I wrote 3k in 2 hours, which now means I broke 10k today on my novel! Suck it novel!

Also another 2k and it beats the wordcount of my magnum opus, “How did the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis affect multinational companies”.

Hello campers, I’m doing the goddamn August Camp Nanowrimo. For those playing along at home, yes, I’m also still doing my masters! My dissertation is going fabulously, let me tell you.

This is my profile, and here is the profile/excerpt from my novel, which really needs renaming because 1. The current title is inaccurate since the character its named for is minor at best and 2. It just sounds like I’m ripping off Neil Gaiman. 3. I’m probably ripping off Neil Gaiman a little bit. 4. I’d like it if people wouldn’t think this until they’ve read it and 5. I’m really tired you guys how am I going to write a novel? And then write a dissertation straight after it?

Anyway, start your engines and lets write 50k, eh?

Hana cakara, data sawala, pada jayanya, maga bathanga.

The travel agent wore a lot of makeup on camera, probably under the out of date impression that the high definition made you look older and awful without it. Instead she looked like old footage, sparkling and sharp and every chalky grain of silica in her miserable mineral foundation visible on my screen.

I’m looking for a quick week away, I explain. Before she could cut in and bring up the in vision live feed to their Martian Cypriot resort I added “not off world”.

She frowned. “I know it seems counter intuitive but its actually cheaper and easier to travel to the colonies than to stay on Earth”.

“I just want some real weather,” I said

She smiled, sadly this time. “Oh honey, you’ll have to go a long way for that.”

I ended up spending a week in England that I booked myself. History tells of the English obsession with The Weather, the capitals pronounced crisp (like autumn) and ominous (like the tutting). History also tells of referenda following the exodus by those left behind, the ‘Jerusalem’ amendments and their fierce white-flavoured patriotism about green and pleasant lands. When terraforming was actually that, transforming terra gnostic into something thought to be lost.

I went in late December, officially the 175^th coldest on record, same as the year before. The pretty snowflakes came down on Christmas Eve, right on schedule. The people stayed indoors, curtains closed, safe in the knowledge it would be gone by Boxing Day night.

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“Ugh, work is so irritating this morning. Not only has everything been running slow but there’s this beeping at in the office that is infuriating! Its driving me insane! It has an edge that must have been specially programmed to be on the same wavelength as screaming babies in tight spaces. I’m pretty sure its coming from the server room though, but when I ring IT they say that nothing’s showing up, but that a guy from the IT department will come and deal with it.” It’s the bad syncopation of it that I couldn’t stand. I sent that email to my sister and she emailed back something funny and cute, with a cat attached. There’s a cough from my boss when she sees it flash up and obviously not work related. She goes to lunch early and so the office is empty now, the wind blowing through my hair from the open window. Its silent, apart from the beeping.

At lunchtime I like to go into the field behind our office. The good thing about working in a industrial estate in the middle of nowhere is the proximity to nature. On days I remember to bring a lunch, I break through the fence and sit on my coat. There’s a field mouse nearby. It’s snuffling, happy in the dull English sunshine. My sandwich is the only thing ruining my commune with nature; it’s so cold from the enthusiastic fridge my teeth end up hurting.  I go back to my desk and stare out of the window all afternoon. There are flowers on my desk when I get back, the date I had on Tuesday. They’re blue roses, coloured by romance. They stand for unobtainable, impossible desires. 

I can’t get my head out of the office when I get home, and can’t stop thinking about the field when I’m at the office. My dreams are half mad. The mouse under my fingers snuffles when I stroke the scroll-wheel in its back, reassuringly ridged with tiny vertebrae that takes me down the page with a tiny click. The chirping of the birds sounds suspiciously like the failing server’s beeping. The flowers on my desk, wilting in grey blue water, their stems floppy and colours muted. My desk kicks me in the knees with strong hooves when my attention drifts from the document. The rolling hills shine in mid morning sunshine, too bright to be real.

The man who would become my Father was a hunter, generally well ranked and fairly successful. He had a string of trophies for rare game, a job as a village hunter in quiet months and a reputation to uphold.

On the day he fell for my Mother, he was sitting in a bar, keeping on eye on his new knife, thin and flat like the palette knife, but with a blade of a homicidal, vengeful artist and a virgin blade. He’d paid extra to have it cleansed by a priest to make it as holy and pure as possible. It glinted in places where the black paint had been washed off a little with the combination of holy water and godly hammer-strike against the blessed anvil. Each dull thud and droning syllable had cost money he didn’t have; he’d only managed to afford it by borrowing handsomely against the payoff with charm and a coal-smudge of blackmail. He took out a tiny brush from his pack and dabbed more blackout paint on the cracks, before leaving the knife in the sun to dry.

