[4 - Alpha] Kwan v. Ink

[Kaez]

750-word limit Flash Fiction

The Cryptic Cartographer

[Inkdrinker]

The old question: how many tunnels are there? How deep do they delve? The ancient folly: why? I have devoted my entire life to the pursuit of the answers to these questions. A classical fool's errand, if ever there was one.

I have walked the great highways all the way to the Taro Assembly, that nation of men and women with dreams of reclaiming the surface, and I have walked further still. I have criss-crossed the hidden back-passages, hiked the treacherous Undermounts and survived the horrors of the Abyssal Chasm. I have seen the last forest of Gairn, lush and verdant, a rare luxury in this world. I have drank from the inky blackness of the Umbral Ocean, shedding my shadow and watching it drown. I have broken bread with spore cultists, false prophets, and doomsayers.

I meandered for days through the Colorless Depths, my vision forever changed. I killed a senator in the Far Yellow City, though not entirely on purpose. It was a community service, at any rate. He was a terrible, corrupt, utterly contemptible man. But everyone is, in that city, I suppose.

I've thrice hunted for deepleather in the Anthracite Wilderness, barely escaping with my skin, let alone the prize of another beast's. I have surveyed for each of the uncountable, exponentially fracturing, new-old governments. I have walked on the surface, treading on the corpse of the old world to count and measure its pores.

I have been a willing witness to incredible things and I have been forced to endure horrific strands of fate, but still I am not sated. I want to see more, to taste new places and experience new people. I want to know again the pleasures of climbing a summit or plunging head first into the deep. I want so many more things out of this life. But alas, it will not be.

Sickness, plague, weakness of the flesh. Call it what you will, but it gnaws at the edges of my being. It is coming for me, that old beast, death. I can feel it in my bones and in my lungs. I can feel its breath on the back of my neck and I am not afraid. I am disappointed, saddened, perhaps angry, but never afraid.

My final work lies almost complete, in these final pages. My final map: the course I have charted through this life. For better or worse, it is my ultimate work. I have uncovered, in these final months, a path to something greater. Greater than gold, greater than all luxuries, but not greater than man's ambition.

I have pieced together the location of a piece of the divine. I am too infirm, too ill, to seek it for myself. Not that I want it for myself, anyway. I seek only to confirm its location and gaze upon its glory. Such things are usually more trouble than they are worth, in my experience, and if there's one thing I have, it's experience.

It should be left alone, it should be forgotten to the ages, returned to the stone. Yet I hunger for the trek. It feels wrong for something so incomprehensibly important to simply be forgotten, swept under the rug of history.

The rational part of me is telling me to burn these pages, to keep the location a secret to society. It would destroy them I think, it would be the end of everything. We survived it once, I do not know if we could do it again.

But the explorer in me, the part of me that yearns for adventure, for new stories to tell and vistas to paint, says I should make it public. It tells me that it will not be the end, that it will be the beginning. It tells me that change is not to be feared, but embraced. I have played the part for too long to ignore it now. It is at the very core of who I am or at least who I hope to have been.

I will leave these pages unadulterated, unedited, and uncensored. The piece of the divine will bring with it a new era, a new future. I hope it will be for the better.

[Matteo ((Taed))]

This was awesome, too! I'm having a real hard time reviewing your stuff, man. It's too good! You're playing right to my joy zone with this rich, esoteric, descriptive stuff.

You're getting a bye on three rounds in a row, but I seriously doubt you wouldn't have won them even if your opponent had written. And I'm including myself in that list of theoretical opponents. This is probably my favourite stuff in the competition. Which is weird, because I remember reading the story you wrote for the 4-way League Cup (which ... I think was the same setting as these stories? Or am I remembering that wrong?) and thinking it was pretty mediocre at the time.

Whatever writing steroids you've been taking, keep taking them.


Winner: Inkdrinker