FANTASY NOVELLA EPISODE #1

This story was originally written in 2022 and is now being serialized.

The stone steps were adorned with flaking paint, splotched in ornate patterns of flowers and curving shapes, all brightly colored with fading edges. From within the dark recesses of the cove, came the warbled, but melodic cacophony of music, sometimes shrill and sometimes softly lulling. Didn’t appear to be a place of skulking humans devoid of humanity. 

The edges of the cave opening were cracked in some places, but jagged all over. The seeping purple of twilight covered the sky. The dark reddish glow of the setting sun bled behind the building and its bordering thickets of trees. Its bloody tint peeked from behind the stone roof, spilling its dying glow atop its craggly bumps like a grove of withering roses. 

On the sides of the hill where the stone building perched, were rolling woods interspersed with cramped wooden huts. Their dark brown surfaces of faded wood blent into the barked fingers of the climbing forest.

Karvhael’s silver boots at the fringe of his pants’ golden-colored fruffles, brushed against the floor, jangling and creating a faint abrasive sound. This stone was unfamiliar to the pathways he’d walked within the confines of the Empire’s Commonwealth. Within those jurisdictions, he’d walked across much of tiled stone and pale rock surfaces. Here, the stone material of the stairs were gravelly and multi-colored, like clumps of the earth stitched together, stained by the varying brown and gray shades of sediment and earth. They fit in nicely into the mosaic of dirt and grass, receding into the rolling surfaces of green grass. 

Far beyond the clustered mass of leaf curtained trees of the woods, where they turned into a faded green, cloaked by the translucent fog of distance, were the round roofs of stone buildings. Two columns of dull smoke crawled out of two chimneys far away.

To the left, a narrow chimney of pale smooth stone buried in a clump of trees, was shooting choked dark plumes that went hissing in the air. 

The world went on while music and the aromas of a siesta’s hot food and slightly musky scent of dancing bodies in a dark room wafted from the cove, grazing Karvhael as he climbed the last set of steps and embarked upon the entrance. 

The sharp crunching of gravel made Karvhael flinch. He turned to see a stout man of smooth chocolate colored skin appear from around the side of the building. 

Like a willowy plant with a thick underbelly of stalk, the man sauntered forth, holding a shiny darkly-stained wine bottle. His dark arms were sinewy with bulging muscles that seemed to twitch with his sauntering, dance-like motions. He wore a sleeveless white tunic that clumped to his large chest. He wore a long brown robe at the waist, fashioned like a skirt. 

His eyes squinted at Karvhael and he stopped walking. He looked Karvhael up and down. The man seemed formless to Karvhael when he considered his own ornate and formal imperial attire of silver satin and metal decked with red velvet. 

A strong musky scent of alcohol wafted out of the bottle’s opening. 

“You here for the party?” asked the man in a razor-edged voice, lilting with mirth. A soft smile touched his lips. 

“Yeah,” Karvhael said slowly. He knew that to be a lie, but he needed a safe passageway. “I’m here to see about about a woman who used to live here.”

The mirth filled man suddenly frowned. His squint of puzzled amusement turned to one of skeptical fear. 

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m the envoy.”

“The envoy?” asked the man as his frown deepened. “Who does the belong to?”

“I belong to the classified,” said Karvhael. “I’m of the Empire, the only entity to send out envoys.”

“Who are you?” the man repeated, pointing a finger at Karvhael in an aggressive manner that made his upper half stagger slightly. 

“I’m here to see about a woman,” said Karvhael, continuing without answering, “who might be responsible for your demise.”

The man cocked his head up in confusion. 

“She may have led the Red Dawn mystic cult to your village tonight.”

“Nobody has portals to speak of!” the man said, waving his arms. 

“The Red Dawn find ways to infiltrate our world through people susceptible to their touch. Those who have touched any of the offchanted realms in any way are sought after as conduits into our world. The night-flyers come into our world when the portals from the offchanted realms are opened. They attack those susceptibles’ homes, the homes that failed them.”

The bearded man said nothing for an extended time. He glared with sullen brown eyes and what seemed like blindingly furious white irises into Karvhael’s. Despite their even gazes from across their similar heights, Karvhael felt imposed by the larger frame of this more muscular man. 

