Sword fight

Rutger stood with his sword held gingerly in his hands, held just off his side, with his legs spread out in a wide, strong stance. He watched his opponent slowly circle around him, their own blade raised up and consistently pointed at Rutger's heart as he slowly turned to stay face to face with the man. Most men Rutger could take easily in a fight, but this one was different. He was fast and strong. Both of their swords had been heavily damaged by the blows they had traded, and Rutger wasn't sure how much longer his own in particular was going to withhold. The blade was old, and while it was well loved, it could only hold for so long, and this was testing its limits.

"Well, it seems you weren't the match that your friends claimed you to be," the man mocked him. Rutger glanced over his shoulder at his two friends, who had been knocked unconscious and tossed aside like day old meat by the mysterious man. He had come from nowhere and demanded to be given a good challenge. The trio had no idea what he wanted or why he had come to them, but his friends had boasted Rutger's skills.

He deeply wished they hadn't.

His breath was coming ragged to him, and blood from a head wound he had received early on while underestimating his foe's skill was dripping into his mouth. He spat it out and wiped at his face without taking his eyes off the man. "I wouldn't go taunting someone who hasn't yet fallen if I were you," he responded bitterly. Stiffly, he lifted his own blade in front of him, pointing up at an angle towards the man's face, right between his eyes, an open challenge for the fight to continue.

The man grinned cockily and lurched forward.

Rutger only had a split second to parry the strike, just barely catching it with his hilt and knocking the sword aside, letting go of his sword with one hand in the next moment to punch the man in the side of the head. But the man was already ducking out of the way, bringing the hilt of his own sword back and striking Rutger in the ribs with it. Rutger staggered back but didn't fall, bring his sword up once more as the man continued to strike. Barely parried blow after barely parried blow, Rutger was pushed backwards until he was pinned against the wall. As soon as his back touched it he hesitated, and the man struck fast, knocking Rutger's blade away and stabbing through his hand, piercing it to the wall.

The man grinned. "Not going to be much of a fighter without your sword hand," he whispered, and ripped his sword back, letting the blood from Rutger's hand splash across his own face in the process. He seemed to revel in it. He lifted his sword once more and pointed it at Rutger's face, his blood dripping from the end of the blade. "Kneel, before it is too late to forfeit."

Rutger glared at the man, nursing his hand. He hated doing this. "I'm afraid you underestimate me," he muttered. He flung his hands forward, a large amount of collected blood splashing forth, catching the man by surprise. The blood hit his body, but didn't stop. It had become solid and sharp, like a dozen knives that cut into the man, sticking into his skin like needles. The man looked down at his body for a moment in confusion, seeing the two dozen red crystalline knives sticking out of him, before looking back at Rutger.

Rutger's blood was dripping down from his hand, but it never reached the ground. It gathered together on itself, crystallizing and solidifying until it formed a new blade, which he pointed at the man. The razor edge on it was clearly sharper than his previous sword, like a freshly sharpened machete in comparison to a butter knife. "Looks like it's just getting exciting," he spat out.

The Door

Darren was covering Gerome's back as they traversed the broken land, looking for food and a place they could safe-hold in for the night. He had a large backpack stuffed full with supplies on his back, and an old sniper rifle with only a few shots still worth a damn gripped tight in his hands. Gerome was similarly stocked, but with a shotgun rather than a sniper rifle, and even fewer shots. Truth be told, weapons like theirs weren't worth much in this day and age. Whatever had happened to their world, it was apparent that it had been on the brink of destruction for quite some time, and technology was to blame. Old, physical guns like theirs were prone to misfire and failure, and could just as easily kill the wielder as the target. But they were more likely to find a bullet or two among the land's wreckage than a useable battery for a laser pistol.

Gerome stopped abruptly, and Darren did a quick sweep of the area he could see to make sure there wasn't anything coming. As he glanced over his shoulder to see what had made Gerome stop, the answer quickly became apparent. In the middle of a stretch of sand, bereft of any connected concrete or buildings, was a single door, still upright and seemingly undamaged by the events that had left their world in ruins.

"What is it?" Gerome asked quietly, speaking more to himself than to Darren.

"Well..." Darren replied, "it looks to me like a door."

Gerome glared over his shoulder at his friend and partner. "Yes, doofus, I know that part. But what is it doing out here? We've moved outside of the city, and it hardly looks like it would have even belonged there. What the hell was it a door to?"

