draft in meter
In a push to make my writing as efficient as possible, I have hobbled myself by editing my words before they get the chance to land on the page.
I participated in another friendly short story competition at my partner's workplace, and decided it would be a good exercise to countermand my writer's block by writing in 'stream of consciousness' style, but sadly found the stream had dried. It was only when I started writing in meter that the words seemed to spill out easily. I think the focus on rhythm and shape rather than meaning or content afforded me the necessary disinhibition.
This may not work for you(r brain). I was chatting to my brother about writing in meter and he said he could not think of anything worse for establishing a good drafting flow.
On this day an old man walked along the lengthened shore where fish did flop and wither into garum on the baking sand, and gathered up an arm and more of stinking weed. Proffered high above his head to bar the unrelenting sun against his shining naked pate, he hurried south until he found a river mouth of sludge and yellowed grasses waving in the brackish wind. There he came to doors of wood, weathered as a standing stone, bleached like bone from drifting on the greying seas for centuries untold. These doors, flung wide, revealed a hovel, thick with steam and merry crackle of a fire kept quite low and slow to dry some hundred seaweed bushels strewn up from the rafters. Down did come the driest of them all, replaced at speed by newly gathered seaweed. From his pick the bald man drew a sheaf of crispy kelp to soften in his bowl of gruel. He moved the meal between his two remaining teeth and shortly after went to bed.
This house, now hovel, sunken half beneath the dunes, had stood upon a time amid a row of gay and brightly painted homes, held in place of joyful pride by all the peoples of the town -- known in ages past as Seabrook -- wherefrom sailors once departed, circumscribed the earth entire, and returned to be by all peers lauded. Such a time of newness; hoping; gladness; giving; hadn't been so long ago that people such as he recalled no longer. Rather, eras so replete with plenty tarried in these parts not decades past, and of an errant evening men like him would still sing what had been taught to them as children in a kinder time.
The man, whose name was Eduard, slept as soundly as he could, for on the coming dawn he would become the last of Seabrook's natives that would issue forth, away from dying coasts, and strive for leagues to pastures green and forests that still teemed with things that clung to life instead of death. But the exodus of Eduard was not in search of chances opportune but rather for he heeded words that came to him from sources higher than himself. He had dreamed a week before of Deruad Shipman -- he who raised him -- stood atop a blackened crag set all about with mosses green and livid, his thin and dripping hand extended straight in his direction, commanding Eduard without hint of compromise that Time had Come, and as all boys or men who had grown up beneath his roof, of Shipman blood, were fated to, he was to make the grim foray to Brimwell Howe where dungeons dripped, wyrms did coil, and gold languished far beneath the cold hard ground.
Morning came and Eduard robed himself in woolen garb and clutched his knobbled staff: shillelagh in the weathered tongue of fathers past. The aged song of that parlance that had been taught to him and all who were his kin demanded only that a candidate should make his 'very best' attempt to plunder back the Brimwell gold. Indeed, it had been centuries since any son of Shipman had done more than journey there to spy the evil glint of ridge and spire, deign to pass the boggy warrens circled 'round the cursed hill entire, and then admit defeat when they were near-consumed by black and stinking mire. Eduard, in his lettered sewn-up cloak, walking stiffly northward up the shifting dunes, dragging like a patchy tail his sledge beladen with his tools and sundries, would run contrary to patterns laid by forebears of the past, for he would aim to penetrate beneath the bulk of Brimwell Howe until he found the cursed mountain's root, and there locate the fabled gold and time-forgotten secrets of the goldsmiths who'd declared the End of History so many ages long ago, only to evaporate upon the winds of time like dust evicted from the mounds of wavered sand upon the coasts that once were land. For Eduard differed crucially from all those aspirants who'd traipsed towards the sunset-lengthened shadow-needle cast by Brimwell Howe in summer, winter, dry or rain; and that was that he and only he of all of them had nothing left to lose. No family, friend, or neighbour anchored him; for five years he had tarried in his hovel, aging, pacing; picking, drying seaweed; waiting, waiting, for his Time to Come. It was all that he anticipated, all that he felt cause to live for.
The journey took him through the lichen glades and mushroom torrs, canyons filled with legged fish and men who barked instead of spoke. He slept by day and walked at night, creeping when he had to, via shade and crevice to avoid these creatures and their vengeful ire. For all sundered things of dying lands blamed men for Earth's betainted plight and wished when meeting with them to extract their pound of flesh for crimes committed in the past that went too long unpunished.
'Twas Winter, then, when Eduard reached the brow of Brimwell Howe, perched upon the Earth's dilapidated edge, and looking quite unchanged for all this time despite the land around it turning sunken, dour, iresome, faulted by the fading of the earth. Buzzing loudly, haemophages of great size would fly in arrow-flocks across the lowlands, picking for their supper little lambs and rangy apes that strayed too far in search of scarce-found water. The lone adventurer was able -- with a pinch of luck and pluck -- to make his way through half the perilled swamp, but then was waylaid by mosquitoes in the manner so described. His shillelagh, then, became for first time blooded. With the ritual method of the men of Seabrook, Eduard named his club, dubbed Proboscis for the limb that it could find and break prodigiously. The path was slow and so he had at sunset only tramped as far as one of two great rifts arranged concentrically around the hill, each quite full of brown effluvia, sat quite still and seeming from afar as if they could be rings of smoky glass, containing in them some fell gas like bromine, one breath of which would kill if surface tension broke from ripples left by any foreign wing or leaf or rock or digit. With trepidation then did Eduard strike his camp upon the mossy, spongey, stinking bank, and like a hawk he watched the glassy waters for a hint of any thing that moved beneath.
