Snippet

[nonionay]

This is from the pov of a character I've been struggling with. I now love him, because it appears he enjoys scaring himself silly.
Relevant backstory: They're a bunch of necromancers hanging out on an isolated island while making a zombie army.


Tied to the end of the dock was a tiny round boat that looked like something that should be used to execute people. Put them in and send them out to sea. Surely any on of the ferocious waves of Petra Inlet should knock the thing over. Entyn had had enough difficulty with the big Calini ship that ferried them to the island. Morya had suggested the constant up and down motion wasn’t any different from riding a horse. But if a horse threw you, you wouldn’t drown. Entyn would pick being kicked in the head by a horse over drowning any day. And horses only went up and down, not side to side!
Entyn shuddered. He wasn’t on the boat anymore, and no one was going to try to put him in the little toy the Naomhr had come over on. He was in a nice, safe stone monastery where the only motion came from the constant gales shaking the walls. He could handle the wind.
The monastery was beautiful and bleak. He liked the loneliness, even if the water surrounding them made him feel trapped. The cloister itself was a stone edifice fortified against the weather and the Noamhr attacks which were now so rare. Goats grazed between the pine trees that grew all the way up to the rear wall of the cloister. Just to the left of the dock, a lively kid danced on a fallen log whose trunk Entyn could never have reached around. It was one of many trees the Scha had never dared chop up for firewood, because once, decades ago, the Naomhr had made that tree walk. In the tangle of roots radiating in a disc perpendicular to the earth, Entyn tried to see legs that could support the massive trunk. Weathered to a bone-white sheen, the log looked an awful lot like driftwood. The Starfever was a magic that made no sense to him. How much of the old stories were just stories? In modern times, the Shaman Ajomlox made the earth swallow a village on the north coast, but no one had seen walking trees.
The island of Saint Ninior was a tiny one—Entyn had walked across it in half an hour. He imagined the Naomhr calling up the waves and the earth and watching the island collapse in on itself, turning inside out with a swirl of coarse sand, leaving only dead trees to float in the water while the Sea People mechanically dragged drowned monks and necromancers to shore.
He shuddered again, and kept shivering. Probably, he should close the window, but he needed a break from his work, and staring out the window scaring himself was at least interesting. Zombies were so tedious.
The Naomhr who had come in the scary boat stood in the clearing between cloister and beach. Annalyn and Abbot Phololen conversed with them while Rory loitered nearby with a handful of Taeon’s soldiers. The few soldiers who could come to the island—resources being few here—had little to do, soldierwise, since the defenses needed to be magical rather than physical. Right now, they were avoiding chopping wood. It was a bad idea to chop wood around the Naomhr. But surely the Naomhr chopped wood of their own? Entyn rubbed his frostbitten nose. People could be such a superstitious lot.

Comments

[bsdotrand.livejournal.com]

That's really very good and engaging.

[criada.livejournal.com]

Thank you. :-)