“I need to get new material”
Slowly but surely I am running out of backlogged stories that I can post when I’m overwhelmed with schoolwork, so I’m either going to need to post less often or start finding new things to post. We’ll see which one wins out. But anyway, here’s the opening of that novel that I keep talking about, since I’ve toyed with the idea of releasing the novel in online installments, perhaps through this very website. That’s actually how The Martian got started, as periodic chapters published by Andy Weir. So hey, maybe I’ll give it a shot. Until I get too worried about copyright infringement and people stealing my ideas.
Spectral Crown, By Andy Sima: Prologue
A curse is a powerful thing, especially if one knows how to use it. Never underestimate the power of someone skilled enough to use a curse placed on them. For someone who is willing to be cursed to further their cause is a frightful foe indeed.
I made the mistake, once, of underestimating curses and those who use them. That was years ago. Now I sit in this dark tavern on the bank of the Arch River at the bottom of the Stalpert Valley. Once this land was the small country of Uradel, and now it is within the southwest corner of the bustling nation of Germany. I look about me and wonder at these folks who know nothing of curses and magic. How little they understand. Perhaps I shall enlighten them, and it, in its course, may be a blessing to them. Or more likely, a warning.
I have visited this tavern for many years, and rarely does anyone ask me where I come from or what keeps me here, in this forested valley’s sad excuse for a decent pub. But one does not necessarily need to be asked in order to tell a story.
“You’re a stupid oaf, I tell you that,” someone at the bar yells in drunken, slurred German. The offending individual is a heavy-set, black-haired man of no importance, and he points at the bartender with a menacing finger. “You don’t know shit!” he yells, and then laughs uproariously, pounding his fist on the bar. His drinking buddies laugh, too. Their laughter, a hoard of boars trampling through the forest, shakes the darkness and the dust cluttered on the lamps above us, and small bits of both drop to the floor. Somewhere between the walls, rats and mice skitter nervously.
“Sir, if you’d like a replacement drink, I’m happy to oblige,” the bartender says. His words speak compliance, but his tone and face say boredom. Here was a man who has become too used to drunkards and slobs making a mess of his bar, and knows exactly how to defuse a situation before it becomes hazardous.
“Ah, screw you and your mother!” the dark-haired booze-drinker shouts, and then laughs again. His glass of beer sloshes about on the counter, and then spills over onto another man, who does not notice. Whatever mistake the bartender had made, it is gone now.
“You are a proper disgrace, sir,” I say out loud, not to anyone in particular, but more to myself. I doubt anyone will hear, or even care, with me being a decoration of this bar. No one notices me at this point. Every night, the bartender gives me a stein of watered-down beer, refills my glass when it is empty, and collects my tab at the end of the night. No words are needed.
But this night, someone other than the bartender pays a measly amount of attention to me. The fat man who had sworn at bartender swivels in his chair to face me. I catch a glimpse of his squinty pig-eyes and broken nose. This is a man who will fight, grow old, fight some more, and die, having done nothing else with his life. But who was I to judge, having done exactly that myself? More or less, anyway.
“What did you say, you old swine?” the man says to me, stammering out the words almost incoherently. Ironic, to be calling me a pig.
“I said that you are a disgrace to this valley,” I repeat my statement. Although the drinks have loosened my tongue, they did not make me so utterly gone as the man before me.
“Oh, that’s a load of horseshit,” he says. “This valley ain’t nothing. Old fairy tales about the Uradel family and a cursed Stalpert Valley don’t mean anything, far as I’m concerned. What I’m concerned about is old men who go stickin’ their noses where they ain’t wanted!” The heavy man heaves himself out of the chair at the bar and makes his way towards me, lumbering like an overgrown stump.
“Now, sir, if you continue this behavior, I will have to eject you from the bar,” the bartender says, but does not seem to be in any position to act on his words. The fat man ignores him. As he makes his way over to my dark, wooden table, his few friends, equally meaningless men, meander over as well.
“Shut your trap, barkeep,” the man says. He leans over my table and breathes into my face, rancid with the scent of hops and indigestion. His stench fogs over my glasses. I calmly remove them and wipe them off with my shirt; old, wrinkled fingers working with the precision of an action completed ten thousand times before, and seen performed ten thousand times before that.
The black-haired man speaks again. “So do you want to say that again?”
“If you want to hear it, you’ll have to sit down,” I say.
“How about I just beat it out of you instead?” the fat man laughs. His friends hoot in agreement.
“Hmmph. I’m far too old for that,” I respond. With one hand, I grab at the golden locket about my neck. In it is a picture of my mother, and the words Forever and Ever. With my other hand I make a small gesture to the chairs scattered around the table. “Take a seat, please.”
And then, like complacent children, the group of men sit down at the table. Though they look calm and orderly, their eyes betray their confusion. This was their first time experiencing anything of this nature, and it showed. They did not understand how I was controlling them.
I see their muscles tensing, attempting to stand up from the chairs in which they are bound by invisible strings. But they say nothing, for there is no way they could say anything. I smile grimly, release the locket around my neck, twiddle my fingers as if playing cat’s cradle, and the men are free once again.
“What the hell was that?” the fat man asks.
“If you’re interested in it, I will tell you.” I do not move my fingers again, though they clearly expect me to. “Don’t worry. You may sit of your own free will. Or what little will you still command.”
This time, the men stay seated at their own accord, pig-eyes wary but also alight with curiosity and intrigue. They are three hefty men, arms coursing with ligaments and muscular strings and chins bristling with black hairs and soot. They could have broken my neck in an instant, had I let them. But I do not let them, and they do not want to. They are not monsters. Not the kinds that I know.
Somewhere behind them, at the bar, the bartender perks up his ears as he cleans his beer steins. He knows the story by now, but enjoys it nevertheless.
“You talk funny,” says one of the fat man’s friends. “You from Berlin or something? Munich?”
“No, no, I am a Stalpert Valley native. I have not left this valley in, oh, many years now. I get my… peculiar way of speaking from my youth. It is a leftover from my time in the aristocracy.”
“You’re a noble?” The fat man’s other friend says.
“Of course he isn’t. The nobles are dead,” says the first man, hitting his friend over the head.
“You’re right,” I say. “The nobles are all dead. I personally witnessed their destruction, and I was never one of them. I was the chief attendant to Prince Maynard Uradel, last in the Uradel family line, previous rulers of this Stalpert Valley. Prior to German unification under Bismarck, that is.”
“Wait, but that’s-” one of the fat man’s friends begins.
“Shut up, you git!” the fat man says. “Let ‘im speak. Say, what’s your name, old man?”
“I am Saelac Bergmann, though my name is of little importance.” This is a true statement. I would not have offered my name, had I not been asked.
“Alright, Saelac,” the fat man says, eyeing the gold locket about my neck. “Tell us your story.”
“Alright,” I say, glancing over his shoulder to the bartender, who is listening as well as the other three. Us five are the only ones in the bar, now. “Well, my story begins as most stories do. With my mother.” And as they sit and listen, enraptured, I begin to unwind the spool of my life, of my story that is so intricately connected to this cursed Stalpert Valley, the demise of the Uradel line, and of the nation over the horizons; the country of Umbra and their Blestemat Family…
To be continued on this website…?
This seems to be a fairly captivating introduction. Please, feel free to continue with another installment.
Thanks for sharing it!