BEHOLD. Excerpts from the five projects I worked on for nano.
I just kind of wanted them all together, really.
Two in Hand
Demons were born of magic and blood.
Dax knew, he remembered seeing images of them carved into the temple walls of Behdaiaa. Grimacingq, drooling faces, sitting with their backs arched like monkeys. Compact, near-human evil created by the hands of man and molded into a nefarious shape.
Dragons were different. They weren’t made by humans and malicious intent. They were a type of vile formed from the magma and oceans and, like the giant dragons of the north told in their history, born of precious metals that hardened their bones and their scales and made them near impossible to kill.
Dragons weren’t of the human world and therefore weren’t controlled by it.
That was what really made them dangerous. Independence and teeth.
Asshole with a Machete: the Chronicles
Roan didn’t kill people. Not really.
Sometimes people died around him, in his general proximity. But that was just a coincidence, part of the job. A symptom not a cause.
He’d shot people before. And probably severed one dude’s leg with a machete once. Life and death situations just happened and he didn’t have time to stick around and see who bled out or made it into an ambulance and lived. If someone pulled a gun on him, they should expect him to return fire. It was science or destiny or physics or something.
Jackson Xiāo was definitely dead though. The back of his skull wasn’t just detached, it was all over the concrete behind him.
Hästen
The voice, when it came, washed over him like cold rain. Sudden. The way a summer storm raced as a waterfall across the horizon, soaking to the bone in an instant.
You’ve been gone a long time.
Buceros’ body contracted, each muscle drawing tight. Crouched on the rocky embankment, hands frozen, outstretched before him. The air turned cold and he dared not move. Where the forest had been heady with the last hints of spring, now the moss beneath his knees crusted with permafrost. The voice travelled with it. Nowhere and everywhere at once, trapped in the air and impossible not to breathe in. Filling his stomach where it curdled and roiled, slick like oil.
The thought of a rabbit exposed and alone in a vast field washed over him. Along with the taste of fear.
He did not stand. He did not kneel. He barely breathed. Behind him, he thought. Turning only his head, he looked upon the black lake.
Ten meters out, a bird sat in the water. Its face was wide and sharpened to a pointed beak that sat menacingly upon a body the size of a man’s torso. Across its wings––elegantly tucked in on themselves, hardly showing a crease––white specs gleamed like stars. Sleek, black feathers curved from its head around the graceful bend of its neck. The feathers turned briefly, white-striped, before descending into the dark water, where the animal perched as if upon glass.
The eyes were red and they watched.
Buceros waited.
Said the bird:
A very long time.
Unnamed
The first reincarnation, Asper didn’t much remember. Nor did anyone else. Not anymore. There was talk of it, in some of the quiet places of the world. Where the main roads were paths through forest and field. Where humans found themselves greatly outnumbered by sheep and birds and wild things. Between the branches and shadows and flickering sunlight of the woods.
Fairytales existed in the small places: Fire. Destruction. The remaking of the world.
He didn’t remember his first death either but he imagined it with each one that came upon him. The finality of it. Had he cried? Begged? He couldn’t fathom the feel of it––the expectation of blackness and cold, things he did not know how to experience. Alone and without knowing, without expecting to come awake again. Not expecting to see light and know the taste of heat on his skin. Not expecting to wake up anew.
The knife sunk in, just below his ribs and his breathing slanted sideways. Hot. Wet. It bled slowly, his skin reacting hesitantly as if taken by surprise. Red and thick, seeping violently as he drew the knife farther down, towards his stomach. A line opening up. This, he thought, this will be permanent.
And when he sunk the knife, later, further into his chest, he went to his death believing it.
Consciousness came young, but not immediately. Asper imagined that each infancy was like any other, he never remembered them.
When he was seven, he stood in front of the polished brass plate that his parents used as a mirror. Just to check. He’d run his hands across his belly, looking for a groove, and found nothing. But maybe it was fainter, maybe he just wasn’t looking right. He stared at his warm-tinted reflection, pulled his tunic up to his chest. There was nothing. No line, where a scar should be, where he remembered. Just child bones and ribs poking out like a half starved thing.
Rewriting Historicals
“You only see yourself,” Agamemnon said, puffing his chest as if he wasn’t as guilty of vanity as Narcissus himself. “You think you are as high and mighty as any king.”
“What I see,” Achilles said in a tone like he was remarking upon the weather or the positioning of the beached ships against the oncoming tide, “is a battle for Agamemnon’s glory and Menelaus’ shame and I’m interested in neither.”
