Fantaësie Gothaëca
Part I—Childhood
Chapter I—Shaede
They say that once, long ago in the noble days of yore, the sun existed. It didn't, of course, but the mule-minded storytellers who told of fantastic colourful tales of the bygone days would not be caught dead saying the sun always was but a myth. Glade, my storyteller, and I spent hours on end every day arguing a possible sun's existence. He maintained with an obstinacy born of stupidity that it did exist:
'My father told me that his father told him that his father—my father's grandfather and my great-grandfather: had actually lived at the time of the sun. And he had hair like flames and a skin like empire-amber,' Glade said.
'Your father was a storyteller just like you! Of course he was bound to make up those kind of stories!' I'd retort, truthfully.
'It's not because our business is in fiction that we live our whole lives in fiction!' Glade then snapped, glaring at me through strands of coarse, peasantly hair.
'Maybe you are just so immersed in your fiction during your storytelling time that you can't make the difference when the real time is here!'
I was magnificently adamant. In my eyes, the sun never existed, so Glade might as well have tried to persuade the stone wall that surrounded Shaede to turn overnight into strawberry-flavoured chocolate.
My main reason for disbelieving so stubbornly in something so quite implausible was that I held this object, the sun, in utter disdain. Born a Shaeder, in the black and white world that was the Broken Glass Factory, nothing in my eyes could equal Sataerylm: this orb carved in the finest, strongest metals by the most talented of our artisans, designed by the Mage Ekt himself, filled with the everlasting flames that were born of all the deceased souls of our ancestors, the coiling iron arabesques of its beautiful made filled in thousands of shards of glass that had been tainted every colour of the spectrum; Sataerylm rotated round our world on a basis that was sometimes regular as a clock for a few months and then totally ragged, coming and going with seemingly no logical rhythm around the four Seasons: the huge, finely carved iron rings that formed the subtle network of Sataerylm's roads around the Broken Glass Factory.
Most of my childhood days had been filled with the eager hope of seeing what I called with an arrogance born of every child's invincible pride 'my Sataerylm.' And then, when it finally arrived, it was as though its bright light filled my heart to the brim with feelings born from it's varying and stupendously beautiful colours: exempli gratia, the vaporous blue brought out all my dreaminess: I walked in mists of blue and thought of imaginary lands and seas and creatures and feelings. Lands wherein pale cobalt grass grew from bluish white stone and tasted of soft sweetness…Seas where azure and indigo crashed in fierce embraces before parting with tears of foamy white lace…Creatures with milky skins and seeing sapphires instead of eyes and voices like the pure notes of crystal shattering against a glass floor…and feelings of sweetness, of softness, of beauty, whisper-fine satiny dreams, cool cloud-cream sighs of love…
My blue-hearted days would last as long as the blue side of Sataerylm shone over Shaede, tainting its twisted slate roofs dreamy blue like the faery castles from coloured storybooks, turning the dull cobbles of its narrow streets to pavements of strewn ethereal moonstones and colouring every Cathaedral's so-called virginal white banners to trailing cascades of azure.
During those beautiful days, if I wasn't daydreaming, or singing softly to the wind or picking up frail flowers, or dancing vaguely in the rippling grass of Eavan, I was talking to infants, pickings up wounded animals and nursing them back to life, visiting hospitals, filled with a need to help and love and draw blankets of dreams and sweetness over other people.
And then Sataerylm abandoned me, and came back a few days or weeks or months later, and she would have turned upon me the green side of her heart.
Glaucous green. My sugar-sweet silky daydreams faded inside my treacherous child's box of memories, and the misshapen monster of mystery took its place inside my body. I roved, then. I climbed up stairs, I broke into houses through half-open windows, I opened drawers, I read hidden letters under loose floorboards. I went on climbing narrow and rickety stairs, I reached tenebrous, dusty, beautifully cob-webbed attics. I drank the bittersweet liquor I found in the bizarrely-shaped green bottles, I vomited copiously in the dust and antique wooden chests, laughed lazily and giddily made my way up on the twisted, steep roofs. I teetered my way from roof to roof, occasionally making a green-tinted tile slip from under me and crash down fifty meters down below on the pavement or even, occasionally, and most unfortunately I'm sure, on someone's head. I explored the celestial universe of Rooftops, and then once gazed into the sky and reckoned it was so wide, and strange, and raggedy, and ugly, and beautiful I should try to explore its mysteries too. I stole a genius's plan in a towering medicine-scented university, I killed hundreds of birds with a beautiful, immense crossbow I filched to steal their glossy ripped feathers, I dived into rubbish-pits to find air-metal rods and screws and bolts among the waves of rejects and wastes and built wings. I took my remarkable inventions up to the tallest roof I could find, slipped on my makeshift wings and flew off into the sky. It told me it didn't want me (yet, at least) and hurled me back to my world. I fell down on to the top of a house, and rebounded from roof to roof down to the ground. I broke my leg twice, my arms, three ribs, a finger and two toes. This incident gave me an insight into a domain I had never consider existed: the one of pain.
