NaNoWriMo

so, ive finally decided to take the plunge. im doing nano. i am going to finish Homunculus and the Cat for it. this is not cheating as i will be doing 50k NEW words on it. and if i have to maybe ill tack on a false beginning just to make it stand alone for nano.

for more information on this project please use the link above.

hopefully there wont be any updates from me until december. (as i should be focused entirely on H&C)

Arachne

coming soon

also i am thinking about cutting it back to a monthly series instead.
i am going to try my luck with NaNoWriMo this year and im trying to get my ducks in a row for that.

but i promise im going to do the story of Arachne

also on my list are:

Balor
Baba Yaga

Monkey King

Karkotaka

Hercules' trials

Izanagi

The Amazons

those are just the ones in the que, i dont know when ill get to them or in what order but theyre on the "id like to do" list

thanks for looking

p.s. i will be posting some of my other stories though so check back!

Fionn Mac Cumhaill and the Salmon of Wisdom

I didn't plan on eating the salmon of wisdom. But I did, accidentally. If I had known how easy it was to eat the fish, I’d truly have been more inclined to do it purposefully, and pretend it happened exactly as it had. But I did not. And I did eat it.

My master had searched for the thing for longer than I had known about its existence, for longer even than my master had known about mine. And he had been there at my birth. He was not a fisherman, but he labored with that river long enough that he should have been, were it not for the obsession that undermined the experience.

We had been fishing that day, just as we did most days, sitting on the bank of the Boyne. Master Finn told me often how glad he was for company. I suppose this was true, in part, but I had witnessed the slight grins and shortened breaths as he supervised the extra fishing line. That’s what he really cared about. Though I gladly received the knowledge he had to offer in return for the extra lure I bore.

“Thus, from the nine hazelnuts, the salmon gained all the wisdom of mankind.”

I wasn’t paying attention. I knew the story well. He knew this, and I was never scolded for my inattentiveness. I could recite it all, in his own words, back to him. As long as I kept on my line, or net, or whatever method we used that day, I had earned my keep.

I did marvel however as I sat and pulled the grass, how knowledge could be carried through the nuts of a Hazel tree, sacred or not. I had eaten Hazelnuts, usually prepared with salmon, for the better part of seven years and the only wisdom I had gained came from a wild and feral old poet. Often I believed he might have been a druid who became a bear at night under the light of the moon. But from him, on no occasion, did I witness the use of magic.

Other times I feared his mind was addled.

Finn Eces was a poet of some renown and he knew the ways of the warrior. Quickly I learned them from him. This was our agreement. Whether he was touched by the gods or possessed, it concerned me little. I learned his poems and trained in his techniques.

Finn lurched from the grass into the river.

“Fionn!” He called for me. “Fi- Fionn! I’ve got him!”

I grabbed the net and leapt into the water. I swam upsteam and outward. I cursed myself for my reaction. I should have run along the bank for a ways. I was going to drift too far to reach them. I dove under the surface and battled the current. Maybe I could get Finn to come to me. I stretched out the net, or tried and failed. It had become twisted and ineffective

I gasped for air as I came above again. I saw Finn, wrestling the great beast. If there ever was a time to be a were-bear. I knew at once it was a sacred fish. Its scales shone in the fading sun and the thing was the size of a seal.

“To me!” I shouted.

I don’t know if he heard through all the thrashing, or if Finn’s head was above water at that moment. But if I kept trying to swim toward them, I knew the river would bring them to me. I kept trying to untwist the net.

I could see that my master had jammed his pole into the salmon’s mouth, or gills, maybe through both. Blood was discoloring the water.

They came to me and the fish’s tail beat me like a Formoriian warhammer. Water filled my lungs as I sank and blackness conquered my mind. But it was momentary and I choked back to consciousness. I kicked my feet against some loose rocks on the river bed. I tumbled and banged my joints on other rocks. Before I drowned, I surfaced again, long enough to take a breath for a second round of river current.

The salmon whipped its tail and writhed with fury, but Finn held the rod. Each time the salmon struggled it had less power.

