Looking Back (Part 2)

Hey, look: the old folder, and here is a second scrap...

=====

The little islands are dark, slightly tarnished - ambergris, blue vitriol, rust, deep slumbersome black-brown hues in a night-lake of midnight blue. The Wanderer sits alone on the cliff, warming old hands over a dancing yellow fire and his food. He has placed his weapons by the fire, and the fire’s light dances over them as well.

It is comfortable here in the Archipelago, he muses. There’s no stress. Back to nature, except that you can have modern conveniences whenever you want. He pulls the spit from the flames, lays it swiftly on a clean, flat stone, sucks his fingers. This is a good life. He looks with Dreamtime-seeing eyes out over the twilight sea, waits for the chicken wings to cool. This is a good life, he repeats, with much satisfaction. He tenderly caresses his flesh, feeling the invisible dents where flesh has rejected bullet and healed. A good life for a Wanderer, this is.

In the distance there is uneasiness. The centre is not at peace. The Wanderer looks back and down, and in the distance sees another with his inner eye. This other wears the billowing cape and dirt-coloured leggings of a Walker. Wanderer smiles.

Toilsome, toilsome step by step, the Walker wends his way Wanderer-ward. The Wanderer thinks of slain Hunters, many of them in a catacomb of the mind, all buried, all neatly entombed therein. He smiles again, and knows that for Walkers, he needs no weapons.

The Walker halts in the narrow defile at the foot of the slope and looks up. “Wanderer!” he calls. “Wanderer, come home!”

The Wanderer waits. He can afford to wait. The Walker is Maradaine Chase. Maradaine was always too good, too humane for his job. The Wanderer’s smile is feral.

=====

That's how the third section goes. What on earth was I thinking of? The question remains unanswered. But still... what was all this about?

Looking Back (Part 1)

Hey, look: an old folder with some scraps of paper in it...

=====

Little islands in a sea of chaos burn with brazen sunset light. The Wanderer waits there, his hands full of weapons. A stone, a branch, the jawbone of an ass, they are as treasure to his cold eye, their cracked and jagged lines as beauty to his soul.

Other things catch this roving camera’s glance: the dead roses, the test-tubes filled with vicious oils, the keyboard. The keyboard snakes its cable under a rock, a rock which twinkles green in the setting sun. A shadow falls halfway across the green.

The Hunter is here. He wears a black cloak trimmed with silver thread. He unclips the Link from his belt, presses buttons, speaks. “Domine,” he says, “I have found him. He carries weapons.”

Whisper, whisper. Fizzle. The connection closes. The Hunter has been instructed. The Hunter walks up to the Wanderer.

“Wanderer, come home,” he says.

The Wanderer is a blind man now, old and weary. Yet, when intuition strikes, he sees with the flash of its lightning. Now, he looks sharply back from the edge of his cliff, notes the Link at the Hunter’s belt, sees the Hunter’s escargot shotgun (every slug a hit, say the advertisements). His dry lips crack open, oozing an unripe smile.

The Hunter watches warily.

The Wanderer strikes, his hands a blur of bone, and stone, and little splinters from a larger club. There is eventually some blood. The shotgun is firing. The Link crackles with powerful energies. The Hunter glazes over before his eyes do, and is gone.

=====

That's how the first section goes. What on earth was I thinking of? Ah well... there will be time, there will be time. I was eighteen years old when I wrote that.