Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-30157838-20180530023530

( Please note: This story isn't finished yet. I still have to write The Final Muse, but I want to make it as memorable as possible, as this story has been some time in the making. I haven't put out any new content in a while, though, and since I feel most of this is pretty good so far, I'm releasing what's done here for you guys to read. Thank you for reading my content, it means the world, and I hope you enjoy. )

'The great wolf leaped through the air like a malicious streak of midnight, pointed fangs bared and snarling as it...'

"No, no no, that's not right either..."

Henry gave the paper beneath him a sneer before crumpling it up into a ball. Hours of work down the drain, just like every other story he had written in the past month. It all lacked energy, something was missing...he shook his head, wrinkled skin curling into a bulldog-like frown. He knew his style remained firm, and his mind was certainly still sharp, but for the life of him he just could not write something to his liking.

Perhaps it was just a case of his age. Henry was certainly getting on in years, and his ideas for new horrific tales were becoming fewer by the day. It felt as if he had tread all the ground he was able, wild and horrific beasts, spirits from beyond this world, vampires that stalked the night, he had done it all. Now, he just wanted nothing more than to retire, but he knew he could not without one last triumph to seal his modest legacy, one final tale of true, unyielding terror to chill his audience to the bone like never before. His blood began to boil, he just could not put ink to page properly! Just in the past week alone he had scrapped over a dozen new concepts, and the number was only growing by the day.

Matilda, lovely wife that she was, brought him food every evening, knowing how her husband would get so caught up in his writing, but he had done little more than pick at it every time. He had become strange and fettered, obsessed with the creation of his magnum opus that he barely took his eyes off the page. Sleep was rare, as were trips outside of his study in general, the dark bags underneath his weary gaze a clear indication of his fatigue in what now seemed like a fruitless endeavor.

Henry banged his hand on the mahogany and cursed aloud, slumping over in his chair and withdrawing a new parchment from his writing desk, dipping quill in ink once again and turning his thoughts to the page.

'In the moonlit town of Ravensbrook...'

Henry screamed in frustration and swept his hand over the writing desk before him, scattering papers everywhere. This was a legacy he had to uphold! As he rubbed his temples with gnarled fingers, there was a knock on the door, the wood creaking open as Matilda poked her head into the room.

"Perhaps you'd best get some rest, dear?"

The writer shook his head.

"No...just some fresh air. That's all I need..."

Henry wobbled to his feet, grabbing his coat off the rack beside the door and passing his wife by, walking downstairs and into the foggy streets of the city. As his spats clacked against the lamp-lit cobblestone, he briefly pondered how long it had been since he had taken a trip outside. It may have been days, perhaps even weeks, but he knew it had been some time since the cold evening air had filled his lungs...this would hopefully be good for him. He was far more accustomed to the indoors, to the worlds in his pages, but the long block he had been facing was beginning to drive the old writer batty.

The novelist met with but a single soul on his extensive walk through the gloomy, bending streets, a curious man clad in many coats despite the relatively average (albeit rather depressing,) weather. This stranger looked almost ready for seven feet of snow instead of what could be potentially be some light drizzling at the most, a scarf and a dusty old top hat concealing most of his face save for his piercing blue eyes. He appeared wider than he likely was, buried under all those layers of clothing, and though it was impossible to tell his age, the odd fellow certainly seemed to be an older man judging by his deep, matured voice when he spoke.

"Mister Coville, out and about on the town this evening, hm?"

The writer gave the figure a short glare before continuing on his way. He had no time for fans right now, he was in the midst of a crisis! Conversing with his public could come after his masterpiece was complete, and not a moment earlier. His ears perked up, though, despite his hearing being as weak as it was, at what the stranger said next, those ocean eyes shimmering in the moonlight.

"I believe I may have the solution for what ails you."

Henry spun around and gave the bizarrely dressed gentleman a yellow-toothed sneer.

"Feh."

