There's a character in the story I finished last month that has a backstory that is begging to be explored. In the story, the main character 'Ally' sees into his past when she is trying to activate a blade that he's lent her. Here it is:
Instead of activating a light, I see a land covered in snow, dotted with vivid red patches. Blood. The bodies are gone. Only I remain and I am very small in the grand scheme of things. My pale hair falls free to my ankles, and my body is a vassal for an aching, hollow sadness.
It intrigued me so that I revisited a piece that I was writing about Hokkaido a while back, and refitted it to be this man's past. This is about 2.5 hours of work (writing and editing):
---
This is a story in which not everyone survives until the end. It’s a story of gods and demons, and how neither of them care for the puppets that they throw at each other. A story of war. Somehow I am a part of it all; both significant and insignificant in their grand design. I find myself putting it all to paper only in the snatches before dawn, in the gap between when duty relinquishes me and the motions of living reclaim me. I’ve been writing now for ten years, much longer than I thought I would be alive. It’s a habit now. The superstitious part of me thinks that it’s the only reason why I am still alive; because my story is unfinished. The rational part of me knows that the causal direction of this statement doesn’t make sense.
At the beginning of this story, I am fifteen years old and still trying to decide whether speaking my mind is a good idea. It might not even be a matter of good or bad, but of relevancy. My voice may be entirely irrelevant.
Visiting Hokkaido was my parents’ idea. It’s just one destination in a long list of ideas they’ve had, usually without much warning. Finland. Toronto. New Zealand. Aurum Isles. The Congo. Bhutan. Mexico. Those are the ones that I recall the easiest right now. Never mind school. Never mind failing class. Never mind that my only friend is Mouse because he doesn’t notice when I leave and gets picked on just as much. If things were up to me? I’d stay home and listen to music in my room. I’d go to school every day and show Miss Lo that I care just as much about Textile Studies as she does. I’d make the perfect pair of pants, pockets everywhere. I don’t really use the internet and I’ve never had a phone. Unthinkable? Are your eyes wide like saucers? Unrelatable? Are you tuning out because I’m not like the guys you’re friends with, or the one that messages you back and forth late at night? If you think that things are weird now, this is the relatively normal. It only gets worse from here.
I am told what to pack, and I do it. I still have my ski gear from Vancouver and my snow boots from the Alps. There’s enough room inside the boots to roll up the patchwork cloak I’m making out of the scraps from my father’s factory. He saw it once. Said it was hideous. I don’t disagree. Ok, if I’m honest, it hurt a little when he said he didn’t like it. But it’s not about the end result. It’s that having needle and thread in my hands is home to me. It doesn’t matter where I am if I can sit back at the end of the day and piece something together.
We breeze past customs in the priority line like we normally do. The officer who checks my passport is a middle age man who chuckles at how I’ve filled out my departure card.
“Connor Silber, occupation listed as Robot.” He gives me a humoured, quizzical look. “You look human to me.”
“Because no one ever suspects the human looking robot,” I reply.
My father, realising that I am still at the counter, comes back to collect me.
“Is there a problem here?” he asks.
“No problem,” the officer says. He waves me on with a smile. I smile back.
I don’t watch movies on the plane. I don’t like anything with violence in it, and all the others are too childish for my taste. I don’t buy into the ones about happy families and talking pets. Even before everything that’s happened happens, I am already of the mind that life isn’t what it looks like in books and movies. It’s sadder than that. Futile. Boring.
My mother makes small talk with me, or at least she tries. It’s hard to maintain a conversation when the other person replies with one word responses. There are long silences in between, but her determination brings her back at it again and again.
“Do you know how to say ‘hello’ in Japanese?
“No.”
“It’s ni hao.”
“Ni hao.”
“Did you remember to bring your snow shoes?”
“Yes.”
“And did you see your father’s Spring-Summer collection?”
“Yes.”
My father sits up a bit straighter. He’s not doing a good job of pretending not to listen. The headphones don’t fool me.
“What do you think?” my mother asks.
It’s tailored to perfection, as it always is. I’m not a big fan of the menswear. Everyone recycles the same cuts, and there’s only so much genius you can infuse into a pair of trousers if you want it to look modern and you also want it to be functional. I like his women’s haut couture though. He’s gone back to the French renaissance and made it his own. I think he should stop turning down offers from mass producers to put out a child and maternity line. Sure, it’s not upmarket, but why should fashion be exclusive?
