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Author	Topic: Hoth (Post NJO, Vong, Drama, Spiritual) Updated 10/4
Art_Of_War Registered: Dec '05	Date Posted: 4/9 11:09pm Subject: Hoth (Post NJO, Vong, Drama, Spiritual) Updated 10/4 - Date Edited: 10/4 1:47pm (6 edits total) Edited By: Art_Of_War
	Title: Hoth Author: Art_of_War Characters: OCs (Vong) Genre- Drama/Spiritual Summary- Here on Hoth does this exiled warrior yet pray to dead gods. Notes: 10 years post NJO; Inspired partly by both T.S. Eliot,Cormac McCarthy and by the OC Database April 2007 Challenge. Odd phrases and the lack of certain grammatical marks completely intended. Updates will occur monthly unless completed ahead of schedule. Disclaimer: George owns it all. Because I do not hope to know again The infirm glory of the positive hour Because I do not think Because I know I shall not know The one veritable transitory power Because I cannot drink There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again. Ash Wednesday- T. S. Eliot Twilight Atlas- The World- Encounter with the Judges-Qualities of a Slumber -Fulfillment- The Ship and the Dead and the Woman- Mending of Flesh **** Under the twilight of that year, the warrior sat atop the summit of the cordillera like some dark and leprous atlas, gaunt limpid arms outstretched and hands risen up as if to hold some unseen and pillaged altar bereft of its tapestries and its sacristies poured out as of blood, clad in only the nacre scars like popped pustules and the rotting carcass of his armor held to him by its ragged and threadbare nodes. Decrepit amphistaff coiled round his torso in some fathomable need. Gibbets of snow on him and his discarded cloak and knapsack like some long famished moss. And also the wind shrill and decrepit torn flat and harsh by the cliffs and the peaks, striking itself against each exposed limb and organ. The cold was beyond his adjectives. His descriptors. Set outright in its nature as a challenge. Firmer then the rocks he’d settled and touched. Greater in height and breadth than those mountains. Both transient and corporeal as some three headed cerebrus bounding in the fog with tottering slackjaws. Fine sharpened incisors deep in his marrow and cartilage to masticate in the days. And the nights. To make itself some measurable deity for him to fall down and worship. Above him there lingered the canopy of clouds like some ceaseless shroud stretched about the world with smoke weaven threads by a seamstress so long at the wheel that her hair was aged into spider’s linen and hands ankyroid and arthritic and dots of free wheeling snow mingled throughout it like dust motes descended from each buried and forgotten mountain torn down in the ages by wind and water and man and war. He searched through its tresses. For what he knew in his dreams and thoughts, but it had none of it. Just figments. His hands caught those snowflakes and against the length of his fingers, they stayed and did not melt. He took in the valley below. Its tern spectrum of white, gray and black; the flatness of it like the side of some felled sword acting as a fulcrum for what lay beyond the horizon’s curved edge. Crossing it were thumbnail sized bipeds, more than two dozen in number, raising behind clouds and tracts as their tails swept behind them like rudders and the horns atop their heads like rotted crowns and he bade them hello, but they brooked no retort and continued onward as nomads fearing not what would come, but had. He spoke to himself and each gust of wind lent a differentiation of timber to his voice and gave each sentence a sentience unknown to the warrior before the numbered years and in the two was both murderer and sinner and he said, I cannot feel my hands. I know. It does not hurt. I know. And without that pain, the gods will not hear my cries. No. No? For I am the last of their children with whom they would be much displeased. He went to his knees and braced the ground with his forehead, mouth kissing the ice, and he smote himself with his fists as he spoke. As if to consecrate those words with motions to fill their hollow souls and make some memory of which to cling to. And- He prayed to dead gods. Past that hour, the warrior went down the slopes, cloak wrapped about his shoulders like a shawl, abating the shivers along his skin by staying his hands to the fur. Scarred from their nature. Marked with deep written wrinkles. Calloused digits spitten with white tumoric lines and the fingernails broken and sharp. His breath trailed behind him. A vague cloud of kanjis gone beyond their half lives; transitory and swept away in any breeze that crossed his path of which there many eager and willing. He waded through the knee high snow of the mountain; created a wake to be mapped and measured. Though the falling flakes would clear it from any memory of sight or thought. As he doubled back on the trail he had made hours past, there stood two judges. Horned like devils with golden coin eyes and claws dug deep into the haunches of the biped they dragged with them. Reddened teeth and tufts of fur clumped with the same dark liquid. Their foul stench like curdled vomit. And their height twice his own. They did not move but watched him, tracked him as he bowed and backed away. Face to the ground and eyes rolled upwards like a traitorous servant expectant of the axe. Taking a step. Then another, till he passed a bend and went another way. Twitching fingers and tightened diaphragm and dry mouth with a bleeding tongue his symptoms and villains. Coming down, he passed fumaroles, warm and engrained with pommels of smoke-like pillars, and when he passed his hand through them, some other pulse quickened into his blood and returned to it a measure of strength and he marveled at it until the ash coated his tongue in a stale layer and he moved on. There were other wonders upon those mountains. Chasms and the ice which spanned them. Pitiless drops cradling abject splintered bones. Beam bridges lined with squatters beneath their ways and etched portents along the sides. Composed entirely of sagely blue ice. Bubbled air locked into the layers like amber. Some burst open on the surface and others like gilded spheres spun free of their momentum and left in a vacuum. He went to his knees and crossed by making shallow cuts in the solidified frore and filling those thin ravines with his fingernails and pulling himself forward like a paralegic. He did not blink, and nailed his eyes forward and said breathe and breathe again. He did not wander his eyes, nor his