Under Sataerylm's glaucous emerald gaze, I set off on a quest I had set to myself: I would be, I announced to myself, the first cartographer of pain. They were many and eternally varying ways to feel pain. I carefully tried and charted the twisted routes and roads, the soaring mountains and peaks, the trickling rivers and terrifying towns. I cut myself; I threw myself down stairs, rooftops, windows. I banged my head against walls, against stones, against iron lampposts, against fences and trees. I pushed pens and spikes and knives and forks and razors and broken shards of glass and even shimmering glamorous mirrors into my flesh. Before I reached the age of thirteen I was a broken doll: my left eye was mostly blind, I could not use the three right-side fingers of my right hand, my left wrist worked only through a metal machine they'd set inside it, my right leg was shorter than my left, I was missing two toes, and the rest of my body was covered in bruises, scars and stitches.
When I'd finished exploring houses, rooftops, the sky and pain, I descended to the underground universe of cellars, secret rooms and passageways and catacombs. I loved those. I loved the perfume of must, because it so reminded me of the colour green, I loved the moss creeping on the carved iron pillars and crumbling ceilings, I loved flipping through scrolls in hidden underground studies, I loved reading the inscriptions on the stone tombs, then opening them and acting out scenes between skeletons, whom I also loved. I especially enjoyed sleeping in velvet-lined coffins on silk pillows that smelled of sweet sickening saccharine death. Loved working out the mechanisms in the abandoned, ancient trains in the labyrinth of train-routes that stretched out its metal-skeletons-scattered net under the whole world. I grew weary with hidden chambers, the dead and the rusty mechanics, and moved on to abandoned mines. I collected shards of gems and minerals of every colours imaginable, though under Sataerylm's green eye they all seemed strangely mysterious and anonymous.
My curiosity of places high and low satisfied, I turned to the earnest study of the living organisms: I killed animals, slit them opened then studied and mapped their insides. Charted and looked up their organs and bones. I mixed mechanics up with the whole process and launched into the creation of half-living half-robot hybrids. I got together a superb collection of those creatures, named them and treated them like my children, siblings, lovers or slaves depending on my mood and my satisfaction on their behaviour.
Animals and places covered, I turned to the fascinating universe of plants. I gave my self the conqueror's title of Botanist, and became Emperor of Eaven, Shaede's immense natural park: a splatter-shaped world-sized garden divided into two sections: the passionately-cared-for half and the entirely wild and neglected half. The latter was my favourite, because I loved its disorganized beauty, which made me think of an orchestra whereat every musician would play a different tune of their instrument, forming a sort of senseless, magnificently illogical melody. The other half did have its attractions, of course: its flowers were the glossiest and most beautiful, its trees the biggest, its plants the healthiest, and it permitted you to get lost, or pretend to—though to my eyes pretending to get lost was missing the whole point of really getting lost, thus missing the pleasure of it.
The whole of Eaven stood underneath an immense glass dome, the inside and outside of which were crissocrossing networks of cables and strings hanging bulbs of varying colours and shades, and little boxes which sprayed chemicals and gazes into the gardens to keep it alive. In my head the question once came up like a demented mermaid emerging from a stormy bottle-green sea: what would happen if someone broke the glass dome? But my respect for the life of nature could not be shaken, even by my wildest, most feral fantasies.
In my botanist's days, I haunted the gardeners. I filled in scrapbooks with sketches and information. I spent evenings planning raids on the different sections of Eaven, stealing flowers and plants and seeds, which I brought home and watched die with terrible depressing desolation, before starting off again.