“I don’t know,” I say.
She launches into her opinion to compensate for my lack of voice, talking extra cheerfully until my father sinks back into his seat. My mother’s a socialite. She can make friends with anyone. But she can’t get me to talk. It’s not her fault. I don’t dislike her. I just... I don’t know why we have nothing to say. She launches into a story about how she and my father have fallen in love with the simple lines of the kimono, which just happens to be the zeitgeist of the fashion world at the moment, but rather than go to Kyoto like the other fashion houses, my father decides to travel further north for inspiration. His selling point is the dangerous ground between the trend and the fringe.
Somewhere during my mother’s story the altitude drops suddenly. Her hands shoot out to grab my father’s and mine. None of us have our trays down, but the champagne glass across the aisle goes flying. I snatch it from the air when it crosses me, but I am unable to stop the contents from spilling everywhere. The man I hand it back to laughs and says something to me. I don’t hear it because at that moment, the plane tips again.
“Ladies and gentlemen please return to your seat and fasten your seatbelt. We are going through a patch of turbulence.”
“Seatbelt, Connor,” my father says.
I roll my eyes and don’t reply. I always keep it on. He should worry more about himself.
“He’s got it, honey,” my mother says on my behalf.
I withdraw my hand from my mother’s tight grip to cross my arms. I think they’re being overprotective. Turbulence happens all the time.
There’s another shuddering drop. Another pause. Then, the turbulence hits for real.
There is no reprieve. The plane is tossed worse than a roller coaster ride. Everyone’s silent except for a baby back in economy who hasn’t yet learnt the unwritten rule of flying; don’t show how scared you are because you’ll look like an idiot later. The turbulence is bad enough that everything not belted down or locked away will be bruised when this is over.
I hear my father tisk in disapproval. He thinks that he knows better because one of his hobbies is flying. I ignore him like everyone else and glare at the seat in front of me. It will all be over soon.
The cabin’s lights flicker, dim, and extinguish altogether. One of the passengers at the window seat slides his window cover up and a bright stream of light penetrates the cabin. It is painfully bright.
I hear a terrible sound, somewhere between a groan and a roar. Startled by it, I look around for other’s reactions, only to find that no one else has reacted. Everyone else is sitting perfectly still. Too still. I don’t need to prod my mother to know that she is unnaturally still. My father’s face is in a mid blink, which makes him look like he’s about to sneeze. Belatedly, I notice that the plane has stopped shaking too. Everything is eerily still as the roar climbs louder and louder in my ears alone.
Something large blots out the light from the window. I turn to see one great, terrible Eye outside the window, rolling and rolling, like an egg on a plate that’s tilted this way and that. The moment I see it, it sees me and snaps to attention. The depthless black iris bores through me.
A voice sounds in my head. It reverberates through my bones. The words are foreign, but I am made to understand the meaning.
Death. Is. Imminent.
The Eye shows me the view over the plane. I watch as an engine bursts into flames and the plane veers into the ocean on a bright blue day. I see the impact knock most of the passengers unconscious. These are the lucky ones. The rest scream in their seats until they drown.
Death. Is. Imminent.
What The Eye shows me is the future. My mind balks at the thought of it.
“I don’t want to die,” I whisper.
I shut my eyes tightly, but that is no protection against The Eye. It’s still there.
Serve me. Say my name. Evoke my power.
I shouldn’t know its name, but I do. There’s no choice but to say it.
“Enma.” The word is heavy on my tongue. It tastes like judgement and fire. “Dai-o-enma.”
An unstoppable force crashes through me. I cannot move. I cannot stop it from tearing me apart, piece by piece, destroying my bones and sinew as it forces its way through my body and remakes it anew. It’s not pain that I feel, but something much worse; some terrible divinity that is unbearable to approach.
Enma said that death is imminent. With his power coursing through me, I believe it.
“Connor?”
My eyes snap open to see my mother’s face looming large in my vision. The power inside me recedes and the sounds of the plane press around me.
The patch of turbulence is over.
Still, I can’t shake the picture of the plane sinking in the water. Were my mother and father among those that lost consciousness? Or did they hold onto each other as the plane sank?
“Connor?”
I give my mother the best smile I can muster. My shaking hands are tucked tight against my beating chest, my arms hiding my distress from her sight. She smiles back, reassured. When she turns to check on my father, I let out the breath that I’m holding.
I am sure I didn’t dream it up. I can still hear the echoes of that terrible voice in my head.
