Post by Tayl on Nov 1, 2015 22:15:15 GMT -6
it's my nanowrimo novel!!!!!!!! whoo!!!!! it's the story of endael and how he becomes endael. essentially i'm writing the backstory of a minor character in asthenopia who does nothing. rock on
Day One - 2,027 Words
criticism of myself:
Day One - 2,027 Words
{Spoiler} “What was it like in Hell, Grandpa?” Elliot asked, wide-eyed.
His grandfather leaned in closer, wheelchair creaking. He had that kind of grin on that he always got while telling stories, no matter the subject matter: nostalgic and just slightly crazed.
“Just the way you’d imagine it, kiddo. Full of screaming and crying and everyone runnin’ for their lives… ‘course, I couldn’t tell you what it was like before The Fall, but I’d bet it was about the same.”
Grandpa scratched his stubble before resuming with gusto, “But that don’t matter! Where I was, it was real dark, could barely see my own hand in front of my face! Wasn’t too worried ‘bout that, though… all I could think about was running! Runnin’ for dear life!”
Elliot started picking at the rug, not caring if his mom yelled at him again for it. He was too worried to sit still. What if Grandpa in the past didn’t make it and the Grandpa now just blinked out of existence? A little part of him knew that wasn’t possible, but that part was too enraptured by the story to tell the rest of him.
“What about the demons? What were they like?” he asked, mouth dry.
“The demons! There were all sorts of them!” Grandpa exclaimed, leaning back in his chair and throwing a hand up in the air. “That’s just the thing, kiddo… always thought they just looked one way, but there were all manners of ‘em! Some of ‘em didn’t look much different than you ‘n’ me, others…”
Shaking his head, Grandpa finished off the bottle he was holding. Elliot tugged at a thread from the rug and wrapped it around his finger over and over. The fireplace seemed to roar at them, and Elliot wondered if that was what Hell sounded like.
“Others,” Grandpa’s voice lowered, “looked like monsters you couldn’t see in your nightmares if you tried. All eyes and slithering limbs and bulbous screaming masses,” he described, waving his hands around, “covered in the blood ‘n’ guts of people I couldn’t even recognize if they’d been family!”
“You dumb old bastard,” grumbled Elliot’s father from the next chair over, slurring slightly, “how could you see anything at all when you just said you couldn’t even see your own damn hand in front of your face?”
“Ha! You couldn’t keep yourself from seein’ those things if you were blind!” Grandpa laughed. “And watch your damn language! Don’t you got any respect for your kid’s innocence?”
“You clearly don’t.” Dad retorted, pouring himself another drink.
“Hey now, this is important history! Can’t just pretend it didn’t happen. Better to learn it now than when you’re too old to care! You get it, don’t you, kiddo?” Grandpa asked, turning to Elliot expectantly. Elliot nodded vigorously, so focused on trying to form Grandpa’s descriptions into an image that his finger was starting to grow blue.
“See? He ain’t worried about a little graphic description! Anyway, as I was sayin’… where was I again?”
“The demons!” Elliot answered, quickly sitting up as he untangled his finger. “You were talking about the different kinds of them!”
“Right, right! So let’s see… some kinda human, some kinda monsters… now the real kicker here is that I saw some of ‘em fightin’ each other off! Maybe just trying to fight each other for all them souls that fell in… but I think I saw some of ‘em tryin’ to get all the people out.”
“No way!” Elliot gasped, leaning forward. “A demon wouldn’t really do that, would they?”
“Well they sure enough did! Saw it with my own two eyes!”
“Your own two eyes that couldn’t see your own hand in front of-”
Grandpa ignored Dad and continued without skipping a beat. “I couldn’t believe it, either! But I figure, all kinds of people go to Hell, right? Gotta be some people who became demons and want to make things right, y’know? Guess it ain’t too weird that Hell’s got some redeeming folk, right? I mean, eternity’s a pretty long time to realize that’cha gotta turn around and do somethin’ good for once.”
“Did they help you get out, too?” Elliot asked, settling back down onto his stomach in an attempt to hold back his excitement. “How’d you escape?”
“Hrmm.”
Grandpa leaned back again and started muttering to himself, rubbing his chin. “How did I get out? Huh.”
“You… don’t remember?” Elliot frowned, furrowing his brow with both skepticism and disappointment.
