Category: Writers Block
Perhaps thousands of Tanelin children are told the stories of the Dark Times--times of passion and glory, times of blood and ruin--on our world. Once we were a great and terrible people to behold. None would stand against our power. Once, we ruled an empire like to few others.
But as every Tanelin child is taught of our past glory, they are also taught of how it brought us to the brink of death--until the Reawakening and the Revelation and the Illuminated Times. For among our ancient race a few recognized what peril we were in.
But they were too late. tHaneli was nearly destroyed. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons raged across its surface for a hundred years, leaving our proud, lush world a barren wasteland.
But we, the Tanelin, survived. Our world is still but a wasteland, but it blooms with knowledge and glory again.
This is not a story of a time when a single world was in danger of perishing.
This is a story of a time when the entire universe as we know it came near to perishing.
"Dr. Hawking? One of the Temporal Elders is here to see you."
He activated the neural links that would turn the mechanical shell and focused the red optics mounted atop the smooth oblong of metal on the aide standing in the doorway. The fine leads that ran from the top of his shell to the computer terminal swirled like silk. The voice, surprisingly artificial and metallic despite the advanced technology the Elders of Time had brought them, emitted from unseen speakers.
"I have been expecting Vieralis already," he said. "Bring him in."
In all his three hundred years, he hadn't encountered a Temporal Elder like Vieralis, and the hope that he'd found a true ally for the people he'd once been part of had returned. It was illogical to hope, but he'd found that, curiously, emotion was the human trait that persisted the most. He'd eventually shed everything else as a snake sheds its skin, but emotions were rooted deep within the core of him, and wrapped in ice they may lie sleeping but they would never die.
The tall figure that stepped through the door had never failed to fascinate his analytical mind. He tried to approach the Temporal Elders on their level, but with a human approach, so that the people that he'd left could understand.
Vieralis was a strange mixture of things. He was a tall, lean man who could be a cynical twenty-three or a very well-preserved seventy-three. You'd never know; he appeared to be ever ageless. He'd once said that he was two hundred and twenty-three, making him younger than Dr. Hawking by a century, but he didn't seem it. He had a slanted, sharp-featured, birdlike face. His eyes were deep, dark wells of collected, calm coolness. His ears were high and slanted and elegant but angular, as was the rest of him. His skin was dark and rich-colored, a healthily gleaming olive. He was wrapped in simple clothing that only seemed to emphasize his striking, angular elegance. He didn't go in for heavy masses of fabric; he wore the close-fitting, dark garb of the desert man. Dr. Hawking knew that, compared to Vieralis' homeworld, it was cold and damp here, but the Elder bore it well. Temperatures where he came from soared to the hundred and fifties in the long summer days and fell into the negative seventies or eighties in the long, dark winters.
Vieralis spoke in a deep, resonant voice, almost curiously accentless. But if you listened with a trained ear, you could hear the hints of something older and hotter and more powerful than mere English. This man could trace his family back two thousand years. The language Dr. Hawking's people spoke wasn't even that old.
"Greetings, Dr. Hawking, from my people to yours." He saluted in the manner of his people--a complex gesture that he made seem simple. In a quick movement he traced the crossed nine points of the Star of Taneli--Knowledge, Truth, Enlightenment, Peace, Life, Prosperity, and the harmony of What Was, What Is, and What Comes, then two fingers outlining the central Eye, through which we see the three points of What Was, What Is and What Comes, the sign over the heart, for Self, and the crossed hands over the heart, a sign of respect. "May you live well under the light of Truth and Knowledge."
"May you also live well under such an elusive and clear light," said Dr. Hawking. He could swear that he almost saw Vieralis's calm, cool-as-stone features flicker for a moment in some unreadable expression.
"You came to me with a question, Elder Vieralis," Dr. Hawking said.
"I come to you with a question of the gravest matter," said Vieralis. "I would ask that you return to tHaneli with me."
"And you know I will not leave without being debriefed. Even a Temporal Elder would not come for me unless it was something truly world-shattering."
"Ah, but Dr. Hawking, it is."
The cold light of the three moons shone on a rolling desert. In the distance, the wind howled like a despairing thing. The stark black outlines of a craggy mountain range stood in the distance, surrounded in the heat haze the scorching the suns had left on them.
Marring the featureless whiteness of the desert, a wide platform of sheer black granite stood raised above the sand. Steps ran down to a chamber in its center on all sides. The chamber lay under a roof of sculptured granite. Obsidian shapes leered from its high, steep dome--cruelly beautiful birds of prey, men with the wings of birds and the eyes of demons, creatures indescribable and strikingly terrible but breathtakingly beautiful.
In the center of the dome, over the chamber, there was a small platform under a massive bell dark with age. It could only be reached by a narrow, railless flight of steps wrapped around one corner pillar, and the slender span of a delicate-looking bridge leading to the bell platform.