With his leopard-like frame and his unmoving nonchalance, he was what stood in between, the young man Karvhael and the goal he was set out to accomplish. The silver-colored satin of his robe, his red armbands and the golden fruffles bordering the ends of his pants no longer felt as dignified and answerable to Karvhael as it had mere minutes ago, as he’d strolled grassy staircase to a hut that had once been hidden by the blue of sky and the mounted grass of the hill. 

Karvhael was starting to feel like he was dressed in a frivolous costume in the land of open fields of grazing animals and farmers dressed in simple dully colored tunics. 

“Listen, boy,” the bearded man grated, almost speaking the insecurities of Karvhael’s mind into existence. He motioned with the arm holding the wine bottle as he spoke. Dark liquid sloshed around inside the tinted glass. “We see the real flyers the Plagese left here. They’ve been here for ages and the Emperor— or…..” He swung his arm holding the bottle up, bringing it up to his mouth and taking a long swig and then wiping off the dark drops of liquid pouring down his beard. 

“— your emperor and his governors have been living here far away from our lands. We make do with what we have. We hear the stories of conquest and rebellion from the Pilasee, but we know they tell them only because they can. They live comfortably. My people haven’t seen the nightflyers haunting our forests for ages. You don’t know our real problems. The Empire doesn’t know our real problems.”

“The Emperor and his governors have been living far away from our lands. We make do with what we have. We hear the stories of conquest and rebellion, but we know they tell them because they can. They live comfortably. Here, the night flyers border the woods. We have more important things to do than listen to the fairy tales of dangers by people who live with more than us.”

Fantasy world story segment #1

The rising sun cast a leprous yellow light atop the smoldering battlefield. The enemy, a dark and bloodied mass of bodies, was streaked in crimson stains that glistened through soaking gray robes. Faint waters lapped at the border of the plain from an ocean too distant to wash death away.

            The Emorian victory had befallen the previous night, frozen under starlight, blown away by the chill of night.

            Logan’s comrades doused themselves in liquor, thumping one another across their plated armor. Cheering raucously. Logan could only spend so much time within the jittery confines of their huddled bodies.

            He slipped away, moving closer to the edge of the hilltop, overlooking last night’s battlefield.

            He grunted, heaved off his plated chest armor, ripping the underlayer of corded leather that connected his large chest plates to the clinking scales that wrapped around his shoulders.

            His eyes stung with the ache of sleeplessness. The roar of his fellow soldiers, the men he had fought with— killed beside, grew less imminent, but never dulling.

            It was a frenzy of blood lusting. Logan and his fellow fighting men would be given epaulets for their labors next to the Beaches of Eden. Within their castle walls, it would be said that they’d fought valiantly at the site where mankind had once swum to Shores of Earth to become humankind. They’d murdered the foreign invaders. Created a new beginning for the Kingdom of Humans.

            They would be heralded as the saviors of a new homeland. They’d paved the way. They’d be rewarded with gold, mansions by the Forlorn Coast, women and the coveted lands of a new world they’d purchased with the blood of fallen men whose corpses basked under the morning sun.

            Logan felt his knees buckle, falling on them.

            He’d achieved what he’d wanted. Attained the status he’d been told a glorious man of his nation should achieve. A lowly peasant boy like himself had done what he’d been told he couldn’t— wouldn’t.

            He’d made it this far. And now, the moment he’d waited for tasted bitter, bile.

            His eyes were glued to the scene below the hillside.

            Charred earth, the trenches of ruptured soil where broken remains— shards of wood and cracked slabs of cement lay interspersed around the corpses, like the work of a blacksmith from the Underworld.

            His work. The work of Logan and his fellow soldiers. They’d arrived at this plain, pillaging the foreign invaders.

            Invaders.

            Who were the real invaders? The fallen men in robes or him?

            Rats caught in metal traps deep in the cellar of the Keep.

            Some of those rats were the boys he’d grown alongside with in the Poverty Fields.

            He’d seen them. Men, shadows of the boys he’d once befriended, turned to killers just like him.