“’Course I remember!” Grandpa assured him. “Just a little fog on the ol’ memory banks. Ain’t got the recall I used to, y’know! Plus I was, oh… couldn’t have been much older than you! Lotta years between then and now.”
“You’d think you’d have a pretty vivid memory of your whole chunk of world falling into Hell.” Dad scoffed.
“Listen, Elliot, don’t give this old coot much thought.” Dad muttered, turning to Elliot. “He just likes hearing the sound of his own voice. Bet he wasn’t even there.”
“Hmph! Thought I raised you to respect your elders, son. The audacity!”
“I believe you, Grandpa!” Elliot reassured him. “I want to hear the rest of the story!”
“See that? Now that’s a good kid!”
“Just means I’m a better parent than you.”
Elliot sighed quietly to himself as the two bickered back and forth, resigning himself to weaving the rug’s stray threads around his fingers again. Grandpa told him vague stories about The Fall every year, and now that he was finally getting to hear about it he wasn’t even going to get to hear the whole thing. It wasn’t like he could just look it up at the library later; Mom never let him get books about things like that.
“Grandpa, the story?” he spoke up quietly, just enough to be heard and nothing more.
“Hmm? Oh, right! See what you did? Always gotta distract me with something.” Grandpa scolded Dad. Dad just shook his head and muttered something into his glass, allowed Grandpa to continue unimpeded.
“So, let’s see, how’d I get out? Pretty sure I just ran like hell, pun intended,” he chuckled to himself with a pat on the back, “and, uh… kept hidin’ around, couldn’t help myself from watching what I could… and then! And then! Then one of ‘em definitely saw me! Looked me right in the eye with them glowin’ orbs of theirs!”
All of Elliot’s impatience was quickly swallowed up again by anticipation and cold dread, his mind quickly flooding him with enough images to convince him Grandpa’s story was happening in real-time.
“See, I was… hidin’ behind something, or maybe it was in something. Under something?”
Elliot started scratching at the rug again as Grandpa rambled to himself, fingers spreading apart and closing in synch with his heartbeat.
“Either way it definitely caught me, and then it… stood there! Just stood there! Or it sat there. Listen, the details ain’t important. Thought maybe it was waiting for me to come out so it could tear the flesh from my bones and feast on my-”
“Arnie!”
Elliot jumped at the sound of his mother’s voice and quickly folded the threads he had unraveled underneath the rug. She stomped into the room, perching her hands on her hips as she approached Grandpa. His older sister, Dorothy, walked out of the kitchen with her and immediately walked upstairs, giving Elliot a quick glance and rolling her eyes at Mom as she went.
“What did I tell you about talking about-”
“Aw, don’t be such a spoilsport, Aggie!” Grandpa groaned, fully prepared for her interruption. “Kids gotta learn about these things early! Get it from the source! Ain’t like there’s many of us still around to give the first person view! It’s an important part of history-”
“Talking about tearing flesh isn’t an important part of history!” Mom sighed, exasperated. “For Heaven’s sake, Arnie, he’s hardly eight years old! He’ll learn everything he needs to know about The Fall in school, and it most certainly won’t involve loving descriptions of violence!”
“Hey, hey! I was only saying what I thought it might do to me! And as you can see, I’m perfectly fine!”
“I wouldn’t say that.” Dad commented with a low chuckle.
“And you! You’re just sitting here, letting your father give your son nightmares?” Mom scolded, causing Dad to shift uncomfortably in his seat. Though he shrank back a little, the expression on his face was firm.
“Relax, it’s just a scary story. Elliot’s gonna forget about it in a week. And if we don’t let the old man ramble, he’ll probably just explode on himself, anyway.”
Mom groaned, looked at the empty bottles scattered across the table between the men, and walked over to Elliot.
“Come on, Elliot. It’s getting late. You leave these two be and get to bed. Winter break isn’t very long, and I don’t want you to get into the habit of staying up late and sleeping in all day like last year.” she instructed.
“But I didn’t get to hear the ending of the story!” Elliot pouted, standing up nonetheless. He knew there was no winning this argument, or any argument at all with her. Mom was an undefeated champion.
“The ending is that eventually Heaven got word of what had happened, the angels saved everyone they could, and they sealed up Hell again and did everything possible to make sure nothing would fall into it again. The end.” she explained, pushing him along toward the stairs.