mind, nor his lips for God and when he had crossed he found a divot in the wall and slept there. * In his dream there was a trail through the mountain pass lit by a child with an emerald orb in one hand and torch in the other; the path trodden through by his predecessors, the snow run slipshod and trampled by their footsteps and the imprint of their boots petrified and solid. Messages scrawled into the stone with dark blood. Relics strewn behind and nailed like ancient paintings. Hairs and scalps and idols and heretics and heathen. The light just beyond him like a lure. And above those monuments, statues of men cut from the granite with open eyes and mouths. Each of them whispering a single word and verse he could not decipher and the girl herself a mute and a deaf and when he reached to succor her all fell to night and he was afraid. ** He woke to the sound of concussions and the rattling of small stones above his head and in his fugue he looked up as rootlike trails of fire and smoke swept through the cloud cover and trailed across the sky with bits of shrapnel raining behind them as of crushed petals. Past the mountains they went like banshees and the ice cracked around him and splintered into numerous cleavages and the bridge he had crossed was struck down and fell into the pit and on the plains a great sigh went up with a diffuse spurt of fog as it cratered into the earth. It was then he could feel his heart again. The steady beat of it in his throat; the thrumming of his blood through his veins and arteries and seeping into his arms and legs and warming them. Like the returning of some lost prodigal son long thought dead. His mouth hung open and humid eyes. The dampness of their moment on his eyelashes freezing over and refracting his sight with multiple realities. Brother, he said, what is this, and rose up and went down the slopes as the gray light filtered down to show him the way. ** He was led to the vessel by the trough plowed through the snow and he walked in the wake with a pebble in his palm. The soil he took it from was blackened and rough and it smelled of smoke and bits of metal were deposited in it and dark gradients stayed underneath his fingernails. The piece of rock itself was rough and igneous and at one time its porous shell was birthed among fire and ash but now it possessed only an alien cold and he rolled it between his forefinger and thumb and he thought on its making and of hands past which had also held it and of what they had also seen in it and if they now watched other things yet young to the earth or lay buried in it and he went on. The ship was a caricature of itself and as he came near its wounds were made more real and more distinguishable. Open holes scattered throughout its hull with the sharpened metal flung inward and tears slung along its top like some foreign form of circumcision and the light of its engine dim and dead. The whole of it a divested and stripped cadaver lying about in the light with its spilled out innards draped across the ground awaiting the scavengers to pick its bones. He circled around the crater and peered into the cockpit where the glass was broken into canines and half of the pilot lay impaled upon a stripling of steel and he stayed there for some time and then circled to the other side. This one held a hole in its ribs the size of his own stature and he could not make anything out and he went in after depositing in the white turf his cloak. It was dark and smoke filled and he coughed into his hand and went in by way of tracing the wall and extending out the other arm as a buffer. Fallen down wires and collapsed panels pressed against him and there were bits of glass scattered throughout the corridors and some of these things bit into him and bled him and the surrounding of all these unnatural things suffocated him as though they pressed down upon his chest and closed up his lungs. But in his fortune, he wandered into a large space and breathed deeply and gagged again on the smoke. When he regained himself, he looked at the ground where the pinhole sizes light struck and where the faces of the corpses could be seen. He looked at them. A varied lot. A rodian, a twilek. Not breathing. The dismembered legs of some barabel in a hallway past a fallen slab. The sulfur stench from a whipid. A human sitting against the wall. His hand was in the air and it reached out. He went to this man whose hand trembled in the air and he kneeled and took it into his own and held it there as it quaked and he traced the palm. It was calloused and held deep set wrinkles and he read it as he would braille. water, the man said. water. please. His eyes were burned away and his skin was peeling and blackened with motes of pink smooth flesh and his hair was singed and fetally curled and his chewed up nose sat awkwardly there and his lips were both cracked and bleeding. The warrior put the pebble down and retrieved from his sack a canteen cut from the lining of a stomach and pressed into it and crushed the ice within and when the sloshing of it could be heard he said here, open your mouth and he pressed it to the man’s lips and tipped it and the man drank with shallow gulps and when he gurgled and choked on the water the warrior took it back and tied it again. thanks. You are going to die. More blood seeped from the man’s clothes and crusted against his trousers via the puddle and some came to rest against the warrior’s knee and it was thin and watery. i. know. Are you afraid? He coughed and spat out some few droplets of blood. don’t. want. to be. alone. stay. The warrior peered down at his own hands and thought for some time and said that this meeting had been arranged and accounted for in some distant ledger and said that he would be here till that time where the tabulation was wrote upon the book and dated. Are you afraid? He held the man by his shoulder and he could feel the tapping of the man’s heart to his chest and then to the palm touching it and it was rattling and shuddering. little. bit. dark. hurts. There is no need to fear. This pain will guide you and in your passing will you leave this earth and be born again. Into his presence. that so. Yes. you. tell. me that. when. you’re dying. The warrior shook his head. I will hope for it. ain’t much. of a goal. there. I take what I can. After a while, is there anything you wish of me? he said. just. wait. a bit. They stayed silent and in that way for some slip of time. Linked by the man’s fading life and by the hand which the warrior had once used as a tool of