Post by Solomon Moon on Apr 21, 2020 20:08:22 GMT -5
Solomon
Sol put down the pen. It was a good pen. A raven feather quill with a soft gilded nib. It had been his father's from before the Great War. Even now, years after Terrel's death, Sol could still picture in his mind the bold flowing text that his father used to gracefully scribe with that very quill.
He compared the image in his head to the hastily scrawled text on the parchment before him. Like so much of his life, it was a rough, grotesque shadow of his father's work. Even in this small way, like so many others, Sol could never match the legacy of his dead father. His own script was jagged, spotty and a bit crooked as it reached the edge of the page. Of course, calligraphy was a novel skill to have in the age of scrolls and SMS messaging, and it was probably a superior example to what could have been managed by many of his peers. But standing so close to greatness for all his life had given Solomon Moon a much different scale of it. He could have blamed the artificial hand for the sloppy workmanship, but he knew the truth. His best efforts would never amount to much more than a pale, hideous imitation.
Still, even the ritual of a pale imitation had power and Sol quickly read through that final part of himself captured in paper and ink. Somehow the flaws felt fitting, and satisfied, he sprinkled some sand from his left hand to blot the still damp ink and then blew gently upon it. He folded the parchment, crisply into a precise quart of its original size. He plucked a candle of marbled red and blue off the table and allowed two precise drops of wax to drop from the burning tip and onto the note where the folds overlapped. He pressed a seal into the still molten wax and gave it a moment to set, before rising with note in hand.
Then weighing the curiously heavy note in his hand for but a moment, he tucked it under the pillow of his immaculately made bed. Like the rest of the room, Sol's bed was an image of military precision. There was not a single wrinkle anywhere in evidence, and the corners of the cover were tucked under the mattress with an ingenious technique that gave it a suggestion of the perfect corner of a cardboard box. Laid out at the foot of the bed was tomorrow's uniform, shirt neatly folded on top of socks and then pants, in the exact order which he would don them in the morning. One the floor beside bed, perched on top of a scuffed drab green footlocker, was one of several pairs of reinforced jackboots, much like the pair he was currently wearing with the difference that they were polished to a bright shine, unlike those he wore which were dulled by the day's use.
Sol turned to the desk once more, proficiently corked the bottle of ink and plopped the quill into a prepared vial of solvent to clean off excess ink that still clung to its golden nib. Inkwell, candle(now extinguished), seal and quill returned summarily to their allotted positions, laid out beside rulers, shears, glue, wax, sand and other tools of producing official documents, taking positions like a formation of soldiers waiting dutifully for the signal to charge.
He glanced out the window that set in the wall above his desk, just to the right of his wardrobe and looked out upon the quad beyond. It was late afternoon, early evening outside and the light entering his room was a soft, warm, yellow, not strong but enough to scribe by. The sky above was taking on the burnished orange that became a bruised red and purple near the horizon, promising that soon the sun would be set. Sol admired that hue for a moment, the red and blue of the sunset being the colors of his noble house, and the soon to rise moon it's symbol. There was some sort of symbolism there about the rising to power, that had appealed to his ancient predecessors, but Sol could only ever remarked that the moon must set eventually as well. With the fates of the family handed to him in the absence of his late father, Sol reckoned that moon had been setting for a while now.
Occupying the space to the right of his desk was a short workbench, neatly arranged on top was a collection of tools, necessary for maintaining his weapons. On the wall above the bench, beside the window, was a wooden rack that supported Whisper, his sword, and a collection of spare magazines for the dust cartridge system set into the weapon's scabbard.
Sol claimed the sword, but deliberately left behind the spare magazines. He didn't expect to need much more than what was in the weapon already. He didn't even expect to be drawing it.
With the thoughtless ease of familiarity he clipped the scabbard to his belt in a single fluid motion. He found something comforting about the weight of the sword on his hip.
A buzzing sound distracted him for a moment, and his gaze followed it back to his desk. The screen of his scroll was lit up, a message causing the device to vibrate. Sol didn't need to read the message. He could guess the general tone of its contents. He rarely received messages that contained good news, and rarely from people who would call him a friend.
