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This is my new project. I just wanted to post the first few chapters here and ask what your opinion about it is. Also, I should warn you that there is a scene that might be very disturbing to some people.

Any reviews, positive or negative, will be appreciated!


They had entered Mobliz, and there had been five of them. They were not faceless, but they might as well have been; they were the apotheosis of scum. Man who would think no further then their on pleasures, their own desires, brawling and cursing. It’s hard to believe for some that there could be people like this, but defying the laws of logic, they were.

They could have come from Zozo. They could have come from Nikeah. They could have come from South Figaro. It did not matter. They had traveled over the Serpent Trench and had now found Mobliz. The dogs barked and pulled at the ropes that tied them to their spot. Spit flew from their mouths when the ropes became a straight line and almost choked the dogs. One of the five looked at the dogs with curiosity. An animal nearly choking himself out of fear and anger was a sight that appealed to him. It was good to see the world was like them.

A young girl had checked to see who they were, and had gone to Duane when she saw that they were no merchants or any of ‘Mama’ her friends. Duane, who had been talking to Terra just then about a minor problem he had encountered, had followed the little girl to the visitors. Terra had followed them, carrying the newborn of Duane and Katarin.

The front man of the five, unshaven and ugly and charismatic in his ways, lay a lazy eye on Duane first, and then on Terra. He never stopped chewing his Brown Tobacco.

Some are born with an ability to spot weakness. They can sense if a person can be taken advantage of. They can smell when a woman is embarrased. They can hear when a man is wounded. They can taste the fear of a child. These people are never good people, and many a good person has been ruined due to this ability.

Chewing, the front man analyzed the town and found it to be instantly attractive to him: it was raw and broken, inhabited by small children he could see from behind broken windows and peeking around a door post. Two older kids had been keeping them alive. Only one man between them and the girl. A good fuck after a long ride. ‘Pull’, he said.

Duane’s eyes widened when four arms pulled out four daggers behind four belts. The front man chewed his Brown Tobacco, almost a innocent bystander. Terra ran away, taking the baby with her, and two men rushed after her. The sound of the crying baby turned hollow when she dissappeard between two houses, followed by the men. Duane stood frozen, undecided at what to do against three armed men. Sweat that might have come from a hard day’s work or the situation he found himself in, fell from the curve of his eyebrow to the ground in a droplet.

The other two men charged at Duane, and planted their knives into his gut before he realized he was being attacked. Pain envoloped his mind, and he could only register the steel in his body as a terrible invading tool of destruction. He screamed and his hair flung into his eyes. Duane dropped to his knees, holding his stomach. He was kicked in the face and he moaned as he tried to get up. One of the men, wearing a bandana, turned him around and buried his knife into the boy’s throat. Duane’s eyes turned to glass.

The front man spat out his Brown Tobacco on the face of the body, and went to see if his men had captured the girl. They had failed: the girl had picked up a sword from somewhere and was defending herself with skill. She had laid the baby behind her, safe on the floor. The men were entangled in a fight with her, more show then metal-to-metal fighting. Neither wanted to be the first to strike and lose the advantage of the defender. “The girl has made a gross tactical error”, the front man thought. Duane’s murderers had found an alternate way to the battle scene and had surprised Terra from behind.

Terra realized that she was chanceless in a pincer attack, and attacked the intruders head-on. She managed to chase them off with several agressive swings from her sword, but she had crossed over the baby to do so. The front man pushed his boot into Terra’s back, and while she lost her balance for a moment, he took the baby by his left foot and retreated. He pulled out his dagger and loosily held in front of the neck of the crying baby. ‘The sword.’ The girl had frozen, but held onto the sword. ‘Drop it.’ The girl did nothing. The front man squinted into the sun. This was unexpected. ‘You think I won’t?’ With a quick move, he moved the knife to the baby’s right leg and produced a shallow cut there. The baby started screaming instead of sobbing tiredly, and the face of the girl twitched in utter horror. She dropped the sword. “Always count on young mothers to give it all up for the babies”, he thought.

One of his men had kicked away the girl’s sword. The front man looked at the girl, and she looked back. ‘Latigos? Let’s hurry the fuck up, eh?’ Not responding, the front man moved the blade of his knife to the baby’s neck again. He continued to look at the girl, whose face had every bit the horror and fear in it you’d expect. ‘Never trust people who have the upper hand on you.’, the front man said. With that, never taking his eyes of he girl’s face, he killed the baby he held in his hand. Blood gushed down the man’s arm, and the baby stopped making any normal sound. When the tiny body had stopped twitching and the girl screamed at the top of her lungs, he slung the dead piece of meat as far away as he could. ‘She’s mine, first.’