            “Logan!” voices had called to him. Pleading. Or were they decrying? Was it disgust? Fear? Logan couldn’t tell in the murderous frenzy. Nor could he now as he dwelled on his memory.

            Old companions. Were they responsible for the massacre at Holy Mountain?

            Or were they just poor men of the Southern Reaches placed in the wrong place at the wrong time? Was it their misfortune to be labelled under the same banner as the marauders of the Southern Reaches? To the Emorian dispatch, there was no difference.

             A patch of clouds brushed past the bottom of the rising sun, creating an explosion of golden light, tinted by orange, spilling out of the sky. The gray peal of the morning heavens had turned to a seashell blue. The sun’s aura tinged the reflecting seawater, rippling like embers of a fireplace, the waves folding like crumbling wood.

            Logan’s dismantled armor plates teetered at the slope of the hill, tumbling down, their thuds echoing across their welded metal surfaces.

            The vertigo and weight of exhaustion made his body limp— shivering, nonetheless. As he fell forward, his torso tipping over, he could see gray wisps rising like steam from the damp corpses.

            His head crashed on the sloped grass, sending him to an unconsciousness of dreams haunted by risen ghosts.

2200 Blues Interlude (Early Draft)

Concept sketch of Eagle’s “basement” by G.R. Nanda

Sand irritated his feathers, having burrowed under his layers of red plumage. He twitched, jerking his feathers back and forth. Sand drizzled out from in between his twisted feathers where there were caked banks of sand underneath. They fell like rain from dense unrelenting thunderclouds. 

He blinked and shuffled his butt across the ground, raking more sand. The air was noticeably still. Of course anything would seem still after being dragged through the sky by Eagles soaring at dizzying speeds.

Looking behind at the depths of the hole he lay in, he could almost trink himself into thinking he was still asleep. The space of the dusty rock walls beyond were as dark as the insides of the eyelids. 

The cavern was silent. The greenery of the creeping wilderness in front was tinged with the evening blue of a dying day. Like a blanket of snow, the blue radiance settled in, splotching the bushes and shady winding trees until the green of the leaves of the bark disappeared. 

Leaving a deep blue that was quickly dimming to the pitch darkness of the cave. 

The scuttling hoots of monkeys died. The night was replaced by the sharp and incessant chirpings of nighttime critters. 

In the slithering pitchess and singularity of darkness, the memories of a frantic hunt and fall into a larke of horrors crashed into his consciousness, snapping back from the tension of dormant memory and ricocheting across his mind. Each ricochet— each thought of unbelieving anguish. 

He’d failed the hunt. Failed his training after enduring and progressing for so long. Was it real? Mother Hawk in chains? Would he ever know? 

What if he’d stayed? What if he could have fixed the situation? Seen if the sight of Mother Hawk was real and fixed it? What if he hadn’t plummeted to the lake? Would the land around it be burning? 

The images of a smoldering forest rimming a lake erupting with forceful heat crashed over him. The helpless questions prodded at his mind like hot rods he couldn’t grasp. 

He’d failed the Eagles. If only they’d let  him stay and fight……………………

“Time to rest.”

The last words spoken to him. 

Father Hawk’s heart hammered with the anticipation of action. Of remedy to his pain. But those last words gonged from his memory, ringing through his mind. 

Hearing them. He sighed and slumped to the floor, closing his eyes to darkness within darkness. With that, he settled into an uneasy, but exhausted sleep. 

2200 Blues Chapter 45 (Early Draft)

Concept sketch of Eagle’s “basement” by G.R. Nanda

The Eagles flew over the lands, but slowly descended closer to the treetops. Once distant shrubs, they were now bustling, swaying bodies of leafed wooden limbs. 

From below the leafed green masses were bodies of grey and red poking through the green and rustling the undergrowth, tumbling through it. 

They scant seemed distant from the hills of red and brown rock that buttressed the trees on their sides and overlooked the woods in towers that loomed every which way, fading into the blur of the blue sky’s havens. 

But the grey, red and brown objects moving at a fast pace on the forest surface were not rock crumbles or rubbles broken off the jagged cliffs. They moved at too fast a volition and speed to be mere rocks and stones where no wind blew. Branch by branch, they grabbed vantage. The stream flowed from the very bottom of the forest up into the tree branches. 