murder. Some semblance of a union between a damned and a theophile which the warrior had been found wanting of. The intimacy of an opened and visible soul before his eyes that did not shrink from his touch or sight. The rhythm of the man’s heart and the pounding of it which could be heard beyond the smoldering wreck. Gasped some; licked his lips. actua. ly. anyone. else a. live. The warrior told him of the four bodies and the pilot and that they had been dead for some time and that the man was only one who still yet breathed. no. missed one. He coughed and shook his head. woman. I will search for her after. now’s. fine. Are you sure? it won’t. be long. Then go unto God, and he stood up and took up the pebble and walked into another corridor. By this hour, his eyes had adjusted and the darkness was peeled back and he could make out the textures of the metal and the lines of geometry that ran through them and he traced the ceilings with his bloodied fingertips leaving behind a sanguine residue and when he heard a rustle past the corner he went to it. On the top of some stacked rubble with one hand pressed against her side and one hand clutching the grip of a blaster, lay the woman squint eyed and pale and labored lit by one sole blinking and efflorescent light and he said no words and went to her and she perked at the crestfalls of his footsteps and saw the foreign outline of him when he came close and she cursed and crooked the barrel his way and he threw the rock and it smacked her wrist and broke her hold of it. No, he said and she dragged herself away from him and debris skittered down in little waves and when he came into the light she let out a hushed cry and her eyes rolled into the back of her head and she collapsed. When he came by her, he parted the bangs of her hair and touched the marks on her face and traced the innards of her palm and could not divinitate this time here present or yet unborn and when he held up his own hand a single puckered scar barred the translation of it and he did not know if she could be saved. **** He straddled her across his arms like a wife checkered past a last ecclesiastical meridian and found a stained bunk with a dull overhead light to place her for suturing and cradled her head and set her down gently against the pillow. When he glossed over her body he could see the thin jacket had been pierced through once near the seam and once more slashed along the side and he stripped her of the material and the shirt underneath and of the locket round her neck and when he saw the convex curvature of her belly strutted with blood he touched it and then tapped the frame thricely. What quality of fetus that yet gestated and dormant in the womb tethered to its bearer and bound by the history of its predecessors, he could not say or predilect. Much of the contents had spilled out of their cabinets and holds and the great manner of things were strewn along the floors of the ship and the warrior went through these materials as would a once king remade anew as a pauper prowling along the backalleys in the dusklight and he picked up certain things like alcohol and gauze and clean clothes and carried these back to her in the crook of his arm and placed them on the bedsheets and took out old and cracked carapace beetles from his rucksack and did the same. He sat on the bed and balled and wetted the cloths and cleaned the blood away and exposed the wounds while placing a finger along each side of the cuts and peering into their depths. The wound at the apex of her curve was light and skin deep and only a bandage was necessary. The one on the side though was deep and he could see the red muscles flex with her breaths and possibly the white flair of her rib. He dabbed away the seep and took a beetle and twisted its head off and expelled its insides into the wound and closed it by using the heads as stitches. Eight were used in total and the cloth was soaked through by the end and the wound now looked like a line of black thistles sprung up and he cleaned up that element along with the others. Lastly, he swept back her hair and coursed his fingers along her scalp and used the last bit of salve to close off those scratches and marks and afterwards covered her in some blankets and served as a watchman through the night. But at some point before dawn, he drifted into a slumber and its contents brought to him some remembrances long contained and circumscribed within the once-hollow of his breast and it was the image of his brother, auger eyes and sharp canines and the clear certainty of speech and life whispering into his ear with words he could not hear that woke him and made the morning worth such things as weeping, for the words were still lost to him and he alone bore all their shackles therein. He did not sleep the rest of his watch and when she woke and threw off the lethargy of her limbs and her eyes, he greeted her and handed her the blaster and went back to the wall and waited. -----signature----- Though legendary was his utter and pervasive lack of care, the storied Art of War set foot on the edge and became a vile tergiversator, doomed to burn in the everfires of Hypocrasatic Hell for his apostasy in daring to give a darn*. -Exeter
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Art_Of_War Registered: Dec '05	Date Posted: 5/15 10:32am Subject: RE: Hoth (Post NJO, Vong, Drama, Spiritual)
	The first condition of the first day- Navigation by Way of Stars and a Small Hope- A fire- Inner Dialogue and Commentary- Deterred Traveling When she woke it was his face that she saw and for that brief moment where she held the blaster in her hand and could feel the warmed and edged contours of it molding into her palm with the fingers traced along the barrel and the forefinger against the capacitor and the thumb stroking the safety, she accounted his face and in a memory from a distant world where she and her brother had huddled together in the ruins as a pyre born of flesh and metal rose up in hellish display as the yuuzhan vong did dance about the pit and its shrill screams, naked save for the blood smeared along their bodies like oil and paint, spouting out tribal chants on battle and death with the etchings of their shadow features engraved large against the buildings did that visage yet coincide. The ebony eyes and the lipless and nose less gaze smeared with a canine tooth grin and scars lined about underneath the blue sac lids in the forms of mazes were seen and in her instinct she pulled up the blaster and fired a single shot into the mass