A woman danced on the granite floor, beneath the open sky. She was tall and slender, and moved with a lovely, sinuous grace. She was naked save for strings of jade, hematite and silver that hung around her hips to just above her knees and a delicate silver band beneath her breasts. Her hair was woven with black feathers beaded carefully with patterns of silver and hematite. Rubies hung from her dark ears like full drops of blood, catching the moonlight and glittering. Her skin was dark and smooth, her features slanted and beautiful in a cold, angular way, her eyes burning with a fire that could strike any man still, amazed by her power and beauty. Her figure was shapely but slender, beautiful as a rare desert flower, and her movements were filled with a tantalizing, seductive grace. Her slanted, almond-shaped eyes, with their sweep of dark lashes, were lifted toward the sky, as if she were searching for something among the unseen reflections of her dance.
She slowed and stilled gracefully. Suddenly she was quite serene, standing in a pose of relaxed readiness. She looked as though she could flow into smooth, liquid motion at any moment, or stand there for hours beneath the desert sky. The only movement was in her eyes, as she observed the world's sister planet, which almost appeared to be balancing on top of the distant mountains, and its single moon, which traveled like a spot of light across its vast surface. Finally she spoke, and her voice was surprisingly deep and full.
"I ask, in our world's solemn hour, that I am granted clear and far-reaching sight." She spoke as one does from a deep trance. "I ask for an unshakable soundness of mind and soul. I ask for the clarity of Truth and Knowledge to come upon me, and for the strength of balance to stand ever between the worlds of pure emotion and pure thought. I ask by the power of my ancient line and the integrity by which I strive to live my life. And I ask by the power vested in me here, so that the clarity of my judgment is sufficient enough to guide my people through the impending storm." She turned, padding light as a cat on her bare, dainty feet down the smooth, worn steps and into the shadow-filled chamber.
In the chamber's center was a hollowed block of obsidian, from which water from a deep, pure spring poured down into a rounded gap in the steps.
"My time is coming," she murmured. "I feel it in my essence. Lene-ol-am-Sinn-Naihyu, Lene-ol--am-Ilianni ..." Time of All Things Changing, Time of All Beginnings.
Yes, the overturn of a lifelong cycle was the time of all things changing and beginning--but what about the end that it also marked?
She bent to the pool, picked up a hollowed-out obsidian goblet and dipped it into the water. When she drank from it, a subtle change seemed to come across her, as if it strengthened her.
"Ta'ana'i."
The woman's head jerked upward. Standing on the edge of the steps, with the three moons behind her, was a girl. The elder blinked. No, this wasn't just any girl. She was all slender, angular elegance. The slanted planes of her dark, exotic face could have been carved from black ice. Her eyes were deep, drowning wells like unruffled pools of cool water.
"Chaos," the woman breathed.
"Yes," said the girl, "the specter of your people." She descended the steps in a succession of perfectly flowing, quick movements full of feral, catlike grace. Each step, every movement, was a deadly dance for her. The elder felt the wash of her cool power against her skin and suppressed a shiver. The girl was small and sharp and delicate and stunningly, coldly perfect, but she was immensely powerful, and her aura was an interlocking framework of sharp silver, stark black, blinding gold and a white so bright that one could not set eyes on it, not even one used to the brilliant t'Hanelin suns.
The girl removed the cup from the hands of her elder with tiny, gracefully-boned hands. Her skin was like warm silk, and a fire burned in her body as hot as any t'Hanelin's--as hot as the fires of one who is under the thrall of the Change. She couldn't be very young, but she was not old either. She was no age. She embodied the secret fires buried beneath carefully-shaped t'Hanelin ice.
She was Chaos--Iulannanikhe, a word impossible to translate. Iulannanikhe is the dark side of all beings. Iulannanikhe is the burning cold in the darkest corners of all souls. Iulannanikhe is chaos and disorder, madness cast in a mold of ice, the heat in the heart of a supernova. Passion is part of it, and darkness is part of it, and things both seductive and terrible. On t'Haneli it is born at the time when all three moons are full, and when all three moons are dark, and then it runs strongest and hardest to control. Though each may individually run on their own clocks, the time of the moons' full is a dangerous time.
Out in the desert--alone, thought the Elder, I will die. It will destroy me with no outlet of its own. I will burn alive.
She reached down, deep within her mind, and touched the element within her that was the link to her world. Energy, pure, hot power, slammed into her and her eyes flew open.
He cannot deny the pull of it, she thought. He has been six days resisting it. All of us can feel the pull of the three moons at full, and we return--lest something terrible should befall us.
She cast her senses out across the waves of dark energy riding through the desert, out into the mountains, out over the rim of t'Iranakhlin, out into the darkness of space.
He will come to me. As I am Kieral of t'Erithaerin, he cannot deny my power and Hanelin power combined.
Wow, you are very talented, the imagery was really breathtaking. Keep that imagination polished.
:)
Awwww! Thanks Maere.
oh, my gosh, Iyana, your writing, is like, awesomeness! Lol, you put some writers to shame, including me.
But omg dude, that was lovely writing! :)
Keep it up!
*cries*
I lost the story...
I can't write...
I don't feel the story anymore, not really, as though it were someone else's. I wrote more to it but that's in my bn.