The color in the stranger's irises swirled into a deeper hue almost imperceptibly, saying nothing more but outstretching a gloved hand instead, a brown cloth bag held loosely in his palm. Coville shook in confused anger for a moment, then steadied some, pulling his hat down over his tired eyes before snatching the sack away with a grumble, turning on his heel and starting his walk back home. The mysterious stranger quickly disappeared as the writer put distance between them, lost in the thick fog as easily as he had emerged. It had been a curious encounter, to be sure, but he had no time to ponder such doldrums. The writer had his work to attend to.

Henry placed his things on the coat rack once he walked back into the relative warmth of his home, giving Matilda a meaning nod before retreating once more to his study, failing to mention to his missus his encounter with the stranger on the moonlit streets. She would only worry about him more, and the last thing he needed was more interruptions. The bag thudded onto the writing desk as Coville sat down, licking his cracked lips feverishly as he began working.

It was less than an hour before the paper was scrapped, the old wordsmith pounding his wrinkled fists into the mahogany in another fit of rage. Forty five minutes of work had been spent on what could have been promising material, all for him to spend the next fifteen trying to fit the premise to work around a gaping plot hole he hadn't thought of at the idea's creation. The night air had done nothing for his writer's block, it seemed. Henry grumbled underneath his breath, tossing the crumpled ball behind him and into the pile. The clock seemed to taunt him, ticking and tocking incessantly, the only other sound the writer heard in his candle-lit study being that of his own pounding heart as the despair of his lost efforts finally overwhelmed him. So long had been spent in this room with only his thoughts, but now even those had stopped. Cramped fingers clutched his temples, trying to conjure up new ideas for scares, for stories, for something to support Matilda once all this stress finally got to his old bones, but the well had run dry, Henry's best ideas for his writing had already come and gone. Part of him considered dismantling this project altogether, it was better to quit while he was aware of the hopelessness of the situation, after all. No use sullying his good name with another pulpy novel. He may not end on a particularly high note, but his life would not have been in vain...

The old man's eyes moved to the burlap bag sitting next to his extra quills, his tongue briefly running over his lips to wet them again. The stranger he had gotten it from was suspicious, no doubt about that, but he could not help but be intrigued. He had told nobody about his recent battles with his writing but his dear wife, and he found it hard to believe that the shiny-eyed stranger was even an acquaintance to Matilda, much less somebody she would have told her husband's troubles to. What did he have to lose? His options were already extinguished anyways.

Coville's bony digits struggled with the tight rope wrapped around the top of the bag, Henry's teeth gritting together as he pulled and stretched the bindings. It was not made of any material he had expected, that was for certain. The light of his lantern now made abundantly clear that this was no type of burlap he had ever seen, it was instead a deep scarlet, and had a texture that could only be described as sinewy. It was wound together as bags were, tied at the top like bags were, but it was something curious and altogether different.

Henry found little time to ponder this grotesque leather, managing to open the bag just as soon as he noticed the strange texture within his fingers, his eyes now occupied with what was inside of the bag rather than what had held it shut. Oily black tendrils slithered outwards and wrapped around his fingers, each one resembling long, tangled masses of human hair. If he looked closely, he could almost see the split ends, hundreds of tiny follicles wriggling against his flesh and expanding ever outwards, moving from his fingers to his palms within seconds, swallowing his forearms before he could process the situation at hand.

A look of fear the likes of which he had never known crossed his face, and his exhausted gaze now sparkled with what seemed to be a glint of inspiration. This was all so horrifying, so undoubtedly bizarre...it had been exactly what he had been looking for. Henry Coville laughed as the snaking locks began to consume him, shaky hands reaching for his quill as the vines plunged within his cackling lips, spilling between his teeth and stuffing his throat with their wriggling presence. It took less than three minutes after opening the bag for the writer's world to go black.

Henry awoke in a desert of gray ash, naked and cold.

The Shepard and the Flock

The old writer coughed as he struggled to his feet, weakly groping fingers wrapping around his body for warmth. The temperature had been the first thing he noticed, then the snow falling from the sickly green sky. Henry's waking mind briefly pondered if it was winter, but as his eyes came into focus he noticed that it was anything but, finally beginning to take in the landscape around him.

