("Epic" and characters 'Dexie' 'Amolcus-Rath' and 'Rom'Catha' (c) a. levinton, 2006)

Prologue

   None of it would have happened if he hadn’t tried to hide.
Had he been bright enough to consider that perhaps he should stand still like a good little victim and allow himself to be paralyzed with fear like all the others, had he simply kept his mouth shut and saved his breath for terrified screams of twisting agony, none of it would ever have happened.

   The value of ‘it’, here, is fairly extensive.  For one thing, he could have saved himself various levels of extraordinary agony and shortened the time it took him to die by at least three full days, if not four.  For another, the fate of every single living being on the entirety of the Land would never have hung so perilously in the balance of a single instant if he had simply permitted his fate to wash over him from the start.  This is not to mention thousands – possibly tens of thousands - of lives that would have ended quite differently, at least at an entirely different date and most likely in an entirely different manner.

     Of course, an argument could be made that all those lives would have eventually passed on their own and that in the end, some good came of it all.  Then again, a larger and more forceful argument could be made that the previous argument was completely full of it, that what happened was a tragedy on hundreds of finely-detailed levels and how shameful it was that of all the times this world had required saving, this was the only instance that could be directly traced to a single act of cowardice made by a single man.
(It’s important to note, here, that the Land was a place that did not so much as ‘embrace’ magic as it was ‘forced to live with it,’ partially due to the Elves, and mainly due to the times of the Dragons, thankfully long since past.  Such places, it is written, require an awful lot of saving.)

     The first argument then could plaintively state that there was no call to be rude and that if nothing else, the Red Moon certainly bounced back from the brink of oblivion as a direct result and look how much good they’ve done, and besides, it was Amolcus-Rath.  Amolcus-Rath and his bloody Rom’Catha, not some piddling army of demonic marauders from beyond the abyss, I mean really now, a man made entirely of stone with the power of drawing down the heavens would be reduced to a pile of quivering jelly when faced with Amolcus-Rath, you can’t possibly have expected a simple trapper to show anything remotely resembling bravery, can you?  The second argument could then thrust a finger into the first argument’s chest, accuse it of being a blatant apologist and demand to be met in the alley outside to settle things with a savage beating.  None of that is important.

     None of it would have happened if he hadn’t tried to hide.

     He’d been calling himself Dexie those days.  Once, he’d had a very simple, specific purpose and when it was done, his masters had hastily thrust a small bag of coins into his hands and told him to get lost.  He spent the better part of three decades wandering before he felt he was lost enough.  He settled down somewhere in Talterven, built himself a tiny, ramshackle hut up on the side of a mountain and eked out a meager living trapping small animals, ripping their skins off and selling them to the small town a few miles away.  The town’s name isn’t important, as the dense forests and thick foliage clinging to whatever scrap of land Talterven’s ubiquitous mountains hadn’t already claimed quickly stole over the smoldering remains and all but erased the stain left behind by that place, but it was where Dexie was when it had begun.

   He was too busy trying to convince a local tanner that the rabbit skins he was attempting to sell were far larger than they quite clearly were to notice the old man with the strip of ragged cloth tied over his eyes quietly entering the town without fanfare or notice.  The old blind man had a kindly, beatific manner to him, a slow, casual shuffle of a gait, a gentle, grandfatherly smile and a demeanor belonging to the sort of person who looked like he belonged precisely where he was, no matter where he went.  No one paid much attention to him at all, apart from distractedly returning a quiet, friendly wave or nod of greeting, right up until the moment he began to kill everything in sight.

   Dexie watched in abject horror, his ears ringing with a vicious symphony of prolonged screams of terror and pain mixed with hideous sounds like bundles of wet cloth torn apart, watched the great, black shadow pass back and forth through the narrow, dirt-paved streets leaving trails of human wreckage in its wake, heard the buildings cave in and blast apart and saw that smile.  That terrifyingly calm, kindly little smile as the old man walked with that cruelly casual stroll down the street that was increasingly flooding over with blood, directly towards him.

      Or so he assumed, anyway.  Dexie, you see, Knew Things.  Important Things.  Things tied up in the task he’d completed all those years ago, before being so abruptly dismissed by his nervous masters.  He thought this must have been somehow connected to it.  He thought this old man, this horrifying old blind man and that... shadow... must have somehow been connected to it, must have known, must have come here for him.  To find out what he knew.  Dexie had often said he didn’t believe in coincidence, which, in the end, turned out to be a Gods-damned shame.  He watched this small, frail form, wizened and grandfatherly, slowly picking its way up a street littered with ruined forms and blackened bodies, and realized, at long last, that he was now and had always been a coward.

     And so he ran.

     Of course, an extremely diligent predator like the old man would find himself compelled to chase after fleeing prey.  And of course, an extremely evil predator like the old man would likewise find himself compelled to punish his prey for running.   Had Dexie stayed where he was, frozen in panic, he would have died in seconds.  Possibly minutes.  Hours at the most.  Maybe a day, but by then the old man would have been long gone.  In running -  scrambling through thick underbrush, bouncing off of densely-packed trees, scraping himself raw against boulders and steep inclines in his zeal to return to the completely imaginary safety of his tiny ramshackle hut - he was more or less demanding that the old man take his dear, sweet time about finishing him off.

     It was, to be sure, the single worst day of Dexie’s extremely long life, but the burgeoning horrors in store for the rest of the world lay in exactly what kind of coward he turned out to be.  Some cowards flail, some scream, some try to keep running, some offer gold and jewels and richest beyond their murderer’s wildest dreams, and some...  Well.  There is a certain type of coward who, when all else has failed, when he has been cornered with extraordinarily painful death staring him right in the face, will say anything, tell everything he knows just to buy himself a few more seconds of life.

