Today's Teaser Tuesday is from Jonathan Winn!
Enjoy & Comment
Enjoy & Comment
A sacrifice. A dying
King. Bones in the stone, blood in the wine. A Queen
consumed by the Darkness.
From ancient Uruk, The Almost King tells his
tale. Of The Elder and his cunning Priests in their robes of red
and gold. Of an Old Woman who can call the power of the Dark
Gods. Of his mother, the Queen, and his dying brother, the King.
And of the Darkness, an evil from before the Time of the
Moon. Inescapable, its hunger never-ending, its shadow fed by the
Priests, slowly overwhelming his family.
Drowning in a sea of red and gold, the Almost King
battles an unwinnable war as he navigates the wreckage towards his fate as
… The Wounded King.
***
The Wounded King is the first
in The Martuk Series, a collection of Short Fiction based on characters
from the full-length novel Martuk … The Holy.
Excerpt:
In the silence of the Temple , they spoke.
A murmur, a sigh, an awakening, a
cry.
Mother
…
Father
…
King
…
I moved my cheek from the stone,
the pain of the whispers too great to bear.
Although night, the workers --
slaves, prisoners of war, many of them mere boys -- still pulled and pushed the
immense blocks into place, the already overwhelming Temple forever expanding, a
veritable mountain of stone overlooking the city.
For many of them, this was all they
knew, their lives after capture, after defeat, one of constant work,
nonexistent sleep, and death, quick and inevitable.
Above them all, the Priests
watched.
And here, under the light of an
almost full moon, the pain, the rage, the powerless despair of all those
trapped and troubled bones in the stone surrounded me like a fog.
In the quiet, safe in the dark, far
from those who watched and those who worked, I pressed myself to the cool rock.
I would listen.
Cry
…
Whimper
…
Sob
…
Yes, I feel you.
Wound
…
Suffer
…
Die
…
I pulled away.
Die
…
King
…
Die
…
“They know you.”
I turned.
A small woman stood behind me, her
long hair as silver as the light bathing her, the years in her face softened by
the glow of the moon.
I glanced around for my guards
before remembering I had left them hours ago, ordering them away before
climbing the hill to the Temple .
“Your guilt needed solitude,” she
said. “Your shame too great to share,
yes?”
She waited.
I nodded.
Yes.
“And this is why you, the Almost
King, stand here now, at this hour, under the moon, listening.”
She stepped closer.
Though draped in woolen, the rough
fabric scarred by clumsily mended rips and tears, her feet bare, her wiry frame
alarmingly thin, she carried herself with an unapologetic sense of majesty and
dignity and strength as she moved near.
“Is your power worth all that
death?” she asked.
“No,” I said, the answer quick and
unthinking. “No.”
“And yet it is not something you
can deny, this power. This crown. It will be yours regardless of what you want
or what you do. Or what I do. Born into this, you are as trapped as those
in the stone.”
The tears threatened to come. I blinked.
And blinked again.
“The most powerful of men,” she
continued gently, “utterly powerless to change what must be changed.”
Watching me, she grew silent as if
she, too, were listening.
She turned her head, her gaze
settling on the workers in the distance, the sweat on their skin shining under
the glow of torchlight.
“Your mother is one with the Dark
Gods, yes?” she asked.
I hesitated.
“There’s no need to answer,” she
then said. “It’s commonly known,
understood. We barbarians, as she calls
us, here in the city talk of her and the Priests and their ancient
religion. Those beliefs from the Time of
the Moon. Of their worshipping those who
must be paid in blood, in flesh, in fear.
In the tears and cries of those they slaughter.”
“This is known?”
Looking at me, she continued.
“It is also known, and spoken of,
that once these souls are bled and lifeless and useless, they burn --”
“Stop. Please.”
She stopped.
It was my turn to watch the muscles
straining as the strangers pulled and pushed, braided rope splitting and
shredding .
“The gift you must give,” she said,
echoing my mother.
“Is something I regret,” I quickly
said. “Something I wish I didn’t have to
do. Something I wish I had never done.”
“But it’s done.”
I looked at her.
“She’s a very powerful woman, your
mother,” she continued. “Not many can
deny her. Not many dare. Those who do .... ”
Growing quiet, she left the thought
unfinished.
“And the Priests?” I asked. “What of them? Do the people talk about the Priests?”
“Yes, they do. And they understand what you and your mother
do not: the Priests are more powerful
than you know.”
“She believes she’s a God.”
“An easy lie for them to feed her,”
she answered. “And her mind …”
Hesitating, she looked for the
words.
“Her mind is wounded and
hungry. Desperate for comfort, the
grief, the guilt, the horror at what she’s done still at war with the delusion
of her immortality.”
“She struggles,” I agreed.
“And eats.”
Confused, I looked at her, her eyes
almost silver under the light of the moon.
“The bones are in the stones, yes?”
she asked.
I waited.
“And what of the flesh? The flesh you burn before they grind these
bones?”
She stopped, watching me before
asking again.
“What of the flesh?”
Author Bio: Screenwriter, playwright, and author of Martuk … The Holy, Jonathan
Winn was born in Seattle, but raised two hours south in a very small town in
Western Washington State. After graduating high school and living in Los Angeles
for the better part of a decade, and desperate for four seasons instead of
constant sun, he moved to New York City where he happily lived in Greenwich
Village with his two dogs. But after almost twenty years, the pull of family
led him back to the Northwest where he now lives once again.
Happily.
Like most writers, every word Jonathan writes is accompanied by endless cups of coffee with lots of milk and sugar (the ratio changing depending on whether he slept five hours or six hours the night before). He's also regarded as politely relentless by his friends, unbearably annoying by his enemies, and recently discovered he makes a mean fried chicken, often used to placate those aforementioned annoyed ones.
The Wounded King is his second book, the first in an ongoing collection of Short Fiction called The Martuk Series.
1 comment:
Great excerpt! Thanks so much for guest blogging!
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