SHARDS
How much would you sacrifice for vengeance? What measure of your conscience, your time, your reputation and even your own body would you be willing to part with to avenge the death of someone loved and lost – even if revenge offered not the slightest chance of bringing them back? Would you sacrifice what is most precious to you in life?
Shards tells the story of two Royal Guardians who fail in the sole function of their office: to protect the lives of those to whom they are bound. This tale poses the question: what happens when such men seek revenge, futilely, knowing it is too late to regain the lives of those loved and lost? As challenges arise, each man is forced to face this futility of retribution, but these brothers Draco also discover that the forces they are up against may be supernatural, and perhaps insurmountable in nature. Yet each man strives to fulfill the vow sworn at his Induction: “Forever loyal and vigilant, as Guardian of your life: until your last dying breath… or my final sacrifice.” If not victorious, then let our enemies be the rock we break ourselves upon.
Book Length: In paperback, Shards is 610 pages (199,221 words)
_________________________________________________________________________
Below is An Excerpt From the Book...
Prologue: The Fusion of Anthrough-Genus
As the thin blade of the executioner’s double-edged sword severed her neck from her shoulders, Muirland Genus acknowledged two final thoughts: the first appreciative, the second inquisitive. Initially, as her head dropped into the crimson-stained wicker basket next to her murderer’s brown boots, she acquiesced a begrudging gratitude for the painlessness of her execution.
Indeed, her killer had carried out the duties of his office with
poise and precision worthy of mention; for she had witnessed five
public beheadings of thieves and adulterers before suffering her own,
and they did not always transpire as gracefully as this one. The
condemned were not always blessed with one painless, swift stroke.
In one such hapless instance, though the instrument of death had
been sharpened no less compulsively than here, a five-year old
Muirland had watched with her kin in sublime horror as a frustrated
executioner hacked downward again and again at a screaming thief’s
neck as if it were a petrified oak, unable to crack the stiff, tightly-
knotted bones beneath the flesh.
The image of this wailing man, tears streaming from his eyes
even as they rolled back into whites, as the blade took his head from
him an inch at a time, had haunted her for the next fourteen years,
and therefore all her life, and the grim memory resurfaced one last
time with vulgar potency as the bulk of her sandy blonde hair
cushioned her head’s fall into the basket.
The last, mortal contemplation of Muirland Genus, as the world
ceased to bring sound to her ears, and she peered with narrowed eyes
through the tiny holes between the intersecting layers of the wicker
basket, concerned a fascination with her own vitality. She had often
wondered, while witnessing the frequent public beheadings which so
often served as a poor substitute for entertainment, at what point did
a life end? Did a moment of consciousness remain as a head was
severed from its body?
Truly, she had theorized, the departed must experience at least
one living moment of disorientation; a transitory, surreal surveillance
of the world through one’s immobile severed head. Now, with eyes
no longer able to bring tears to her face, and a throat unable to cry
out, as her vision faded and closed in from the corners, Genus
congratulated herself. She’d guessed right, and the moments
continued to pass for much longer than she would have imagined.
Time accommodated these introspective, melancholy thoughts,
these flashes of grisly memories; granted her the moldy, melted-
copper odor of a wicker basket which had caught dozens of heads
before hers, before this last sense, that of smell, left her forever. Time
allowed for regret and anger. And then the darkness took her. But it
was not the end.
In the black, a profound passage of time continued. More time
than she would have guessed, and much more than she ever would
have wanted. Consciousness remained. As if locked in the darkest
room, leagues below the surface, with no ears to hear a silence
forever undisturbed, the consciousness that had existed briefly as the
woman, Muirland Genus, lived on behind the dead and useless blue
eyes of a face that soon began to sag in decomposition.
Genus existed as a solitary, confined being without a body to
move or a voice to speak, living in an uncompromising blackness
which allowed only thought and memory and emotion. Had she ears
to hear it, she would have screamed in panic, for it felt akin to
drowning, or being smothered or buried alive.
For the first few hours, she felt as if a child again, locked in the
cellar by her older brother Darien while their parents were gone. He
called it punishment every time he pinched her upper arm inside his
colossal fist, dragged her underground and locked her inside, but she
knew in every instance she had done nothing to deserve it. Whether
Muirland’s behavior offended him or not, Darien Genus used the
cellar as a means of independence.