Why! They were monkeys. 

Hoots bombarded the air. They were shrill, but lilting with lightheartedness. Bubbling like laughter. 

Monkeys scrambled at the forest floor and mounted the trees. They chased after the Eagle’s airborne path. Almost as if they were trying to grab ahold of Father Hawk’s legs. 

Suddenly, upon the first dozen monkeys reaching the top of the trees, they split at the peak, diverging into two different paths that raced across the leafy roofs. Bounding over different trees, the two streams, slivered in their furry brown masses across different stretches of woods, separated by dozens of trees in between. 

Amid a frenzy of frantically moving masses of monkeys vying for leverage, climbing over each other and grappling branches. They climbed above, around and to the sides of each other. They were a web of interlacing threads, constantly shifting and rolling. 

However, amid the frenzy, the masses always separated into the distant lines, rivulets receding away at distantly separating paths. 

Father Hawk watched in fascination below him. The cascade of hollering monkeys climbed up the trees, creating a squawking high pitched clamor. Yet, monkey by monkey, they dropped down, melting into highways, moving further and further apart the more the monkeys strolled. 

The highways hastened underneath Father Hawk until they surpassed the Eagles’ flight. Their shouts faded to a shrieking din and their bodies settled back into the undergrowth. At the far reaches of the highways, their presence dwindled to mere splotches of grey and red, bubbling and popping in between the leaves and trees. 

Father Hawk looked back up the woodlands, trying to see the monkeys’ onward path. 

Rising in front of him were two rock monoliths, ascending from mounds of lower rock grazing the trees. 

They rose like dry mountains, peaking at the blue haze of the higher heavens. 

The monoliths were bridged by a craggly rock ridge of orange protruding from the poking trees. 

As Father Hawk neared the ridge, he spotted a small monkey, frozen atop the ridge, watching intently with beady black eyes large enough to be seen from so high. 

Once Father Hawk and the Eagles neared the ridge, the monkey flailed and screamed. He jumped on all fours as Father Hawk passed over, shouting into the trees below. 

The Eagles suddenly swooped to the right, shifting their left wings upwards. They swivelled and glided below, moving fast and skimming the treetops where the clamor had left them behind, turning into an increasingly distant chatter. 

Smaller birds fluttered here, flitting away from the oncoming bodies of Father Hawk and the Eagles.

The wilderness here seemed more active, teeming with buzzing, darting critters and scuttling bugs and mammals, scampering up tree bark and, the forest floor and slithering out of crevices in leafy foliage and clustered sticks. 

The life and movement was spread out larger than in the Eagle’s haven. Larger than anywhere in the Shadowlands. Here, the life was so spread out that its din of chirping and buzzing created a general din emanating from all directions. 

The Eagles broke formation allowing those on Father Hawk’s side to hover to the earth in between the trees. 

Swooping to the treetops, they left the safe haven of the skies for the gently rumbling, teeming leaves topping the trees and blossoming in the buzzing undergrowth. 

The Eagles separated, flying farther and farther away from each other, but staying in a constant line. Father Hawk’s chest pinched and a fuzzy faint semi-consciousness flooded him. It bled darkness, obscuring the forests and cloaking the Eagles’ destination.

2200 Blues Chapter 44 (Early Draft)

Concept sketch of Eagle’s “basement” by G.R. Nanda

For the majority of the flight, Father Hawk was in a half-awake daze. A helpless stupor of immobility and half open eyes that always threatened to close. But as his eye-lids closed, he’d always be jolted awake by the strain and motion of dangling in flight. 

The grey light with flickers of red fire shone through his eye-lids, but dimmed as the journey continued airborne. The insides of Father Hawk’s eyelids turned to a pitch black. 

The cracklings of burning trees, roars of wolves and the smells of sulfur and charred trees disappeared. 

The Eagles maintained a straight formation, soaring into skies above smoother, rolling landscapes. They rode high enough that the darkened trees of the Shadowlands were blotted out and made to a distant carpet for hills and cliffs perched higher. Above the Mark of Shadow. Touched by light. 

