Pattern Walking
Jan. 5th, 2007 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
knights_say_nihA small excerpt from Random's life. His walking the Pattern.
I don't actually like it very much. It's more description than stuff, so no real natural arch to the thing. For a short story it should sort of wrap itself up. This doesn't have that.
Figured I'd jam it up anyways.
They say home is where the heart is.
Random dreams sometimes that Amber is a living, breathing thing. That if you lie perfectly still on the stone of the corridor you can hear the gently lull of its breathing, the slow pulse of a heart beat. He dreams the city blinks its windows, eyes of coloured glass, hair of the vines that crawl up the walls here and there. The hallway to his room curves gently, like a finger of a reposed hand. People push through the halls, organizing, running, the blood of this creature.
His father sits in its heart, and he wonders sometimes about cancer; the rotting, spreading tumour of the throne that’s corrupting all of them, making it not what’s best for Amber, but who’s sitting there.
The Pattern sits in the belly of the city, in her womb, and pulses with a life of its own, too. He comes down here sometimes, stepping over the stair that doesn’t work (he remembers when the others don’t) and sits at the edge of it, watching it. Imagining he can see it breathing too.
Being here makes him feel like there’s power behind his eyes, something not to be reckoned with. The trumps feel like lead in his breast pocket. He wants to get up and Walk and run. Away from all this, to the very core, to make love to the world as it lies spread out and spelled out before him. How easy it would be. There’s no one here he’d be sorry to see behind (except sometimes Corwin, and even then, not now. Not with his skin still raw and red from being left out there on that island.)
What a pathetic case am I, he thinks one day, to himself, as he watches the horses riding up towards the castle from the forest. He can’t tell which one’s Julian from this distance.
It’s watching his brother, actually, his older, twisted brother coming into the castle and bowing low to his father that does it. It’s not grovelling, it’d be impolite to call it that, but it rankles every inch of him and he takes the stairs down to the Pattern at a run.
He sets his first foot onto the lines without an instant of hesitation, and then it hits him both that he could die some time within the next two minutes and that this is what he’s supposed to be doing. What it feels like when you’ve found your life’s meaning. The real one.
His heart in his throat, he pushes on, half blind in the darkness, with the beautiful burning lines burnt onto his retinas as the living being of the thing comes alive under his feet. He imagines he can feel it pulsing through him. It’s hard. It’s not as hard as he thought it’d be.
He leaves Amber, his home, and doesn’t look back. Not for a very, very long time.
I don't actually like it very much. It's more description than stuff, so no real natural arch to the thing. For a short story it should sort of wrap itself up. This doesn't have that.
Figured I'd jam it up anyways.
They say home is where the heart is.
Random dreams sometimes that Amber is a living, breathing thing. That if you lie perfectly still on the stone of the corridor you can hear the gently lull of its breathing, the slow pulse of a heart beat. He dreams the city blinks its windows, eyes of coloured glass, hair of the vines that crawl up the walls here and there. The hallway to his room curves gently, like a finger of a reposed hand. People push through the halls, organizing, running, the blood of this creature.
His father sits in its heart, and he wonders sometimes about cancer; the rotting, spreading tumour of the throne that’s corrupting all of them, making it not what’s best for Amber, but who’s sitting there.
The Pattern sits in the belly of the city, in her womb, and pulses with a life of its own, too. He comes down here sometimes, stepping over the stair that doesn’t work (he remembers when the others don’t) and sits at the edge of it, watching it. Imagining he can see it breathing too.
Being here makes him feel like there’s power behind his eyes, something not to be reckoned with. The trumps feel like lead in his breast pocket. He wants to get up and Walk and run. Away from all this, to the very core, to make love to the world as it lies spread out and spelled out before him. How easy it would be. There’s no one here he’d be sorry to see behind (except sometimes Corwin, and even then, not now. Not with his skin still raw and red from being left out there on that island.)
What a pathetic case am I, he thinks one day, to himself, as he watches the horses riding up towards the castle from the forest. He can’t tell which one’s Julian from this distance.
It’s watching his brother, actually, his older, twisted brother coming into the castle and bowing low to his father that does it. It’s not grovelling, it’d be impolite to call it that, but it rankles every inch of him and he takes the stairs down to the Pattern at a run.
He sets his first foot onto the lines without an instant of hesitation, and then it hits him both that he could die some time within the next two minutes and that this is what he’s supposed to be doing. What it feels like when you’ve found your life’s meaning. The real one.
His heart in his throat, he pushes on, half blind in the darkness, with the beautiful burning lines burnt onto his retinas as the living being of the thing comes alive under his feet. He imagines he can feel it pulsing through him. It’s hard. It’s not as hard as he thought it’d be.
He leaves Amber, his home, and doesn’t look back. Not for a very, very long time.
