be.

This is my worst one.

Silence

Silence grasps the stage. The actor is poised, contorted, her face scrawled into a tight grimace. She is sat on a sofa. Another actor watches dejectedly from stage left. A cigarette prop hangs loose from his mouth for a few seconds and then its quiet tumbling to the ground becomes the only movement. The backdrop is a curtain painted to look like ancient medieval stonework with a small window behind it looking out on rolling fields. As the cigarette approaches the ground the actor’s eyes swivel to follow it and then freeze again. These moments of miniscule action become titanic due to their barren context.

In the pit meanwhile, the audience is an ecstasy of activity. Sweet packets silently crumple into purses lips smack eyes dark chests heave kids fidget old men adjust to pull their trousers up young men glance nervously at their girlfriends an immense roiling mass of arms and eyes and mouths and legs roil and toss in the pit without a sound. They are the dynamic quivering soul of the verb ‘watching a play’. The actors can each see this mass of writhing bodies that the audience themselves cannot. Likewise, the audience can see the trance like calm of the stage in a way those standing atop it cannot. But no one watches both at once, no one can see the utter contrast. No one sees the blood that races through still veins but is lost in moving ones. The strange eclectic violent screaming picture goes unremarked upon.

And who cares?

Stage

I am not ready to confront the thing which sits beyond the terribly trembling threshold. It stares back at me with uncomprehending eyes. It’s crouched against the wall. It’s clearly been crying. It’s breathing hard. Its shivering. Long matted hair, thick with its own and other’s fluids, covers thin shoulders which shake in skeletal slightness. It is an abject creature. I stand exactly as it does, and go to leave the room out the back as it does from the front.

Nycanotholep ryy’leh thrannkar

Ghønflü akresh rakathama

In the valley of sleep

Find great power

– The Old One

The king looked serious as the Wizard Nim entered the room. The situation had gone from bad to fucked the shut up. What?

-Ah, Nim, I see that you are here at last. He said cooly.

-Yes sir I understand the seriousness of the situation. Nim said.

-Hmm… well… in that case I have a very serious question to ask of you.

-What would that be sir?

-Nim, the King said, can you explain to me, in Layman’s terms, what the underlying magical rules of our world are?

-I’m sorry?

– The underlying system Nim. What is the logic on what a Wizard can and cannot do with magic in our world?

-I’m sorry sir but I really don’t understand.

-Perhaps an example, okay you recall last week when you performed that spell that made it so nobody except me could reveal the location of our secret armies hidden away north of the border?

-Yes sir? A standard Epistemancy Charm sir.

-Yes well you were able to take a piece of information known by many and make them all forget it so I alone could control the information?

-Yes.

-Well then Nim, why the bloody hell are we fighting this damned war in the first place? Couldn’t you just make everyone forget how to use a sword? Then I could teach all my men how to do it again and the minions of the invincible overlord would be a piece of cake. That sounds much easier.

-Well you see sir… Nim tried to speak up but was interrupted.

-Nim bottom line here is their a rhetorical justification for this inconsistency or not? Because if not-

-You know what no sir, there isn’t, we are just squiggles on a page and I only was able to cast that spell because it was convenient!

-I say what the bloody hell are you blathering about now man I swear I’ll have your head for addressing your king like that

Nim did not face consequences however, because neither he nor the King really existed.

Card Advantage

You wander the passages in search of great power. Your studious eyes scan the walls for clues or glyphs that might Mark out hidden doors. The details of the passages flicker in your trembling torchlight. At that moment you hear it. A terrible voice rasps from ahead of you. It speaks your name. You freeze. It speaks your name again. -Step forward now step forward come to me I command you step forward into my knowledge glow and seize power everlasting coward! You walk forward, your body moving automatically as tears of delirium leak down your ashen face. You enter a room lit by a strange ambient glow. You have found it. A great book bound in a strange leather covered in unfathomable runes lies on a stone table. It is the source of the glow. You stand there staring into the book as the voice begins to scream -Step forward coward step forward and open me step forward step forward and claim great power step forward-

The book unfurls as I look down in horror at my disobeying hand. It is too late. The book falls fully open.

Uncountable ideas begin to flood into mind, my pupils dilate to accomadate the flood of knowledge. I know more and more until soon I know everything. Thousands of ideas scream around inside my shredding the carefully constructed webs of understanding developed over years and decades like birds swarming through two open windows and colliding with houses of cards. My forehead burns as one essential idea endlessly screams through me. This has all happened before, infinite times, and it will happen again, exactly the same, until time itself runs out. As I feel the last fragments of my mind shredding away I understand the true nature of my power.

There is a thud in the dungeon as another dead scholar collapses in the piles of his rotting kin.

Night Time Nerves

It is night. You have been struggling to sleep for a while. Today has been stressful and now you’re tired but also all the thoughts you pushed down during the day have come back to enact their revenge. You try to not think. To allow your mind to go blank. Long rubbery hands stretch through the translucent curtains towards your defenceless body. You won’t see them unless you look around now. Your heart races. There’s nothing there, you tell yourself, you are just anxious. There’s no need to look round. There are long rubbery hands. There are. They are getting closer. This is ridiculous. Everything in your mind and body is screaming to turn around. You’re sweating. Your blood pressure is up. You’re tense. You look round. Nothing. You try to relax again. Placing your back to the magical enormity of the night time world outside.

Werehuman

There is a man at your office. He comes in just as everyone leaves, just as the sun dips beneath the horizon. You have been working there almost a year and have seen him in person only a few times. He doesn’t come every night. Only certain nights of the month. His head is bald. His eyes are grey. He seems ragged, hungry, strangely unsuited for the human world. We all gossip about him. Does he even work here? We ask HR and they see he is recorded as an employee but his attendance is terrible, designing to arrive but a few nights a month. Carol from HR looks haunted. His work is perfect. The accountancy firm has never had a more model employee. One night you decide to investigate. When the work day ends and you see the man walking up to the building (he doesn’t seem to have a car) you hide in a bathroom until everyone else leaves. You listen for him entering the room. Listen to the click as he opens his briefcase. You hide all night. Moonlight spills through the frosted window of the bathroom. You listen to the typing of keys, the scratching of pens, the occasional murmuring of report names and expense sheets being mentally jostled. Dawn approaches. You here him leave. You wait a few moments and follow him. You walk out of the bathroom and past an immaculate desk covered in impeccable and orderly files and forms. You follow the man down the hallway, across the lobby, and then into the parking lot. He walks across the street and then, to your amazement, steps through the hedge into the nearby field. It takes immense strain to force his ailing body through the wall of shrubbery. You climb through the crater his passage rends and goes to follow. He is somehow out of sight but still leaves footprints. You follow them as the blue of the full moon begins to dissapate in the face of the growing blue emerging from the horizon to light up the sky. The shoeprints are big. He has collapsed arches. He wears a special brand for big footed people. The patterns are strange and unnatural to you. You continue following the trail and the footprints become increasingly erratic and veer all over the place as if the walker is in great pain. You follow, your mind trembling with exhaustion, until the footprints change. You freeze in place, the first rays of the sun revealing your abject discovery.

Wolf prints.