of his thigh and he cupped the smoking crater in his leg and howled through pursed teeth as she rose up, holding one hand to the bandage, and stepped to him and placed the blaster to his head. What the kriff did you do me? Poison me? Huh? When he did not answer, she belted him across the cheek with the butt and it thudded against the bone and a small token of spittle and blood was thrown out of his mouth and his face was turned from her and she could not make out his expression. Answer me. Her voice trembled and all the moisture had leapt from it and the faint beginnings of a shiver wove up her spine as along those corridors came a shrill gust shaved by the angular geometries and debris into some form of damned screams. I would do no such thing, he said and touched his blood and marveled at in the fashion of a dumb, his voice roughened as if by gravel. Such a cowardly action. Like hell I believe that. I could have let you bleed or cut out your heart, he said. But I did not. You still yet stand, your wounds bound and stitched. There is no quarrel between us. I’ll decide that, she said and leaned against the wall and used it as a crux. And when she looked over the vong once more, she attributed to him what crimes his people had done unto her family and her acquaintances and her own flesh and the lands which they all had dwelt upon and burnt but she had no strength to it though she did wish for it. Could she kill hi- it. This thing. In one such flicking of a finger. She sworn she had such a capacity some days ago. Then I should take part as well. I’ve got the gun. Yes. You do, and he rose up and before she could register the patter of his feet he was to her and holding her blaster in his hands once more and threw it away into the corridor. With its passing went her courage and she was weak-kneed and faint. But that is not such a constant. He grabbed her by the shoulders and took her to the mattress and sat her on it. Now we can discuss these things as befitting us. Don’t touch me. Don’t. If that is a precondition, then I will give you one as well. He took her jaw and squeezed it and said, do not shoot me again, and released it. He limped out to the hallway and picked up the gun as she stared wide-eyed and set it on the mattress and leaned against the wall and stared at her. Puss began to leak out of his leg and ran down the length of it and the blackened broken skin stared at her with the pink muscle exposed and the odor wafted. He seemed to have forgotten it and spat out some blood on the floor. What are you going to do? She said and huddled herself closer with the blaster in her grip. It was cold to her and gave no comfort with the stock pressed to her ribs. These are the other rules you shall abide by. Do not leave the ship this night or the next. Sustain yourself. Keep warm. Otherwise, do as you will. And if I don’t? Then you will die, he said. That is fact. You’re going to kill me. Or sacrifice me, or whatever you vong do, she said in a near hysteria. Then believe you me; that the yuuzhan vong have been dead these many years and are far gone. And as of their bloodlust, it was long ago sated. She shook her head, Liar, liar. There is nothing I can do for you then. You may take my word or you may not. Until then, I will be outside, and he left clutching his leg. Calming herself, she waited for a minute from his departure before rising up and going through the ship like an awakened comatose, hand steadied by the walls and bulkheads and trailing bits of wire and choking on the small wisps of smoke present and the goose bumps trailing along her spine from the cold. Now when she came upon the dead, she checked them over with a critical eye, taking notes of their wound placements and the state of them and when she found none to bear witness of the vong’s crimes she paused and thought and its current lasted her all the night as she wrapped herself in some sheets and shivered in the bed like she had as a child. There was no light to herald morning, only snow turning grey between ground and covered sky and when she rose she went through the bodies, coveting what values and trinkets could be found in their homunculi, carrying forth her the blaster in one hand, index finger resting below the trigger, and a thin flashlight between her teeth. She pecked through only those passengers who bore the image of still life and whose wounds were limited by comparison, and shut their eyes with her passing. Fingers highlighted their pockets; came away with spare few credits and the odd knickknack. Some foreign coins, scraps of paper embroidered with poetry, a locket with a half washed out holo. She spun the picture in the air and placed it back in the pocket. She keyed in vague treatises of existentialism and nihilism in the scattered touch displays but the monitors lay dim, unknowledgeable and possessing no samaratin inclination and in her frustration she saddled up against the wall and beat it with the base of her hand. To which he was witness. At those times she saw him do such, she gestured away with the blaster and he adhered to such biddings and waited outside on the manifold. The lined stitches ached for her. Some of the panels were scattered about, revealing the multicolored wiring and she traced it through the ship like some medicinal cartographer appraising the complexities of the form but not the soul and she came upon a burned and degraded area where the would be beacon uttered off a dimming and slowing red light to which it died as a thin ember. Hardly crimson. She squatted near it and pressed against its skin and came away with blackened palms and cursed with an unbefitting tongue filled with a broader base of diction and slang than appropriate. She cleaned them against her slacks; her head hung in her hands. What to do. Possibly nothing. The name of the world she inhabited came to her. She rose up, stuck to her mind longitude and latitude of that memorial hidden in the tundra, and went outside and the cold buried through her layers like a lance and she gasped. As he watched, she looked up. Light was still dim on the horizon; enough parted clouds to measure the stars. Certain ones were out whose names returned to her and she took their measure and calculated vectors and angles and came away looking at the world’s edge with her estimation. She returned to the ship and gathered what she would. Food, water, a lumilamp, a slim vibroknife, some oil from a banister poured into a bottle, the locket stored in her locker. Blaster tucked into her waistband. Canteen filled. She