That was no snow, it was falling cinders, only adding onto what must have been miles of the stuff underneath his feet. As strange as it was, the phenomenon was not concerning, at least not as much as what was dropping the smoldering embers from on high. The sea of sickly green above him was only pierced by large pointed spikes that emerged seemingly at random across the sky, all of varying sizes but each one at the very least several hundred meters long. They thinned from a wide base into a narrow point that, for some of the sky-structures, nearly reached the wasteland below.

These spikes were not the source of the ashen snowfall, however. That would be the ghoulish corpses bound to these strange stalagtites with heavy iron chains, hundreds of them, their mouths all opened in horrid screams and spilling forth noxious clouds of gray smoke endlessly, their deposits falling to the ground unceremoniously and adding to the endless spread Henry currently stood on. The old writer shook at the very sight, his lips moving as if trying to form words, but no sound came. He had been a master of terror, of fear, and yet he had never felt anything such as this in his life.

Weakly, Henry moved a hand to his chest to ensure he was still alive, almost surprised to find that his heart was still beating as his gaze focused on the ash-belching carcasses above, finding little comfort even when he felt the familiar thumping beneath his ribs. His knees wobbled, but he took a step forward, then another, beginning his slow trek through the sea of cinder as his eyes turned to the horizon. There was nothing he could see of note but a row of mountains in the distance, all taller than any he supposed existed around the city, but he had nowhere else to turn. All around him, the substance under his feet built on top of the many layers that came before, hauntingly majestic hills of ash that carried on for miles...where else was he to go but the mountains?

Henry considered it a sign that he had a purpose in this place, something within his heart that told him he had been given the bag for a reason...surely, this all was a gift? Never before had he laid eyes on anything so astoundingly horrific, so unthinkably strange, already he could feel the words to his magnum opus begin to take form within his mind! As he stumbled forward, confidence building from his newfound determination, Henry began to cackle to himself, teeth chattering from the cold. He would make the trip, even if it killed him. What else was there to do?

It seemed like he had been walking for weeks by the time he came across the skull. It was that of a ram, perhaps twice the size it should have been, partially buried in the dunes, the ridges on bleached-white horns caked with the smoldering dust from on high. As soon as Henry saw the skull, he froze in his tracks. There had been nothing else this whole journey thus far that he had seen on his trip to the distant mountains, nothing aside from the cinders beneath and the silent corpses trapped on their rocky prisons above. Surely, this was a sign.

Coville crouched down, placing one hand on the shifting embers beneath him to steady himself as he tried to get a closer look, his entire body shuddering and sweating as if from fever, his skin starting to take on a bluish hint from the overwhelming cold. At first, there was nothing out of the ordinary that happened to the skull, in fact, sights like this should be expected in such a desolate wasteland, but there hung a lingering dread in the pit of Henry's gut. His mind could not process this newly alien thing in this hellish nightmare, paranoia beginning to set in about what it could signify. There had been nothing on the path behind him, nothing for hours and hours, what could it all mean?! Was he to die, the skull a sign of death for the journey ahead? Was it a threat from the reaper himself, or whatever creature ruled this hellscape? Perhaps this place had already driven him mad. Henry reached a quaking arm outwards.

Just before his finger brushed against white bone, a dreadful ringing filled his ears, then a deafening shriek, the old writer taken aback enough to draw his hand away sharply. The noises only lasted a short few seconds, but the silence did not last long, the air now echoing with a potent squelching, sickening gurgles pervading the old man's senses and drawing his eyes directly towards the gaze of the hollow sockets before him. Two bloodshot eyeballs lurched their way out of (presumably,) where the brain on the ram would be, each taking their place in respective sockets before continuing their movement upwards. Thick veins coiled up and up, forming grotesque stalks that held the calm, steady stare of their eyes upright, like the stalks one would expect on a snail.

