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Brian Stansell replied to the topic Audio Cinema in the forum Fantasy Writers 4 years, 11 months ago
To start the “Audio” ball rolling,… (Yes, yes, I know that’s cliche…)
Here is the first entry:Moniker:
@obrian-of-the-surface-worldText: (1623 Words)
The old woman watched as the foamy tides cast themselves relentlessly upon the wet sands of the beach, expending the last breaths of their moon-driven energy.
Her body had once had a name, and an identity. She had been called Noadiah, but now that name was lost with the death of the personhood that had quitted the body when it fell into the great fjord and the wounded beast prowling those frigid waters took her under.
Afterward only the image of the old woman remained, and the thing that inhabited her form was nothing like the woman who once was lovingly known by that name.
Before coming to the beach, she’d been in a great stone city. And there she had existed for several years. In the shadows. In the alleys. In the darkness. Waiting for an opportunity to take back something that did not belong to them.
Each day the old woman’s form became more restrictive and weakened. The presence within her, now fully occupying her dissembling remains seethed and chafed in the length of the waiting. Yet it did not dare to show its degree of impatience. After all, time was only a construct given to allow humans to experience dispensation. Impatience gave birth to recklessness. And recklessness was a child that should be strangled in its infancy.
The old woman had arrived upon the beach and had taken up residence in the sea caves months before the coming of the beast. She had unwittingly summoned the creature. Or, rather, the thing living inside of her had.
Since the coming of the second quest, she had learned what the Surface Worlders were after. The three virtue stones that would unlock the hidden kingdom. For years she and her sisters had blown through the lands of the Mid-World, seeking the current resting places of the two remaining stones, for she knew the place where the first stone now lay- high in the mountains of the great Stone Wall, where the fire-beast slept until the final time for its re-awakening. The second stone had gone beyond her sight, but she suspected that it had fallen in the possession of The Pan. Its true resting place was unclear, and that bothered her not knowing for sure.
Through swirling about eaves, and hearing tales whispered by firelight, she had, at last, learned of the location of another, and that breathy intelligence she had whispered across the waves, reaching the sea creature that had given her its present form to walk unnoticed among mankind.
And insinuate herself there near the location of the third and final stone that lay locked within the treasury of the great stone city of Xarm, named after its founder and first monarch. Guarded by fools who did not know what they had in their possession.
No one suspected the old beggar woman who sat day after day in the shadows, wearing tattered rags, with matted hair, and various insects crawling on her form beneath her clothing to keep her company. She’d waited and watched for an opportunity, allowing the lax guards to grow accustomed to her huddled and seemingly innocuous presence. To see her only as a regular fixture of a city impoverished by the mundane and ineffectual. Just another pathetically huddling piece of human debris, skulking in the shadows. She stared out at the world with gray-blue eyes, clouded with cataracts. No one suspected that she might be anything more than she appeared. A blind beggar—seemingly unseeing. Dismissed by the wary guards as only a ubiquitous and harmless shadow to the point that they no longer saw her. And in this guise, she was able to trade the blindness they perceive to be hers for their own.
The Xarmnians never really knew what they had in the inner room of the treasury, to begin with. To them, the stone was just a valuable rock, unique in its large size, retrieved long ago in a time best forgotten, when their ancestors first traveled from a great distance to settle in the surrounding plains of the mountainous valley. Legend had it that this particular stone was dug out from its golden setting, along with two other large stones, and each of these stones was divided among the kingdoms that occupied the region. The Xarmnian Kingdom, the Capitalian Kingdom, and the Middle Kingdom, an alliance formed of the indigenous proto settlements who occupied the plains before the arrival and formulation of the latter kingdoms. The three precious stones were said to have once been the jeweled adornments of a mysterious golden crown capping a pillar that predated all known races of men and other kinds occupying the lands of the Mid-World. These separated fist-sized stones were taken from the mysterious pillar stone and, along with the twelve base set mover stones, were used to build the great cities that grew into powerful walled empires.
But the thing inside the old woman knew these stones were much more than they appeared. They were particularly connected to a prophecy of the Mid-World’s future. These three stones were key components to unlocking a multi-dimensional gate and whose opening would bring about a change in the Mid-World and signify the ushering in of a new kingdom age that would supplant everything. A potential future, this occupant of the old woman would do everything in its power to prevent. And when at last the opportunity finally came, she had absconded with the mysterious gate stone, smooth and polished and perfectly round and larger than any other natural stone of its kind.
One evening, the old woman, at last, saw her opportunity. The treasury had been easier enough to enter under distraction than she had ever anticipated because the sight of her and the groveling denizens like her had grown commonplace within the city. All city guards were ordered to the city walls to track and kill a particularly hated traitor and prevent him from escaping.
In the rush to comply with orders, the posted guard of the treasury failed to notice the old woman’s stick extended into the closing doorway as they rush out to follow the command.
In the evening darkness, they failed to see the old woman’s slinking form, accustomed to blending in with the shadows, hobbling out of the now-closed treasury rooms, with a large smooth stone tucked into the flea-ridden folds of her tattered clothes. They failed to follow her skulking course through the night, out of the city, or tracked her progress for days without food or water, walking through the wildlands toward the seashore, she knew to lay to the eastern edge of the lands of the Mid-World. The incompetent soldiers would not discover the loss of the great and ancient treasure stone for many days, months or even years. They would never conceive of what she intended to do with it. That the great and giant sphere would be cast, as soon as she reached the shoreline out into the Great Sea, never to be found again. And then she would decide, what next to do about the other stones that remained, but first, she must rid herself of this old body and once again walk in the newness of a life stolen from among the lands of the living.
The old woman arrived at last at the beachhead embankment. From atop the edge of one of the many sea-cliffs, she watched the continual march of the waves coming from the distant pumping heart of the ocean, pounding in frothy surf along the seashore, extending far as her old eyes could see.
She thought and raged long and hard about what all had transpired to lead her up to this moment. The insufferable restrictions she has borne living within the decaying mud of the now almost bloodless body. She harshly chuckled to herself, realizing that she had at last gotten the upper hand. That those outworlders would, finally, be prevented from being used as instruments of the Terrible One to bring about the prophesied return of this land’s champion.
If she could not destroy this stone, and she had tried many times along the way, she would do the next best thing. From an outcropping ridge that extended as a tall peninsula into the ocean, she heaved the stone, a giant, sparkling pearl, outward as hard as her frail form would allow and, breathless, she watched as the stone left her hands, arched and descended towards the swirling frothy waters below, only to see, to her amazement, the pearl seemed to punch into the air and ripple the fabric of the Mid-World’s veneer of reality, the seascape undulating and forming concentric circles in the very air and as it passed through the center of this reality, she saw, what appeared to be the great fanged mouth of a massive creature catch the falling pearl through a swirling tear in the air. The massive head and jaws clamped down upon the stone, and its eyes shifted and stared at the old woman’s form standing shakily on the cliff before it.
Something passed between them, and the old woman knew that it was only a matter of time before this terrible beast would be allowed to pass through its mystical portal and meet with her again. She need only wait for its coming and the inevitable people that would follow soon afterward. Twenty-one meddling and clueless Surface Worlders who she had vowed to kill as soon as possible before they could make any further trouble with ancient prophecy non-sense.
She waited for many months, occupying the sea cave on the shore below the overhanging cliffs. At last, the first of the otherworldly travelers came.
Audio File Link:
Prologue: The Beachhead – Scene 01: “The Old Woman Who Was Not”
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