found a knapsack and sequestered her supplies within it. Clothed herself in the heaviest raiment and layers. Pulled the ensemble together. Went outside once more. Looked at the horizon and tightened the straps, the buckles and breathed in the dry air through the sheet of cotton with icicles already formed by the wetness of her lips. Where do you intend to go? This is not some place where you can wander at your leisure, your whim, he said and swept his hand out. Do you not see this world as it is? Barren. Fruitless. A pause and quieter, Godless. It isn’t any concern of yours what I do. It is. Wrong there scarface. Bout as far off from right as you can get. Should you do this, yours will not be the only death. But the child’s as well. Do not be foolish, await your rescue. I know what I’m doing, she said and turned to look at him, so shut it. And one other thing, she patted the blaster, don’t follow me or this time I’ll take off your head. Then she marched out under that sky, all stalwart and alone, the mountains of which she went to slumbering in a white haze, the wind whipping about her legs in a growing fury and the warrior himself incanting and motionless and fallen down on the ground with her passing. He piled the bodies in the hold and doused them with what oil she had not commandeered and prayed before striking out sparks with twin sheets of metal. For their lives, for their journey to God. He asked his dead lords for such. The volcanic embers rode into the oil and danced along its length, consuming the bodies, rendering them as they once were. To their basic elements. The lithe red flames overlaying the low running blue in seasonal plumage. He went out and kneeled,clutching his leg, outside the ship and watched the fire rise up. As pinpoints of light from which the darkness could be held off. To grasp and to hold and to be the sign and portent for things in their becoming. In their beginnings. To serve as a beacon and a memorial for those yet unborn as his pain had once been for the gods. Held his face in the snow; would not sunder so much those flames with his eyes. Brother, is she the witness? Could she be? Forgive me, for I have not heard the word these many years and am still yet a fool. Even unto this end. Ask her of their fate and the doubts will be stripped to nothing. That the children of gods are long dead and brooked no passage beyond purgatory. As their sins remanded. There can be no question of this. What did that oracle foretell? That she should be taken for a sign and be this exile’s release. This can not be. Be silent. Be silent. But follow her still, in that unlikely case. In the midst of her trek, a pale whisper grew out of the land and the currents of curved wind strung along the ground like a river’s eddy and which flowed snake-like and coiled through the turf rose up swiftly and in a great fury and in such a time that there was no preparation and she covered up her face against that mass. So she went blindly, forearm on forehead, the snow accumulating against her clothes and forming a blanket of white moss, forcing each step after next after next. Starting down a small incline, she stumbled and fell into a large drift and in the time it took to free herself, a numb feeling began to work itself through her nose and her fingers and her feet, but it was unrecognizable to her and she went on heedlessly. The hour following, the creeping slumber ran up her legs and down her back and seeped through her pores like an anthrax and bit by bit, all aspects of her body gradually slid into the world’s dominion. Breathing became labored, consciousness dimmed, along with the slower beating of her heart. With that she fell amidst a sudden flurry and when the storm came and encompassed her fallen body, she saw things in between the swirls of ice. Daggers of frozen water. Teeth of a dead monster; burning fire in the sculptures of snowflakes thrown from the headwind. Texts stacked together. Ink and leather bound together in matrimony. Knowledge yet undimmed, the universe held captive by trimmed fingernails and uncalloused fingertips. Poems. Epics. Ballads. Tomes. Stories of all magnitude and virtue crushed into the embers of her breath. Her father, her brother both faded away in the distance. And finally the sound of a melody, old in nature and slow in tempo which she once knew but had forgotten in the years of her wandering; followed by the swift loss of reality into black. -----signature----- Though legendary was his utter and pervasive lack of care, the storied Art of War set foot on the edge and became a vile tergiversator, doomed to burn in the everfires of Hypocrasatic Hell for his apostasy in daring to give a darn*. -Exeter
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Art_Of_War Registered: Dec '05	Date Posted: 6/21 2:37pm Subject: RE: Hoth (Post NJO, Vong, Drama, Spiritual) Updated 6/21 - Date Edited: 6/24 1:37pm (2 edits total) Edited By: Art_Of_War
	Author's note- Thanks to whoever nominated this for for best short story in beyond the saga. It's most definitely appreciated. Retort- His Dream- Risen Together He found her by happenstance as much as his own tracking of her trail and when he drew near, a single judge, and a giant among its peers, stood by her, curious and nonchalant and frightening in the casual glint of its golden eyes as the truest and most embodiment of death and what courage he had stocked within himself by the appearance of the woman evaporated and left him parched and weak. It smelled her, and prodded her; examining her with the maliciousness of a critic. Leave her be, he croaked, drawing close with his amphistaff stiff and ready. She was promised to me. You can not have her. Be gone. All the years of his training and survival ran from him and down his legs like water. The judge turned to him and left the woman and drew near. A foul stench, a retched fused evolution of rot and choleric rusted blood. Deep stains in its pelt and the scars of past battles long and pink and warped along its chest and around its eyes. He could not say what this suzerain had seen and known but he feared it nonetheless. I tell you again, you will not have her. He looked at the woman, still shaking, but something within her made itself known within him. A warmth almost. A hope. I have made an oath. His voice grew. An oracle promised her to me. Stronger still. I was rejected by the Avatar of the true God and I am the last of my race of fools and murderers. And I say to you, you will not have her. You will not. So go from here. Go from