#writing #fantasy #OfTheArbour Even heroes get insomnia. ---- He could see shapes in the ceiling. Shadows writhed in a sensual dance as the dying embers of his candle spat and faded. What little light remained cast an eerie glow across the worn stone walls of his room, and the edges where the mortar had crumbled and flaked away had shadows like spider legs stretched across the surface. The door on the other side of the room was invisible, swallowed by blackness; for a moment he considered taking the time to relight the candle, then decided that wasting the flint would be ridiculous. Master Korrin wasn’t about to give him more because he thought the shadows on his ceiling would give him nightmares. He rolled his shoulders and winced as bolts of pain shot down his spine and spread through his muscles. Nightmares weren’t for the waking world—usually, he reminded himself with a small shudder. One required sleep to have nightmares. Flexing his fingers to ease the cramping that began during dinner and lingered long after, he let out a long sigh through his nose and squinted at the shadows. It was all too easy to imagine spiders and snakes and demons from myth crawling through the cracks in his walls and skittering across his naked flesh. As the light danced, he concentrated on pulling the shadows together, on banishing the tendrils that might be hairy legs or flicking tails. Hair, instead. A jawline—square, like his, or maybe rounder—a nose and eyes. A scowl clouded his brow as another pulse of pain worked its way through him. There was no use. He had no face to base his imagination on; there was no point trying to decipher those particular ghosts. When he blinked, the shadows twisted once more and gone were the wisps he had imagined, the faces of the mother and father he never knew.
Posted on: Sun, 23 Jun 2013 07:34:56 +0000