We regularly feature a selection of original works created by members of our amazing community.
In recent months we've featured YouTube videos, paintings, sculptures and even cakes! Perhaps the traditional art of creative writing has been under-represented of late - so to redress the balance, here are some of our favourite written pieces that we have received in the past few months.
Childhood Dreams
by iChuk
Icicles clung to the Breaker's hull, glittering white in the starlight where splashing seawater had surrendered to the frigid air. Wrapped in his thick parka, fur-lined hood framing his face, Vikgard hardly felt the cold, though he stood at the prow, vulnerable to the biting wind. He gazed forward, eyes shining brighter than the ice, bright enough to join the stars.
"Almost there," he said as if speaking to himself, but the young woman by his side smiled.
"Almost there indeed," she answered, proud smile warming her face.
Vikgard's glance strayed to Brynja, his wife of only a month, and the corners of his lips crinkled upward in return, but a moment passed, and his focus returned to the dark mass rising from the night sea before him. Less than an hour until their ship reached those shores. After years spent dreaming and planning, less than an hour until he became the first Fremennik to set foot in the Far North lands, the first Fremennik to tread ground beyond Lunar Isle. He had dedicated his life to reaching this place, and now, despite its dimness, he felt he could stretch out an arm to touch it.
The hour passed far too slowly, and the first grays of dawn chased away the stars before the Breaker dropped anchor in the mouth of a small bay. Vikgard hardly waited for word that the anchor was out before lowering a rowboat over the side and, along with Brynja and two of his friends, climbing in. Swift strokes carried them to a snowy landing before the sun had peeked over the horizon. Stunted evergreens dotted the white-covered hills that spread before them, increasing in girth and height as they approached the feet of jagged, towering mountains. Nothing moved, not even the air, and once he was out of the boat, his boots leaving fresh prints in the snow, he stood staring in wonder. He hardly noticed when Brynja joined him, wrapping an arm around his waist.
"You always meant it, didn't you?" she asked, stealing his attention. "Even when you were just playing as a child, you knew that someday you'd make your games come to life."
Vikgard nodded, and put his arm around her shoulders, pulling her closer. "Always," he said. "My friends played along because it entertained them for a day, and then they stopped, but I pretended because I knew. I knew that one day, I would no longer have to pretend."
"And now here we are," Brynja said, smiling up at him.
"Yes, here we are." A grin split his face. "And better than in any of my wildest imaginings, too, for I could never dream that I'd have you with me."
Vikgard tipped his head, meeting Brynja's lips with his own. And then, when they broke apart, he took her hand, leading her through the snow towards the nearest broken peak as the sun crested the horizon, shining on the waves behind them.
A Wanderer in Mort Myre
by Mors et Vita
The Green. The oppressive color swirled through his mind and entwined his body in an inescapable embrace. His soul screamed at the revolting Green light that reflected off the Green pools, and he cried out against the Green smog that choked his lungs and tortured his breath with thick, Green smoke. But it was the Ghasts, those hideous spirits that sapped whatever energy remained in this living corpse of his, who persecuted his being into the convoluted shape it possessed. Their barren, Green forms passed through his pale bones, infecting them with cruel color and consuming the life they had once supported.
The Hunger. An insatiable, ever-present Hunger sent daggers of anguish crawling through his being and ripped through him with every pulse of his heart. It would be criminally incorrect to say the wanderer’s every step was agony, for the wanderer could hardly move, let alone step, and even in those long, blank periods when he laid inhumanely still the Hunger’s laughter propelled echoes of misery throughout his body.
As his form pushed itself forward, and the Green devoured his soul while the Hunger tore apart his frame, he found himself gazing at a most dreadful sight; to call it man fails to describe the appearance of the creature that stared back. Its clothing, the color of which had faded into dull gray, hung off his shoulders in tatters like the wings of some defeated, long-forgotten angel. Its skin, once resplendent and lively, had conformed to the pale Green of the swamp so the eye could barely distinguish the creature’s form from the dying bog in which it lay, and it clung so tightly to the bones beneath that their dying white forms almost escaped its surface.
But it was the eyes that pierced the heart with tendrils of unrelenting pity. No, it was not the veins that criss-crossed the white space. And it was not the irises that had taken on the sterile hue of defeat. Rather, it was what lay beneath. The so-called windows to the soul were now portals to the infinite, abyss, filled with a blackness that reached deep into one’s mind and overwhelmed its vigor with fatigue and resignation; the entrance only interrupted by the fluttering of the creature’s eyelids, opening and closing with the beat of the wanderer’s heart.
Not even our poor wanderer, so tormented as he himself was, could ignore the wretched creature before his eyes. He reached out to touch the thing, to caress it and bring it forth from the emptiness that so powerfully radiated from its frail body. Slowly, he felt his fingers pierce the murky surface of the water into which he gazed, and watched as the waves they formed distorted the being below. A humorless smile crossed his face, and the corners of his lips seemed to penetrate the cheeks in which they were set. Laughing, he let himself fall, and the Green of the pool swallowed him up.
