C R Y S T A L P A L A C E

To hell with the horns!

[crrystalpalace]

What is this blog all about?

A novella type thing that I’m writing... and I’ve just got to get my thoughts out about it. 

Synopsis

At the edge of the world is a castle embedded in the snowcapped mountains, where a cult of ice apparitions have taken refuge. Although he is always absent, their king sees all, knows all, and has kept them in a state of superstition and subservience to spirits that supposedly live in the castle with them. The Queen is succumbing to madness... apparently. And the prince has some sort of condition which has burdened him with constant fatigue, hallucinations, and dreams that he’s stuck in the castle. However, he learns through one strange occurrence after the other that his “condition” is something he shares with his father, and it not only explains his absence but reveals the true reason their subjects live in perpetual fear. 

 Genre: Mystery/Drama, with some elements of gothic horror.

What inspired the story?

I was approached by the prince in my dreams, when I was fourteen. He told me exactly who he was and begged me to find his palace, said he was trapped and the only one left. Seemed terrified and highly dramatic. As dreams like this don’t usually occur, the whole thing held my fascination for many years to come, and it was originally going to be a weird fanfiction for the game Paper Mario, which is where the palace he was talking about actually came from. It was terrible, and it wasn’t original, so I gutted the whole thing, but still really liked the idea of a mysterious ice palace and all of the fuckery that may have been possible. I wanted to explain how the prince could have ended up in my dreams, making those claims. 

Other things that have lent inspiration:

-- Folklore about ice creatures, especially Japanese koorime and tsurara-onna.  -- Astral projection and its claims, especially about different planes and the akashic records.  -- No Doubt’s very strange song “Tragic Kingdom”, which is actually about Disneyland, but when I was a young child I took it at face value. Re-discovered the song shortly after my dream and my jaw dropped.

Main characters:

The Prince -- highly intelligent, but terrible at strategizing. Short-tempered and always tired. A mix of masculine and feminine energy. Has no idea just how dramatic he is.  His Servant -- tight-lipped, stoical, and just trying to survive. Seems to be awfully pious, dedicated to rituals. Looks after the prince obsessively but emotionally avoids him. Really seems to know something, but isn’t helpful at all. The Queen -- losing her mind and off limits to almost everybody. The prince can only see her every few months. It’s not clear what she knows and her involvement in it.  The King -- plastered all over the walls, the subject of the prince’s bedtime stories. Lives in the most haunted part of the castle and sleeps during the day. Apparently a “true phenomenon”, despite his advanced age. Controlling and scary, but also negligent and aloof. 

[arsenicinshell]

Celestial Ceilings

[crrystalpalace]

Yes, it reminded me.

[crrystalpalace]

S Y L V E S T R E  +  A U G U S T U S 

Two more of this story’s characters, whom are still being developed. This is the first time I’ve drawn them. Please do open the full images… they’re huge. Let’s call them… two of the prince’s, erm… friends. And by his friends I mean his father’s friends… that the prince has to be friends with… whether he likes it or not…

[crrystalpalace]

T  H  E    D  A  R  K  E  S T     S  H  A  D  E    O  F    T  W  I  L  I  G  H  T    S  T  I  L L    S  U  B  M  E  R  G  E  D  the castle when an eerie howl escaped its northern halls, first very faintly, then gaining intensity. It was guttural, as if the behemoth that usually awoke them had fallen wounded somewhere inside. The staff was astir – frightened and curious, and beside themselves when the reason for this disturbance came to light.

When the prince’s own eyes opened, he threw his sheets off his head with his heart pounding. He lied in bed, in a pool of his own memories, until the horns sounded. They were followed by silence. Silence that continued indefinitely.

His servant appeared to take extra care, preserving that silence, when he arrived late, only to find once he had lit the lamps that his master was up and scrutinizing him.  

“I apologize, sir. Everything, and everyone, is off by several minutes, and I didn’t have what I needed to prepare your tea.”

It took only a glance for him to realize that something was different about the prince. The way he sat straight upright in bed, the way his alert expression shifted to face him through every step of his ritual. Noting his subtle mistakes, too: how he needed to stop himself to remember what came next, and the unusual trouble he had, taking out the folded table that was stowed under the bench at the foot of the bed. About the only thing he did right was pour the tea and back away… but the prince was not thirsty.

“Where are my exorcists?”