The river bent and I rolled onto a pebbly beach. I got to my feet as quickly as I could, which is to say not at all. And I looked about me. There was a log nearby and I went for it. Heaving it into the river I leaped on it and rode it like a raft. I heard the wood crack as My master and his catch slammed into it. But it held long enough for me to put my hand in the salmon’s mouth. It clamped down and tore my flesh, but I held its jaw and reeled it, slowly, despairingly, back to the shore.

My net had tangled itself around Finn and the fish. It had nearly cost my master his life but it had hindered the fish.

“Well, worth it.” Finn said.

We lay there on the dark sand and gravel for some time. I learned much of the blood in the river had been Finn’s and not the salmon’s. But I was too fatigued to tend to his wounds, or mine, and neither was fatal.

We woke some hours later to the sound of wolves. The wind whistled through the dark forest behind us and the river rolled on at our feet. I was shivering violently and acutely aware of the pain in my arm.

“Finn! Master Finn!”

He got up, checked his prize and begged Avalon that this was indeed the one. I silently added my oblation to it.

“We should leave this place.” Finn said, looking across the river in the direction of his cabin.

I agreed.

He made me fetch the wheelbarrow.

“Too excited to sleep.” Finn squeaked as he saw to the fire.

I changed into dry clothes. Finn did likewise as I set myself on the preparation of the salmon. It took a heroic effort just to scale the fiend. But I got my revenge. After little tribulation, the salmon was gutted, cleaned and on the fire.

Finn dozed while I turned and jabbed at the thing. Over the past seven years that I had been here, cooking salmon had become to me, so familiar, that my mind idly wandered as I did so. But this fish was so large that it took all my attention to not burn the edges or under-cook the middle. I poked and prodded, always being careful not to taste it.

My stomach growled like the wolves in the forest but I did not give in. I could not deliberately disrespect my master. The smell of the meat touched my nose, like the stories of the gods touched my imagination, but I did not eat it. I did not even taste the fish. I pretended to fear it, like an ill omen. And the salmon neared completion.

The thought of finally being done with the ordeal and done with salmon was as sweet to my mind as any meal could have been to my body that night. I tested the thing one last time, pressing it with my thumb. The grease burned me. Even in death the fish found ways to torment me.

“Finn!” I yelled sucking on my blistering thumb. “Come eat your damned fish!”

 I was tired and overwhelmed by the night. I felt my mind fatigue and my body lose its vigor. Suddenly the world was too much for me. I thought I would retire that night with an empty stomach and I was at peace.

“Fionn,” Finn said to me, “have you eaten the salmon of knowledge?”

“No master.” I told him truthfully.

“I can see it in your eyes!”

“No!” I removed my sore thumb from my mouth, “I have not taken so much as a single bite.”

“You-” Finn stammered.

I knew he was right. I knew that all the knowledge of the fish had been condensed into that small amount of grease that burned my thumb. And I ate it. That was not all that I knew. I had gained all the wisdom of the world at that time. My mind had filled with knowledge beyond mortal capacity and comprehension. I knew how the sacred Hazel trees bore enlightening fruit and how those nuts had dropped into Nechtan’s well. I knew the salmon, Finntan, had eaten them and gained all the wisdom of the Tuatha Dé Danann. I knew Boann and how she begat the river Boyne. And I knew of all the men who had tried and failed to capture Finntan the salmon of wisdom.

Finn Eces, my master knew it too. It did not take the magic of the well of knowledge to see the light in my eyes.

That was the last I, Fionn mac Cumhaill, ever saw of him. He bade me eat the salmon, which I did and I left the next morning.

Pantheon ch: 1 - Gaia

Black knew exactly what he was doing. Stealing wasn’t just about taking stuff. It was about keeping it.

“Anything good?”

“What?” Black jumped back, retracting his hand from a backpack that was not his.

“Did you find anything you like in there?”

Black had found something he liked, precisely what he was after. His fingers tightened around the slender bit of plastic The attached headphones dangled to the floor. In his other hand there was a small case for games and memory cards.

Every foster mom and volunteer rec-center dad he had lived with, knew he stole. As far back as his memory went. But they could never prove it.

“I...um…”

Being caught in the act was unthinkable.

 “Look kid, I’m not campus security. In fact I’d like to offer you a job.”

 “Wait, what?”

“I happen to be the world’s greatest smuggler.”

“You look like a bum.”