Sol had thought he had friends. That fight in the first round of the Vytal festival, had been the first time he'd felt the connection of comradery to his peers. It had lasted only until shortly after the outcome was determined, and with the same mindless precision of his belongings returning to their allotted positions in his room, Sol's mind had drifted back to isolation and scorn for his peers. During that fight he'd felt more connected to his comrades than ever before at Haven, and with that connection had felt every mistake he'd made all the more keenly. He didn't know if they blamed him for how the match had gone, but he definitely blamed himself, and it weighed heavily.
Perhaps it was that weight that he felt now. Perhaps that weight had contributed to what he'd decided must be done. Perhaps it was just the settling of a weight he'd carried since his father's death, lifted during the Vytal fight, just long enough for him to remember what freedom felt like, only to drop back into place even heavier than before.
Whatever the case, he was too tired to labor beneath it anymore. That was why he'd written the note, and why he was arming himself and preparing to face a foe of unknown strength in an uncontrolled environment. She would be here soon, the instrument of his destruction, his liberation.
He took one final glance at his room, making sure that everything was in its place and then, as he tugged a pair of black leather gloves onto his hands, he departed with long powerful strides of a man marching in lock-step.
Down a flight of stairs and out the dorm's front door, as if the world were made of fog around him. Sol spied his partner approaching from the other dorm across the quad.
His face was set and stony, a mask of impassive flesh that betrayed nothing of his mind. He wore his best waistcoat, blue with golden buttons and trim, with a braid on the right shoulder signifying his rank within the Celestial Legion. The red lining of the coat was visible upon the interior face of the swallow tail cut that hung down behind him. His pants were a stark grey, flaring slightly where the cuffs tucked into his boots.
He nodded to the woman approaching him, as if regarding an acquaintance for whom he felt no strong opinion. Then with a languid cocking of his head, he wordlessly conveyed, "Not here." and fell into step towards the exterior sparing ring, set far enough away from the dorms to give them privacy.
He marched without any words, face as absent of reaction as the sheer wall of a granite cliff. Anything his companion may have said to him did not seem to register. He thought only of the note, stashed under his pillow in his room, of how the script was a pale mockery of his fathers, of how his life was a demented imitation of his forebears. He very deliberately did not think of those he may have called friends while he fought for them at the Vytal events. He did not think of Aegle, or Carmin, or Jack, or Holly. His thoughts for them were on the note, as completely as if he'd plucked them intact from his own skull and entombed them within parchment and pigment, and hidden away where someone might care enough to find them. It was fine if they didn't though, care that is, better even.
His half lidded eye showed the same dull bovine indifference of cattle entering an abattoir, before the smell of blood and the screams reach it. Sol felt oddly peaceful as he took up position on the other side of the featureless arena, gravel crunching beneath his boots. It was very easy, so easy, as easy as a trolley on the track for him, to face a foe and the risk of injury of death. There was a relief in it, somewhere far off, far away, right beside the horror for what he was about to do, but it was quiet, somewhere deep and muffled by the fog that surrounded him.
His hand, without his even needing to tell it to, found the hilt of his sword, just as the other gripped the scabbard, and a finger caressed, almost lovingly, the trigger mechanism set there. The gravel crunched as he shifted his weight and fell into a fighting stance, front and back foot point out to twelve o'clock and nine o'clock respectively, right side angled slightly towards his foe to prove a more narrow profile.
His sad golden eye, set itself upon his foe, face like stone around it as all at once he went from merely adopting a fighter's stance to embodying it. Without any change of any single detail to explain the transformation, he went from simple motionlessness, to radiating violence like the barrel of a cannon steadily swiveling into position and taking aim upon his enemy. His body was all of a sudden a device of destruction, coiled up beneath him like a spring, cocked like the hammer of a rifle. That sad golden eye abruptly lost all of the humanity within it, and took on the flat gilded sheen of a lifeless gold coin. The motions of his body seemed starkly mechanical, as if any intellect behind them had completely departed and now all that was left behind was an intricate machine executing commands laid out long in advance. He seemed to no longer be a person. Like a veil lifting, he became death, a machine that ran on simple indifference, a corpse animated by violence.
"Shall we begin, then?" He asked in a crack parody of speech that sounded like the gasping creaks of a massive metal frame groaning beneath unimaginable strain. To say that his words sounded like speech was to say that wind whistling through a crypt could sound like a flute, that is, almost identical save for the fact that one was produced by a present and thoughtful mind acting deliberately, and the other was just an empty facsimile produced by coincidence and happenstance.
