Story Seed Challenge - Shakespeare's idea
>> Monday, November 30, 2009
I remember reading about the story circle in a book when I was a kid. Someone would start a story and pass it to someone else to continue. Unfortunately, the attempts I've done before at "writing exercises" haven't gone well. However, I'm always ready to try again. I know I enjoy doing them.
So, here goes. I have no plan. I'm just going to start writing and see what happens...See what you can do with it.
Lotha didn't know this place. Even before he opened his eyes, he sensed the difference, the scents, burning his nostrils with unfamiliar fumes that covered the smells he was used to like earth and plants and the animals, even himself. Beneath his back, the ground felt unnatural: cold, smooth, hard. Nor did the air feel right. The air flowed, but not as he was used to and there was a staleness to it.
He opened his eyes to the stillness, the blackness. This was a new darkness - no moons, no stars, just the emptiness of all he knew. His hands searched the ground. No dirt, no plants, no roots. It was unbroken and smooth like a river worn pebble, only flat. And it seemed to go on and on until he found another surface the same standing from it, like a tree, only with the same lack of texture, the same flatness.
There were no smells except the foreign ones that filled his head and choked his throat. Tears flowed unnoticed down as his cheeks as he searched for an escape from the unassailable smoothness, the featureless sameness, the absolute emptiness of where he was. In desperation, his hands scrabbled over his own face, to ensure it's known features were his own, were the ones he knew.
They felt like his features, felt like what he knew as himself, what he'd seen in the reflecting pool, only the hair he knew was gone, his chin strangely smooth like the space around him. And his hands and body smelled different, as if his odor had been covered by the strange smells.
Was he done, gone to the land of the Gods? Was this horror the afterlife, one that not even the greatest elders had predicted? He threw back his head and cried, only to hear his voice echo unnaturally in this strange place.
And then there was light.