The front man, called Latigos by his men because he liked the sound of the ancient words – it meant bother ‘leader’ and ‘victor’ – took Terra’s face in his hand and made her look at him. The hatred he saw in there pleased him. ‘Cook for us. You’ll be watched.’ He pushed her face away, and stood up. ‘Bandai. Take Ging and watch the bitch.’ The man with the bandana, Bandai, pushed the girl to get her moving.

It was then when the clear sound of a voice was heard.

‘STOP!’

In between the men, like a cat jumping from a branch, landed a young man whose features were not clear in the quick movements he made. He swung a stick of some kind around him, and hit Ging hard in the face. Blood sprayed from between his fingers when he clutched his broken jaw in a muffled cry. The man jumped for Bandai, and hit the frond end of his stick into the place between his lips and nose. Bandai died when the bone in his nose lost contact with its surroundings and was pushed into his brains. Turning around, he hit Ging on the back of his head, causing him to stumble into the other two men of the front man. Finally, the Latigos saw what the man was wielding, and he did not believe his eyes.

A cane.
A fucking WALKING cane!

‘KILL HIM!’

While Ging did not react, the other two men put two steps towards the man…and then hesitated. They had found a stronger power in the man they were to face, and they weren’t willing to attack him for the Latigos. They retreated and ran, leaving the front man with Ging and the body of Bandai. The Latigos took Ging by his hair and pushed him ahead of him, keeping a sharp look-out for the man with the cane. He hadn’t moved an inch, waiting for him to finish his business. The Latigos left, taking Ging with him. There were other times. Because the young man, too, had been weak. Much weaker then the girl.


Terra felt fer body and mind collapse from whatever twisted had happened. So sudden, it had all changed from good to violated, from happy to miserable. All kids were crying out of fright, and Katarin was pale and silent as she looked at the body of the man she was supposed to love for the entire life. Looking at her baby was no option, she would surely go insane. Maybe she had already reached that.

Pollie was not capable of understanding what exactly had happened, but was nonetheless scared and sad. The air around here shivered from the negative feelings of Terra and from the other kids, and although it was sometimes said that children with the syndrom of Down, like Pollie, could not really grasp sorrow like normal people, Pollie cried her eyes out when she found the thing that had once been the baby of Katarin and Duane. Terra had rushed over to her and had maneouvred her away from the baby – feeling as terrible as anybody but keeping her composure for the good of the others – but by then the feeling of illness had spread trough Pollie's stomach and had corrupted it all. Mental pain so strong that one could feel physical effects were not uncommon around her in Mobliz, not today. She missed her big brother Duane, and silently waited for him to come back. Questions of his where-abouts did not form in her mind, as he had always been a steady factor in her life. He was part of the world.

The man who had saved Terra – not to mention Katarin – from an unspeakable horror was resting on a chair, spinning his cane. He felt distracted, not specifically by something. It was more a feeling of dizzyness, an inability to take a series of events in his mind. He could not grasp what had happened, could not even begin to calculate how this might fit in into his past and his future. He stared emptily on the ground, and made no attempt to comfort Terra or any of the kids. After a ‘thank you’ from Terra, she had ran away to find Duane, after which everything went wrong because he was dead. He didn’t blame the small society of Mobliz for forgetting him for the time being. He was almost incapable of focusing on himself, let alone on the others.

The plan had been so simple. And he had lost control.

Again.


‘Sir?’

Nothing.

‘Sir?’

The man looked up, and met the eyes of a small girl. Four, five years old. Her eyes were crossed and her child-like features were enhanched by whatever sickness had taken her. He could not remember ever having seen a kid like this. He looked at her, curious, and acknowledged her existence by saying: ‘Yeah?’
The girl called out a word that he did not recognize. ‘Dwaine’, it had sounded like, or perhaps ‘Drain’. It didn’t matter. Panic was readable on her face, and whatever she had meant to say was surely a question of comfort. He walked over to her and held her. She didn’t move in his stranger’s hug. He spoke in cliché’s in her ear – everything's going to be fine, don’t you worry about a thing – but wondered while he was doing that. He had helped by interfering, that was true. But maybe unrepearable damage was already been done. The girl sobbed in his arms. ‘Come on, come on. Don’t cry’. Crying could be healthy, and absolutely would be in situations like this. But deeper psychology was wasted on a five-year old, and he didn’t bother encouraging her. He merely tried to act like the older girl had most likely done for while, trying to comfort her and trying to lure her into a tired sleep.