Daybreak was forelengthened by a rolling bank of thick grey clouds that brushed the tip of Brimwell Howe, but Eduard had already woken, packed, broken fast, and wandered up and down the loathsome bank of Brimwell's moat until he found the wreck, abandoned, of a fleet of river-ships with flat-floored hulls. Gunwales still held shields of splintered oak with green bronze caps and jutted from the murky waters at all angles. Arrangement of the raider-boats suggested they had made to block the river, meeting bow to stern and lined up right-angled to the water's edges. But some tide of sundering force had smashed apart the flagship, which as proof of its existence offered from below no more than its black mast, a weathered skeleton keeping watch for ever more atop the rotting crow's nest.
Forced to leave his sledge behind, Eduard stretched his aging joints and girded up his cloak about him, lashed his sandals tight, and sprang, as sprightly as he could, from rotted beam to rotted beam, cringing clammily whenever surfaces would dip beneath his landing feet and threaten to submerge him in the deadly waters. One square of tar-stained plank, which Eduard thought to be a remnant of the flagship's deck, proved to be a raft of rotted woody fibres, and for a dreadful minute Eduard plunged straight through decaying timbers, splashing, thrashing to and fro to find some purchase on a nearby prow. Emerging, sopping, shaken to the core, he cast about with wild fear and found what he was dreading: the river's wide and lazy curve now yielded to an arrow-wake that glided smooth and fast and powerfully, far too big to be a simple fish. Surely a leviathan inhabited this moat, dredged up from distant seas by Goldsmiths, in years past that numbered thousands, or perhaps a river serpent that surpassed its kin, turned by ravages of time and waters irreversibly polluted to a monster that defied the edicts binding Life itself.
A fan-shaped fin now jutted from the water. Clumps of moss, a lurid green, were growing from the craggy spines. Eduard was about to flee when suddenly a thought did pierce the veil of tiredness and fear with which he had become afflicted. A blackened crag and mosses green and livid. Deruad's hand that *dripped -- his finger pointing forth, perhaps to say 'this is the way'*.
Mayhap it was a madness that now overtook him, but if it was, then all the gods of Luck of every age had come together in that moment, pressing Eduard forward in a striving leap to catch the river-monster's spines, even as the beast did rear its blind-eyed maw of many teeth and tear apart the ruined ship where just a moment past he had been stood. The heavy plunge exploded frothily around his ringing ears, then muffled suddenly as water filled them. Surging faster than he'd ever sailed or swum before, Eduard clung on hard and gasped for air as undulations of the league-long serpent carried it by subtle faults amidst the peat from outer moat to inner moat, and then a breakneck dive beneath the peaty bank into a submerged tunnel. Black, and bubbles, brittle roots and softened bones, whipped by his face, urging him to take a killing gasp and fill his lungs with boggy water. The fell beast's dive continued arrow-straight towards where Eduard reckoned -- in his foggy state deprived of air -- the darkened bulk of Brimwell Howe was situated. He was on the verge of passing out entirely. A chill and dreadful sense of calm had grown for he now realised he had fallen victim to insanity. There had been no sense in clinging to the beast's slick back, and now he would become another set of bones left floating, decomposing, in the flooded tunnels 'neath the Howe. Darkness came to overtake his vision, and he gladly let it usher in the cold and quiet hug of death.
As such, he barely felt the kiss of air, when abruptly to a subterranean cave the beast arrived. It spun around within the pool it came to. As it did, it flicked the half-dead human from its back as if he were a shredded rag, and surged away again down frothing flooded channels, leaving him to waken slowly over hours, breathing raggedly and shivering.
Once he had slept and dreamed in fitful bursts devoid of sense and full of fear for some amount of hours that he would never fully reckon(for to this deep and dripping cavern, sunlight would not ever pierce), Eduard staggered to his feet and peered into the echoed gloom, and what he saw compelled his heart to glow and warm and leap and sing. For here within a dark forgotten manifold submerged beneath the bulk of Brimwell Howe, gleaming, perfect, and untarnished, was a hoard of gold to rival those of Earth's last remaining kings.
The tales told true! Not just a fabrication told to send ancestors out on pointless quests -- the Brimwell Hoard was here before his blinking eyes! Eduard cackled and leaped forward. Banished now, the weary chill that ate into his yellowed bones. With a clink and hiss and jangle, coins and crowns now flew about as Eduard plunged and rummaged deep within the brightly shining mounds. He mantled crowns of, agate; ruby; silver; gold; thrust gem-hilted daggers through a girdle set about with filigrees of platinum; popped loose ancient corks and stoppers, spilling free the wines and brandies that had aged so fine, so long, inside. But Eduard started suddenly: His frail and thinning claws had dug too deep and landed on a surface, metal-hard but warm as flesh. He flicked aside the golden coins to find a scale, thick as plate and wider than his head.
Eduard was then knocked down to his feet as rumblings summoned all the coins and treasures into movement, as if they'd been compelled to stand and dance and slide upon each other, forming instantly a treacherous and shifting landscape, one which threatened right away to inundate the hapless black-cloaked figure.
In his heart he felt a deep and final dread, even as it hammered on his breast as if it were an anvil. In his final living moments, staring now into an eye beneath him blinking slowly to reveal a width beyond the greatest sails that Eduard had seen ever fly, he thought of loss. He thought of lands subsumed by waters grey and unremembering, families fragmented by death, war, and fadings of forgetfulness, and he uttered forth a single animalian sob.
No heir succeeded him. No tale, of journeys deep beneath the Howe to caves where gold and dragons slumbered ever and onwards, would escape the foul and flooded tunnels. Piteously Eduard clutched at coins, his head made cold and heavy by crowns golden-banded, as he disappeared from Earth and Time into the apathetic maw of Dirkuar, the hoarding beast outside of legend that had caught him, guiltless, thieving, and red-handed.