(e x c e r p t)

[crrystalpalace]

Also, Sylvestre’s nickname is Sylvia now, thanks to autocorrect

luckily he’s not able to have an opinion about that

[crrystalpalace]

I have made the prince say “gods damn it all” enough times that I have begun to say it myself

yet there are no gods I believe in, so it’s quite ironic

[crrystalpalace]

So with all those things about the prince in mind, the King is very embarrassed by him. He's kind of like "yeah, I created that, but don't blame me." He would say he was all his wife's fault. "If that had come out of MY womb, he would have been a whole other being, of different spices... just an entirely different broth, he would have been steeping in."

today’s musing

[crrystalpalace]

“Sir…”

The prince didn’t respond.

“There’s something you should know… So that you’re not troubled by it…”

Already, he had bolted towards the waxing sun’s exit and left his servant to sputter words he knew to be nonsense, as hollow as the sound compelling his master ever further from him. As the prince wandered, and his servant followed, they did so in separate trances: uninhibited curiosity, and an echo of duty.  

“Sir, the sound you hear… I’ve been told a cleansing of the entrance hall was… p-performed. D-deep in the night. As such, the doors were opened… They may still be in the process. We’re advised not to go this way.”

The prince carried on through the corridor beyond the exit, which was identical to the one from which they had arrived. Nothing would tell it apart. The prince glanced for the boy again, then at the corner of the corridor he stopped to listen, to gauge which direction would bring him closer to the perplexing sounds. “Sir, your whim to investigate is reckless…”

“You hear it, then?” The prince was back to charging as his servant tripped in his trail. “You haven’t explained what it is.”

“I don’t know, sir…” Answered his servant, while the prince stopped at another corridor and looked around, knowing and despising how this castle had only the subtlest clues by which to orient him. “Sir, the further you wander, the more likely it is you will find the lower class servants. You… shouldn’t walk amongst them, sir. They… wouldn’t know how to behave around you, you… Y-you may frighten them. Your majesty! The entrance hall is off limits at this time!”

By now, the speed of the prince’s steps matched both the fervor of his servant’s pleas, and the pounding in both of their hearts. His servant didn’t think as he reached for his master’s arm, swiping his sleeve, missing it only by an inch. His hand landed instead on the banister of the staircase at the edge of their path, one he was sure his master was approaching.

To his shock, the prince passed it by as if he hadn’t even seen it and rounded the corner. “Sir, where are you going?!”

Past that point were flurries of snow floating through the air, delicately, like embers from a fire. The whipping and moaning was even louder as a breeze swept the prince’s coat tails and twirled past him to play with his servant’s hair. Snow powdered their path, the further they went, until the floor vanished beneath it.

“I beg you to stop, your majesty… If you must see, let me look for you… It may be dangerous…” Weak and frightened were the words behind the prince’s shoulder. For no moment was he about to listen.

In front of them was an opening, and though it was very clear what was about to happen to him, the prince stepped out. He was immediately swallowed by violent snowfall, bolting in the wind and thrashing against the walls, up to the ceilings. The entrance hall, like a deep, wide throat, had produced these wounded sighs.

The prince shielded his face from his hair as it danced before his eyes, looking for the source of the madness. The double doors that he knew so well in his dreams were sealed shut, as sturdy as ever. There were no windows, no cracks in the walls. Nowhere, as far as the prince could see, that the outside’s chaos could have infiltrated the palace.

“Please come back, sir!” His servant begged, the farther he wandered. He was just behind him, too hesitant to reach and pull him.

“A cleansing of the entrance hall, you said?!” The prince shouted as his focus drifted with horror, though his voice was nearly lost to the wind itself. The snow, wide and sharp as razor blades, simply appeared, as though it had sliced from the outside through the walls.

The gusts of wind picked up and nearly threw them both to the floor. Why the prince had to stand in it for so long, in such awe, had perplexed and concerned his servant greatly.

He found that they were not alone soon after.

The heads and hands of the staff at the castle’s lowest tier had appeared behind the pillars and statues, faces as pale as the marble, eyes as bloodshot as one would imagine, being that they braved daylight for everyone else. Snow blindness of these cracked and fragile creatures was not enough to quell their fascination with the prince.

The whispering mounted as he staggered in the knee-deep snow to the other side of the corridor, with his servant trying his best to shield him. He hadn’t at first realized he was being watched. Though the elements had battered him, the prince gazed out to the faces at the other end of the jetting, white “razor-blades” with mysterious power, yet vulnerability. Clarity that he was helpless to. The staff receiving this gaze began to shrink and recede from the corridor. Though they were first enthralled by this prince whom they had rarely come to face before that day… the image of him proved too spooking, as if he were the storm itself.

