Prose

I'm working on a short-ish story which is in and of itself a prologue to a much longer work. Truly, my ambition knows no bounds.

Here's the intro, along with the first paragraph after the intro because the transition is one thing I wonder about. Comment away.

He is climbing a mountain, a steep jagged chunk of stone bursting out of the bowels of the world to wrench the breath from his lungs and the sweat from his body. Stone dust pricks at his eyes, gravel digs under his clothes into his skin, his hands are raw and bleeding, and he is still climbing. Perhaps he has been climbing forever. He cannot remember when he was not.

He is climbing a mountain because there is a woman climbing it, too, perhaps ten feet above him. She is a pale, flickering shape, with a tumbling cloud of cherry-red hair and a green dress unaffected by the tribulations of mountain-climbing. He has yet to see her face, but he is climbing after her, relentless, refusing to acknowledge his weariness as she refuses to acknowledge his presence.

He is climbing a mountain and she is getting closer, maybe eight feet now. His arm muscles are barbed vines corded around lightning, his back is ridged with terrific agonies, and his fingernails are ten tiny beacons for hordes of stinging wasps. But it could be seven feet now, only the space of a very tall man, and he keeps climbing. Her feet are bare, and this is indescribably exciting. He catches the flicker of bare legs too, and hauls himself up the jagged face of the rock just a bit faster.

He is climbing a mountain after a faceless, nameless woman, the frame of his body threatening to burst from his skin like Saint Guharrin’s. She is only a blur as he gets closer, the sweat staining his eyelids - very nearly within the reach of his arm now, and yet no clearer than when she was a dot of color in the distance. But it seems he has never seen a girl so desirable, and so he furiously scrabbles at the stone and forces his tortured body those last few strides.

He is climbing a mountain, inch by precious inch, his fingers digging into rock as if they would cut into the earth’s flesh. With one ferocious effort he stretches out his arm, and his gravel-scored fingers close around her ankle. The words are wrung from his throat, hoarse and bleeding in the air. “Your face. Let me see your face.” And she turns her head and looks down at him, smiling, and for an instant he appends the Grace of God.

Then they are falling from a mountain, his hand still locked around her slim ankle, the stones about them giving way to their weight. Her dress flutters in the air as they plummet. He cannot see her face. He cannot feel the cool blessing of her skin. He cannot find the breath to say he is sorry.

----------

Tarquin awoke to the steady hailstone tap of a knock on his door, one of those knocks that carried the intimation that this fist was using far less force than it could and very shortly would. There was hair in his mouth, vomit at the back of his throat, and a woman stirring groggily in his narrow bed. He stared at the sunlight coming in through his window and discovered that, as usual, this gave him absolutely no idea what time it was. The idea of choking down his bile and retreating to his fading dream appealed immensely, but the knocking was still coming and now the woman at his side was starting to mumble.

Bamf, content.

-R