The Credoroium Part Two: Sequeloroium.

I tumbled backwards, coming to sit side-saddle on the dusty, brick floor that had gone a thousand years undisturbed, causing a surprising pillow of soot and sand to pout out from beneath my thinned, feather-weight frame. Looking down to see my legs, my pants strung about my ankles after they’d loosened and fell during the time I was fixed to the Credoroium, I could see how frighteningly gaunt they were. It was as though I had not been fed nor exercised in a decade and it felt likewise, the surprising carry-on weight of my head pulling me forward, resisting my body’s urge to slump back in the opposite direction in a desperate bid to die.

Hudson wouldn’t let that happen, and neither would I. I struggled to keep my eyes open, to fixate them anywhere around the tomb, now a-glow with orange, the embers accelerating around me faster and faster. Concentrating on anything moving or otherwise proved impossible, so I started small and tried to invoke an image of what I must’ve looked like – to scare me, to summon that want to stand and work out a way to reverse the curse, and, all-forbidding, not to convince myself of defeat, or fall to rest and never wake, which I felt would soon be the case.

In my mind, gaunt was a matter of fact. I saw my eyes, the space around them bruised dark, outlining the skeletal cavity in which they are set. The light from the ember-like fire that spins around me, pacing audibly fast, slightly revealing the contours of eye-balls behind my closed lids, but nether-the-less,their darkened state making my head look much more like an empty, sovereign skull than one with skin or muscle stretched over to conceal its unsightly macabre. Taking in to account that I could feel my lips cracking, and that I had not been able to shut my jaw, I envisioned my teeth as yellow to keep with the exaggerated image I’d created. I imagined my hair thinning and falling out. It all came together as horror. There was no certainty to any of this, of course, but the thought was successful in waking me, and, thoroughly disturbed by myself, I’d found that desire to fight.

As I pushed off the ground my wrist suffered a severe fracture. I hadn’t felt it, at least, I was not pained by it, but I knew it had happened. Once I was erected, I glanced at it to see the bone had broken through my paper skin.

Filed under: Fiction, adventure, fantasy, fiction, flash, flash fiction, sci-fi, science ficton, short, the credoroium, tomb, tomb raider

The Credoroium (flash fiction)

I slammed my hand down flat on the page. The Credoroium responded with a sizzle, its pages corroding, some kind of flame shooting out from the tips of my fingers reducing the paper to ash. The walls of the tomb shouted, thunder clapped about my ears causing them to pop before deafening the sound. I slumped as the bones of my spine pushed themselves apart as though wedged by opposing magnetic slates. All my energy was being syphoned by the book and was taken with the ash as it floated towards a hollow point in the ceiling.

The patterns inside the empty funnel sparkled, for every piece of ash sucked up through it an ember twirled down and flew around the room. I remembered Hudson telling me that the book would ask I touch it and no matter what I was not to oblige. But it had beckoned me, convinced me that through nothing more than the wander of my palm I would be given my dreams and more and I whispered back to it ‘Anything.’

Imagine Hudson’s face if he stood beside me. There, a gleam in his eye, his worry about the Credoroium’s power and my complacency forfilled. No doubt, he would try to wash it away with premeditated concern to no avail. I would be scorned at, at times he might run out of things to yell at me, struggling between sounding fearful on my behalf and jeering at my dismay. If I’ve never seen Hudson terrified, I surely would have now. If he were here.

But I was alone in the tomb with Credoroium pulling the life out of me, surrounding me with it in some kind of automated ritual.

My eyes sunk in, my cheeks thinned. I felt the horror of my face as the muscle deteriorated and my skull fanned out from behind my skin. Thankful to have not been able to see myself in such a state, soon, to my horror, my arms followed suit. They became thin, too, and it frightened me greatly to see every bone in my hand and forearm, every vein, nerve, and the space between where there was once pockets of flesh.

It took all that was left of me to tear away.

Filed under: Fiction, adventure, fantasy, fiction, flash, flash fiction, sci-fi, science fiction, short, the credoroium, tomb, tomb raider

The Write Practice (Practice)

I discovered The Write Practice the other day while quietly hounding clues on how to write more effectively. The first thing I discovered is that I shouldn’t be as embarrassed as I was to be searching for writing tips in the first place, the second that this blog has some great exercises to partake in that are really helpful. 

The first exercise I tried involved writing the last sentence of a story first. Contributors were asked to comment with four sentences that could be used to complete a current or future story they were working on. I chose these four endings for a sci-fi short I am currently working on: 

1. The irony of my wishes, that the burnt ash of our bodies would safely float down in the direction they were intended.

2. I hope they can enjoy the lights.

3. I’ve grown to accept my fall, comforted in knowing that for now I’m no longer watching.

4. It grows smaller still, I feel I was only a visitor anyway.

The second (so far) was to write either a fiction or non-fiction part on a hard aspect of your own childhood, depending on which style you are least comfortable in. Having only worked on fiction, I chose to retell exactly what happened to me in hospital: 

I imagine one of the hardest things to ever be told is an estimation on your life. I know, for me, I had the most difficulty hearing the recovery rates of the immune mediated Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis (ADEM).

ADEM, a Multiple Sclerosis borderline, has an incidence rate of about eight per million people per year. I was unlucky enough to fit into that eight when I was fifteen years old. For those that don’t know, and I hadn’t until I was already over a week into my hospital stay, the mortality rate can be as high as five percent.

I’d been bed-ridden with the mysterious ailment, for which there is no real forewarning or concrete explanation, for the better part of a month already. Come to think, it could’ve been longer than that. After a while I stopped counting how many Home Improvement reruns I’d watched and significantly lost
track of time. During this period, I was under the false diagnosis of a particularly bad case of Tonsillitis .

While I did, in fact, have Tonsillitis at the time, my GP was ill-equipped to tell that it would lead to a much more severe condition. He sent me home with a box of antibiotics and told me that the light-headedness and incredible sense of nausea were uncommon but expected side effects of the viral infection. I was told I should rest, and I would be better in a week or two.

Come my second week in hospital (in my second month of being ill) unable to speak, move, or do anything other than moan and turn to the overwhelming pain in my head and wheeze of my upset stomach, a new(er) doctor had come to warn my parents – who, bless them, took shifts in sleeping beside my bed each night – just how devastating ADEM could be.

I’m not sure if he thought I was asleep, if my near vegetative state had fooled him into thinking I could not hear, or if he considered it important I knew, but I
remember him standing at the foot of my bed, telling:

The mortality rate can be as high as five percent. While somewhere between fifty and seventy percent of cases can see a full recovery, at times a further sixty to ninety percent will recover with residual disability.

There was a high chance of brain damage causing mental disability.

This came to worry me more than my expanding headaches, and much more than my upset stomach.

 

Already, I feel as though I’m learning and becoming more comfortable with my writing, and all I’ve written is a few sentences I pulled out of my arse and an incredibly stilted recap of something horrible. 

I implore every aspiring writer to sign up and do some of these. They’re a great deal of fun. 

Head on over to The Write Practice and start writing, and post your own examples from these two activities in the comments here as well. I’d love to read them. 

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