Once he’d secured his garrulous and annoying younger sister
there, he could take solace that she would survive until his parents
returned, and he was, of course, relieved of the burden of watching
over her. And could she honestly claim she would have acted
differently in his stead? She could.
Because Darien is evil, she decided. And I am good. As she had
in her previous life, covered in flesh and bones and a nearly flawless
complexion, Genus continued to see things in absolute terms: good
and evil, black and white, light and dark. I am good, she told herself
again. Good enough for the chopping block.
Encumbered with bountiful time for memory, Genus reflected on
her brief nineteen years of existence. She remembered her childhood
in the Kingdom of Danyubin, the poorest and most vulnerable of the
four claustrophobic kingdoms of the known world. Claustrophobic
because the known world consisted of a gargantuan scrap of land
surrounded by a raging sea in all four directions, and no man had
ever returned from exploring it, to tell a desperate people that no, the
sea did not stretch on forever; that other lands and other people
awaited. Like everyone else in the Four Kingdoms, Genus imagined,
she had died believing in no world beyond the sea.
She recalled from the youngest age being taught the meaning of
the word “war,” and learning from her father and older brother that it
should be revered. The Four Kingdoms of the world: Danyubin,
Shards, Anthenock and Menzeneas had maintained decimating wars
since they first carved up the world into four sections, bickering
about borders and passing down grievances, curses and promises of
vengeance from father to son for eight generations and counting. But
their relentless conflict touched Genus’ life only sporadically during
her nineteen years. Though untrained farmers, her father and brother
had both fought for the King of Danyubin in multiple, border-related
skirmishes, and she had felt at times relieved and at times
disappointed to see them survive.
She remembered becoming infatuated, a mere two years ago,
with the man who would bring about her demise. The arousing,
incorrigible and, of course, already married man who grew all the
more difficult to restrain when he discovered his obsession with
Genus was well reciprocated. And after weeks of locking eyes and
crooked smiles across the marketplace, when he grabbed her by the
arm and pulled her into the winding alley behind the pottery maker’s
stand, she had done her best to restrain his affections, had she not?
Had she not, in spite of her own clenching desires, reminded him of
his wife as he entered her?
And when he betrayed her, in his pathetic, sobbing confession to
his spouse, and Genus was herself called out as a whore, and
condemned to death as an adulterer, did she not accept her
nonnegotiable fate with dignity, head held high to meet the eyes of
her masked executioner? She did indeed.
Because Claudius is evil, she thought. And I am good. Though
imperfect. Had she eyes, she knew they would be streaming tears.
Her memories overlapped, intersected, interrupted and bled into each
other like the meaningless images one sees in the mental twilight
between awake and asleep. The discipline of her father’s thundering
hand. The comfort of her mother’s frail, bird-like arms. Hunting for
small beasts with knife and crossbow under the arrogant guidance of
her brother Darien, whom she had often admired and sometimes
despised. The salty taste of a mysterious, endless ocean; cursed for
its insurmountable entrapment and nearly worshiped as an idol for
its elegance and power.
Alas, nineteen years amounts to such a short time to live, and her
new existence would last far longer. Though similar, she realized she
had not arrived in the cellar of her childhood. Darien would not be
opening the door, flooding daylight into her eyes. How long, she
wondered, could her mind remain intact in the dark, with nothing but
memories to distract itself?
Although she could not track the passage of time, just forty-two
hours after her beheading, she found herself wailing voicelessly for
mercy from whomever or whatever had confined her in this
intangible prison. She begged the misanthropic puppet master that
had damned her to such a miserable fate to end her existence, to
destroy her consciousness, to cause pain, to torture her or touch her
in any way that would allow her to feel something and alleviate her
eternal and intolerable monotony. But no answer came.
With no stimulus and no response, the mind of Muirland Genus
turned on itself like a starving woman forced to eat her own body.
She lost the memory of her own voice and her thoughts were spoken
with other female voices she had never heard, even as she realized
she was creating them herself, gnawing on the skin and bones of her
own depleted sanity in a desperate attempt to find anything or anyone
with which to interact. They began to converse, then to argue and
degrade each other, much as she imagined the four kings of the world
she had so recently left would have done, if ever they were trapped in
the same room together.