In my post about dragon lore, I mentioned a scene from the perspective of my twins’ mother. For nano, it was the opening scene and it’s rough but one of my favorites that I wrote.
And will probably never see the light of day so here it is.
TW: forced abortion, miscarriage
Every woman knows that with pregnancy, she courts death. There are laws and regulations and to break them is to die at a Maiden’s hands, deserving death all the way from sentencing to the shadows of the afterlife.
When I was fifteen, I watched a woman stoned for her pregnancy. They had tied her to the ground, hands above her head and her ankles tethered to stakes so that she watched the cloudless blue sky as men laid stones the size of a bull atop her body. The screams had started after two and stopped when the weight had become too much for her lungs to draw breath.
Children were dangerous, everyone knew and still everyone took the risk. My husband and I tried. We were in love, we wanted children.
Eyes brimming with possibilities, I could look at him and see his thoughts of an idyllic future. Thoughts of what we could build together. About having a son, teaching him how to lay bricks so that they kept the desert sands at bay, the water currents and how to moor a boat. I used to think about the love I felt for my husband and the way his eyes warmed when they met mine in the kitchen, across the yard, where other people could see at the market. I thought of his eyes in a daughter’s face and tucking her hair behind her ear. Or a boy with my nose and a dirt smudge across his cheek that never stayed away for long.
I dreamed about a child in our house, lazy autumn afternoons under the Red Date tree in the yard, closer to the desert than the river. Our apartment sat at the edge of the village, past the wheat farmers and the farrier. Less than a day’s ride to the capital, there was still enough room for the hens to squawk and roam and lay eggs where the sun would bake them before they could be collected. Perfect for raising a child.
We were in love. We were so in love that we needed someone else that was ours and ours alone, that our love could overflow into. Children were dangerous and still we were willing to try. A pearl does not lie on the seashore, if you want one, you must dive.
Pregnancy came in the dead of night when I was nineteen. I woke in a sweat. Sick plagued me for weeks, every morning worse than the last. The nerves arrived soon after and stayed, roiling, until the Maiden Guard rode down the main street two months later. Then the nerves turned to fear.
Every pregnancy had to be checked, inspected, given the blessing of not being cursed with the worst plague of all. Twins.
Five Maidens entered, two men and three women, the oldest middle aged. They asked questions about my habits, my mood, ill thoughts. Did I find myself waking under the waning moon? When the desert sands were hot at midday, did I wear sandals or go barefoot? When I crisped rice over the fire, did I prefer it burnt? Had I always?
The oldest’s hands pressed against my belly, first over my clothes, then under them. I remember the warmth of her fingers. I remember as they stilled, felt them burning holes into my skin the longer they held still. Everything showed in her face but she only spoke two words.
Cursed.
Twins.
They gave me saanhar resin, distilled from the sap and oil of a plant that flowered in the spring. Applied it between my legs, pressing their fingers inside my body. Then they beat me, one with his hands, the other with a short, straight wooden pole that made a dull sound against my stomach.
Cleansed by fire, my insides turned to ash but the sweat that broke over my body was cold, ice rolling down my skin. I felt feverish, bile rose in my throat, and then the blood began to flow. Down, down.
Down.
“Be grateful,” the Maiden said, “that you’re still alive.”
She was right, most women were killed. But I did not feel solace, I felt nothing. And everything.
They took my first pregnancy from me, tore it screaming from my fingers.
The second left me on its own, two months after my stomach started to show.
The next one left me too, and the one after that and the one after that. And the one after that. There was blood. So much blood and tiny, barely formed hands.
I cried over every one of them, alone on the floor with blood on my legs or the sheets and everything inside me empty, desecrated. I hated the Maiden, I hated the house, I hated the constant eyes watching, watching, watching. There was nothing worse than seeing a woman pregnant, walking the streets, tending her garden, holding her husband’s hand, like being neighbors with a shark that walks on two legs. And, for a while, it seemed like I was always pregnant. Never holding a child’s hand or carrying a baby abreast, but always in the early stages, ceaselessly, endlessly.
When my body rebelled, I expected it. For years and years after, we tried to conceive, chewed all the recommended herbs, tried every position, but my womb had given everything it could. There was nothing left and every day I hated myself. But, moreso, I hated what it had done to me.
After everything.
