Quicunque

This is my entry for the Yuletide Flash Fiction Challenge at PanErotica - "The challenge is to write a short story of no more than 600 words. The only other rule is your story must begin with the following first line: The lights appeared out of the darkness.

The lights appeared out of the darkness, a score of candles dancing in the unnerving stillness of the night, fixed to a small pine tree that had been set up on the parapet of the enemy trenches some seventy yards away. There was still some sporadic gunfire and the dull thud of shelling in the distance, but along this stretch the artillery had fallen silent on both sides of the line. Instead, the still night air carried voices across the span of barbed wire and mud: snatches of laughter and shouts, bursts of singing drifting across the stilled battlefield.

The stench of rotting and unwashed bodies, stagnant mud and cordite was little better above ground than in the trench, but he lifted his face to the night sky and breathed deeply anyway. After weeks of cloud and rain, it was a clear moonlit night. On the enemy side, he could see small groups of men emerging from the parapet, and behind him, his comrades were singing carols of their own.

The two sides met among the bodies of their fallen comrades in the open ground between the trench lines. They were cautious of the extraordinary and unexpected truce at first, but soon small souvenirs were being offered and accepted. Hands were shaken, buttons snipped from greatcoats and exchanged, tobacco swapped for chocolate.

“Ein Licht für Ihre Zigarette, Tommy?”

He glanced round to find an enemy officer, a lieutenant of some kind, grinning at him, holding up a brass lighter and miming lighting a smoke. He accepted with a nod and leaned over to let the tip of his woodbine touch the offered flame cupped in the officer’s hand. The brief flare of light illuminated the grime ingrained into the skin, the broken and bitten nails, and for a moment he felt a powerful sense of intimacy with this stranger.

“Thank you, danke,” he straightened up and exhaled a lungful of smoke, gazing at the face of his deadly enemy.

Not the sadistic and cold-blooded devil that propaganda would have him believe, but a man just like him, young with ancient eyes that had seen too many atrocities. It was hard to sustain hatred for a man who shared the same grim and brutal reality.

He offered a cigarette from his battered case, which was cheerfully accepted. Tomorrow they would go back to trying to kill each other, but tonight was a different country.

“Für Sie, behalten Sie es.” When he shook his head, not understanding, the officer reached out and took his hand, pressing the brass lighter into it. The metal was smooth and still warm from his enemy’s touch. Turning it over, he saw there was a name engraved into it but it was illegible in the dark.

In return he gave the cigarette case. It was heavily dented now and the silver tarnished, but the officer grinned and seemed pleased by the exchange. From the pocket of his greatcoat he produced a small flask of schnapps and they toasted each other in the temporary peace of no man’s land.

“Fröhliche Weihnachten, Tommy.”

“Merry Christmas, Jerry.”

So it's time again already for PanErotica's annual Hallowe'en Drabble Challenge. The theme this year is "Dead but Dreaming" which is a hell of a tough theme but I have only myself to blame because I set it. Yes, I am slightly crazy...

This is my entry for this season's drabble challenge at Pan Erotica - 100 words on the theme of 'winter'. I based this on one of my collaborative fiction characters, a werewolf named Winter, whose story I wrote in 'Love Bites' in the Doors novel at PE a few years ago. It was nice to revisit him, albeit in a brief vignette.

Winter solstice; a far-off bell strikes the midnight hour.

Ash-grey and moon-silver, a wolf runs along the wood’s snow-shrouded edge. Pausing to snuff the familiar woodsmoke drifting across the frosted air from the tumbledown farm below, it raises its head to howl a night-song that pierces the glittering stillness like an arrow.

In the darkness of an upper window, a light flares up before banking to a steady glow. The wolf’s lover tends the beacon-torch that guides him home from his wilderness, until the night he too can shed his skin and dance with his mate in the moonlit snow.

Panerotica is holding a 100-word drabble contest for Hallowe'en, with the theme of Ghosts. This is the entry I've submitted for it.