Pollie could smell confusion trough her own sobs and tears, and she tried to determine if the man was dangerous. She couldn’t place his presence into any catagory she knew, but unlike most people she wasn’t scared of what she didn’t know. Things she didn’t recognize came by every day for Pollie. The man spoke into her ears, and he sounded like Mama when something had gone wrong. It was the sound of Bad Things, and it was another prove that things were very Bad. She cried harder, and lost consciounce thought.

Terra rested on the side of the bed and couldn’t move on. The kids seemed to notice this and left her alone for a while. She thought of Duane. How she had liked him a lot and her body had sometimes told her that he was the only partner in the area, making her feel things that she couldn’t quite accept. How he had talked fondly of Katarin every single time. How he had tried to be a fatherly figure to everybody (and to Terra’s amusement, even to her).
There was a knock on the door and before Terra could respond, the door was opened. A man she had never seen before entered, together with Pollie. She tensed up, her mind shooting towards what had happened in the morning. Then, she recognized the man as being their savior, and she calmed down. Pollie had cried, Terra could see the wet marks on her cheeks. But more importantly, she wasn’t crying at the time and Terra thanked the stranger for it. There were little things worse then a child crying over something that you couldn’t fix or talk yourself out of. And Pollie, a kid that only knew unconditional love and unconditional sadness, was somebody she couldn’t stand crying at the moment. She’d collapse.

‘I thought to bring her to a bed, I’m sorry if I disturbed you.’
Terra smiled – a smile that both looked and felt short, slightly hysterical and unhappy – and said: ’It’s okay, I was only resting’.
‘I think that rest is the first priority at this moment. For all of you.’
‘I’ll manage, thank you.’ It seemed easy to pull up barriers like ‘thank you’ and ‘it’s okay’. Every bit of casual protocol was a place where the sadness and chaos couldn’t creep into. ‘I haven’t thanked you yet for your…’ The man looked at her. ‘your help. I…think that…’ The man continued to look at her. ‘All I want to say, I guess, is thank you. Things looked bad, but now everything is fine.’ She let out another one of those laughs, oh so hurting, and said: ‘Going to be, anyway.’
The man let go of Pollie, who walked out of the room, and sat down next to Terra at a respectable distance. ‘I think you’ve really taken too much. Sleep.’
‘No, I can’t. There are kids who need me and if…’ The idea of the men returning sent shivers all over Terra’s body.
The man stood up from the bed. ‘I’m telling you that you should rest, for your own good. Won’t you listen to my advise? Please? I will take care of the children. I will take care of anybody who comes here. Go to sleep.’

Night crawled into the corners of the day, and soon the world had gone dark. The kids were all sleeping, as were the two girls. He surprised himself with the knowledge that he didn’t know their names, and they didn’t know HIS. He walked trough the deserted remains of Mobliz, and noticed that some of the things had been broken and repaired. He walked past the place where Duane had died, not knowing that was the case. He walked past the place where the Latigos had killed the baby. He didn’t quite remember what happened between the time of his intervening and the time of the Latigos’ leaving.
He suddenly heard a bird, calling out to the sky. He looked at the trees to see of he could find the bird that had sung at such a strange hour, and failed to detect the bird. It had sounded like a pigeon, but pigeons didn’t sing at dusk. Unless…
He looked around and him and then heard the sound from within a building. He entered and saw a cross of wood firmly planted in the ground. The horizontal piece of wood was slim and painted green, while the vertical was sturdy and round, the plain and unaltered color of wood. A pigeon was sitting there, and he was not a ordinary pigeon. He walked over to it and untied the letter that was attached to it’s left leg. The carrier pigeon, for that’s what it was, moved uneasily when his letter was taken.
He unfolded the letter and read:

Dear Terra,

How are things in Mobliz? Celes asks about the baby, so I will too. Everything is fine back here. We are planning on a vacation. Celes and I both agree that you can’t stop adventures cold turkey, and it would be great to see the kids again, not to mention Duane and Katarin. Assuming this bird arriving three days after we’ve sent it, we will be there in four days. Setzer will accompany us and we’ll travel on the Falcon. If you don’t want the three of us in Mobliz – very rude indeed, but a possibility – you will need to get this bird on the road before the night has fallen.