“Took ‘em at least half a day just to get down there!” Grandpa called after them. “And it’s not like you can’t get into Hell now! Bet you could get there on accident, still! Don’t get him all complacent and thinkin’ that-”
Mom covered Elliot’s ears and continued pushing him along, past Dorothy’s room and all the way into his bed.
“Mom-”
“No buts and no arguments. You need sleep. You’ve stayed up long enough as is.”
“Was all of the stuff Grandpa was saying-”
Mom gently grabbed his shoulders, took a deep breath, and looked him in the eye. He tensed up a little bit and tried to focus on her nose instead.
“Don’t worry about anything Grandpa was saying, okay? He’s just an old man who likes to hear himself talk.”
“That’s what Dad said, too.”
Mom smiled, letting a gentle giggle slip out. “Well, see then? Don’t let yourself get scared by his exaggerated stories, alright? Nothing like that will ever happen again. Heaven wouldn’t let that happen.”
“I wasn’t scared!” Elliot insisted. “I wanted to know more!”
“You don’t need to know more, and even though you say you do you don’t really want to know more, understand? You know everything anyone would need to know. You don’t need more details about… tearing flesh or whatever your grandfather was going on about. A bad thing happened, but it was fixed and won’t happen again. So no more thinking about it. It’s time to sleep.”
That wasn’t it. He definitely wanted to know more, and even though the subject was scary he wasn’t afraid. They learned all about Heaven in school and knew a lot about angels, but Hell and demons only ever got passing mentions as things that were bad. He wanted to know the details, however terrifying they were. Every time one of his questions got shot down, it made him squirm. It felt like an itch he wasn’t allowed to scratch.
Still, he stayed quiet. It wasn’t like Mom was going to tell him anything else, and if he went back downstairs he’d just get in trouble. As Mom left the room and turned off the light, he curled up and squeezed his eyes shut, hoping he would be able to hear Grandpa through the floor if he just focused enough. Eventually he gave it up and glared at the curtains instead.
He just needed to be patient, he told himself. Everyone was just being overprotective because he was still a kid. But someday he’d be old enough to learn whatever he wanted, and no one would be able to get in the way of that.
His grandfather leaned in closer, wheelchair creaking. He had that kind of grin on that he always got while telling stories, no matter the subject matter: nostalgic and just slightly crazed.
“Just the way you’d imagine it, kiddo. Full of screaming and crying and everyone runnin’ for their lives… ‘course, I couldn’t tell you what it was like before The Fall, but I’d bet it was about the same.”
Grandpa scratched his stubble before resuming with gusto, “But that don’t matter! Where I was, it was real dark, could barely see my own hand in front of my face! Wasn’t too worried ‘bout that, though… all I could think about was running! Runnin’ for dear life!”
Elliot started picking at the rug, not caring if his mom yelled at him again for it. He was too worried to sit still. What if Grandpa in the past didn’t make it and the Grandpa now just blinked out of existence? A little part of him knew that wasn’t possible, but that part was too enraptured by the story to tell the rest of him.
“What about the demons? What were they like?” he asked, mouth dry.
“The demons! There were all sorts of them!” Grandpa exclaimed, leaning back in his chair and throwing a hand up in the air. “That’s just the thing, kiddo… always thought they just looked one way, but there were all manners of ‘em! Some of ‘em didn’t look much different than you ‘n’ me, others…”
Shaking his head, Grandpa finished off the bottle he was holding. Elliot tugged at a thread from the rug and wrapped it around his finger over and over. The fireplace seemed to roar at them, and Elliot wondered if that was what Hell sounded like.
“Others,” Grandpa’s voice lowered, “looked like monsters you couldn’t see in your nightmares if you tried. All eyes and slithering limbs and bulbous screaming masses,” he described, waving his hands around, “covered in the blood ‘n’ guts of people I couldn’t even recognize if they’d been family!”
“You dumb old bastard,” grumbled Elliot’s father from the next chair over, slurring slightly, “how could you see anything at all when you just said you couldn’t even see your own damn hand in front of your face?”
“Ha! You couldn’t keep yourself from seein’ those things if you were blind!” Grandpa laughed. “And watch your damn language! Don’t you got any respect for your kid’s innocence?”