It's written as an answer to a poem by Robert Browning, Porphyria’s Lover, which relates how a man strangles his lover with her own hair to preserve forever the single perfect moment in which she loves him. Because I’m some kind of weird masochist, I set myself the challenge of not only making Porphyria’s response 100 words, but also keeping to the same rhyme and meter (iambic tetrameter) Browning used. Please don't laugh too hard, hmmmm?


The rain is cold and hard tonight,
The chill wind tears the sky apart,
Steals away the warmth and light
With fingertips like deadly darts,
Shards of ice that pierce the heart

And I will come through wind and rain
To crouch as ever by your chair.
Are you so sure I felt no pain
When round my neck you twined my hair,
One perfect moment to ensnare?

Our love is pale and dead, but ever
Bound together by death’s knot
I will haunt your dreams forever,
Feed your madness till you rot.
May God forgive you, I will not.

Although I generally don't write fanfic, I have dabbled. One of my forays, back in 2003, was writing a couple of original characters in a Highlander novel at Panhistoria. The fact I'd never seen any of the TV series - and indeed only the first of the movies, many years previously and well forgotten - didn't stop me. What did stop me, was when the novel was lost in the infamous Crash of '04. Many the novels at Pan were rebult from the ground up, including the Highlander one, but I never revived my characters there. They went into space in a science fiction story instead.

Recently, myself and several of my original writing partners from that first venture into Highlander territory have started to pick up our story again, after a 5 year hiatus. This time it's at Pan's sister novel, Panerotica, even though the story is no racier than it ever was (ie not really at all *chuckles*). We've started by undertaking to repost everything we had saved from Version 1 before picking up where we left off - and it's been an interesting exercise to say the least. I have managed to frighten myself with the realisation I wrote much better 5 years ago than I do now.... *laughing*. Oh, and I still haven't see any of the TV series at all!

Since you have to be a member to read everything at Panerotica I thought I'd share a brief excerpt from the story here. So here is my Watcher character, Dante Sparda, newly arrived in Rome to take up his new (and first) field assignment - observing the Immortal known as Zaekim Sanburd - and harbouring a private agenda that threatens to distract him...

Making notes

Roma, August 21st in the Year of Our Lord 1585. The Woman hath taken a House in the Monti District of the City, at the corner of the Via del Boschetto, where she doth now go by the Name of Margarita and passeth freely amongst the Artisans and all People. Your Servant hath taken a Lodging nearby, and doth Keep close her close in Observing her though she knoweth him not…

Old archive entries from long ago that had been encrypted in code by an unknown Watcher and buried deep in the dusty chronicles, until Dante had found and deciphered them. He had read them hundreds of times, using them to painstakingly plot Marguerite Chauvelin’s route across Europe and three hundred years. Now he read them again on his laptop in the small room of his pensione.

Dante sighed in wry self-amusement as he realized he’d got distracted again while painstakingly transferring the handwritten notes on his present assignment to the computer. Almost without thinking he had brought up the codeword-protected files that contained information on another Immortal, one that held a deeply personal interest for Dante. Though the chronicles asserted she had been dead these last hundred and forty years, she was the reason for his existence and his secret obsession, just as she had been his father’s.

He lit a cigarette, leaned back and closed his eyes, letting his mind slide back to how it had all begun: himself sixteen years old and left without family or means after the violent death of his father in mysterious circumstances. No one had known what to do with him, until a man he’d never seen before had turned up to “tell the boy his heritage”. This was Tomas Le Haine, and what he had told Dante had changed his life forever.

“I am here because of what your father was, and because we look after our own. Andreas Sparda was not just a bookseller, he was also a research Watcher, Dante,” Le Haine had smiled at the grief-numbed boy gently. When he returned to the Watcher Academy in Geneva, he had taken Dante to train him to follow in his father’s path.

But although he was studious and often found pouring over old manuscripts in the library, there proved to be a secretive and wild streak in Dante. He was often missing for hours or even several days, from which he would return inexplicably cut and bruised as if from a fight.

He told no one, not even his beloved mentor, that he had now discovered something to focus his bitter vendetta on. It was in his father’s personal notebooks recording their own family history that he had first found the name of the obsession that had drawn Andreas Sparda into this secret society, and hence to his death.