Darren shrugged in reply and, after a moment, the two moved closer to it. They searched the area around it, sweeping away sand to see if there was any kind of hint of a structure that had once stood there, but found only hardened sandstone, which the door seemed to have almost chemically fused to. They passed their hands over it, searching for some kind of hidden compartment, but found only solid oak wood under their fingertips. After a bit, and with some hesitation, Darren put his hand on the doorknob.

Gerome looked blankly at him as though he had lost his mind. "It's just a door," he stated flatly. "It's not like it's going to lead us anywhere."

Darren sighed. "Yes, I know," he said. "But the only place left for us to potentially gather information is from the inside of the doorframe."

Gerome hesitated for a moment before nodding in agreement. Darren slowly and carefully turned the knob, afraid that the door might break from the exertion after years of disuse. As it swung open, the two saw something they had never seen before.

On the other side of the door was a world full of colors and noises and bright lights which they had never witnessed before. It was near blinding and deafening, and yet it drew them to it unavoidably. It was like something from a dream, yet it was something they never could have imagined in their wildest dreams.

Gerome swung around the outside of the door to the back of it. Nothing was there. The world was unchanged from the one he had been raised in. Dead and lifeless and brown. He looked through the door from the other side, and he could see nothing. But swinging back around to the front, he was once more exposed to this new and different experience that not even the stories of the elders could compare to.

The two looked at each and nodded in silent agreement. Guns prepared in hand, they stepped through the door.

The other side was a different world entirely. It wasn't just a narrow corridor as it had looked from the other side. It was all encompassing. Bright and colorful and loud, like a million societies bundled all together inside of it and around them. They looked back at the door as it swung shut behind them. It looked completely inconspicuous - a door to an abandoned building that not even they would think to enter. But peeking through once more, they could see their world, still there on the other side.

They took a moment to try and take in the surroundings, but it was overwhelming. They gripped their guns tightly, like their lives depended on them, and waited for their ears to adjust.

Darren looked at his friend, his head pounding. Gerome looked hardly any better. But a thought was coming to him.

"Do you think... this is the old world?"

Apocalypse

Gerome perched himself on top of a miraculously still standing steel beam that had once been the cornerstone of a skyscraper wall. He sat, one leg dangling off, and looked out over the ruined landscape. Greenery still had not succeeded in cracking the dry, dead dirt and concrete ground that spanned so far off into the distance. Broken buildings as far as the eye could see dotted the horizon. Even the mountains that were said to have once stood tall and majestic had been broken apart, and were now ragged and dangerous expansions of despair that had become the everlasting, overwhelming world in which they lived.

Gerome's best, and only, friend leaned against the beam Gerome had posted on. "You believe any of the stories?" he asked.

Gerome didn't look down at his friend. They had spent many years together. They were all the other had. Correspondingly, they had a sort of sixth sense, always aware of the other's presence or lack thereof. "You mean about how this all happened?"

"Yeah."

Gerome sighed and looked at the position of the sun. It was getting near sunset. At night time, the bottom dwellers would come out and search for any fallen that they might be able to eat. Up this high, however, he and Darren could sleep in peace. Knowing that they would need to return to the underground before the sun rose, the bottom dwellers would never dare climb so many floors of a building, even if they knew there were a hundred fallen there.

"When I was a kid, my mother told me that several generations ago, the nations had created such devastating weapons that, when the peace treaties failed, no one survived."

Darren looked up at his friend. "Then how are we still here?" he asked.

"Yeah," Gerome replied, "I never really understood that part either."

Darren nodded and looked out at the setting sun. The atmosphere was so thick they could stare directly at it for extended periods of time without sustaining damage. The sun looked like a dim flashlight being shone through thick cloth. "My dad told me that the earth itself ruptured open and the elements erupted forth and tore through everything on the surface was ripped apart."

"That explains why the bottom dwellers are still here. But what about the rest of us?"

Darren shrugged. "Same problem."

Gerome slipped down from his perch, and the two set to work setting out sleeping bags to rest for the night. As they settled in, they both continued to think on the question.

"I guess the only people who could have known are long dead," Gerome mumbled out loud.

"And the records have probably been gone for a few hundred years," Darren agreed.

They fell asleep shortly thereafter, knowing that the next day they had more ground to cover.

Life

Cador sat in his house at the dinner table, across from a young girl that he had rescued from a group of gang members who had had less than good intentions for her future. She was nervous, but had begged him to be allowed to spend more time with him after what they had been through. It had been some months since he had saved her. In that time, they had grown together as friends, and he had been able to teach her many things that she had never thought possible. Tonight, however, he had promised to explain something that she had never quite understood, and that was what was causing her nervousness.

This was why he didn't make many friends these days.