Meanwhile, in that mortal world of kings and borders, beyond
Genus’ darkness, cracked and weathered hands wrapped the two
severed pieces of her body in a white tablecloth drenched in lamp oil,
and long ago dyed burgundy with spilled wine. The rope she’d once
used to tie her own horse to its post lowered her body into a
rectangular grave nine feet deep. As was their custom with all their
beloved departed, Darien Genus and his father dropped a flaming
torch in the grave, to burn the flesh off the corpse.
And even when the skin incinerated off her bones, and the sex of
her charred skeleton became indistinguishable, the female
consciousness of Muirland Genus remained trapped in her cryptic
prison, in a realm far removed from the father and brother who
buried and burned her with tears, remorse, and just a bit of relief.
Years folded into decades. Then a century. And another. The
scorched remains of Muirland Genus withered into dust
underground, as did those of her father, her brother Darien, and her
brother’s children. Finally, when the insane and frantic consciousness
born as Genus had aged three hundred and twenty-nine years, as the
female voices of her subconscious continued mumbling and snapping
at each other as she suspected they would for millennia, she heard
someone else.
Yes. Heard. After what seemed infinite silence, a sound. This
voice sounded male, and that quality alone sufficed to convince
Genus that she hadn’t created it herself. Though pitched at a mere
whisper, the shock of hearing quieted all the squabbling voices of her
thoughts.
“What do you think of eternity, Genus?”
A question. Someone is here with me, in the dark. Have I truly
been without ears to hear, or has there been nothing to hear until
now?
“The latter,” the male voice responded.
A realization, both terrifying and exhilarating, surfaced in
Genus’ understanding. The voice had replied because even as she
had formed them in her mind, for the first time her own thoughts
were also manifested in sound: the crisp and vibrant articulation of a
nineteen year-old farmer’s daughter named Muirland, beheaded for
adultery over three centuries ago. A moment passed, its length
unfathomable, for seconds and minutes had long ago become
indistinguishable from years and decades.
“Do you understand this question?” the male voice insisted,
louder now and heaving impatience.
Genus uttered a confused, choked sob, bitter and confrontational.
“I…think…for eternity.”
“Yes.”
“How long have you been with me?”
“From the moment of your deliverance. From the beginning.”
“Why am I here? Why do I still exist?”
Her questions were met with a brief silence; one which
suggested to Genus that this new presence understood the weight of
her inquiry, the furious anguish of her excruciating solitude, the
misery of her undying, incarcerated existence.
“To be observed,” the male voice said.
“Is this what happens to us all when we die?”
“Why? Would it comfort you to know that billions have suffered
before you?”
“Then who decided my fate?”
“If it was decided, then it was not fate, was it? The decision was
made by the same gods you have remained oblivious to your entire
life.”
“Have they confined you here with me?”
“I suffer no confinements nor limitations. At least…not as you
have known them. I can transcend the world from whence you came
in any form I wish. Given a choice, would you prefer to exist in such
a state, or remain alone in the dark?”
Overwhelmed, conflicted, Genus’ tone grew contemptuous and
sarcastic. “Given your choice, I would prefer to not exist.”
“You have not the luxury of that option, Genus. There is, in fact,
no such state as non-existence. Have you not amassed sufficient time
for pitying yourself? Do you require another century?”
“I require nothing from you.”
“Are you certain? Has your spirit so withered as to forget the
colors beyond the dark, the warmth of the sun, the intoxication of a
human touch?”
“What are you?”
“I am Anthrough. I offer you the chance to be absorbed into my
divinity. I offer you everlasting retribution against the world from
which you have been delivered.”
And so it ensued that two beings once relative and separate were
joined into an interdependent absolute – neither male nor female, but
both at once. And could Genus be condemned for accepting this offer
of sanctuary; the chance to avenge the injustice of her now ancient
execution, to punish the world in which her young life was cut short,
betrayed by Claudius and his sanctimonious bitch under a blatantly
misogynistic system of criminal law, when the alternative was
interminable isolation, ageless seclusion? She could not.
