So anyway, what follows is the first chapter of a story I'm writing. I'm not entirely pleased with all of it, honestly think a lot of it sounds far too juvenile, but I suppose it's quite alright for a first try.
There are some details that are a little fuzzy (like where exactly they live) that may or may not be finalized later, depending on how the writing of this thing goes..
If you do read this, I would really appreciate it if you could take the time to tell me what you think, how I can improve, etc. :D.
Enjoy?
Ashes
SHARD #1
12/17/2013
California
hadn't seen the car coming.
That's actually a pretty good one for once,
nice and ambiguous;
she thought, even now finding amusement in the strange sentences that sometimes
formed when she thought of herself in the third person, making a sort of
narrative to accompany her life. California
hadn't seen The Car coming. Was the entire state of California ignorant as
to the process of revolution preceding the eventual advent of the modern car,
allowing for the appearance of said mode of transport to hit them in the face,
totally unawares? Had Californian people not been aware of the growing
excitement around the subject of vehicular transport?
It was
food for thought. Or it would be if it were an actual thing. Realistically
speaking, this tangent she was going off on was perhaps not the reaction most
would have had to her situation. Then
again, I'm not all that much like most people. Cass would probably have
understood. He found her ability to laugh at the horrible name she had been
given through means of contextual comedy quite entertaining, even if he himself
had never had a tendency to cross-examine pieces of text for the unintentional
hilarity of alternate meanings. Although this was a situation so strange and
otherworldly that perhaps even he would have found her ramblings inappropriate.
California
hadn't seen the car coming.
That
should be pretty obvious, considering the situation. This quite impossible
situation that would not have arisen if she had
seen it coming. Probably. Then again, things often happened for a reason, and
the way the guy was driving, he might've even hit her if she had been paying
attention. Possibly. It was strange, she reflected, that she hadn't felt
different this morning, hadn't paid much attention to anyone around her. She'd
been glad, as always, that her father's girlfriend did not have to leave the
house early and therefore was not downstairs to bother her. She'd been annoyed
at the pelting rain that greeted her when she stepped foot outside the door and
made her way to their small bike shed in the backyard. Cycling to school, she'd
been cold, wet and tired, and she'd not been looking forward to the day ahead
of her. Never for a second had she stopped to think about the way she'd absentmindedly
walked out of the kitchen, offering her father nothing but a barely
intelligible murmur of goodbye. Never for a second had she stopped to consider
the possibility that those words would have been the last she'd ever get to
speak to her dad.
California
hadn't seen the car coming.
It was a
small mistake, but it had been a fatal one.
California
Bethesda Thorne had died this morning, yet right now she was awake and
conscious in a place that resembled Earth, but was somehow fundamentally different. She was alone and confused in
a place that was Other, and she was going to have to figure out what was going
on.
***
Casper
Farground had never been the type to pay much attention in history class. This
could technically be considered a fundamental flaw of character, if only because
history was a bitch if you had to study for the exams without having paid the professor's
lectures any mind. He knew this fact very well, and had spent countless nights
stressed out, dreading quizzes he had just vainly studied for, knowing that he was
never going to understand it at this rate. One would think that after
experiencing the dread so many times, he would know not to drift off during
class. He did know this, technically.
He wasn't unintelligent, but he tended to be quite absentminded at times. Times
like history class, in which his teacher would drone on endlessly about one war
or another, rattling off facts about battles and revolutions in quick
succession and yet managing to make every word to come out of his mouth seem extremely dull. It was times like these that
would set his mind adrift, floating from one thought to another. As always,
though, his thoughts seemed to cycle back on themselves, ending up with him
spending most of class thinking about his dreams from the night before. God, he
wished Callie lived closer. That way they could hang out and he could actually
freely talk about her to his friends, without having to pray they wouldn't pry.
She was a subject he had learned early not to bring up too casually. In fact,
he hardly talked about her to anyone, and never in great detail. She did the
same thing, he knew. It was hardly surprising; both of them knew exactly how it
felt to be treated like a weirdo. Or – even worse, really – a fraud.