[crrystalpalace]

To his father, what made this a land of ice apparitions was its desolation and distance. They thrived because they were cradled in the planet’s deadest trench: an extremity its veins could not reach. […] Humanity, the word all of the prince’s books used to describe mirror image creatures, whose lives were much shorter than theirs, and whose blood and skin were disturbingly warm. They melted the worlds they discovered, trampled over the spiritual with the material, and had finally carved veins into this extremity.

[crrystalpalace]

Apparitions of ice were born in virgin caves too treacherous to venture. They were born in the winds of storms too violent to weather. And in the singing cracks of the harbor, whose frozen depths kept ships at bay. Their realm was possible only as a mirage to humanity.

[crrystalpalace]

After thinking on it a while, it seems that ice apparitions wouldn’t need to eat

Or maybe any apparition. I think it depends on how much you want to humanize them. A lot of creatures in a lot of stories are often just humanoids with quirks or powers, but there seems to be enough about their existence to begin with that it would call for more drastic differences in how they function.

For whatever reason, I’m continuously drawn to the concept of tsurara-onna (icycle woman), which is a short and simple Japanese folktale about a man looking upon an icycle and wishing he had a companion who was just as elegant, something like that... And so that companion appears. Then, after being married to the man for some time, she felt unwell and went to take a hot bath... then disappeared. One can deduce she melted in the water. (But was she unsuspecting or was it a suicide?)

I like the story because of the simple way life was stirred: it took the elements + a kind of unintentional witchcraft (a lot of magic is simply one’s earnest will)... So I like the idea of playing with animism and saying that these creatures are nature personified. Everything and everywhere has a soul. A mountain, a cave, a stone. Knowing where the soul of an apparition came from is how one would know how to destroy it, too. Water evaporates, fire is snuffed or burns itself off, ice is melted (maybe cracked?), wind... well, how does one get rid of wind? 

If you set the parameters for a creature’s existence like this, then there is something to work with when it comes time to answer questions like “how is life sustained”, and yeah, it’s not making a lot of sense to me that any apparitions need food to live. I’ve shown the prince at dinner several times, but hm... 

I do think they have a thirst, however. Can’t have ice without liquid, right? So maybe they are just very thirsty... 

More on this another time.

[darlingdeathbird]

A (hopefully friendly seeming) PSA...

If you like someone’s work, give it a good ole reblog! It’s much more supportive than a like, because a reblog exposes their work to more people. Liking without reblogging is like leaving the post up on a shelf, in just one room, indefinitely. And for obscure blogs this means things that others really should see don’t get seen, and are caked in dust not long after. Please. For the love of creativity, if you see someone creating good content who isn’t getting a lot of notes, or even if they are, click that reblog button. It is so easy, yet so important

[crrystalpalace]

The top notch quality content you were expecting

[crrystalpalace]

Look at him. He must gain his wisdom through the eye of a needle.

Sylvestre

[crrystalpalace]

The castle cried of its own wounds; howls echoed from the northern entrance once again. From what could be seen of the forbidden passages, his touch had transcended dreams, his haunts had materialized. Not as a world of light and clarity, for which he had so desperately wished, but as visions not his own, compromised and smeared. Wind like the breath of poltergeists seeped through subtle cracks in the walls. Walls were ravished of their stories, naked, vulnerable, vast projections of emptiness. The king’s conquests and triumphs were murky portals in the prince’s dreams; now, even the frames had been carried off.

excerpt, pt. II

[crrystalpalace]

Update 6.9.21

I lament to say that not a lot of writing has gotten done in the past couple weeks. I’ve been feeling a lot more artistic and crafty, not author-y... authorish? Authorly. Yeah, authorly sounds good. I haven’t been feeling authorly. And in fact, I’m still a little confused what I’m writing. I know that a lot of drama is supposed to be happening right now, and I’m trying to come up with the best stuff that doesn’t come off, you know, sensationalist. Absurd. 

I also feel like I’ve set up a lot that needs to be dismantled. Contradicted. Poor Cosmo is still afraid to speak... The King’s entourage might seem complacent, when that is not the case either... Maybe I don’t trust my reader(s) enough to see they’re quietly shitting their pants. Always trust a reader, give them credit, let them connect dots, or wonder, or theorize for themselves. 

Well anyway, there won’t be an update tonight, because I’ve been too busy sewing a tailcoat. I make clothes now! ...sort of...

[crrystalpalace]

He's almost always been the favorite, this peculiar guy...