On the wild side of Eaven, I camped and planned expeditions, lost my way for days on end before emerging half-starved and very often ill from some poisonous fruit I'd attempted eating. I added up my books of drawings, experiences and plant information to my collections of robot-animals, gems and minerals, bones and bruises; then, assured that I was the best in the domain I started looking for something else.
My explorations and restless thirst for discoveries only lasted during the green-lit days of Sataerylm's emerald side, and therefore all my discoveries were stretched between long periods of times when I sought and found out nothing because Sataerylm's light would have changed. To blue, or to red.
Red was probably the one which made me the most frightening. It shed upon the world a sheet of demonic crimson, which threw me into fits of anger, morbid passions and bloodlust. My favourite drink no longer sweet milk and nectars or dizzying wines and poisons, but blood. I loved the taste of blood. Like rust in my mouth, half sweet and half bitter and so very rich! It was like drinking a beautiful, passionate song, it was like drinking danger, it was like drinking gold. On countless times I bit the inside of my cheeks to feel the vague rusty taste in my mouth. Sometimes it was enough, but other times I felt a terrible longing to actually have it fill the whole of my mouth, and then pour down my throat. I cut myself and drank like an alcoholic. Once, during one of my pain-exploring sessions, I'd slit open my cheek from the left corner of my lips down to my jaw, giving myself an eerie, dizzyingly wide clown's smile. They drugged me to stop feeling the pain and then spent six consecutive hours linking back nerves and muscles and veins together, before sewing it up to where my lips normally joined: but Sataerylm's ruby glare came at that time and my bloodlust returned, so I kept feeling the stitches with my tongue, tugging them loose and chewing on them, eventually pulling them all off one by one. They reprimanded me, used a special scarring cream, sewed it up again, shut my mouth with leather and metal for five months, but I started again. Eventually, Sataerylm went away, and when she came back she was blue, so I left my cheek heal in a fit of love and generosity: though the wound closed up eventually, I was left constantly disfigured, a huge scar on my cheek, and nearly the whole of the left side of my face paralyzed.
Else than the consuming bloodlust, red brought a passion which I felt to tormenting pain. Passions on and about everything and anything. I killed a bird in a frightening passion of devouring, crippling jealousy for its gift of flight, and then sobbed hours on end over the dead broken corpse in painful frenzies of remorse and sorrow. Anger took terrifying proportions: one day I was playing in a street with Crae, a half-mechanic bird of my inventions whom I then loved with a limitless, lost love. It had pale blue feathers which under Sataerylm's red Cyclops's look turned into violet, with little luminous white eyes and its natural voice. I taught it to sing my favourite tunes, and never parted company from him. And then that day, as I walked through Appleside's marketplace with Crae, my little singing bird was snatched from my shoulder. I whipped around and felt my heart's rhythm accelerate, every beat knocking into the next one inside my bandaged chest. A boy a few years older than me, tall and thin with gangly limbs and long hair, dressed in rich ragged clothes with a red scarf tied around the collar of his white shirt and a golden watch hanging from the pocket of his embroidered waistcoat, was holding Crae in his fist, grinning at me.
'Who's the little singing fellow then?'
'Give him back!' I snarled.
He opened his palm and took one of Crae's wings in his hand. He tugged:
'You going to weep over the weenie fellow, pretty damsel?' he jeered.
He ripped the wing off. Crae let out a pitiful wail of pain.
'En't there some bonnier fellow around than this little beastie, dams—'
He never got to finish his sentence. I sent my fist crashing in his face, the momentum multiplied by my irrationally intense hatred. I broke a finger and half ripped-off his jaw. He screeched and fell on the stone cobbles, blood pouring from his mouth and face. I picked Crae up and ran, crying passionate tears of anger and hatred and pity.
Else than my anger, the other feeling that the crimson duplicated out of measure in me was love. And I set my cap at the storyteller Glade.
Author's Comment
Right. I am currently re-writing all the chapters I've already put up, erasing all my spelling mistakes and smoothing stuff over. It also is a clever ruse to get my story to go back up on top of the list see what I've been reduced to do? Well, anyway. As I already said, the whole Part I is basically nothing more than an introduction—it just sets the place and heroin and throws in some characters that may or may not be seen later. The first part isn't really important to the plot as a whole, it's basically simply background info on the world of the Broken Glass Factory and our protagonist. Enjoy and please please please point out any mistake, spelling or other wise, and any stuff you feel I should change or add. I am open to critics, suggestions and questions. (See how desperate I am actually getting? XD)