Childhood innocence had led the both of them to
excitedly talk to anyone who would hear about the person they met every night
in their dreams. Back then, around the age of six, neither of them had realized
it wasn't normal to return to the same scenery every dreaming moment. Neither
was it normal to share those dreams with another individual, playing together
and exploring the vast forest of a dreamscape. Back then, adults had looked at
Casper in bewilderment before smiling and nodding, going along with his
stories. It was not entirely unusual, after all, for children to have imaginary
friends. This amused dismissal of the issue stood at the base of Casper's
openness in talking about it. It was only years later, when his peers had lost
their illusions and imaginary friends, that the problem arose. Children are
harsh creatures, and their belief that Casper was making things up in order to
appear special eventually caused his classmates to start picking on him. Once
he finally entered middle school and made new friends, he made sure not to make
the mistake of mentioning the dreams. In those very same dreams, he was at
least able to talk to Callie about it. She'd had much the same experience, and
the ability to understand each other on this front made them grow ever closer.
Over the years, they'd noticed there were a few
conditions to the dream sharing. Apparently it only happened when both of them
were asleep at the same time. Anytime one fell asleep when the other wasn't,
they were able to have normal dreams. In their youth, their time zones had been
quite close to each other, but when Callie's parents had divorced around five
years ago, she'd moved with her dad to a place half a world away, and now she
was about five time zones removed from his residence. This essentially meant
that they only had half the night together. Really, he mused, this was not so
much of a problem, because while they were perfectly adjusted to each other and
had no problems at all with just being together in companionable silence, the
fact remained that they were growing teens. Spending hours upon hours with a
person of the opposite sex – with any one person, really – caused annoyances
and frustrations that were sometimes a little hard to deal with. Luckily for
them, at least, the two friends had figured out that while they couldn’t do
anything about the strange dreams, they could spend them away from each other.
It made for a good escape from the otherwise inevitable but pointless
confrontations that left them hours later, wondering why they’d been angry in
the first place.
Last night, Callie had mentioned something
about a fishing trip she would be going on with her dad next week. She was
understandably excited; the way she told it, her father hadn’t had much time to
spend with his only child since he got into his relationship with the Grump.
Not that she loved him any less for it. His girlfriend she didn’t care all that
much for, although there had been worse ones. Callie had had derogatory
nicknames for all of her dad’s girlfriends, of which ‘grump’ was one of the
more flattering. Sometimes Casper found himself thinking she shouldn’t be so
hard on the women, but then what did he know? His parents were still together,
and even if the measure of their togetherness could be a little nauseating sometimes,
he’d rather have them act lovey-dovey than fight all the time. It would have been horrible, having to
choose between my parents. I’d probably have been one of those kids that travel
back and forth all the time, living with both parents in turn. It wouldn’t
be an issue anymore, now. He was old enough to move out, rendering the whole
discussion of whom to live with redundant. All of that considered, though, it
became easier to understand his friend’s attitude. He couldn’t imagine having
to put up with some strange woman filling in for his mother.
All of a sudden he started into awareness of
the path his thoughts had taken. He chuckled under his breath and noted, not
for the first time, that he was glad his train of thought had no passengers. They’d
probably be hopelessly lost and confused on a train that was going somewhere
else than intended. Incidentally, the one time he’d mentioned this particular
concern for non-passengers on a figurative train, Callie had not even blinked,
merely replying that she was sure the rail maps were bound to be interesting.
The train without passengers was called to an
abrupt halt by an elbow that somehow found its way to Cass’ ribs. He let out a
soft whoosh of air and turned to face the offender. His friend Jack looked back
at him with amused annoyance, all the while finishing a sentence the start of
which had gone regrettably ignored. As usual. All Cass was able to pick up was,
“–the entire point of coming to class in the first place, right?”