… Shit! The forgotten cigarette had now burned down low enough to threaten Dante’s fingers and he quickly stubbed it out in the overflowing ashtray on the writing desk. A glance at his watch showed he had spent longer simply sitting here mulling over the past than he could afford. Shaking his head and muttering at himself, he closed the Chauvelin file, and dutifully began a new one to continue transcribing notes on the one who called herself Zaekim Sanburd instead.

[from Highlander: For All Eternity, all rights reserved]

The collective noun for hares is a husk. A husk of hares. Though I've also heard of a drove, a down, a leash, a mute, a trace, and a trip of hares. This morning, I've been sitting at my computer gazing over the field the other side of the road, entranced by the antics of a pair of hares.

After being blanketed with snow for several weeks, the temperatures have risen and the days been relatively warm and mild. With the rise in temperature, Nature suddenly started to Think Spring. Snowdrops are blooming, daffodils are peeking through, catkins are in the trees, and the hares have started their boxing matches a few weeks before they normally start their breeding season.

Hares are wonderful little creatures. They're chasing and leaping about the field, then racing up to each and rearing on their hind legs to box at each other rapidly with their front paws. This is the behaviour that gives Mad March Hares their name. It used to be thought the boxing was a aggressive/competitive thing between males. Turns out many of the 'matches' are between unreceptive females and persistent males - you go, girl!

It's hard to imagine our fields and moorlands without them, but brown hares aren't native to Britain. It's thought that they were introduced in Roman times, probably from Asia. Our true native is the mountain or white hare, but I've never seen one in the wild. They headed north with the retreat of the Ice Age and nowdays are really confined to the Scottish Highlands where they're still more common than brown hares at higher altitudes. There's just one colony of mountain hares in England, that was reintroduced to the Peak District in the 1860s. But even though they're foreign interlopers and not as glamorous as their white cousins, I still love my brown hares.

That reminds me, I once wrote a series of little pieces about hare lore for another project; I should find them and post them in The Cock, the Scythe, and the Cat mythology and folklore lounge at the Panerotica community site.

Wyatt has posted in his blog - Plotting Between Collaborative Writers - about the fact that most collaborative fiction stories at Pan Historia are presumed to keep rolling on eternally into an indefinite future, which can make coming up with new plot ideas all the time a real challenge.

I have to confess that I personally often find difficulties with very long-term stories because I run out of inspiration, or get bored and distracted by something new and fresh. Sometimes you just have to accept you have hit the end of the story's trail and know when to call it a day - to continue dragging it out beyond its natural end would be akin to aging rockers trying to wring out one last tour for a yawning audience before they kick the bucket.

The first time my co-writer gently explained to me the story we'd been writing for years was to all intents and purposes now told and that we should write "The End" beneath it, I felt - weird. I had learned to write in a culture where stories didn't end (at least not deliberately). I had grown to love our characters and feel comfortable in their world - how could I simply set them aside?

We compromised. We told ourselves we would close this story arc and put our beloved characters into retirement, a little hiberation period, give them a holiday - just until we had fresh ideas for them, you know? The next time was easier, and the time after that it was I who suggested "The End" was due.

Now, I don't embark on a storyline with the assumption it's going to be a forever thing. I have learnt that ending a story can be a virtue, not an admission of failure. Since I generally write one-on-one, my partner and I now set off knowing our story is likely to have a definite end, and that when we reach it, we will sign it off with a cheerful flourish and start a new one. There are so many stories we want to tell, and only a limited amount of time to write them, after all!

For this reason I am a huge fan of the anthology novels (a 'novel' in this context is Panspeak for a collaberative writing group) that we have at both Pan Historia and Panerotica. Like their fleshspace equivalents, anthologies such as Tempest's Sanctuary for horror/fantasy and Shadows and Smoke for speculative fiction are volumes of short stories rather than a single full-length work. They are ideal for those who want to write a finite story, and also great places for writing solo, or for those new to collaberative writing to dip their toes without committing to a long-term relationship.

So if you think you want to give this collaberative fiction writing lark a try but are daunted by the prospect of narrative eternity, why not grab a partner (or two) and run through a short story first?