Death is imminent.
Enma’s power curls up in me as a reminder and a promise.
Instead of activating a light, I see a land covered in snow, dotted with vivid red patches. Blood. The bodies are gone. Only I remain and I am very small in the grand scheme of things. My pale hair falls free to my ankles, and my body is a vassal for an aching, hollow sadness.
It intrigued me so that I revisited a piece that I was writing about Hokkaido a while back, and refitted it to be this man's past. This is about 2.5 hours of work (writing and editing):
---
This is a story in which not everyone survives until the end. It’s a story of gods and demons, and how neither of them care for the puppets that they throw at each other. A story of war. Somehow I am a part of it all; both significant and insignificant in their grand design. I find myself putting it all to paper only in the snatches before dawn, in the gap between when duty relinquishes me and the motions of living reclaim me. I’ve been writing now for ten years, much longer than I thought I would be alive. It’s a habit now. The superstitious part of me thinks that it’s the only reason why I am still alive; because my story is unfinished. The rational part of me knows that the causal direction of this statement doesn’t make sense.
At the beginning of this story, I am fifteen years old and still trying to decide whether speaking my mind is a good idea. It might not even be a matter of good or bad, but of relevancy. My voice may be entirely irrelevant.
Visiting Hokkaido was my parents’ idea. It’s just one destination in a long list of ideas they’ve had, usually without much warning. Finland. Toronto. New Zealand. Aurum Isles. The Congo. Bhutan. Mexico. Those are the ones that I recall the easiest right now. Never mind school. Never mind failing class. Never mind that my only friend is Mouse because he doesn’t notice when I leave and gets picked on just as much. If things were up to me? I’d stay home and listen to music in my room. I’d go to school every day and show Miss Lo that I care just as much about Textile Studies as she does. I’d make the perfect pair of pants, pockets everywhere. I don’t really use the internet and I’ve never had a phone. Unthinkable? Are your eyes wide like saucers? Unrelatable? Are you tuning out because I’m not like the guys you’re friends with, or the one that messages you back and forth late at night? If you think that things are weird now, this is the relatively normal. It only gets worse from here.
I am told what to pack, and I do it. I still have my ski gear from Vancouver and my snow boots from the Alps. There’s enough room inside the boots to roll up the patchwork cloak I’m making out of the scraps from my father’s factory. He saw it once. Said it was hideous. I don’t disagree. Ok, if I’m honest, it hurt a little when he said he didn’t like it. But it’s not about the end result. It’s that having needle and thread in my hands is home to me. It doesn’t matter where I am if I can sit back at the end of the day and piece something together.
We breeze past customs in the priority line like we normally do. The officer who checks my passport is a middle age man who chuckles at how I’ve filled out my departure card.
“Connor Silber, occupation listed as Robot.” He gives me a humoured, quizzical look. “You look human to me.”
“Because no one ever suspects the human looking robot,” I reply.
My father, realising that I am still at the counter, comes back to collect me.
“Is there a problem here?” he asks.
“No problem,” the officer says. He waves me on with a smile. I smile back.
I don’t watch movies on the plane. I don’t like anything with violence in it, and all the others are too childish for my taste. I don’t buy into the ones about happy families and talking pets. Even before everything that’s happened happens, I am already of the mind that life isn’t what it looks like in books and movies. It’s sadder than that. Futile. Boring.
My mother makes small talk with me, or at least she tries. It’s hard to maintain a conversation when the other person replies with one word responses. There are long silences in between, but her determination brings her back at it again and again.
“Do you know how to say ‘hello’ in Japanese?
“No.”
“It’s ni hao.”
“Ni hao.”
“Did you remember to bring your snow shoes?”
“Yes.”
“And did you see your father’s Spring-Summer collection?”
“Yes.”
My father sits up a bit straighter. He’s not doing a good job of pretending not to listen. The headphones don’t fool me.
“What do you think?” my mother asks.
It’s tailored to perfection, as it always is. I’m not a big fan of the menswear. Everyone recycles the same cuts, and there’s only so much genius you can infuse into a pair of trousers if you want it to look modern and you also want it to be functional. I like his women’s haut couture though. He’s gone back to the French renaissance and made it his own. I think he should stop turning down offers from mass producers to put out a child and maternity line. Sure, it’s not upmarket, but why should fashion be exclusive?
“I don’t know,” I say.