He compared the image in his head to the hastily scrawled text on the parchment before him. Like so much of his life, it was a rough, grotesque shadow of his father's work. Even in this small way, like so many others, Sol could never match the legacy of his dead father. His own script was jagged, spotty and a bit crooked as it reached the edge of the page. Of course, calligraphy was a novel skill to have in the age of scrolls and SMS messaging, and it was probably a superior example to what could have been managed by many of his peers. But standing so close to greatness for all his life had given Solomon Moon a much different scale of it. He could have blamed the artificial hand for the sloppy workmanship, but he knew the truth. His best efforts would never amount to much more than a pale, hideous imitation.
Still, even the ritual of a pale imitation had power and Sol quickly read through that final part of himself captured in paper and ink. Somehow the flaws felt fitting, and satisfied, he sprinkled some sand from his left hand to blot the still damp ink and then blew gently upon it. He folded the parchment, crisply into a precise quart of its original size. He plucked a candle of marbled red and blue off the table and allowed two precise drops of wax to drop from the burning tip and onto the note where the folds overlapped. He pressed a seal into the still molten wax and gave it a moment to set, before rising with note in hand.
Then weighing the curiously heavy note in his hand for but a moment, he tucked it under the pillow of his immaculately made bed. Like the rest of the room, Sol's bed was an image of military precision. There was not a single wrinkle anywhere in evidence, and the corners of the cover were tucked under the mattress with an ingenious technique that gave it a suggestion of the perfect corner of a cardboard box. Laid out at the foot of the bed was tomorrow's uniform, shirt neatly folded on top of socks and then pants, in the exact order which he would don them in the morning. One the floor beside bed, perched on top of a scuffed drab green footlocker, was one of several pairs of reinforced jackboots, much like the pair he was currently wearing with the difference that they were polished to a bright shine, unlike those he wore which were dulled by the day's use.
Sol turned to the desk once more, proficiently corked the bottle of ink and plopped the quill into a prepared vial of solvent to clean off excess ink that still clung to its golden nib. Inkwell, candle(now extinguished), seal and quill returned summarily to their allotted positions, laid out beside rulers, shears, glue, wax, sand and other tools of producing official documents, taking positions like a formation of soldiers waiting dutifully for the signal to charge.
He glanced out the window that set in the wall above his desk, just to the right of his wardrobe and looked out upon the quad beyond. It was late afternoon, early evening outside and the light entering his room was a soft, warm, yellow, not strong but enough to scribe by. The sky above was taking on the burnished orange that became a bruised red and purple near the horizon, promising that soon the sun would be set. Sol admired that hue for a moment, the red and blue of the sunset being the colors of his noble house, and the soon to rise moon it's symbol. There was some sort of symbolism there about the rising to power, that had appealed to his ancient predecessors, but Sol could only ever remarked that the moon must set eventually as well. With the fates of the family handed to him in the absence of his late father, Sol reckoned that moon had been setting for a while now.
Occupying the space to the right of his desk was a short workbench, neatly arranged on top was a collection of tools, necessary for maintaining his weapons. On the wall above the bench, beside the window, was a wooden rack that supported Whisper, his sword, and a collection of spare magazines for the dust cartridge system set into the weapon's scabbard.
Sol claimed the sword, but deliberately left behind the spare magazines. He didn't expect to need much more than what was in the weapon already. He didn't even expect to be drawing it.
With the thoughtless ease of familiarity he clipped the scabbard to his belt in a single fluid motion. He found something comforting about the weight of the sword on his hip.
A buzzing sound distracted him for a moment, and his gaze followed it back to his desk. The screen of his scroll was lit up, a message causing the device to vibrate. Sol didn't need to read the message. He could guess the general tone of its contents. He rarely received messages that contained good news, and rarely from people who would call him a friend.
Sol had thought he had friends. That fight in the first round of the Vytal festival, had been the first time he'd felt the connection of comradery to his peers. It had lasted only until shortly after the outcome was determined, and with the same mindless precision of his belongings returning to their allotted positions in his room, Sol's mind had drifted back to isolation and scorn for his peers. During that fight he'd felt more connected to his comrades than ever before at Haven, and with that connection had felt every mistake he'd made all the more keenly. He didn't know if they blamed him for how the match had gone, but he definitely blamed himself, and it weighed heavily.