The Maidens’ eyes never left our house, they were always watching. We moved, left our lives and took camels through the eastern crossing, where the desert was tame. There were ox in the field next to our house. A field. I never knew so much green existed in the world. It stretched on forever and the nearest house laid beyond even that. In our self imposed exile, no one could ruin us.
When my final pregnancy took, I was thirty-four. We hadn’t been trying for a child and yet, the sickness came. And then the rest of the signs followed one by one, like landmarks on a trail I had walked before. But the trek was farther than any I had taken, I walked onwards, past the third month. And the forth. After the sixth, I locked myself inside the house and worried that I might stumble between the bed and the kitchen or move too quickly stoking the fire.
But nothing went amiss. Six months became nine. And then ten.
There were complications. My husband, for all his talents, was useless once the contractions started. Bent on avoiding the Maidens, we had left everything we’d ever known behind but there was nothing to be done. It felt like I was being rended in two. I would die if I tried to go on untended, I felt it, a baby was always meant to be my end.
My husband ran for a Maiden so that I was alone with the sweat and my screams, hair stuck to my face, pain lancing through every nerve. Starting in my gut and working slowly through each, unexplored inch of my skin. Just me and my child. I stood, braced myself against the wall and the dry heat and let gravity do some of the work.
Returning five hours later with a girl half my age, my husband held my hand and it felt strange, to be accompanied through this singular terror. After I had already accepted that I would give birth myself or die here on my own. The girl’s presence felt oppressive, a savior come too late. She was young, inexperienced, I don’t know where he found her.
But I remember her cold hands and her cold, horrified eyes when the first baby came silently into the world. And there was still another behind him.
The second child was as much a terror as the first. The Maiden saw them both into the world and when it was done, her body laid dead and broken on the floor. There was blood on my hands but it wasn’t my own and it wasn’t my child’s.
“You’re lucky to be breathing,” I said to the first, its small, squashed face.
The baby looked like the earliest miscarriages, where they had come out wrinkled and not quite human. Red irises stared back at me, so bright they seemed to glow. He didn’t cry, but his brother did and in his mouth there were teeth already beginning to surface. The other babies hadn’t been fully human yet; this one wasn’t human at all.
I mean they’re an entire different…genetic family? So there’s many species of shapeshifter dragon within that. Each of them with their own mythology and folklore and religions and creation myths.
I WILL BE HONEST I HAVE NOT BUILT OUT ALL OF THEM.
I’ll give you an overview which is mostly based off their interaction with humans.
The general human consensus on shapeshifter dragons is avoid, barter with when you have to, probably kill them to be safe.
A few reasons for this:
Most major human political powers don’t like dealing with species as intelligent but, on a basic physical level, also more powerful.
“Real” dragons also exist. As in the non-shapeshifter kind. They’re extremely long lived and powerful animals that the shapeshifters usually claim to be descended from and worship as gods. Humans discovered/decided that real dragons could be hunted for parts that would cure illnesses, grant powers, etc. Which means that most real dragons are extinct and survivors avoid populations and are never seen.
Humans need their powdered dragon horn from SOMEWHERE, SO––
Dragon shapeshifters are basically half animal so killing them for parts is acceptable, obviously. Gotta get your powdered dragon horn fix.
And then there’s the twins.
Twins
Shapeshifter dragons never give birth to multiples. Twin dragons are a rarity that only come into the world one pair at a time, they are always fire dragons, they are always more powerful, they have been known to cause mass destruction, near cataclysms, etc.
Humans and dragons can’t interbreed, it’s not genetically possible. But twin dragons are always born to human parents.
This is the modern dragon lore I’ve spent the most time with because my two main characters are dragon twins. I could post an entire scene from their myother’s perspective, it’s not a great time. Giving birth to something that’s not even your species was not ideal for her.
If you want to get into the lore and mythology of individual dragon cultures THAT IS ANOTHER STORY.
A list of dragon species that I have ideas about and have worked with:
Drasaih
Lishung – a version like a standard Asian dragon
Goreund – similar to what you might think of as a “classic” dragon, they’re absolutely massive and are the “dragons of the north” mentioned in my Two in Hand excerpt
(I have others written down but these three I write the most)
and then a few types that I haven’t named
Desert Dragons
Jungle Dragons
Lishung Counter
I could keep going but if I start getting too in-depth at once I will just write an encyclopedia about it.
I know what a Drasaih pelvic girdle looks like anatomically. I have gone deep.