She launches into her opinion to compensate for my lack of voice, talking extra cheerfully until my father sinks back into his seat. My mother’s a socialite. She can make friends with anyone. But she can’t get me to talk. It’s not her fault. I don’t dislike her. I just... I don’t know why we have nothing to say. She launches into a story about how she and my father have fallen in love with the simple lines of the kimono, which just happens to be the zeitgeist of the fashion world at the moment, but rather than go to Kyoto like the other fashion houses, my father decides to travel further north for inspiration. His selling point is the dangerous ground between the trend and the fringe.
Somewhere during my mother’s story the altitude drops suddenly. Her hands shoot out to grab my father’s and mine. None of us have our trays down, but the champagne glass across the aisle goes flying. I snatch it from the air when it crosses me, but I am unable to stop the contents from spilling everywhere. The man I hand it back to laughs and says something to me. I don’t hear it because at that moment, the plane tips again.
“Ladies and gentlemen please return to your seat and fasten your seatbelt. We are going through a patch of turbulence.”
“Seatbelt, Connor,” my father says.
I roll my eyes and don’t reply. I always keep it on. He should worry more about himself.
“He’s got it, honey,” my mother says on my behalf.
I withdraw my hand from my mother’s tight grip to cross my arms. I think they’re being overprotective. Turbulence happens all the time.
There’s another shuddering drop. Another pause. Then, the turbulence hits for real.
There is no reprieve. The plane is tossed worse than a roller coaster ride. Everyone’s silent except for a baby back in economy who hasn’t yet learnt the unwritten rule of flying; don’t show how scared you are because you’ll look like an idiot later. The turbulence is bad enough that everything not belted down or locked away will be bruised when this is over.
I hear my father tisk in disapproval. He thinks that he knows better because one of his hobbies is flying. I ignore him like everyone else and glare at the seat in front of me. It will all be over soon.
The cabin’s lights flicker, dim, and extinguish altogether. One of the passengers at the window seat slides his window cover up and a bright stream of light penetrates the cabin. It is painfully bright.
I hear a terrible sound, somewhere between a groan and a roar. Startled by it, I look around for other’s reactions, only to find that no one else has reacted. Everyone else is sitting perfectly still. Too still. I don’t need to prod my mother to know that she is unnaturally still. My father’s face is in a mid blink, which makes him look like he’s about to sneeze. Belatedly, I notice that the plane has stopped shaking too. Everything is eerily still as the roar climbs louder and louder in my ears alone.
Something large blots out the light from the window. I turn to see one great, terrible Eye outside the window, rolling and rolling, like an egg on a plate that’s tilted this way and that. The moment I see it, it sees me and snaps to attention. The depthless black iris bores through me.
A voice sounds in my head. It reverberates through my bones. The words are foreign, but I am made to understand the meaning.
Death. Is. Imminent.
The Eye shows me the view over the plane. I watch as an engine bursts into flames and the plane veers into the ocean on a bright blue day. I see the impact knock most of the passengers unconscious. These are the lucky ones. The rest scream in their seats until they drown.
Death. Is. Imminent.
What The Eye shows me is the future. My mind balks at the thought of it.
“I don’t want to die,” I whisper.
I shut my eyes tightly, but that is no protection against The Eye. It’s still there.
Serve me. Say my name. Evoke my power.
I shouldn’t know its name, but I do. There’s no choice but to say it.
“Enma.” The word is heavy on my tongue. It tastes like judgement and fire. “Dai-o-enma.”
An unstoppable force crashes through me. I cannot move. I cannot stop it from tearing me apart, piece by piece, destroying my bones and sinew as it forces its way through my body and remakes it anew. It’s not pain that I feel, but something much worse; some terrible divinity that is unbearable to approach.
Enma said that death is imminent. With his power coursing through me, I believe it.
“Connor?”
My eyes snap open to see my mother’s face looming large in my vision. The power inside me recedes and the sounds of the plane press around me.
The patch of turbulence is over.
Still, I can’t shake the picture of the plane sinking in the water. Were my mother and father among those that lost consciousness? Or did they hold onto each other as the plane sank?
“Connor?”
I give my mother the best smile I can muster. My shaking hands are tucked tight against my beating chest, my arms hiding my distress from her sight. She smiles back, reassured. When she turns to check on my father, I let out the breath that I’m holding.
I am sure I didn’t dream it up. I can still hear the echoes of that terrible voice in my head.
Death is imminent.
Enma’s power curls up in me as a reminder and a promise.
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