here and return anon when she is gone, to judge me and I will accept it. It sniffed. Deep, deep breaths like the rumblings of the earth in the days of old when all just things were new and boiling and small. When it circled and smelled the pelt about him, it stepped back and with a single grunt of enmity, went down its own ways and paths. He stood until the white fog encased it entirely and he sunk to his knees and thin layers of water blurred the world to him. Thank you God. Thank you. Though I know naught why mercy is given unto me. He went unto the woman and wrapped her in the cloak and began digging a shelter for the night with his hands yet all the while beseeching the lost and the dead. His brother spoke to him before the day in the belly of the worldship. Bare chest sculpted by the flickering shadows. Those few scars marked for the advancement of his life. The dragons in the fire flickering, fading, burning. The indiscernible features of his brother’s face. Only the glitter of his eyes remained. Solid gold amber, tranquil and relaxed. Have you found them yet? No brother, he said. I have not. I searched amidst the texts; I fasted as the intendants directed. I plied the air with my prayers. There was nothing to be found. So your faith is still… I cannot say that it is lost for it has never been with me. I know this. Do you think that I could not understand my twin? No. Then let me hear you speak without this condescension. I think that my eyes are weak. When I look upon all the god’s work and gifts to us, I do not see something made by those who are infallible. I see mistakes, errors, unneeded accessories. When I hear the prayers during sacrifices, I hear history and clerical changes made for motivation. Where others charge heresy, I see choices. Alternatives of opinion. For all my efforts, I cannot find the gods. And yet…. Is that what you have named your doubt? Bad eyes? Clogged ears? No. These things you speak of are excuses; aftereffects of what truly drives you. Then tell me, what truth am I trying to speak? Your heart is not moved by thoughts above yourself. While others breasts’ beat for the calling of our masters, yours yearns to be unshackled. Yours is a child that demands freedom from its parents. Then there is no cure. No. There is not. But move your thoughts of this from your mind. You are yet a blessed soul. Blessed? You sit there in your belief and call me blessed? There is a hallow in me that cannot be filled and you say that I am not cursed? Yes brother, he insisted. Yours is the blessing of doubt. The gods reward their faithful, that is true. And it is also true that those who fail to uphold their belief are punished at their dimming days. But those who doubt and find faith? They are the precious praetorite of heaven. Theirs is the high place closest to the thrones. The gods reward those who struggle for what they have obtained. He stared into the burning embers, slowly dimming. Shadows grew large. The light left all to imagination. Faith, his brother said, cannot be found here by understanding if your mind provides no leniency. Instead, find the cliff of your doubt and jump into the darkness. Courage will be the yorik-et that brings you to the gods. And then tomorrow we can stride into the arena with the comprehension that we shall see each other amidst paradise no matter who falls. There was no light when he rose and pushed off the ceiling of snow atop his shoulders and none when it crumbled off of him into a small growing pile. Night and the world still yet embraced in union. His breath misted out and fell to his feet, shards of diamond translated a shade of fog black. His skin prismed through crystal and all its distorted reflections as if were capable of being beyond one spectrum and dimensions beyond the one it so inhabited. His scars; grotesque and beautiful and nothing more then a history of wrongs. She groaned and unfolded herself in a stupor and came to. He handed her the gourd and said, Drink, and she did. Eat, he said and she did. After she had gotten her fill, she spoke to him. I told you not follow me. I heard. If I had seen you, I’d have shot you dead. You see me now. It’s not the same. I believe it is. Well it isn’t, alright. She squatted and cupped her face. Her face was flushed from the cold and dark circles marked her eyes. So I’ll say it again cause you’re either half deaf or dumb. Don’t. Follow. Me. She rose and stretched and gathered up her belongings and set the locket back under her shirt. She did so seamlessly and without halting in the same manner as a ritual. Like these actions were not unknown to her. Moving and gathering from each and every place. Accounting for cents in floor cracks and pocketing them. We are progressing you and I, he said. You did not wish for my death. Just cause I didn’t state it doesn’t mean it’s still not there. She turned and walked naught twenty paces before she perceived the crunch of his steps from her own. Pivoting, she looked at him and slowly pulled the weapon from her holster and thumbed off the safety. What are you doing? I am not leaving you. I can handle it. That is what you said before, he did not look at her; instead glancing at the sky, the flat clouds, calibrating his senses and his body for the rigors of the day. And we both understand what that result was. He put up his hand to forestall her. You go to the monument, he said pointing to the mountains. I have been there myself long ago and can lead you through the mazes. Otherwise, death will come to you. To you and your unborn. She grimaced, shivered. He knew little of their expressions, these humans. But even he could see the conflict in it. A furrowed brow and clenched jaw. Her eyes. I can’t trust you, she said. You have my oath. Words are just words, she said to no one. Alright. With one hand she waved forward, Then lead on oh knowing guide. And he did. -----signature----- Though legendary was his utter and pervasive lack of care, the storied Art of War set foot on the edge and became a vile tergiversator, doomed to burn in the everfires of Hypocrasatic Hell for his apostasy in daring to give a darn*. -Exeter
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SilSolo Registered: Mar '04	Date Posted: 6/22 10:03pm Subject: RE: Hoth (Post NJO, Vong, Drama, Spiritual) Updated 6/21
	very nice Yuuzhie fic. -----signature----- http://boards.theforce.net/beyond_the_saga/b10477/27517284/p1/?11 Like this quick sketch: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/32848083/ ? Then commission me. Prices are negotiable.