On the table between them was a collection of ancient scrolls and books, collected over a period of several lifetimes. Cador had kept them carefully stored away, so as to preserve the legacy that had been held within their pages. Next to each of them was a sword, stained with dirt and blood over the years, and in a variety of styles to match the literature it accompanied.

"What are these?" Sarah asked.

Cador opened the book closest to her, visibly the newest style, from some time in the Victorian era. Next to it was a cavalry leader's saber.

Sarah leaned forward to glance into the book. Her eyes quickly gave away her confusion. "This is a picture of you," she said. "But... You don't look any younger in it. You look exactly the same, other than the facial hair and haircut."

She grabbed the book and flipped through the pages, looking at the inked in images and glancing over the text beside them. It was a military records book, with an effective catalogue of units who had served under General Cador's command. "This..." she mumbled as she read, "This is definitely real. I've heard some of these names in school. But... Not yours. How did...?"

Cador pushed the next book towards her. A much older, more fragile style, with an inked in date on the front page of 1673. Sarah flipped through the pages once more. A journal with detailed drawings on some of the pages, by a child of...

"This can't be possible," she whispered. "There is no way that you have..." As she turned page after page, getting more frantic the further she went, she came across a very detailed face. There was no doubt about it.

It was Cador.

The next was a scroll. She rolled it out to see that it was a letter from the church, authorizing King Richard III's request to take one Sir Cador off of the front lines of battle and hide him away, so as to protect him from the invading powers.

Sarah looked up at Cador, more confused then ever. She groped wildly in her mind for some kind of answer, and the more she thought, the less of a reasonable conclusion she could come up with. These pictures were far too similar to Cador to be ancestors. They could be no one but him.

Cador waited patiently for the question. The same question. The same question he had answered countless times. The same question that he had been asked for his entire life.

"How long have you been alive?"

Cador sighed and lifted the sword closest to him, and visibly the oldest. Chipped and rotted away by rust, made of weak bronze, at the time it had seemed unstoppable.

"Entirely too long."

Anthropomorphism

Growing up, you hear a lot of stories where the main character is in some form or another an animal, and yet they can still talk, think philosophically, and other traits that are typically only attributed to humans. At the time, I never really thought anything of it. I thought that the characters were cute, and I liked to imagine what my pets might have been thinking or doing when I wasn't watching, so it was kind of cool to be able to see those ideas be put up on the big screen. But looking back, seeing how many children's stories were told this way, and especially how popular they were, I find myself questioning why.

It's not that I don't think it's a good or effective way of telling a story. Clearly it has been very effective. And it's not something particular new either, as we can look back through history and see that often times the stories of animals were told, and how they moved about the land and found homes and new ways of living that allowed them to continue to thrive, and we have passed down those stories as a way of teaching lessons.

So that leads me to the question of why? Why did we start telling stories this way in the first place? What lead us to think that, rather than telling the story of a man, we would tell the story of a dog, or a bear, or a horse? Why tell the story of a pack of wolves migrating to a new home, when you could just as easily tell the story of a tribe of humans?

Perhaps it was told this way to give the stories more of a sense of timelessness. After all, while humans have grown and evolved, finding more advanced ways to affect their lives and the lives and world around them, animals have not quite done the same. They exist in a co-dependant world that operates on a cycle, giving their lives a greater meaning that they cannot fully comprehend, but that they know on some level that they have a role to play.

It's the circle of life, as one animated, animal-centric movie would tell you.

Of course, I find it hard to believe that that was ever an intentional decision. But perhaps it never was intentional. Perhaps there have always been stories of man and beast, but it was the stories of beast that were more able to last through the generations, because they were the ones that stayed relevant. They were the stories that could be observed and verified, while the stories of man drifted into legend over the centuries.

Sight

"Alright, Sam. We're going to start taking the wrappings off of your eyes now. Are you ready?"

Sam nodded his consent, not quite trusting his lips not to betray him. He had been born since the day he was born, over seventeen years prior. He had been selected for a test procedure that may or may not be capable of reconnecting the nerves in his eyeballs to allow him to see. No one was quite sure whether or not it would work, or if would carry with it any dangerous side effects, and it was possible that it could damage him even further. But Sam had elected to go through with it. He had hoped beyond hope that he would be able to see the colors that had so frequently been described to him, but that he could never fully comprehend.