Higher above, the air was less musty. It was clearer. Light green trees swayed gently below them, dancing amongst each other. Unlike the cramped barked bodies of the Shadowlands below. Cliffs were snaked by shrubbery, climbing grass and vines. They had a dark reddish-brown complexion of scraggly rock that glinted in the light. 

It looked like the lands of the Eagles. Yet, in his stupor of half-open eyes, Father Hawk could still tell that he and the Eagles were not close to home. 

The lively hoot of a monkey echoing from below the treetops echoed this thought as well.

2200 Blues Chapter 43 (Early Draft)

Concept sketch of Eagle’s “basement” by G.R. Nanda

Upon leaving the roars and hissings of the water, Father Hawk was assailed by the raucous howlings of wolves. They growled, grated, barked and haunted the world with their eerie, high pitched cackling howlings.

It was a sea of unrelenting, booming cries for death, ringing in booming blood curling tones. 

Father Hawk was still engulfed in water that dripped off of him and was flung at him in hot droplets that fizzed from the lake’s surface. 

His body was pinched in an aching pain that throbbed from within his center and shot outwards. He was too weak to move. His ascent was propelled by the soaking Eagle who took slow, but strong and forceful strides to flap his wings to elevation. Water leaked from his airholes. The blockage turned the roaring and howlings to hums, collective and distant. 

Father Hawk struggled to blink away the water that dripped down and clung. Through the wet droppings were the blurred yellow lines rimming the ash-choked greenery of the trees. Smoke was a grey blur blanketing the sky and the edges of the treetops. 

The yellows, reds, blacks, greys and greens intermingled in a murky acne of a burning jostled forest coated by the water dripping over Father Hawk’s eyes. 

His body felt as if it were on the verge of giving out. He teetered on the edge between consciousness and unconsciousness. Weakness befuddled him. There was a flame of iciness flickering at his core, threatening to lash out and envelop his insides. 

The claws tightly grasping Father hawk jerked with each flap of the Eagle’s wings. It was disorienting, nauseating. The world spun around Father Hawk as he hung, limp, his claws, wings and head lolling back. The burning, shaking trees smeared by water eyes spun around and jerked to and fro. 

Father Hawk’s eyes involuntarily squeezed shut as coarse warm liquid pushed through his throat and beak. He opened his beak to let out the vomit. He grunted and moaned as the substance poured out, plummeting to the lake surface. 

“Shadow-seer!” 

The wolves yelled in unison, shouting that phrase of two words in their rough gravelly, barking howls. 

“Shadow-seer!”

Their united clamor resounded all around Father Hawk from the rim of the lake. Their voices sounded like groaning trees, roaring waterfalls and crashing rocks. 

“SHADOW-SEER!”

“SHADOW-SEER!”

“SHADOW-SEER!”

Father Hawk opened his eyes and moaned after the last stream of vomit left his beak. He blinked out the last drops of water. While water still dripped down his face and from his neck, he could see more clearly than before. 

In his pinched fuzzy vision, Father Hawk saw a ring of fallen trees surrounding the lake. Some had been uprooted, fallen to the waysides of the forest or had crashed into the lake, where their bark and leaves dissolved into little brown and green bits in the streaming waters. 

Many had been ripped off at the midsections of the stumps. Behind the edge of the lake were the raging fires of yellow and orange tendrils flickering and dancing through foliage and leaves. Some had made their way to the edge of the lake where they flared on stumps, grasses and groups of leaves. 

In between the fires and ravaged trees were howling wolves. They were the grey furred, large snouted, muscular creatures with glinting yellow eyes that Father Hawk had fought before. 

They edged the lake and crowded behind, deep in the forest, in hundreds. Their roaring rippled and blew their silvery fur, fanned by the many flames around them and shook the grasses, shrubbery and trees. 

Their roars pushed at the lake’s waters, creating a vortex of bubbling water that met at the center, right under Father Hawk, where it swirled and fizzed upwards like a hill of foaming columns threatening to engulf Father Hawk all over again. 

The trees were the size of Eagles and the wolves, the size of ants from Father Hawk’s height. 

A wolf at the center of a pack of his comrades directly in front of Father Hawk’s lolling head stood up on a boulder, visible above the rest. 