“Because the world is an Absolute Evil,” Anthrough-Genus
whispered. “And I am an Absolute Good.”
Shards tells the story of two Royal Guardians who fail in the sole function of their office: to protect the lives of those to whom they are bound. This tale poses the question: what happens when such men seek revenge, futilely, knowing it is too late to regain the lives of those loved and lost? As challenges arise, each man is forced to face this futility of retribution, but these brothers Draco also discover that the forces they are up against may be supernatural, and perhaps insurmountable in nature. Yet each man strives to fulfill the vow sworn at his Induction: “Forever loyal and vigilant, as Guardian of your life: until your last dying breath… or my final sacrifice.” If not victorious, then let our enemies be the rock we break ourselves upon.
Book Length: In paperback, Shards is 610 pages (199,221 words)
_________________________________________________________________________
Below is An Excerpt From the Book...
Prologue: The Fusion of Anthrough-Genus
As the thin blade of the executioner’s double-edged sword severed her neck from her shoulders, Muirland Genus acknowledged two final thoughts: the first appreciative, the second inquisitive. Initially, as her head dropped into the crimson-stained wicker basket next to her murderer’s brown boots, she acquiesced a begrudging gratitude for the painlessness of her execution.
Indeed, her killer had carried out the duties of his office with
poise and precision worthy of mention; for she had witnessed five
public beheadings of thieves and adulterers before suffering her own,
and they did not always transpire as gracefully as this one. The
condemned were not always blessed with one painless, swift stroke.
In one such hapless instance, though the instrument of death had
been sharpened no less compulsively than here, a five-year old
Muirland had watched with her kin in sublime horror as a frustrated
executioner hacked downward again and again at a screaming thief’s
neck as if it were a petrified oak, unable to crack the stiff, tightly-
knotted bones beneath the flesh.
The image of this wailing man, tears streaming from his eyes
even as they rolled back into whites, as the blade took his head from
him an inch at a time, had haunted her for the next fourteen years,
and therefore all her life, and the grim memory resurfaced one last
time with vulgar potency as the bulk of her sandy blonde hair
cushioned her head’s fall into the basket.
The last, mortal contemplation of Muirland Genus, as the world
ceased to bring sound to her ears, and she peered with narrowed eyes
through the tiny holes between the intersecting layers of the wicker
basket, concerned a fascination with her own vitality. She had often
wondered, while witnessing the frequent public beheadings which so
often served as a poor substitute for entertainment, at what point did
a life end? Did a moment of consciousness remain as a head was
severed from its body?
Truly, she had theorized, the departed must experience at least
one living moment of disorientation; a transitory, surreal surveillance
of the world through one’s immobile severed head. Now, with eyes
no longer able to bring tears to her face, and a throat unable to cry
out, as her vision faded and closed in from the corners, Genus
congratulated herself. She’d guessed right, and the moments
continued to pass for much longer than she would have imagined.
Time accommodated these introspective, melancholy thoughts,
these flashes of grisly memories; granted her the moldy, melted-
copper odor of a wicker basket which had caught dozens of heads
before hers, before this last sense, that of smell, left her forever. Time
allowed for regret and anger. And then the darkness took her. But it
was not the end.
In the black, a profound passage of time continued. More time
than she would have guessed, and much more than she ever would
have wanted. Consciousness remained. As if locked in the darkest
room, leagues below the surface, with no ears to hear a silence
forever undisturbed, the consciousness that had existed briefly as the
woman, Muirland Genus, lived on behind the dead and useless blue
eyes of a face that soon began to sag in decomposition.
Genus existed as a solitary, confined being without a body to
move or a voice to speak, living in an uncompromising blackness
which allowed only thought and memory and emotion. Had she ears
to hear it, she would have screamed in panic, for it felt akin to
drowning, or being smothered or buried alive.
For the first few hours, she felt as if a child again, locked in the
cellar by her older brother Darien while their parents were gone. He
called it punishment every time he pinched her upper arm inside his
colossal fist, dragged her underground and locked her inside, but she
knew in every instance she had done nothing to deserve it. Whether
Muirland’s behavior offended him or not, Darien Genus used the
cellar as a means of independence.