“You clearly don’t.” Dad retorted, pouring himself another drink.
“Hey now, this is important history! Can’t just pretend it didn’t happen. Better to learn it now than when you’re too old to care! You get it, don’t you, kiddo?” Grandpa asked, turning to Elliot expectantly. Elliot nodded vigorously, so focused on trying to form Grandpa’s descriptions into an image that his finger was starting to grow blue.
“See? He ain’t worried about a little graphic description! Anyway, as I was sayin’… where was I again?”
“The demons!” Elliot answered, quickly sitting up as he untangled his finger. “You were talking about the different kinds of them!”
“Right, right! So let’s see… some kinda human, some kinda monsters… now the real kicker here is that I saw some of ‘em fightin’ each other off! Maybe just trying to fight each other for all them souls that fell in… but I think I saw some of ‘em tryin’ to get all the people out.”
“No way!” Elliot gasped, leaning forward. “A demon wouldn’t really do that, would they?”
“Well they sure enough did! Saw it with my own two eyes!”
“Your own two eyes that couldn’t see your own hand in front of-”
Grandpa ignored Dad and continued without skipping a beat. “I couldn’t believe it, either! But I figure, all kinds of people go to Hell, right? Gotta be some people who became demons and want to make things right, y’know? Guess it ain’t too weird that Hell’s got some redeeming folk, right? I mean, eternity’s a pretty long time to realize that’cha gotta turn around and do somethin’ good for once.”
“Did they help you get out, too?” Elliot asked, settling back down onto his stomach in an attempt to hold back his excitement. “How’d you escape?”
“Hrmm.”
Grandpa leaned back again and started muttering to himself, rubbing his chin. “How did I get out? Huh.”
“You… don’t remember?” Elliot frowned, furrowing his brow with both skepticism and disappointment.
“’Course I remember!” Grandpa assured him. “Just a little fog on the ol’ memory banks. Ain’t got the recall I used to, y’know! Plus I was, oh… couldn’t have been much older than you! Lotta years between then and now.”
“You’d think you’d have a pretty vivid memory of your whole chunk of world falling into Hell.” Dad scoffed.
“Listen, Elliot, don’t give this old coot much thought.” Dad muttered, turning to Elliot. “He just likes hearing the sound of his own voice. Bet he wasn’t even there.”
“Hmph! Thought I raised you to respect your elders, son. The audacity!”
“I believe you, Grandpa!” Elliot reassured him. “I want to hear the rest of the story!”
“See that? Now that’s a good kid!”
“Just means I’m a better parent than you.”
Elliot sighed quietly to himself as the two bickered back and forth, resigning himself to weaving the rug’s stray threads around his fingers again. Grandpa told him vague stories about The Fall every year, and now that he was finally getting to hear about it he wasn’t even going to get to hear the whole thing. It wasn’t like he could just look it up at the library later; Mom never let him get books about things like that.
“Grandpa, the story?” he spoke up quietly, just enough to be heard and nothing more.
“Hmm? Oh, right! See what you did? Always gotta distract me with something.” Grandpa scolded Dad. Dad just shook his head and muttered something into his glass, allowed Grandpa to continue unimpeded.
“So, let’s see, how’d I get out? Pretty sure I just ran like hell, pun intended,” he chuckled to himself with a pat on the back, “and, uh… kept hidin’ around, couldn’t help myself from watching what I could… and then! And then! Then one of ‘em definitely saw me! Looked me right in the eye with them glowin’ orbs of theirs!”
All of Elliot’s impatience was quickly swallowed up again by anticipation and cold dread, his mind quickly flooding him with enough images to convince him Grandpa’s story was happening in real-time.
“See, I was… hidin’ behind something, or maybe it was in something. Under something?”
Elliot started scratching at the rug again as Grandpa rambled to himself, fingers spreading apart and closing in synch with his heartbeat.
“Either way it definitely caught me, and then it… stood there! Just stood there! Or it sat there. Listen, the details ain’t important. Thought maybe it was waiting for me to come out so it could tear the flesh from my bones and feast on my-”
“Arnie!”