“Shadow-seer!” he growled. “You have seen and arisen from what most have been consumed by!” His voice boomed above the general rumble of “SHADOW-SEER!”

“Your dominion belongs with the Shadowspawn! You are the seer of both warring sides! Your powers do not belong to the righteous!”

The Eagle carrying Father Hawk buckled his legs, tucking in Father Hawk, bringing him closer to his chest. Father Hawk could now see the swarm of Eagle comrades who had arrived at the lake with him before submersion. 

They were blurs of black bodies and wings, speckled by white heads. 

“Your powers belong to the POWERFUL!”

The wolves rose on their hind legs, caught in an uproar louder than the last. 

“SHADOW-SEER!”

“SHADOW-SEER!”

“SHADOW-SEER!”

Trees from the lake edge and beyond were ripped from their roots, snapped in half and flung into the lake. 

Dozens of trees crashed into the lake. They resounded in a hot splash that cascaded into the vortex of water underneath Father Hawk. 

It morphed into a terrific geyser that imploded under Father Hawk and the Eagles. Torrents and jets of water shot forth, just merely missing Father Hawk. Yet, he felt their hot wrath. 

“RISE!” shouted the Eagles frantically flapping above. 

Father Hawk’s rescuer flapped furiously, this time flapping front and back, propelling away from the lake. 

All the Eagles formed a line swiftly passing over the lake, over the burning treetops and their missing neighbors. 

“No,” croaked Father Hawk. His eyes bulged. “Fight………..them,” he managed. 

“It is not time to fight!” said his rescuer. They left the lake and entered the space above the decimated woodlands. 

“It is time to rest.”

 

 

 

2200 Blues Chapter 42 (Early Draft)

Concept sketch of Eagle’s “basement” by G.R. Nanda

Tears seeped from Father Hawk’s stinging eyes, befuddling his vision  as they splayed out, merging into the volumes of the Shadowlake. The sight of Mother Hawk’s burning grew blurrier and distant. 

It was then at the welling of further anguished tears, trembling at the brink of the wavering scene of Mother Hawk that Father Hawk thought with clarity. Mother Hawk was haunting. That was all there was to her essence. When the brightness of the searing sight diminished under the blur of tears, Father Hawk could see clearer. The burning body below was merely a spectre of his projected fears and insecurities. 

He knew better. Mother Hawk was not at the bottom of a lake with the Huntsman’s soul. She was far up in Father Hawk’s former haven against the stars. 

“THE QUEST”

“DON’T-LEAVE-”

“Don’t leave the quest, muttered Father Hawk, spluttering as water seeped in his beak and he spit it out. 

“Don’t leave the quest!” he thought as clearly as he could. 

It was all he had left after all………

Father Hawk whirled his head, pushing against the weight of the lake’s deepness. He squinted at the pale grey light jutting from the surface, so as not to hurt his already stinging eyes anymore. 

The Eagle reaching for him appeared to be suspended in a slowed movement. His panic seemed frozen– etched in his still wide eyes, unblinking. Tendrils and waves of water slithered and morphed around him. They cascaded, frothed– vines turning into rock walls, melting into oncoming serpents and sea-stallions. 

Pressure mounted in Father Hawk’s chest. The distractions of the Shadowlake had blinded him to his own drowning. 

He’d pulled away and noticed the sensations too late. By now, the pressure and torrents of water streaming through his beak, suffocated him– hit him in a startling wave. 

It seemed like he’d moved from one terrible sight to the terrible reality of struggling for air in a lake. Which one was worse?

The Eagle winced, his eyes squinting and his beak opened wide in a gurgling scream. 

“COOME…. HAAA..WWK!”

Father Hawk clawed at the water helplessly as it bubbled with a rising force that seemed to crowd him out. Just when his wings sloshed down in defeat, a hot bubble swelled under him, searing his back and pushing him up. 

The bubble’s fizzing consumed his hearing as he shot up, jiggling on its burning viscous surface. He rose swiftly, quickly passing many of the surrounding bubbles that had overtaken and loomed over him in their ascent. 