The eyes on top of these straining stalks turned and twisted on their new perches, unblinking as they moved not with focus but through sheer subconscious will. Each pupil swirled and glanced in constantly shifting directions, pinballs within their milky white prisons, always bouncing, bouncing. Henry fell onto his back and nearly tumbled down the ashy hill, scrambling backwards as the shifting cinders moved, the dead ram's body writhing underneath the slope as it slowly began to pull itself out of the dune. In lieu of hooves, the creature had decayed human feet, flesh still sticking to the bone, toes wriggling as it dragged itself forward with great effort. The jaw of the skull snapped open and it let loose another bloodcurdling howl, a second set of legs revealing themselves, then a third, then a fourth, the tendons that remained clenching as if every pull forward it made was pure agony.

The unnaturally long abdomen it possessed stretched on for what must have been twenty feet, a haphazard collection of random bones that served little purpose other than to hold the wretched thing together with small clumps of messy black hair bursting out between the cracks. The ram's screaming and the sounds of its bones snapping and lurching were louder in Henry's ears than they should have been, the old man giving a pained groan of his own as rivulets of blood began pouring out of both ears, the horrific sounds soon replaced with a loud ringing. He had gone deaf.

Gnarled fingers clawed at either side of his head, trying in desperation to make what was now an insufferable shrill whistle end, part of his mind expecting to be trampled as more skulls made themselves visible in the quaking ashen dune, dozens of them. Each one sprouted its own eye stalks, repeating the very same process the first did, a herd of the things all buried beneath the ashes and struggling to be free. They were grotesque centipedes, their pained moans and eager, piglike squeals still able to find their way into Henry's mind despite his deafness, bouncing off the walls in his skull and forcing him into a writhing mess on the ground. Surprisingly, the flock of rams slowly passed him by with their lunging gaits as they freed themselves from the hill they had been trapped in, the naked human in their wake of little consequence to them. He was not an intruder, it was simply as if he was not there.

As a finale to this erupting carnival of bone, the last of the ash dune swept away to reveal a creature much bigger than that of the others, its skull adorned with hundreds of tiny holes from which sprang eyes of all shapes and sizes. When their stalks began to emerge, they twisted and wrapped around one another, congealing into a fleshy heap hanging between the horns, twitching and unblinking as the thing's many legs began to shuffle outwards. Henry was so focused on the birth of eyes and the screaming in his head that he only now noticed the beast's rider, a pale, skinny thing with arms that nearly dragged into the wasteland below him and a neck that stretched up, up, up, the writer just barely able to make out a ruby-lipped grimace in those sunken, deeply wrinkled features.

For whatever reason, Henry's mind sprang to his work, and he immediately found need for a quill and paper to write down what he saw. This was the thing he had been looking for, the shock, the thing, a monster to truly bring fear into the hearts of many. A shepherd and his twisted flock.

"My muse! My muse!"

As the old man began to cackle, that perilously long neck of the rider craning down to observe him, watching those gnarled fingers desperately grasp at the desert beneath him as Coville struggled to hold on to his sanity. Its sunken eye blinked once, and just before its mount galloped into the horizon with the rest of the herd, it spoke a single word in response, voice raspy and echoing.

"No."

The writer wept and curled himself into a tight ball in the sea of ash below, choking and sobbing as the otherworldly cattle sped off to gods knew where. The cold grabbed him again, as if to keep him on his way, and his hearing slowly returned now that the deafening shrieks of the skeletal beasts had finally faded. Henry worked himself to his feet with some effort, and as he began lurching his way towards the mountain, he stared upwards, and heard that the chained corpses were now wailing.

The Bonfire

The cold was unbearable as the night fell, so much so that icicles had formed on the corpses above, screams now muffled by mouthfuls of ice. Coville's skin turned an icy blue as frostbite began to truly settle in, the old man having lost several fingers and toes on the long trip. His mind still raced after all this time, turning his encounter with the herd over and over again in his mind, shivering feet plodding towards the mountain range. It could not have meant nothing...but that must have been days ago, even with the unusually long passage of day to night in this realm. From what his grasping mind managed to remember of the human plane's concept of time, neither the morning nor the evening should be lasting this long.