At his neighbor’s cloudy expression, Jack
heaved a long-suffering sigh, blowing his slightly too-long fringe away from
his face. “You know what? I wonder why I even bother talking to you anymore.
You’re no fun, Castillo. All you seem to do all day is gaze dreamily in front
of you – thinking about dear sweet California, probably – and you never find it
in you to listen to your best bud when he’s trying his damnedest to give you
advice. I see when my help is not wanted.” At this, he turned up his nose and faced
away, but the glint in his eyes gave away his good humor. Jack was the one
person Casper had told the truth about the dreams. He was intrigued, rather
than repulsed at the strangeness of it all. That didn’t mean he would refrain
from making comments about it now and then, however.
“Perhaps if you would stop with the constant
random nicknames, I’d be more inclined to listen to you, you moron,” Cass
replied with a grin. “Anyway, since when do you take it upon yourself to give
other people advice? You don’t think you’d do better to start with yourself?”
“I’ll have you know I give myself very good
advice. Remember that one time when I –” he was interrupted by the professor’s
announcement that most of what he’d said today would find its way into the
end-of-term exam. Sighing, both young men packed up their stuff and made their
way to the cafeteria.
***
That night, Casper didn’t dream the world with
Callie. Instead, he found himself in a place that was, in an inexplicable way,
decidedly strange. It was hard to tell what, if anything, was markedly odd
about it, other than the atmosphere that kind of... pulsed. And even that was more of a hint of perception, rather than
an actual sensation. But that was the environment. Immediately obvious was that
he wasn't really himself. Or, well, not physically anyway; his body felt all
wrong and the palms of his hands and soles of his feet felt incredibly
sensitive where they stood in connection to the pastel-tinted bluish-green
grass he appeared to be on. Cass had had enough experience with 'normal' dreams
of this kind to effectively judge himself to be a cat. A glance down at his
paws and a twitch of his tail confirmed his suspicions. This was fine. Felines
he could handle. There'd been that one time he was apparently subconsciously
rather interested in spiders... let's just say too many extra limbs didn't sit
well with him. And that was completely disregarding his perfectly manly and totally-not-childish
fear of anything remotely spindly-legged and insectile - or, in this case,
arachnoid.
But all this was beside the point.
Though they could probably be considered weird
in and of themselves, most of the cat-dreams tended to be very mundane in
nature. Never before had he ended up in a place quite like this; it was
probably best comparable to a great plain of what appeared to be normal grass,
aside from its strangely dull color - cat vision might be different from its
human counterpart, and colors might always be comparatively dull, this was a
bleached-out sort of color, more like an idea of a color than the actual thing
- which was also kind of blue. The plain was flanked on all sides by a strange
sort of rocky bluff that protruded out of the ground with a remarkable
suddenness, the grass growing right up to the edge but the jagged slopes
themselves unmarked by vegetation of any kind. The cliffs weren't very high -
not much more than five meters, Casper would estimate, and as far as he could
see there were two ways off the plain: a narrow crevasse with a sort of dirt
path that appeared to lead through it, and a broad set of stairs, hewn into the
rock face and worn by the touch of many feet. The sky above was an idyllic
mixture of shades of pink, purple and blue, with some mostly gray patches that
might have been the orange his feline eyes weren't equipped to pick up on. It
was neither warm nor cold; some sort of non-temperature that is not really paid
any attention for its lack of definition.
Cass' earlier cursory glance at his body had
told him that the fur he donned tonight was a smoky gray. He supposed he may or
may not have been orange, red or brown, assuming (which is what he'd always
done) cat vision in his dreams worked akin to the way he knew it did in
reality.
Sizing up the stone steps and coming to the
conclusion that his current shape would not accommodate the ascent,
Casper-the-cat turned to the path leading through the cliffs, a narrow stretch
with solid, imposing rock walls towering on either side. He supposed he hadn't
much to lose either way. It was either do some exploring or wait out the time
in the grassy clearing. The decision was a quick and easy one.
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