The Brotherhood
by LoneWolfe
“When a good man is hurt, all who would be called good must suffer with him.”
Euripides - Greek tragic dramatist (484 BC - 406 BC)
Prologue
Dark, inky clouds congregate over the sleeping city, spilling out rain that beats down onto the worn cobblestone streets below. Sharp gusts of wind whip through the lonely grounds, and a small contingent of soldiers clad in thick steel armor treads quietly along a neglected back alleyway.
---
The metallic footsteps echo hollowly against the narrowly enclosed space. Grime that had been churned by the elements not moments earlier lay sprawled across the passageway; and the darkness of the night was complimented by an old pair of oil-lanterns that currently irradiated a dim glow of light throughout the meager range of its illuminating capacity.
The soldiers, cautious in their footing, crept silently along the alleyway—and upon reaching its end, gazed outward toward the crumpled double-story stone structures, that lay conjoined together in a sagging linear heap; towards the outer brim of the city.
Carefully hidden from view in the shadows, the soldiers quickly disperse without a said word towards their objective of that of the stone building to the left, differentiated only by a small clay pot of blooming scarlet roses, sitting carelessly inside on the bottom windowsill.
The soldiers mount the wall, their crimson cloaks fluttering in the unrelenting wind, silver precipitate pounding down on them; and their grey insignias of a dragon in flight, located on their left chest-plate, signifying that they are a part of the Elite Guard, are contrasted by the overall shadowy color-scheme of the scarred armor that was long ago bestowed upon them.
The elitist soldiers withdraw their carefully crafted and maintained swords, which all bore the inscription: Cleanse the world of all Vice and Evil.
---
Rooke awoke to a room shrouded in darkness. He has been dreaming of his father, again—something that was increasingly on the rise. The dream was always the same. It was the day his father disappeared. However, it did not display the usual characteristics of a dream, for it was more like a repressed memory, sourced from the depths of his recollection to form a vivid ensemble of moving images that amounted to a clear living experience of that particular winter’s morning.
It always began as their father was bidding him, his sister, Kell, and his mother, Aena, farewell for the day. His father told the two children what he expected of them for the duration of his absence; and upon embracing them both, considerably longer than usual, he and Rooke’s mother quickly conferred with one-another out of earshot at the front doorway. Then he was gone. But when Rooke’s mother hesitantly closed the door, leaving the bitterness of the morning chill beyond reach, Rooke could sense something that did not belong.
Rooke did not see his father after that, never even knowing his name. For Rooke’s mother did not acknowledge his existence thereafter—falsely believing that he did not remember that most peculiar morning, due to his young age. But he remembered.
Rooke laid his head against the soft fabric of the pillow and adjusted his lean, adolescent frame to its side, as too acquire a comfortable position from the ancient, oak bed. His eyelids were heavy with fatigue. He closed them and cleared his thoughts, hoping to be plunged into a temporary murky, bliss.
---
A crash erupted from the floor below, and a quick succession of footsteps followed.
Rooke woke instantaneously from his slumber, and sat upright a moment later. Confusion overtook him. He cautiously dismounted the frame of the bed, and stepped out onto the cold wood-panel floorboards that lined his small bedroom—the bedroom that was situated on the second-floor of the two-story stone dwelling.
Just as he was listening intently to the mysterious muffled sounds of heavy, weighed down footsteps below—a piercing screech ripped through the tense atmosphere, catching Rooke off-guard and causing him to run instinctively to the stairs just outside of his bedroom doorway.
There he witnessed what would be seared into his memory for the remainder of his mortal days: his mother, clutching his sister on the ground in a desperate bid to shield her from the powerful blows launched by the group of soldiers that hounded on them both with their shadowy, armored fists—his mother’s usually dark chestnut hair matted with a copious amount of blood, her clothes torn and riddled with a number of inflamed darkened blotches. His child sister, crying out in agony as one of the soldiers crushed her ankle under his ironclad foot.
Then suddenly, after mere moments of standing idly atop of the stairs speechless, confused and afraid; a sensation that Rooke had never experienced before took hold of him, surging through his body. This newly-found emotion enraged him, and forced the whole of his body to shake violently. His eyes, unbeknownst to him, transformed into two pitch opals of power; and a sound erupted from him so deafening and distorted that it could not have been comparable even to the most barbaric of beasts—for it seemed to shake the very foundations of the building and engulf it in its entirety.
For the first time in his life, something buried deep inside Rooke’s subconscious transformed him into something else entirely; a thing, a beast of legend and nightmare. The darkness consumed Rooke and he lost control. But, deep-down, he liked it.
If you have a creative submission you'd like us to include in the newsletter, please email it to us at
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. We can't promise to use absolutely every entry but who knows, you might see your work featured here in a future edition!