“I’ve pulled jobs that would make casino vaults look like candy stores run by a babies.”

“Look, if you’re not gonna-”

“No, I’m not going to call security or whatever.”

“Good, I’ll see you later then.”

“Actually you will. I need you to steal the sword of Hsin Lann.”

“The hell?”

Black stared. The man hardly looked like a professional thief. His hair was unkempt, his clothes ratty and he smelled disgusting. He was a cardboard sign-sob story.

“What if I told you that Earth has an identical twin, magic and mythology are real and I can teach you to steal from the gods themselves?”

 Black didn’t know how to react to that. But, in truth he didn’t care one way or the other. The man was obviously insane.

The student from whom he had stolen was returning. Black shook his head and made for the door. The stranger walked outside with him but turned to go a separate way.

“Be ready by nightfall.”

Safely inside a UNLV exhibition hall, away from stray bums, Black went over the conversation in his mind. He couldn’t get it out of his head. That guy was so weird. But a part of him wanted to believe the crazy dude anyway and abandon his life.

Black wanted out. He was sick of foster homes and boy’s ranches and their lame-assed “field trips” to cut rate campus exhibits. Black wondered why he hadn’t run away sooner. Free food and scarcity of cash were just excuses.

He could get by. Even tonight he would have taken the whole backpack, but anything that big was too hard to smuggle back to his current correctional facility. The PSP would have to do. Hopefully the careless co-ed had good taste in music.

Black could survive on the street, he had the know-how. He had the sticky fingers for it. He had once again confirmed that this evening. He conned the rest of the boys from his ranch to try and make it to the casino strip for some fun. Black never met them at the rendezvous spot. Instead he hit up the campus library and lifted backpacks. Like he would really go up against casino security, and try to gamble with stolen wallets and purses.

What use were some vacationer’s credit cards anyway? A few chips were nothing to him in the middle of a go-nowhere boys’ ranch compared to eighty gigabytes of memory sticks, loaded with free music, movies and games. Black couldn’t help laughing.

‘What were they thinking, allowing us to be taken on trips to the city?’ Thanks to that lapse in judgment though, he was enjoying his new toy. The headphones ran, under his shirt and hoodie. Black made sure his music was loud enough that he didn’t have to hear the adults discussing the dorm situation for the night and trying to discipline the other boys.

The commotion all around the young teenager couldn’t break his gaze out the high windows. Black was comfortably defiant, ignoring the mess he had caused. An arid, rainless tempest grew outside. Lightning flickered in through the window and bounced off the marble floors, casting twisted split-second shadows on the other delinquents as they were searched for contraband. From behind his black cheek-length hair he looked past the prison-like bars into the vacant sky.

Black wondered if he was close-by the place where he was once abandoned. At five years old Black was the victim of a doorbell-ditching at a Las Vegas City fire station. The only thing he had besides a pair of shorts was a note tied to his leg with scratchy twine.

“Keep alive.”

Dropping a half-naked toddler on a porch didn’t seem like a great way to keep him alive. All his life he wondered what kind of idiots would leave a note like that. And everyone who knew him since then, at some point, felt a hot desire to disobey the explicit command. In a sadistic sort of humor he would often wonder if his death would make his parents failures.

Las Vegas declared him Caucasian. He never understood what that meant. No one ever offered a straight answer when he asked where Caucasia was. Adults either scolded his attitude or chuckled and ruffled his pitch hair. By now he had stopped asking questions, but they were always there in the back of his mind. ‘Who am I? Where did I come from? Why was I abandoned?’

Then there were the big mysteries. ‘When’s my birthday? How old am I?’ Most importantly ‘why can’t I remember any of it?’ Still in his teens at least, he knew he should have memories of the fire station and before. The answers, like his parents, simply escaped him.

They gave him a name. He never used it. He went by Black. It was his favorite color and dress code. He liked it so much that he dyed his already black hair just to make it look deliberate.

 He was the black sheep of the lost Vegas boys. No foster family kept him. Valiant couples took him as a parenting challenge or divine project. The better that people got to know him, the more they tried to “help” him. It made him sick. Sooner or later he always bounced back to the state, and he preferred it that way, not that he liked the state, but Nevada nagged a lot less than would-be-mothers on a mission. Above all he didn’t like the feeling that he belonged anywhere. He needed to keep moving.