He felt the wrappings slowly be uncurled from around his head, and the familiar feeling of light falling on his face began to return. It was a warmth and, through his unseeing eyes, it gave a sense of presence that was otherwise unattainable. But as the wrappings came further and further undone, there was something more. A lessening of the blackness that had been his life that he couldn't fully understand. Something new. Something different. A sudden joy erupted in his heart, but he tried to stifle it, afraid that failure would make him hurt more than he ever had before if he let the joy take him.

He wasn't sure how long he had been under. They had given him some kind of medication that had put him under so that they could preform the operations without fear of his reactions. But with circumstances as they were, there was no telling how long the surgery would take. Sam didn't even know if it was night or day.

He felt the last wrapping be pulled away from his face. His eyes were closed tight shut, because he was afraid of what he might see. "Sam," came the gentle whisper from the nurse. "It's time to open your eyes."

Sam took a deep breath. He opened his eyes only a sliver before shutting them tight again. The brief moment of sight had been intense. The world was so bright! He couldn't make out anything he had seen. Where once his world had been nothing but darkness, in that split second it had been nothing but light. He waved his hands wildly, still afraid of what terrified noises he might make, and after a moment of desperate and quick footsteps, he could see through his eyelids the light dimming.

He tried once more. He got his eyes fully open, but things were blurry. A mess of lights and colors bombarded him. They were dim and muddy, strange on his untrained eyes, but it was so much more than he had ever experienced before. He didn't want to close his eyes, afraid that it would all go away and he would know that he had only been dreaming. But he had to blink, and for a moment it went dark again.

But his eyes opened a second time, and the world was still there. After blinking, things became a little sharper, a little more well defined. They moved past his eyes like the sound of a passing car, not quite in tune with their actual movements. He heard the nurses approaching before he registered that he had seen it.

"Sam?" she asked. He looked at her. He could see a mixture of shapes and colors, not quite sure what they were. It took him longer than he would have liked to admit to realize that they were her face. "Can you see?" He reached out slowly and tried to place his hand on her face. He didn't fully understand depth perception and he missed, but for a moment as it passed in front of his face, he saw his own hand. It was pale. Even in the dimmed lights, he could see that it was lighter than her own skin. And a thought abruptly came to him.

"I thought I was black," he whispered to the nurse.

She smiled brightly at him. "It worked!" she called out in excitement.

Complexity

A common theme in tales of the medieval variety is that, regardless of magical involvement, political enemies and alliances are the driving force. Thirsts for power through marriage and war are heavy issues of the times, and the main motivations for many villains. Clamors for land and wealth, women and power, things that are on the mind of every single member of royalty. Being able to balance this with the individuals desires of characters is what marks the truly skilled when it comes to writing these kinds of stories.

I have... attempted to do this in some small projects. And I have found that I am less than proficient. I don't think on a grand enough scale to properly imagine how a king might feel about his people, his neighbors, his allies, and his enemies. I have enough trouble trying to think within the confines of one kingdom, much less several. On even just a single continent, there can be upwards of a hundred kingdoms depending on how they are divided, and then if one was to consider any nearby island nations, or month long voyages across the ocean...

That kind of dedication and imagination is where world building gets its name from. This isn't just a pocket area in which a story takes place. This is a world with a history, where every action truly has its ramifications, and actions need to be fully thought through before they are taken, for fear of creating a future where one's children may be doomed to life long servitude or exile.

I wish that I could think a world so thoroughly through. A world in which every law is fully developed, where treaties and documents can be written and have far felt impact. Where people of even the lowest livelihoods can have a role in the events that are too transpire, and small acts of heroism can lead to great reward down the road, and the smallest thievery can lead one to taking part in a scheme to take over the world.

I suppose the biggest obstacle to being able to create this kind of world is my desire to write hastily. To have such a defined world, one would have to spend a lifetime there. Perhaps several lifetimes. One would have to think of consequences before actions have even taken place. One would have to create a history for a place that does not yet even exist. Know the wars that have already transpired, the alliances that have been forged, and how strong or tenuous the bonds that tie hundreds of people together are. Know the way children are raised by family and teachers. Know the way history is viewed by different people, with a dozen biases producing a dozen different results.

And these are all things that are to be taken care of before the story even begins. The story itself, even if focusing on only a small number of characters, would take these things and expand upon them. Show the ways in which the very fabric of the world can twisted and turned in such a way as to produce the desired results. Rewrite laws to create a brighter future. Make promises that may or may not be seen through. Make deals that my weaken what it is those characters are searching for, but without doing so they could never get close. Having to deal with the emotions that come from making those sacrifices, and trying to come to terms with all that comes with it.

And, worst of all, trying to find a way to balance of all these things so that it feels like you are reading a novel rather than a textbook.