Thankfully, Henry had spent his abundant amounts of free time making progress, not even knowing himself where he got the stamina to continue onward. It could have been his unbridled curiosity, his inner will as a writer to discover the muse meant for him, the fear of turning back, the fear of not having anywhere else to go. He had little doubt in his mind that if he chose another direction, he would only encounter a sea of endless dune for all eternity, and never be able to find his way back. There was no evidence for believing in such unusual geography in his mind, perhaps just a way to rationalize his endless march, but this place housed little life even near this solitary landmark.

In the days (or was it weeks? Months?) he had been walking since his encounter with the herd, he had only seen smaller, more irritating creatures, ones that happened to be the old man's only source of sustenance. Coville had managed to catch a small, vole-like mammal that had been burrowing underneath the dunes, the thing managing to wrap its multitude of thin, grasping feelers around his arm before gnawing off a chunk of his wrist, the elderly writer showing surprising force as he beat the gurgling horror to death, his crooked teeth plunging into the soft flesh even as it voiced its death cries.

There had even been the time he had found a nest of tiny birdlike creatures under a warped dead tree, having what looked like many pairs of tumor-spotted, featherless wings growing out of their back, failed attempts to create the proper wing structures to fly. The nest was nearly empty, only three of the squawking giblets left in the rather sizable nesting area, many spiral-patterned shell fragments scattered around the failures. Henry ate each of them whole, and they had been delicious. His mind was too broken to process the decisions he was making, his eyes merely left to witness the shell of what he had become, and the depths this shell would go for answers.

At least the base of the mountain was close. As Coville crossed a particularly large mound of embers, one of the largest that was left in his path, he suddenly stopped atop it, dust-caked hands slowly clutching at handfuls of the shifting ground beneath him. His emaciated form struggled, Henry gasping for breath as he saw the good fortune that his life had bestowed on him...a fire. A fire had been lit in this cold night. Just before the trail to the mountain's top, many tall, pale-skinned creatures gathered around the smoking, blazing flame, some of them dancing, some convulsing. No matter whether the creatures meant harm or good will, the writer smiled, yellow teeth flecked with flesh and blood. It was an impossibly slim chance, but it was a hope for some small comfort even with the constant terror looming over him.

It was only when he got closer that he realized exactly what the faces of these mysterious beings looked like, mostly taking notice because of the way they all turned their gazes to him as they approached. Despite the scarecrow-thin limbs the creatures were sporting, and the different number and placement of limbs they had, they all took the visage of his dear wife Matilda, who instead of her usual patient smile, were all scowling at him menacingly. The ones performing some strange, elaborate, leaping dance around the fire never stopped their performance even as their many sets of eyes locked on him, making it quite obvious that Henry was an intruder in their midst.

Despite their menacing appearance, however, they didn't seem to do anything other than stare at him as he approached the fire, Henry desperate enough for warmth that he would take his chances. He laid down before the licking flames, stomach bloated from extreme hunger and his eyes barely able to keep themselves open, his eyes watching the entrancing dance of the gray creatures as he started to drift off into a deep sleep, the angry gazes of what was once his wife becoming a distant thought as opposed to the comfort of sleep.

As the faces all began to loom over him though, their dance done and the figures all beginning to congregate around his starved skeleton of a body, the old writer found himself beginning to cry, a naked old man weeping in a personal hell. It was a world intended to frighten, but he felt as if he had been here so long that just seeing the face he had once loved so dearly was enough to stir up some sliver of human in him again. He still shook with terror, but as he desperately tried to piece together Matilda as she used to be in his head again he found himself sobbing, every memory they spent together now replaced with this silent scowl of disapproval, the beautiful night he had proposed to her, their wedding day... he soon couldn't remember a word she had ever said to him. Even the image of her loving smile that he had held on to throughout this torture was soon replaced with the mockery these things had made of her memory as they started to sneer and gnash their teeth at him, letting out deep and booming laughs to drown out his sorrow. After some time, the flames of the bonfire began to crackle away in the frigid cold and the glaring faces eventually left him, Coville finally granted the mercy of sleep as the last of his tears sank into the ashes.

All that was left was the mountain. 