Perhaps it was that weight that he felt now. Perhaps that weight had contributed to what he'd decided must be done. Perhaps it was just the settling of a weight he'd carried since his father's death, lifted during the Vytal fight, just long enough for him to remember what freedom felt like, only to drop back into place even heavier than before.
Whatever the case, he was too tired to labor beneath it anymore. That was why he'd written the note, and why he was arming himself and preparing to face a foe of unknown strength in an uncontrolled environment. She would be here soon, the instrument of his destruction, his liberation.
He took one final glance at his room, making sure that everything was in its place and then, as he tugged a pair of black leather gloves onto his hands, he departed with long powerful strides of a man marching in lock-step.
Down a flight of stairs and out the dorm's front door, as if the world were made of fog around him. Sol spied his partner approaching from the other dorm across the quad.
His face was set and stony, a mask of impassive flesh that betrayed nothing of his mind. He wore his best waistcoat, blue with golden buttons and trim, with a braid on the right shoulder signifying his rank within the Celestial Legion. The red lining of the coat was visible upon the interior face of the swallow tail cut that hung down behind him. His pants were a stark grey, flaring slightly where the cuffs tucked into his boots.
He nodded to the woman approaching him, as if regarding an acquaintance for whom he felt no strong opinion. Then with a languid cocking of his head, he wordlessly conveyed, "Not here." and fell into step towards the exterior sparing ring, set far enough away from the dorms to give them privacy.
He marched without any words, face as absent of reaction as the sheer wall of a granite cliff. Anything his companion may have said to him did not seem to register. He thought only of the note, stashed under his pillow in his room, of how the script was a pale mockery of his fathers, of how his life was a demented imitation of his forebears. He very deliberately did not think of those he may have called friends while he fought for them at the Vytal events. He did not think of Aegle, or Carmin, or Jack, or Holly. His thoughts for them were on the note, as completely as if he'd plucked them intact from his own skull and entombed them within parchment and pigment, and hidden away where someone might care enough to find them. It was fine if they didn't though, care that is, better even.
His half lidded eye showed the same dull bovine indifference of cattle entering an abattoir, before the smell of blood and the screams reach it. Sol felt oddly peaceful as he took up position on the other side of the featureless arena, gravel crunching beneath his boots. It was very easy, so easy, as easy as a trolley on the track for him, to face a foe and the risk of injury of death. There was a relief in it, somewhere far off, far away, right beside the horror for what he was about to do, but it was quiet, somewhere deep and muffled by the fog that surrounded him.
His hand, without his even needing to tell it to, found the hilt of his sword, just as the other gripped the scabbard, and a finger caressed, almost lovingly, the trigger mechanism set there. The gravel crunched as he shifted his weight and fell into a fighting stance, front and back foot point out to twelve o'clock and nine o'clock respectively, right side angled slightly towards his foe to prove a more narrow profile.
His sad golden eye, set itself upon his foe, face like stone around it as all at once he went from merely adopting a fighter's stance to embodying it. Without any change of any single detail to explain the transformation, he went from simple motionlessness, to radiating violence like the barrel of a cannon steadily swiveling into position and taking aim upon his enemy. His body was all of a sudden a device of destruction, coiled up beneath him like a spring, cocked like the hammer of a rifle. That sad golden eye abruptly lost all of the humanity within it, and took on the flat gilded sheen of a lifeless gold coin. The motions of his body seemed starkly mechanical, as if any intellect behind them had completely departed and now all that was left behind was an intricate machine executing commands laid out long in advance. He seemed to no longer be a person. Like a veil lifting, he became death, a machine that ran on simple indifference, a corpse animated by violence.
"Shall we begin, then?" He asked in a crack parody of speech that sounded like the gasping creaks of a massive metal frame groaning beneath unimaginable strain. To say that his words sounded like speech was to say that wind whistling through a crypt could sound like a flute, that is, almost identical save for the fact that one was produced by a present and thoughtful mind acting deliberately, and the other was just an empty facsimile produced by coincidence and happenstance.
| @tag | 1097 words | notes |
Velvet of WW