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Art_Of_War Registered: Dec '05	Date Posted: 6/23 9:49am Subject: RE: Hoth (Post NJO, Vong, Drama, Spiritual) Updated 6/21
	Silsolo- I'm glad you enjoyed it and, hopefully, you'll like the depth I go into on the Vong in future chapters. Thanks for reading. -----signature----- Though legendary was his utter and pervasive lack of care, the storied Art of War set foot on the edge and became a vile tergiversator, doomed to burn in the everfires of Hypocrasatic Hell for his apostasy in daring to give a darn*. -Exeter
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Blue_but_beautiful Registered: Jan '06	Date Posted: 6/24 12:08pm Subject: RE: Hoth (Post NJO, Vong, Drama, Spiritual) Updated 6/21
	wow a rare sight of a Yuuzhan Vong fic here, and so beautifully written, I have just finished the first installment so far and am in love with your way of the description of events. An interesting notion you put across at the beginning, the gods being 'dead' as such. I will be watching this one with avid interest, could you PM me when you update please? -----signature----- "Are you sure you are not an Ooglith masquer with nothing actually inside?" My Fan Art: http://boards.theforce.net/Message.aspx?topic=25954742&brd=10020&start=26270818 My Fan Fic's are in my Profile Proud Recipient of the Golden Elegos™
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Art_Of_War Registered: Dec '05	Date Posted: 6/24 7:34pm Subject: RE: Hoth (Post NJO, Vong, Drama, Spiritual) Updated 6/21
	I'm glad the whole dead bit didn't come of as a little too...weird for you and I'll be sure to pm you at the time of the next update. Thanks for reading. -----signature----- Though legendary was his utter and pervasive lack of care, the storied Art of War set foot on the edge and became a vile tergiversator, doomed to burn in the everfires of Hypocrasatic Hell for his apostasy in daring to give a darn*. -Exeter
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Art_Of_War Registered: Dec '05	Date Posted: 10/4 1:53pm Subject: RE: Hoth (Post NJO, Vong, Drama, Spiritual) Updated 10/4
	Author's Note- Losing files in the move to school plus writing block does wonders for a posting schedule. History of Atlas- her first conversation with dead men- small epistolary- A minute sermon Together they crossed the plains. He, shouldering her belongings without staunch effort and leading her by but two arms lengths, stayed to his oath and though she had none publicly made, she kept to her own and followed. Onward they walked, trudging through and against the pockets of sunken lands filled with snow up to their chests and which clung to their skins with small, hooks of ice and made of them a mosaic of the world’s history- cold, cold, cold and the cold which brought upon the misery of pain unto those paroled into its borders came unto them and also other plagues- and against the hills and ridges which came out from the ground malformed and petulant like half-made giants of stone. Amidst the horizoned pale fog, the mountains grew in stature and width and the blackness of their monads were salient enough to be distinguished and made separate. And between them; save for the crunching of their footsteps and the crackling air and her labored breaths, there was silence and it was this that drove him to speak. For all these long years, he had kept his mouth shut to stave off the loneliness, speaking only for prayer or for those debates between himself.. The sickness unto death and the heaving shivers of their skin and the barbed arid throats and the And now, to be in this place without the words while she walked not far off behind was an agony of a sorts he was unacquainted with. And he said- Once, there were brothers born the same day of the same year. And when the older came into the world, he looked upon it and wailed at the sight and the caste members there were revolted and reached for their amphistaff to kill it. For when a child was born to the yuuzhan vong, it was judged in its fitness and capacity and if it found itself disgusted at the world- the begotten sacrifice of yun-yuzzhan, the creator who had poured out his own bowels to fill the void- it was cut down and cast aside and used as food for villips and koffees. And this was so even so for twins, whom by their nature were prized for their rarity and whose presence testified for the gods. Now when the priests came upon the babe, the mother gave out a cry and his brother came to and was held aloft but no sound moved from his lips and when the older’s gaze drifted to his twin he too fell silent. Those gathered there took this as a sign. That these two before them, though not brother and sister, were of relation to the twin gods and deserving of life. And thusly, they were trained in the ways of the flesh and muscle, he said and spoke of the manners in which they were raised. The rituals of scarring throughout childhood. Along the forearms. Across and around the folds of the neck. Indentations along their spines. How each scar was carved into the skin with a special koffee blessed with the blood of all those proceeding the mark. Each and every forefather who had walked the path before them in glory and battle and death. The trial of culling an amphistaff to bond with. Walking along the boundary between the grottos and groves through three days and three nights chanting without rest till two amphistaffs took heed and dug into their wrists full of venom and they lessened the beatings of their heart and abated it and did not succumb to the pain and the fevers. This too he discussed in detail. For if there was but one, defining word of the yuuzhan vong, it was pain. The pain of birth, the pain of life, the pain of death, the pain beyond such. All things were under its jurisdiction and under the gnashings of its whip and most assuredly were the yuuzhan vong, ; the true heirs and children of yun-yuuzhan-; who had following their lord’s dismembering sprung out from the congealed blood fully formed and armed and willing to break their hands upon the world and to mold it into its true and rightful image. To be godlike was their essence. Their utmost desire. Their reason for being in its entirety and at the heart of this was pain. The gods had bore this upon their shoulders. Each and every one of them in a differing manner. Yun Yuuzhan, creation, Yun-Yamka- conflict, war, Yun-Harla- the lies between all things, Yun Shuno- failure and shame. And so to bear that burden was to be godlike. To go beyond the dim trappings of life and grasp at providence with one’s own fingers and hands. This was such for the yuuzhan vong and it was true for these brothers. That they too in their lives lived by such laws and conceptions of reality and truth. Each growing to their shared fate through the accumulation of scars and pain and battles between all calibers of foes and challenges. Inching, ever inching, towards a pinnacle which had come to them by way of their forefathers and by the stories they had spoken and inherited also. This they followed samely. Trials and tribulations. Barriers placed on each child of God as a measure and a test of their capacities. Combat with other clans. Spectacles in front of convocations. Lessons in the embrace