Leaning against a wall, he imagined a drunken homeless guy bursting through the doors trying to convince the disgruntled social workers to let him take a kid. Black envisioned the epic jailbreak it would require. ‘If he could do that, and avoid the cops, then maybe the hobo would be a decent smuggler.’

Again Black considered running away. ‘If the homeless guy could make it work…’

Black jumped away from the wall, back sweating. Half expecting to see that he had been standing against a broken radiator he saw the wall melt from the top down. He gawked as the stranger stood alone in the opening. The storm was blowing his stringy hair around the edges of a hood. A black coat ran to his knees. He wore tall boots and his hands were bandaged.

Black scowled. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding. I was expecting a professional thief, not some cirque du sideshow.”

The sunken-faced man peeled himself back from the opening, offended.

“The con-artists of your world-” He cut himself off. “I don’t have to prove anything to you. Stay here if you want. I hear you enjoy digging latrines over at that delinquent labor camp.”

‘Finally’ Black thought, ‘someone real.’ The stranger bore no façade, he had no intentions to candy coat the world for Black’s sake. It seemed as good a time as ever to run away. None of the state workers would miss him. They would just miss their jobs. Isn’t that what unemployment was for?

The possibility taunted him. Even after seeing the wall boil down into nothing, the prospect of finally getting out was more real to him now than it had ever been.

The stranger beckoned with a follow-me motion and turned towards the night.

Black didn’t trust him, but he had never trusted anyone in his entire life. Why start now? Besides, whatever might happen, this beat the alternative.

Coping with the shock over what had just happened, Black envisioned walls melting all over the world. Glass display cases, vault doors and even prison bars in his mind disappeared effortlessly with each imagined caper.

 “Ah, what the hell.”

 The air was filled with a cool storm breeze. Though lightning flashed the sky, still no rain fell in the city, there was only wind and shadow. As they tore away from the exhibit hall, Black saw the wall close up as if nothing had happened. That was the night he disappeared.

Black left behind his “Camp Fix-me” duffel, hoping to leave the impression that he simply vanished. He wanted them to wonder why he didn’t take anything with him. Having just shown up one day, now he was gone.

They had gotten off the main roads, out of sight from the bright lights and traversed seedier alleyways and derelict parking lots. Descending into the deep shoulder of a freeway underpass, the rushing of sixteen wheelers on a four lane highway wrenched him back into reality. They stepped down into the ditch stopping at a metal grating guarding a drainage hole. The man’s touch melted it. He grabbed Black’s arm and pulled him to the hole.

“Get in!”

“Yeah right.”

“Do it or I’ll stuff you down myself.”

Black nearly pulled out his knife but his better judgment took over and he cautiously climbed in. He was no match for a wall melter and whatever else this stranger was, nor did Black think it wise, presently, to find out. Too soon, his feet hit a splashy ground that he didn’t know was coming. But, he only fell to one knee.

“Not bad kid. A natural faller. You might add up to something.”

“Thanks?” Black paused, “What’s your name anyway?”

“Yuki. I guess you’re going to hear it sooner or later.” It was a meager offering.

After a little walk in pure darkness, being pushed from behind by Yuki, Black saw a bright flash and felt a sharp pain in his head. He didn’t realize what had happened. There weren’t enough seconds between he the floor to find out. Black was unconscious before his body fell.

Black became aware of a sewer-like stench. As he grew more alert, he noticed he was wet, lying in rancid water next to a set of wide steps. His eyes adjusted to the dim light emanating from something above him. The surroundings were unrecognizable. Black looked around, trying not to seem awake.

Soon the darkness beyond the steps became an archway and there appeared a light. It was jagged and incomplete, obstructed by whatever contained it. As the light drew nearer it grew a pair of arms and then a body. Someone was holding a bright object in the palm of their hand. ‘Son of a bitch!’

“Sorry kid, it was necessary, would have been mounds of trouble. We’re here now so get up.”

As Black got to his feet he opened his mouth but was cut off.

“Just shut up and listen. I need to know everything you have on you, down to every little hairpin and piece of string. Put it on the table or it’ll be your head.”

“What?”