Locke

P.S. Celes threatenes to leave me if I don’t stop wearing my bandana. Saying you were always a big fan of my bandana, I convinced her to listen to your fashion judgement. I count on you to support me in this battle!

He folded the letter and reminded himself to give it to Terra (which one of the two that was, he needed to find out). He wondered for a minute about this letter, coming from people who didn’t know what had happened. The names sounded familiar and foreign to him. He would ask this Terra and ask who they were.


‘May I come in?’
The man who had knocked on the door stuck his head trough the crack of the door. Terra smiled at this mixture of politeness and rudeness, and invited the man in. She couldn’t remember his name, although he surely must’ve said it somewhere during the previous day.
‘Last night, I heard a carrier pigeon in the shed. I picked up this letter from it. It’s adressed to you.’
Terra smiled a little. ‘You’re manners are strange to me, I must say. Knocking and asking if you can come in, yet snooping trough my mail.’
The man looked positivaly offended by this. ‘I didnt mean to be rude, I just figured it might be very important to see what it was! You never know.’
‘Never mind, you did right. Now, I’m terribly sorry to say I forgot your name. Things have been so hectic.’
‘Don’t be. I never mentioned it. My name is Baäl.’ He halted and he seemed to look to the ceiling for a minute as if to think of a second name. ‘Baäl Hendersson.’
‘Terra. Terra Branford.’

They shook hands.

DA…!’ Baäl quickly pulled back his hand and waved it vertically in the air, as if he had burned his hand. His face was pulled in a grin of pain. Terra stepped in his direction, worried, but rememberd what happened and didn’t touch Baäl. ‘What’s wrong? You hurt?’
Baäl’s face tensed down. ‘It’s nothing. The air must’ve been very dry to create such a static shock between our hands.’
‘What do you mean?’ Terra wondered what Baäl had felt, and knew that no way it could have come from dryness in the air. It was rather humid these days, and even in the driest of climates Terra didn’t think one could get such a shock from static force.
‘Nothing, like I said. Just a slight shock, more surprising then painful. You didn’t feel it?
“I felt nothing.’
‘Another one to add to the mysteries of the world, then.’ He dismissed it with a wave of his hand. ‘Why I came here: I wanted to ask if there’s anything I could do.’
‘Well, you could go hunting for us. I don’t know if you know anything about hunting, but there are Buffalax out there. You should…’
‘I should pick the most healthy ones, since the slow and old ones are poisonous. I know. I’ll be back as soon as possible. Until then, miss Branford.’ He left, leaving Terra to wonder about the unusual ‘shock’ he had felt. It was probably nothing, she concluded, and she turned her mind to daily business.


The herde was small, and Baäl wondered about the society of Mobliz. How long had they been hunting for these? At any rate, this was one food source that would be gone in a few months. He had wanted to ask Branford why they had retreated into one of the most remote corners of the new world, but he had considered it to be inapropriate. Then again, leaving dozens of children to die of starvation wasn’t very polite, either.
He walked over to the herde, and some tensed. He spotted one walking a few feet further away from Baäl, and he noticed that it was healthy. Extremely healthy, even. Buffalax were animals who had suffered from the Apocalypse. Most likely because of a forced change of diet, most Buffalax were sick and developed rash all over their bodies. He pitied them, but saw no further need for concern about a breed of animals when there were still humans who suffered from worse things.
He thought back to the shock he had felt, and he remembered something from long ago, something that had…

“What’s that?”
“It’s a rock, man. Why bother with rocks? Hey, it’s a pretty special one, check that out! Seriously, there’s something…There a gem caught in it, here…let me try to get it out.” Sanjuro.
“…”
“Man, it’s stuck in it. It's a gem in the rough, but a gem anyway. Maybe we can grap some gold for it in Jidoor, you know? It’s nothing like that fly in amber I found once, but it’s rare enough to pay for a few meals.” Sanjuro.
“I wonder what kind of gem it is, though. Any idea?”
“Don’t know, maybe a ruby. Let me see…nah, no ruby. Cant’ be carbuncle either…no dragon skin…I have no idea, really. Then again, I’m just an amature. I know this gal in Jidoor who can give you a name for ANY gem.” Sanjuro.