of pain upon the manner of salvation and of the unity brought to them through such devices. All the while investing themselves in each other; each placing within the other apportioned segments of themselves of which our very souls are comprised. Fears. Hopes. Thoughts and actions. Dreams. And what became apparent to the younger brother, who was in all things a template or idol by which each and every yuuzhan vong should aspire to- vetted by combat yet without arrogance, so skilled in speech he lectured all warriors present on the trueness of the way and the life- was the conflict within the older. An inner turmoil camouflaged by the appearances of piety- self-flagellation, prayers at all appointed times and places, bodily shapings done without utterance- but which was visible to the vigilant. And so they discussed these things as the days tumbled down towards the ceremony of the twin gods which would anoint the coming invasion, most especially in the night before it. Gods and of their purpose and of the trueness of life and the way which men should follow. The manner by which one should conduct themselves within all things and the terror and hope that such profound isolation from faith was circumscribed of. The freedoms granted to each soul to carve out their own path among mountains and set ways. So in that day, they both strode into the arena under the eyes of the overlord and twenty and one hundred thousand and did battle and in a single stroke the older took the younger’s heart with his amphistaff and in sorrow forged himself into the memory of his brother and went to war chanting without hope while yet covered in that fratricidal blood. Did she, that woman, listen to his words? He could not say nor would she. And as night fell, they dug a shelter and lowered themselves into the pit where the woman recoiled from his touch and slept apart from him throughout the night. She conceived a world apart, of conflagrations above looming monuments of metal and concussions ringing through the ears of each and every living thing and driving into them the primal fear of death. Once neighbors ran about with possessions hung over their shoulders, mothers clutching babes to their chests and children weeping and dazed and gapemouthed at the coming onslaught. Cries and tears sparked by long bands of fire above them and by the flowering heat. Her brother rested his hands upon her shoulders. Pale like snow and unblemished; trim fingernails concise atop the tips of his fingers. We need to get going. Pack only what you need, he said. His voice had a stoic quality. An almost perceptible hardness to it, hidden underneath his youth like granite. Were it not for his eyes, the veneer would have held- stiff lip, furrowed brow, clenched jaw- and given her a comfort. They hurried into their home as the walls shook and the hanging relics began to fall down a clatter. Stark steel and polished copper wirings falling into scrap heaps. Their father’s treasures and artifacts coming to their finality long postponed. In the light of dusk, cheap golden rays sprayed down from the window and enriched the dust and the air and what few things she gathered were rusted by it. Her life could be assembled from what things she gathered. Small trinkets. Little things of no consequence save to her. Notes and bracelets. Cards. A holo of them together snapshot across the table with none smiling save her. Earrings. She bundled them with clothing and food and found him in the main room standing astride the pile, head braced against the wall, shoulders slouched as if in prayer like the spine of a sagging cathedral whose beams and buttresses were worn away by wind and rain. All old things in their entirety swept away and what childhood he possessed within that shell lifeless and cold and sloughed with the telltale signs of age; the broadness of his back and the stubble along his jaw and the worry in his skin. This was not always such nor should it be, yet it could not be disguised from her. We’re going to do fine. He spoke to the air or to nothing it all. I’ll make sure of it. I will. Hand tight and pounding against the wall. Turning, he asked if she was ready and without prompting took their mother’s locket from his pocket and held it glinting in the light. Scratched and marked as it was, the beauty of the forging still glinted, as even the indentations and the darkened etchings under the lettering shone in some manner. Years and more then memories were accounted for in this metal. Small meanings to greater truths. Smaller accounts for some greater ledger. Wholesale loss bought of chance and pain its representative. She wore it around her neck with it pressed against her chest where the dwelling of her heart drummed against it. A deep and heady bass which ached now from this leaving. He swayed with the rumblings and the scattered cries outside their home. So little time and none of it had now. It’s yours now. Take care of it. I will. And there they paused and waited amidst the world being put to rest, counting the seconds, and in due time leaving, abject and sorrowful with the only words to distinguish such from an old miner’s song. On following stone walls by hand and reading the earth in its truth like palmists and blind men in their tombs. When she woke, she could see naught but darkness and the unending tenebrosity of it drove into her the sudden seizure of helplessness. As though her arms and legs were dismembered and lost and she was left to face the world and its cold without dignity or hope like a babe or a dumb. Breathing quickly, breathing deep, she moved about. Returning the blood to her limbs and feeling about the confines with shaking digits. Ice ground against their tip, jagged and malformed with end broken peaks. Bits of soft snow which dug their way under her nails and the air clutched with some vague presence and- A hand touched her and the voice said, Be at peace girl. Peace. As though it were such an easy place to find and inhabit. And though it was his hand- a thing composed of black blood, and dried skin and crisscrossed scars- it calmed her and she breathed and asked for the canteen. Somewhere in that mass of dark, what could only be the vong, shifted and placed it near her. It did not seem as if he had awoken or made any preparation for sleep. Nothing in his voice or movements said otherwise. You were dreaming. It was nothing. A pause and then, That is a lie. I heard you speak of your brother. She drank, rolling the water in her mouth, thinking of the cold and the coming day and the dream. I said it was nothing. Stop picking at i- What did he tell you? It wasn’t anything. She went onto her side and laid out as to sleep. You will learn in due time as I did then, he said, after a time, like a deep breath before a plunge. That when the dead do speak, so we must listen. That in all this world, there are no things so valuable as the words of those who have passed on this way before us. Okay. -----signature----- Though legendary was his utter and pervasive lack of care, the storied Art of War set foot on the edge and became a vile tergiversator, doomed to burn in the everfires of Hypocrasatic Hell for his apostasy in daring to give a darn*. -Exeter
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