Father Hawk was fixated on the Eagle and his capsule of slowly descending froth. The Eagle barely receded in size while the walls of rising bubbles blurred away in a passing vortex. A vortex leading to the Eagle. 

Father Hawk’s rear was slipping back along the bubble. He was also getting blasted with an intake of water as he struggled to control his beak. He turned to the left and used his right wing to slap his beak. 

His movement caused him to teeter off the bubble. As he fell over it, the bubble burst under his cascading weight. 

The scalding slippery surface dissolved into a wave of heat that emanated outwards before dissipating. 

Father Hawk was once again fighting against his weight in the rapids of the sizzling, bubbling furnace of dark water. 

He frantically waved his wings ahead, trying to swim in and dent the thick liquid. 

The vortex seemed to undergo a reversal; the Eagle slowly receded and the bubbles stopped moving back. Instead, they flew up past him in their usual latitude.

The pale grey light of the Eagle dimmed. 

“No!”

Father Hawk kicked his legs. A bubble burst at one of his kicks, creating a heat wave that pushed him farther up to the side. He could use these waves to shoot up! Father Hawk had moved to the right, further away from the Eagle. 

He kicked a bubble rising underneath him to the left. It fizzled in its dissolution and sent a rippling wave of heat, pushing him up. 

 He kicked another bubble below. Pop! He rocketed up, doubling over in the process. His vision blurred. He was choking on water. The arrays of rising bubbles started to merge at their blurred edges in his eyesight. 

He quickly kicked another bubble. Pop! Phoo! Father Hawk shot up. 

Kick! Pop! Phoo!

Kick! Pop! Phoo!

Kick! Pop! Phoo!

Kick! Pop! Phoo!

Father Hawk was near the surface. The Eagle hung above him to his left. He kicked his  claws, mustering his final strides before his body gave way. 

The lake’s surface and the Eagle’s cascading froth no longer glimmered just a pale grey. Splotches of yellow, asky grey and orange sparkled and slivered around the froth and across the roof of the Shadowlake. 

Pinpricks of yellow flashed through the lake surface. 

Father Hawk mustered his final kicks, shooting up so his legs grazed the Eagle’s froth. Father Hawk doubled over backwards in his motion. His face neared the surface, allowing him to make out the faint green shapes of trees, whipping to and fro. A mass of leaves lunged backwards and shot over, snapping from the rim of the trees. 

As Father Hawk’s head dipped back, falling through the water again, he could hear the jangled, rippling crash of the leaves and their branches, splashing into the lake. 

He arched over, causing his head and the rest of his body to dive back. 

He had risen, only to fall once again. 

“My story doesn’t end like that,” thought Father Hawk. He screamed in fury, allowing more water to enter his beak. The shrill noise was warbled in the water. He waved his wings above him and kicked his legs a few more times. The vortex closed in on him until the tip of his left wing lapped the expanse of the sky reflecting on the water surface. Then, his body did give. Father Hawk’s pressure threatened to pinch his entire body and being into oblivion. His eyes dimmed, eyelids closing in. Black creeped across his vision. 

A roaring torrent ripped through the water above him, sending whirls and waves of froth pushing into him. A thick wing of drenched dense black feathered plumage snaked around Father Hawk’s wing, pulling him up out of the Shadowlake. Father Hawk’s eyes reopened to a hellish world.

UPDATE: A New Chapter is In

I have to apologize for the lack of communication about the missed publication date. I got sick for all of last week (not COVID). I am recovered and have written a chapter that is about to published tonight. The bi-weekly publishing schedule will resume with a publication next Wednesday on July 8th.

My break is over and you can all expect a summer of regular 2200 Blues.

PUBLISHING UPDATE

I apologize for the falsity of this week’s home page countdown timer. It had to change in accordance with my routine. I’ve just completed an exhausting virtual school year and have been taking time off to rest and take care of other responsibilities. This is going to be writing-filled summer, but I was burnt out following school and I still have some unresolved issues in my personal life that are taking my focus. Rest and my personal life have been taking up my attention for the past two weeks.

I’m going to update the timer for a publishing date this coming Monday, June 21st.

Rest assured, Father Hawk, the Atlantic Canyons, Nickel and Hedonim have not left my mind!