Elliot jumped at the sound of his mother’s voice and quickly folded the threads he had unraveled underneath the rug. She stomped into the room, perching her hands on her hips as she approached Grandpa. His older sister, Dorothy, walked out of the kitchen with her and immediately walked upstairs, giving Elliot a quick glance and rolling her eyes at Mom as she went.
“What did I tell you about talking about-”
“Aw, don’t be such a spoilsport, Aggie!” Grandpa groaned, fully prepared for her interruption. “Kids gotta learn about these things early! Get it from the source! Ain’t like there’s many of us still around to give the first person view! It’s an important part of history-”
“Talking about tearing flesh isn’t an important part of history!” Mom sighed, exasperated. “For Heaven’s sake, Arnie, he’s hardly eight years old! He’ll learn everything he needs to know about The Fall in school, and it most certainly won’t involve loving descriptions of violence!”
“Hey, hey! I was only saying what I thought it might do to me! And as you can see, I’m perfectly fine!”
“I wouldn’t say that.” Dad commented with a low chuckle.
“And you! You’re just sitting here, letting your father give your son nightmares?” Mom scolded, causing Dad to shift uncomfortably in his seat. Though he shrank back a little, the expression on his face was firm.
“Relax, it’s just a scary story. Elliot’s gonna forget about it in a week. And if we don’t let the old man ramble, he’ll probably just explode on himself, anyway.”
Mom groaned, looked at the empty bottles scattered across the table between the men, and walked over to Elliot.
“Come on, Elliot. It’s getting late. You leave these two be and get to bed. Winter break isn’t very long, and I don’t want you to get into the habit of staying up late and sleeping in all day like last year.” she instructed.
“But I didn’t get to hear the ending of the story!” Elliot pouted, standing up nonetheless. He knew there was no winning this argument, or any argument at all with her. Mom was an undefeated champion.
“The ending is that eventually Heaven got word of what had happened, the angels saved everyone they could, and they sealed up Hell again and did everything possible to make sure nothing would fall into it again. The end.” she explained, pushing him along toward the stairs.
“Took ‘em at least half a day just to get down there!” Grandpa called after them. “And it’s not like you can’t get into Hell now! Bet you could get there on accident, still! Don’t get him all complacent and thinkin’ that-”
Mom covered Elliot’s ears and continued pushing him along, past Dorothy’s room and all the way into his bed.
“Mom-”
“No buts and no arguments. You need sleep. You’ve stayed up long enough as is.”
“Was all of the stuff Grandpa was saying-”
Mom gently grabbed his shoulders, took a deep breath, and looked him in the eye. He tensed up a little bit and tried to focus on her nose instead.
“Don’t worry about anything Grandpa was saying, okay? He’s just an old man who likes to hear himself talk.”
“That’s what Dad said, too.”
Mom smiled, letting a gentle giggle slip out. “Well, see then? Don’t let yourself get scared by his exaggerated stories, alright? Nothing like that will ever happen again. Heaven wouldn’t let that happen.”
“I wasn’t scared!” Elliot insisted. “I wanted to know more!”
“You don’t need to know more, and even though you say you do you don’t really want to know more, understand? You know everything anyone would need to know. You don’t need more details about… tearing flesh or whatever your grandfather was going on about. A bad thing happened, but it was fixed and won’t happen again. So no more thinking about it. It’s time to sleep.”
That wasn’t it. He definitely wanted to know more, and even though the subject was scary he wasn’t afraid. They learned all about Heaven in school and knew a lot about angels, but Hell and demons only ever got passing mentions as things that were bad. He wanted to know the details, however terrifying they were. Every time one of his questions got shot down, it made him squirm. It felt like an itch he wasn’t allowed to scratch.
Still, he stayed quiet. It wasn’t like Mom was going to tell him anything else, and if he went back downstairs he’d just get in trouble. As Mom left the room and turned off the light, he curled up and squeezed his eyes shut, hoping he would be able to hear Grandpa through the floor if he just focused enough. Eventually he gave it up and glared at the curtains instead.
He just needed to be patient, he told himself. Everyone was just being overprotective because he was still a kid. But someday he’d be old enough to learn whatever he wanted, and no one would be able to get in the way of that.
criticism of myself:
{Spoiler}
- too much telling and not enough showing. just so much damn telling
- could my prose be any more dull and humorless
- this is like the weakest thing i've written in a long time yikes
- i promise the future things will be better esp once zhirael comes in