(…skip…)

He picks it up, and holds it in his hand. Light as a feather. He moves it around, and loves the feeling of the thing. Logically enough, if you considered that it would provide some food for them, something that they could use. Tomorrow they’d arrive in Jidoor. He looked at the ruby in it. Or carbuncle, or whatever. He put his thumb on it, and caressed the smooth surface of the gem. He smiled. Too bad they had to sell these beautiful artifects. It’s almost as if…

His vision blurs, his world becomes red and he starts to scream. He becomes frightened, and he tries to let go of the stone. His hand won’t open, and in the sea of blood that he sees he can identify something. It’s a skeleton, and it’s floating in front of his eyes. In his horror he notices every detail about it. The bones of his legs and hips are long since pulverized and left behind

(how he knows this he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know, either)

, and now he sees it is the upper half of a skeleton. A cape is tied around his neck, and is curling and straightening in patterns that almost drives him mad. The word ORGANIC springs to his mind but he can’t grasp it. There is something peculiar about the skull, too. It is curled back, and the skull has nothing human at all. A forked tongue hangs between the nakes jaws of the demon, and he tries to scream continuously. If he succeeds he can’t know. He can’t hear anything at all. The creature notices him and instantly there are waves of hatred flowing towards him. The creature in the stone is not evil

(again, he can somehow feel what the creature is like)

and he can even feel something familiar, something human inside of him, as a pearl in an oyster, but a stronger version of pure and directed hatred he has never felt, witnessed or even heard about. He can feel the demon’s age

(old, so old)

and a name swims past him

(Zone Seeker)

. He is about to lose every coherent thought when he blacks out.

The memories go away and when he looks up, he steps back in horror. The smell in the air is sickening, and the remains in front of him are still…he turns away and throws up. After he’s done, he thinks about Sanjuro.



“You smell funny.”
Terra looked up and saw one of the smaller girls, Penny, talking to Hendersson. She was worried about him, but twice as much about his presence. He had shown some virtue when he saved their village, but the man that had come back from the hunting had been a wreck. He had dropped a carcass at the feet of her and Katarin and he had helped prepare the thing, but he had remained silent during the cooking and had looked ghastly to say the least.
His eyes were distant and somehow glowing a bit in a way that Terra couldn’t really appreciate. And Penny was right, there was an odor hanging around him that was not only funny, it was also all too familiar to Terra. As somebody who had once escaped trough the Western Mines of Narshe, where the monsters were vicious and she had only had her magic to protect her, she knew all too well about the smell of…burning flesh. It was different from the smell that was produced when you cooked meat. The smell of cooked meat was mouth-watering when you were hungry and rather pleasant at most times…but actually burned flesh was a disgusting smell that seemed to hold violence, fear and pain within itself.
“Yeah, I know. How do you people take baths here?”
“What?”
“You know, how do you clean yourself. Get the mud off your faces.” He picked the girl up, and she let him. “And get rid of funny smells.”
The girl wrinkled her nose – probably because of the smell - , and said: “Mama takes us to a waterfall nearby. It’s cold, but we have to.” The girl seemd to think her comment over and said: “There are fish in the water.” She jumped off and joined a boy that was playing with a few rocks. Hendersson turned his gaze to Terra.
“Why don’t you try some of those fish one day? I’m sure it would be a welcome change of pace form Buffalax and weeds you live on.”
Terra shook her head. “They’re no good. We’ve tried them once…or Duane tried one once, but he was sick for two days in a row.” A bit of uncomfortable silence fell over them.
“How was the hunt? It was an awfully big one you got us.”
“It was okay. Nothing special, just chase-one-until-you-get-him-style.”
Another one of those uneasy gaps in the conversation. Hendersson stared and his fingernails, and Terra was about to get up when one of the kids came storming into the place.


“Uwaaa! Somebody’s coming! It’s the bad men! Mamma!”


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The Collapse of Heaven and Earth

Very Nice. i like your Style Of writing. It almost reminds me Of George RR Martin. Almost.

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If you've been mod-o-fied,
It's an illusion, and you're in-between.
Don't you be tarot-fied,
It's just alot of nothing, so what can it mean?
~Frank Zappa

Sins exist only for people who are on the Way or approaching the Way