My father checked the hunt board for the third time in the hour, marking the location of his mark on a faded map with a stub of a pencil. I learned to read off the big, worn strokes of his round a’s and sharp crescents of his hunter’s shorthand on that piece of paper. Scales strong, need to get between them; weakness=holy fire; beware of pits.

He usually hunted with something larger that could double up as defence (and in one memorable case, shelter) but this was no ordinary mark. It was a wyrm, and one so old not to have been renamed dragon when they switched from the archaic names to the newer tongue, and therefore it demanded a more subtle touch. It would be worth the expense and the potential sucking wound for the bounty, a smouldering goddess worth a lifetime of coin, bread and beer that he yearned for more than any glory or experience. After all, their patina would erode, deflate and dwindle in a less enjoyable way than the gold ever would.

The caves were nearby, and setting out at sunset with a few beers and a final teleport token tucked into his belly and belt, my Father set out for his future.

—-

My Father loved to say ‘I never expected to fall for your Mother’ when he was upset. My Mother would get angry, and insist that they fell for each other, that it was mutual and inevitable. He was right in the poetic way - he wasn’t usually looking for women like her, strong and powerful with magic and knowledge and well schooled. He was right because he never expected to fall at all. She was right, because some things always happen, no matter how you prepare against them. Sometimes you do the right thing, something chivalrous and charitable that you have to live with for the rest of your life.

—-

The wyrm was huge. Not just that, it was deranged and desperate in the way ancient beings that secretly doubt their eternity are. My Father set about knocking as many scales away as he could, avoiding the huge disembowelling claws that cast about wildly in order to expose the underbelly that was supposed to be its weakness.

The wyrm had killed bigger and more famous men than my father, and so it was inevitable that it did eventually catch him off guard, taking his breath and most of his insides outside his body with one deft, dangerous claw. He fell to his knees, trying to whisper a healing incantation with lungs empty and vision blackening, eyes rolling away from the coils of intestine winding their way into the dust when he was knocked sideways again, this time by magic, strong and warm and so tight it hurt but put him together. He looked, and there was a woman, tall and centred and wielding her stave like an extra limb.

He caught her eye and nodded once, intending it to be ‘I’ll give you 30% of the bounty and no more’. She nodded back, meaning ‘Get out of my fucking way, I have an infernal wyrm to kill.’

(They never told each other this, but whispered it to me in their own retellings of the story, secrets endowed in my mind, the only safe place they knew.)

They fought the wyrm, my Father’s crafty slices countering my Mother’s beautiful arcing streams of holy fire punctuated with the dull thud of her roundhouse kicks to the monster’s head and slowly the Wyrm’s resistance crept down a little faster than theirs did, until the great beast roared its final, ineffectual attack and slumped just as my parents were about to ascend themselves. Exhausted, they watched its great tail, studded with razor barbs and the statistical potentiality of poison charms, arc towards my Mother, and my Father grabbed her firmly around the knees to save her, throwing them both off balance – falling, feeling sickening dread along with the seductive pull of gravity.

They braced for what felt like hours, for the eventual dull crush that would signify the end of their lives. It didn’t come, despite what they hoped. It’s why ‘beware of pits’ was underlined.

The practicalities of falling forever are rarely discussed. The general advice (as taught by General Tautology) is ‘don’t fall down a bottomless pit. If you do fall down a bottomless pit, don’t fall down a bottomless pit.’ It’s not on the syllabus at any school of monster hunting, if there was such a school (there are a few training camps in the mountains for city folk, but they rarely offer anything but the basics, for people who can barely pack a box or skin a grass eater) my parents weren’t the kind who would have taken ‘practical workshop in near death experiences’ or ‘survival in highly unlikely circumstances – seminar’ had they been offered. They were skilled warriors, so they never starved, Mother was adept at summoning magic, even at distance and velocity. Every morning (or the parody of morning they fell into) she would try the teleport spell, and Father would hold his final token like the get out of jail free card it wasn’t.

There’s not much of a life falling as fast as you can to nowhere, down a charmed column of blackness made of infinite numbers and the sadistic imaginations of wizards. Not much at all, which is why I was born months later, my first wails stolen by the rushing wind as I was caught in my father’s steady hands.

I’m not saying this to anyone in particular. I don’t think anyone can hear me, but my parents deserve a decent send-off, this eulogy of sorts. Falling into their eternal grave. They did their best with me, but they were lousy teachers, and their death signals my own eventual one, as I didn’t inherit my Mother’s magic, only my father’s cunning, a useless weapon against this prison I grew up in.

Of course, I can’t seem to overtake them, even when dead. Terminal velocity, its the pits.

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