     It is to Dexie’s small credit that he did not know he was precisely that sort of coward until a vast, black shadow descended, a wall of his hut blew in and that sweet, kindly smile beamed down on him.  And Dexie, quite unfortunately, Knew Things.  Important Things.  Things that, contrary to Dexie’s wild fantasies of persecution, the old man knew nothing about.

     Until Dexie told him.

     Dexie told him everything.

Well, the second sentence is contrary to my style, but I completely see what you mean.
POPPA SPOOK SHO DO LUV HIM SUM RUN-ONS

I can fix that up pretty easily with a few edits, hack my sentences up into more easily-digested chunks.

For example:

He was busily trying to convince a local tanner that the rabbit skins he was attempting to sell were far larger than they quite clearly when it happened.  The old man with the filthy strip of cloth wound about his eyes entered town without much fanfare or notice.

Two separate thoughts.
I can do that.

As a prologue, this works really well for me. It's intriguing, it gives just enough background so the reader doesn't feel lost, while at the same time not overwhelming him with details. (Strangely, the reference to the Rom'Catha does not work for me. It was the only thing in the whole epilogue that made me actively go Huh?).

It does feel rather, uhm, brainy, though, for lack of a better word. The epilogue tells me that what follows is probably a fantasy/horror/comedy mix aimed at brainiacs and geeks. There is some coolly humourous, intellectual distance in the narrative voice which may or may not be what you're aiming for, but which I would assume may not work for everyone. I happen to like it, even though the distance between narrator and narration sometimes feels a bit too large, making the narrator more noticeable than I would usually like.


vs.


? The first version wins. Hands down. The way the long sentence kind of swallows the event of the old man's arrival, thus mirroring in its structure what it actually says in its content, works *really* well for me. The two-sentence construction has precisely the opposite effect - it rather stresses the old man's arrival and draws attention to it.

So, if you want to break up some of the longer sentence monsters, which may not be a bad idea, be careful about keeping the voice of the whole thing intact.

OK, you're probably right. There wasn't quite enough hint in there for me to connect the shadow as an entity to that name. Re-reading it with this interpretation in mind, it all makes sense. But on my first read I didn't quite perceive the shadow as a sufficiently independent entity to deserve its own proper name.


That's my impression, yes. Such a personal narrator is, like a first person narration, somewhat uncommon to find in contemporary fiction, and it's even rarer to see it pulled off well. Which is where most of my uneasiness stems from, which is probably baseless, because this one looks like a winner to me.


Seconded.

I also enjoyed the suspense, but I think you went on a bit too long in the first four paragraphs- all obscure and non-specific.  It's very pretty and teasing at first, but then in the middle of para #2 I start having to really make effort to follow, para #3 confuses, and #4 is like, "Huh?  What is all this stuff?".  I, the reader, hang on through, knowing that some of it will soon be explained, but there's just too much for me to juggle all at once, with no context.

When you start moving into the actual story of Dexie and what all does happen, I finally have context, and in addition I find it most interesting and awesome.

On this aspect, i don't mind a bit of confusion.  Considering as how the old man and his shadow are a pretty solidly important part of the story, all of that will more sooner than later be made abundantly clear.

As for the style... Krieg, who's been with me through three different games, does in fact have a great deal of experience with my personal style.  I write almost exactly the same as I talk, so.... yeah... the end result of a more first-person narrator taking the place of a third-person omniscient is exactly what I'm going for.
Here's hoping I'm slick enough to pull it off.

Zee:  I hear you.  I've known that the first few paragraphs were a bit on the dense and obscure side, but I wasn't sure how it would work out.  I'll give it a once-over.

Again, Krieg has it exactly right - this is kinda sorta meant to be read as if I'm directly telling you the story, verbally.

I really like this as a beginning in general. It's a nice way to kick it off, and I like how in the beginning you set it up as him seeming to have done some huge act of betrayal, like popping open the side door of Helm's Deep to let the orcs in, when in fact it was a lot more subtle than that. It also has your usual flair for kindly, almost friendly bad guys who then go on to do horribly graphic things to innocent people.

I didn't have any difficulty in understanding the first few paragraphs, though I kinda agree that they're a little weak, though for different reasons. I think the problem is that you didn't go far enough as a personal narrator, that it either wasn't bardic enough or sharp enough, such that it comes across more like a a sort of tongue-in-cheek breaking of the 4th wall, akin to Terry Pratchett, instead of more of a slightly sarcastic T. H. White, which I think is more of what you were going for. My suggestion there is to not hold back. Don't hesitate in either gradiosity or being impressed with your own words. The advantage of the personal narrator's voice is that it lets you be as much of an egotistical bastard as you want to be.


This was a little odd as well. I couldn't tell if you forgot he was blind and then had people waving to him and what-not, if people were waving to a blind person because they were stupid, or if despite his blind appearance he wasn't actually blind, and was waving to people and they were waving back automatically (with likely some confusion following).

If the former two are the case, you'll probably have to change the scene a bit for the sake of consistancy. If the latter is the case, then I'd change it a little to make it more clear that the old man is the one who's doing the waving at people, and I'd draw a little bit more attention to the fact that he appears blind, and let them sit for a little while longer with the knowledge that he's supposed to be blind and still kindly waving at people, and let them go "wait, huh" for a few seconds before all the corpses start piling up.

I'm sorry...but when you talk a about a vast black shadow with a sweet kindly smile? I immediately think of MML2D, and nothing else.

I'm trained, unfortunately.