Once he’d secured his garrulous and annoying younger sister
there, he could take solace that she would survive until his parents
returned, and he was, of course, relieved of the burden of watching
over her. And could she honestly claim she would have acted
differently in his stead? She could.
Because Darien is evil, she decided. And I am good. As she had
in her previous life, covered in flesh and bones and a nearly flawless
complexion, Genus continued to see things in absolute terms: good
and evil, black and white, light and dark. I am good, she told herself
again. Good enough for the chopping block.
Encumbered with bountiful time for memory, Genus reflected on
her brief nineteen years of existence. She remembered her childhood
in the Kingdom of Danyubin, the poorest and most vulnerable of the
four claustrophobic kingdoms of the known world. Claustrophobic
because the known world consisted of a gargantuan scrap of land
surrounded by a raging sea in all four directions, and no man had
ever returned from exploring it, to tell a desperate people that no, the
sea did not stretch on forever; that other lands and other people
awaited. Like everyone else in the Four Kingdoms, Genus imagined,
she had died believing in no world beyond the sea.
She recalled from the youngest age being taught the meaning of
the word “war,” and learning from her father and older brother that it
should be revered. The Four Kingdoms of the world: Danyubin,
Shards, Anthenock and Menzeneas had maintained decimating wars
since they first carved up the world into four sections, bickering
about borders and passing down grievances, curses and promises of
vengeance from father to son for eight generations and counting. But
their relentless conflict touched Genus’ life only sporadically during
her nineteen years. Though untrained farmers, her father and brother
had both fought for the King of Danyubin in multiple, border-related
skirmishes, and she had felt at times relieved and at times
disappointed to see them survive.
She remembered becoming infatuated, a mere two years ago,
with the man who would bring about her demise. The arousing,
incorrigible and, of course, already married man who grew all the
more difficult to restrain when he discovered his obsession with
Genus was well reciprocated. And after weeks of locking eyes and
crooked smiles across the marketplace, when he grabbed her by the
arm and pulled her into the winding alley behind the pottery maker’s
stand, she had done her best to restrain his affections, had she not?
Had she not, in spite of her own clenching desires, reminded him of
his wife as he entered her?
And when he betrayed her, in his pathetic, sobbing confession to
his spouse, and Genus was herself called out as a whore, and
condemned to death as an adulterer, did she not accept her
nonnegotiable fate with dignity, head held high to meet the eyes of
her masked executioner? She did indeed.
Because Claudius is evil, she thought. And I am good. Though
imperfect. Had she eyes, she knew they would be streaming tears.
Her memories overlapped, intersected, interrupted and bled into each
other like the meaningless images one sees in the mental twilight
between awake and asleep. The discipline of her father’s thundering
hand. The comfort of her mother’s frail, bird-like arms. Hunting for
small beasts with knife and crossbow under the arrogant guidance of
her brother Darien, whom she had often admired and sometimes
despised. The salty taste of a mysterious, endless ocean; cursed for
its insurmountable entrapment and nearly worshiped as an idol for
its elegance and power.
Alas, nineteen years amounts to such a short time to live, and her
new existence would last far longer. Though similar, she realized she
had not arrived in the cellar of her childhood. Darien would not be
opening the door, flooding daylight into her eyes. How long, she
wondered, could her mind remain intact in the dark, with nothing but
memories to distract itself?
Although she could not track the passage of time, just forty-two
hours after her beheading, she found herself wailing voicelessly for
mercy from whomever or whatever had confined her in this
intangible prison. She begged the misanthropic puppet master that
had damned her to such a miserable fate to end her existence, to
destroy her consciousness, to cause pain, to torture her or touch her
in any way that would allow her to feel something and alleviate her
eternal and intolerable monotony. But no answer came.
With no stimulus and no response, the mind of Muirland Genus
turned on itself like a starving woman forced to eat her own body.
She lost the memory of her own voice and her thoughts were spoken
with other female voices she had never heard, even as she realized
she was creating them herself, gnawing on the skin and bones of her
own depleted sanity in a desperate attempt to find anything or anyone
with which to interact. They began to converse, then to argue and
degrade each other, much as she imagined the four kings of the world
she had so recently left would have done, if ever they were trapped in
the same room together.
