Alex and I are headed to Toronto for secret things I’m not allowed to discuss. It’s the first time I’ve been away from both of my kids, and I’m definitely fine. We’re fine. Everything is fine. While I sit in the airport at 5:30 am, my sleep-deprived brain has decided now is the time to introduce a new project – a standalone speculative fiction story that has been percolating in my brain for several years. Maybe now and then I will post a chapter in its draftiest form. Maybe not. Oh my god, why do people get up at this time? How are the Starbucks baristas even functioning?
Anyways, please enjoy the prologue for Arro of the Waste.
Prologue
The Earth is a frozen, dead cell. Without beat, without pulse, it floats with aimless propulsion towards its destiny. And from the core, beneath the layers of salt and dirt and magma, it rises.
And soon, it is lush, verdant, untouched by the hands of man yet instilled with the complexities of life everlasting, until a single moment in time, a knot in a thread, dashes it all away. Yet, beneath the core, reaching towards the sky, it rises.
Beyond the Proterozoic, the Mesozoic, the Jurassic, communities form. The base instincts driven by hunger and sex. We are nothing more than humorless puppets driven by our own feral desires. And beneath our feet, it rises. It rises and blossoms like the untouched bud of a black iris.
Time elapses, bones are broken and wars are waged. Streets are paved, stories are told, and we exist and have existed. It rises now, jutting from the earth, seen and unseen, declared mystery. Black reflecting the light of the sun to those who glance at the strange, expertly carved glass that blossoms from the land. It, too, rises.
Wars are waged; the Earth is broken beneath the unscrupulous nature of man. Atmospheres heat and cool and heat again and man survives, but cannot thrive, because what could in all of this? When we have wrought our own ending in such a way. We witness the coming desolation and are too consumed with our own pitiless existence that we do not see how it rises.
Now we are a wasteland, dunes of sand spread thick and far. The drop of life a commodity to be shared and split and divided among those who can, those who do. And among the masses, clamouring for the pieces of eight, neighbour devouring neighbour, they do not see, or do not recognize, how it has risen.
It stands there now, an unvoiced monument to humanity. Black, glassy, reaching towards the sky. Those who enter it are never seen again. And in time, it exists as nothing more than a piece of the land. Among all the grains of sand, there stands a blackened tower of obsidian that shuts out everyone and everything. Risen.
Arro of the Waste dreams of the tower. But before that, she is crushed.
The Code Series 