A Gallivespian World

[AUST]

Just a couple of ideas really, a thousand words which may become more. I'd like to see your reaction anyways... (oh, and if anyone would be willing to beta/spellcheck this that would be awsome)


I love that feeling you get when you lie down after a game of rugger. You sit back and feel the cramp slowly leaving your body, every muscle and sinew slowly cooling and unwinding after the tension of the day’s activity. Sometimes you can actually feel the injuries here, abstained muscle which twitches with surprising regularity or a twisted ankle which slowly swells beneath the duvet. You slowly slip into your coma with a feeling of utter relaxation.

After a battle, however, it is a utterly different feeling. As I lie down at night I fear the dreams that are to come, the memories that will fill my mind with convulsing hate and violence. My father once said I was warrior, that I was born to kill and that I should accept my nature; to a certain extent I often think that he was correct. I have few abilities, but fighting has always come naturally to me; I’ve done it since I was a child and never stopped since, but I will never accept it as my unavoidable nature.

The dreams of violence are coming more and more often now; I can’t escape from them anymore. I dream of armoured bears and subtle knives, of the last battle at the end of the universe and golden children. I wake in cold sweats and I feel a mewing at the very heart of my being. Who are these people who haunt my dreams? I have never been the imaginative sort and yet such visions now follow my every step. I try to banish them but I can’t, whenever I lose concentration they return once more and fill my mind with death.

I haven’t told the Chaplin yet. I dare not, for admitting to such cowardice would open me up to accusations of possession and heresy. I would be accused of letting the abominations into my mind, of opening myself to the little people and their damns spurs.

So, I stay quiet. Most of us scream in our sleep now, remembering battles fought and comrades lost to the dragonflies, so my screams are ignored. If anyone notices my particular moans then I explain it away as the imagination of an old soldier, one who has seen to many battles and lost too many friends. I suspect they think I’m insane, but service to the church is for life and so long as I can wield a gun I am useful.

This night is different; my mind is filled by something else now. The violence is still there, yes, but there i something else which filters through the carnage. A single image of a golden child, sparking through the mist, always just out of reach. No matter how hard I fight, no matter how many times my heart is wrenched from my body by the bizarre ghosts which roam the heavenly battlefield she remains just beyond the fighting. A golden child in summer.

I wake breathless and bloody, my body scored with scratches where I’ve clawed at my body. I sit upright and look around the barracks, at the bodies of my sleeping comrades. For once it is quiet, the moonlight filtering in through the cross-shaped windows on the walls and casting an eerie glow over the room. The bodies almost seem to glow under the light, making me feel as though I can see through the covers and into the souls of my comrades, each ones aura pitted by the war.

So few. Once we where a battalion, a group of brave young men sent out to try and finally defeat the devils which plague this world. Now we are no more than a company, our numbers decimated by poison and insanity. Some became possessed, others simply begged the little people to kill them, to end the suffering. They knew we were coming, when we marched out a thousand strong from the capital. The little bastards are everywhere, always spying and always watching. They came at us in their thousands, a swarm of dragonflies with poison spurred riders, we killed as many as we could with our clubs and guns, swatting them from the skies and using acid to guns to dissolve through their plate armour. It was too no avail, eventually we were beaten back and they where merciless in victory, killing everyone who fell or surrendered.

Bastards.

I lie back and think of the images that have just flittered through my mind, the images of the cosmic battle at the end of the world. I realise one word is left on the tip of my tongue, a bizarre arrangements of unfamiliar syllables and odd sounds which whirl round my head like a magic spell. Lyra. I repeat it over and over to myself, quietly thinking about what the words meaning. Lyra. I say it out loud. Lyra. I feel like shouting it now, the impossible word from the impossible dream, so I do, almost shaking the rafters with my voice. Lyra. Lyra. Lyra.
Nobody stirs. They are used to such outbursts and screams in peoples sleep, able to sleep through all but the most insane of yells. Above, in the rafters, I can hear the sound of rats scurrying away from the noise, and then the hum of insect wings outside; fleeing the terrifying vibrations my voice caused. Then all is quiet once more, and all is still.

I am an old soldier now, or at least old by the standards of my army and yet that night still lives with me. I don’t know why I still remember that night, why it hasn’t been expunged from my memory like most of that period, by later and greater events, and yet it still does. It was the first time, to me memory, that I uttered words in that most foreign of languages, and the first time that I knew the name of the person who would become my obsession. I would sleep thinking of that golden face, I would march thinking she was just around the corner and I would pray that God would provide her for me.

One day he would be kind and do so, but for the meantime I would march and fight the little pests which infected my world with their spurs. In doing so, however, I would perhaps learn the truth about the Lord and see things that no man from my world had ever envisaged seeing. I am not, as I have previously stated, an imaginative man. I am slow and dull witted, with little ability with the pen or our language. Thus I can promise to you; this is all true. Every word, every thought is what I saw and experienced. All men, in all worlds, are good.

[Peter]

This is extremely promising. It does need a bit of polishing, but it leaves the reader wanting to know more, which is the most important thing.

[AUST]

This is extremely promising. It does need a bit of polishing, but it leaves the reader wanting to know more, which is the most important thing.

I agree totally, but its a rough first draft (As people know I have a few problems with spelling etc.) however I like the idea and I reckon HDM gives me a lot of freedom.