Meanwhile, in that mortal world of kings and borders, beyond
Genus’ darkness, cracked and weathered hands wrapped the two
severed pieces of her body in a white tablecloth drenched in lamp oil,
and long ago dyed burgundy with spilled wine. The rope she’d once
used to tie her own horse to its post lowered her body into a
rectangular grave nine feet deep. As was their custom with all their
beloved departed, Darien Genus and his father dropped a flaming
torch in the grave, to burn the flesh off the corpse.
And even when the skin incinerated off her bones, and the sex of
her charred skeleton became indistinguishable, the female
consciousness of Muirland Genus remained trapped in her cryptic
prison, in a realm far removed from the father and brother who
buried and burned her with tears, remorse, and just a bit of relief.
Years folded into decades. Then a century. And another. The
scorched remains of Muirland Genus withered into dust
underground, as did those of her father, her brother Darien, and her
brother’s children. Finally, when the insane and frantic consciousness
born as Genus had aged three hundred and twenty-nine years, as the
female voices of her subconscious continued mumbling and snapping
at each other as she suspected they would for millennia, she heard
someone else.
Yes. Heard. After what seemed infinite silence, a sound. This
voice sounded male, and that quality alone sufficed to convince
Genus that she hadn’t created it herself. Though pitched at a mere
whisper, the shock of hearing quieted all the squabbling voices of her
thoughts.
“What do you think of eternity, Genus?”
A question. Someone is here with me, in the dark. Have I truly
been without ears to hear, or has there been nothing to hear until
now?
“The latter,” the male voice responded.
A realization, both terrifying and exhilarating, surfaced in
Genus’ understanding. The voice had replied because even as she
had formed them in her mind, for the first time her own thoughts
were also manifested in sound: the crisp and vibrant articulation of a
nineteen year-old farmer’s daughter named Muirland, beheaded for
adultery over three centuries ago. A moment passed, its length
unfathomable, for seconds and minutes had long ago become
indistinguishable from years and decades.
“Do you understand this question?” the male voice insisted,
louder now and heaving impatience.
Genus uttered a confused, choked sob, bitter and confrontational.
“I…think…for eternity.”
“Yes.”
“How long have you been with me?”
“From the moment of your deliverance. From the beginning.”
“Why am I here? Why do I still exist?”
Her questions were met with a brief silence; one which
suggested to Genus that this new presence understood the weight of
her inquiry, the furious anguish of her excruciating solitude, the
misery of her undying, incarcerated existence.
“To be observed,” the male voice said.
“Is this what happens to us all when we die?”
“Why? Would it comfort you to know that billions have suffered
before you?”
“Then who decided my fate?”
“If it was decided, then it was not fate, was it? The decision was
made by the same gods you have remained oblivious to your entire
life.”
“Have they confined you here with me?”
“I suffer no confinements nor limitations. At least…not as you
have known them. I can transcend the world from whence you came
in any form I wish. Given a choice, would you prefer to exist in such
a state, or remain alone in the dark?”
Overwhelmed, conflicted, Genus’ tone grew contemptuous and
sarcastic. “Given your choice, I would prefer to not exist.”
“You have not the luxury of that option, Genus. There is, in fact,
no such state as non-existence. Have you not amassed sufficient time
for pitying yourself? Do you require another century?”
“I require nothing from you.”
“Are you certain? Has your spirit so withered as to forget the
colors beyond the dark, the warmth of the sun, the intoxication of a
human touch?”
“What are you?”
“I am Anthrough. I offer you the chance to be absorbed into my
divinity. I offer you everlasting retribution against the world from
which you have been delivered.”
And so it ensued that two beings once relative and separate were
joined into an interdependent absolute – neither male nor female, but
both at once. And could Genus be condemned for accepting this offer
of sanctuary; the chance to avenge the injustice of her now ancient
execution, to punish the world in which her young life was cut short,
betrayed by Claudius and his sanctimonious bitch under a blatantly
misogynistic system of criminal law, when the alternative was
interminable isolation, ageless seclusion? She could not.
“Because the world is an Absolute Evil,” Anthrough-Genus
whispered. “And I am an Absolute Good.”