“Don’t make me ask again.”

Black started emptying his pockets.

“Everything!” Yuki barked.

There wasn’t much, a utility knife, a little cash and a lighter. Black wasn’t about to hand over the new mp3 player he had just recently adopted.

“If that’s not everything you’ll be dead or in prison in less than an hour, and believe me you won’t like this sort of prison.”

Black subdued his nerves.

“Do you have any necklaces or jewelry?”

“No.”

“No piercings?”

A ring and a bar went from his lip and tongue to the table.

“Happy?”

“Don’t get smart, runt.” Yuki set a glow-in-the-dark rock on the table and reached into his coat, pulling out a small black and brown box with a square hole in one end. He held it so the hole faced outwards and touched the hole-side of the box to the knife. It melted and disappeared. Then the piercings.

Yuki used the lighter to burn the cash. Then crushed it underneath his shoes and tossed it aside.

Black stood with a protest deep in his throat.

“No more questions squirt?”

Black dared, opening his mouth-

“Good, stay shut up, you’ll live longer.”

“No,” Black complained, “I need information. Choose what you’re going to tell me, it won’t matter what I ask, but you’re telling me something before you or I make another move.”

With a wide grin Yuki retorted, almost sinisterly. “Ok kid, you’ve earned it, but keep your shorts on. I work in a little different line of smuggling than you think. This is a border unlike any you’ve ever seen, and I always have plenty of tricks up my sleeve. This box is a smuggler’s hole. It can store huge amounts of just about anything, even someone unconscious. How’s your head by the way?”

“You put me in…that’s-“

“That’s what, impossible? Or magic? I told you it was real.” With that Yuki touched the side of the box, stroked the corner, closed his eyes, and pulled a three foot long sword out of the box.

“This, once belonged to a man named Gilgamesh.” His proud announcement was met with a blank stare. “Don’t know your history, eh?” He traced the box, closed his eyes, and pulled out “something you might have heard of, the staff of Merlin. And this,” he boasted as he pulled a third time, “is the helm of Hades, worn and lost by Perseus.”

Something about the last item felt familiar but the name to which the staff belonged, he knew. “So what?”

“So what?” Yuki repeated in disbelief. “These artifacts are hundreds of years old and worth a fortune. I told you I’m the world’s greatest smuggler. This box can hold just about anything you want. I put you in there.”

“So where are we going?”

“I’ve already told you.”

He didn’t actually believe there was some other world did he? What did he say it was, an identical twin to earth? ‘Doesn’t make any sense.’

But, Black knew when to quit. Questions got people like him into trouble, not authority trouble but trouble with trouble itself.

Ignoring Black, Yuki  stared at the box for a minute or two then jammed two of his fingers in the hole. While saying something under his breath the box began to melt. Yuki pulled his fingers apart and turned the box inside out. Then he clapped his hands together around the box. There was an absorbing silence that followed and he opened his hands to show nothing but air, like a magic card trick when the card ended up in your sleeve.

“Reversed the magic. Put the box in my hands. Painful,” Yuki winced, “but they’ll never find it.”

Black saw a deep red smear on the palm of Yuki’s hand. Curious, he looked at the other hand and saw blood seeping out of a cut so deep he expected to see through to the back of the hand. Pulling long strands of cloth from his pockets, Yuki dressed the wound like it was an involuntary response.

 ‘Ok this guy gets some credit,’ he applauded mentally, jaw gaping. He was growing more convinced of all the crazy stuff Yuki had said before about magic and mythology.

 “Great marring,” Yuki continued, “will stand out under the Aigian lights.”

“The what?”

“Aigian lights, named after the shield of Zeus, the aigis. It means protection. Think of the lights as magical x-ray scanners. You’ll see what I mean. Come on.”

He pointed at some heavy metal doors on the sides of the walls. “Almost nothing of this world can be taken to the other, vice versa. I take what I want where I want.” With that Yuki went over to a chest next to some lockers opened it and started rummaging.

“You still think I’m going to believe this other world stuff?”

“Believe what you want. Here put these on.” Yuki held a bundle of interesting looking cloth.

“No way!”

“You’ll wish you did.”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Alright kid,” Yuki chuckled. “You know best. Come on, time to go.”