Unbound

[the unbound]

Prologue

“What are you?” he asks, all glassy-eyed sincerity and childlike disappointment.

The boy thinks he can move me with his startled eyes, sticky with judgement. I’m the alcoholic parent sipping one more from the thin neck of the bottle as he looks on pleading, “Please, Papa Bear, please say it ain’t so.”

He doesn’t know. How could he? He can’t realize that the slate of marble in this temple to whatever cockamamy excuse I gave them to build it might as well be the compressed powder from the bones of every subject of my rule who has died in service to my will and that I have lorded over foolish, trusting boys like him long enough for the weight of my own ego to exert enough pressure over the centuries, the millennia, eons spent on world after world, to forge the pristine white walls of this place.

I could have sat and watched it happen, watched time turn dust into stone and back again.

He doesn’t know any of it. He only knows that the paternalistic paragon of his imagination, the icon for whom he and generations of his people have toiled and lain down obsequies has been unmasked.

All he knows is that the emperor has no clothes.

 

[Tambien]

Good begining!

 

[the unbound]

Part I
Chapter I

Sometimes when I die, it does things to my mind.

When I wake up in the muck, naked and head-spinning, I'm not sure who I am or where I was. I'm sure I died somewhere, but how I slipped from one world into another, I don't know. It will all come back to me, I know, because it always does. Sometimes centuries later I'll remember my name.

Until then I'm a nameless wretch pulling himself out of knee-deep sludge dripped off thousand-year old jungle trees.

And I am not alone.

A band of men, crouched like theropods licking their dagger teeth, hands gripping the bone of their axe handles so tightly the flesh fuses to the stock.

I get to my feet, try speaking to them. They just curl up their brows in confusion. I say more, not sure what language I'm speaking, and they finally reply in Nahuatl.

I don't know it well and the languages always change when fate or whatever drops these backwards people into the wilderness to see what they make of a pristine, unblemished world, so their exact meaning escapes me.

I try to answer, but my pronunciation is so terrible that their grimaces pull up the wooden bolts shoved through their noses, revealing their enflamed nostrils like braying animals.

Now I know someone is going to die.

I wouldn't be here if I hadn't just died somewhere else, so I know it is going to be one of them this time.

As the leader of the band steps forward his headdress of plumage and sheep bones shakes like dead branches in a gale. He's claiming the honor of slaughtering the outsider for himself.

There can't be much honor at stake. I must make a miserable prize. Scrawny and naked, covered in slime alive with breeding insects and newborn snakes so fresh their bones are still sapling soft.

But he's doomed.

He can't be more than twenty and his arms bristle with muscle fed on lean, hard prey and women's adoration. He's killed men, that's enough clear in the confident, piercing gaze, but all his vigor and desire count for nothing.

I've learned from a thousand teachers on a thousand worlds.

He swings, typical high stroke.

I sink in a full horse stance, stab at him with my fingertips through the connective tissue above his left kidney. He winces and the pain saps his focus. I grab his wrist and twist it counter clockwise, pressing his carpals into each other. His grip falters. I rise and plant my elbow under his chin--a splatter of blood fountains from his shattered teeth.

Three points of contact and it's almost over.

He's stunned and the axe is slipping from his fingers. I release his wrist and take the weapon, spinning so I glance my elbow across his face before seizing the axe for myself and planting my back to him. I tuck the arm of the axe against my ulna, sink into stance again and then thrust the blade past my back, catching him just below the sternum.

He falls and his fellows creep forward obsequiously. They cut out his heart and hand it up to me.

It tears between my teeth like old worn rubber, hot with blood and still-crackling nerves.

"Take me to your tribe," I tell them.

 

[ShadowNX]

Subscription post: Looking forward to more.

 

[sukritact]

Love it, it reads so much like a novel, an interesting change from what i usually see.

 

[yahzuk]

An excellent start. You are certainly raising the bar for storytelling! Please keep it up.

 

[Pouakai]

This is looking very promicing, hopefully the story will continue

 

[Tambien]

I love it!

 

[the unbound]

Part I
Chapter II


For thirteen days and nights they challenge me. Only the ones from the woods believed I was anything to be feared. By some fluke I had bested their hunter and they would have their bloody revenge before the assembly. My new supplicants pleaded with them not to challenge me, but the others had become hardened with incredulity. Even as more of them fell in the arena, the others shook their heads, telling themselves they saw weaknesses in my approach, vulnerabilities in my attacks, ways through my defenses.

Thirteen days. Word spreads and other villages converge on the river bank, until thousands are encamped around the central fire burning six men high and cooking lamb shanks staked beside it.

Though they come at me hoping to suck the marrow from my bones, I deflect their attacks without killing them.

One after another, I put them down. On the first night, the priests give speeches. I hear words like "unholy" and "fearful."

By the fourth night, though, the priests look at me as if I am the blackened lamb's meat. The camp is becoming a single city of celebrants and the magnetic pull of my presence is filling their heads with visions of greater and still greater power. They think to themselves that I will be useful.

If only they knew.

Finally the tournament ends. No challengers are left. The remaining strong, young men deliver speeches by the firelight, pledging themselves to me, to serve my will. "You, unholy one sent among us, we will march with you, we will redden the whole of the jungle with the blood of our enemies." The women dance in jerking undulations, breasts heaving, hips snapping with each step. They sing about my greatness, putting rhythm behind my nascent legend.

I should tell them.

I’m not great.

Ask my first teachers. My first hundred or so teachers would tell you about my gross inadequacy as a warrior: Poor physical memory. Lousy coordination.

But I had time on my side.

I’m no born fighter, I just have ruts so deep in my hippocampus that every move is automatic. The product of the martial knowledge of a thousand cultures, or the same culture run and rewound a thousand times.

The same culture, over and over again, but not this one. This is different. I have lost my way.

Yes, this is not where I belong. Not with these people, these blood eaters, these fear drinkers.

This is not my world.

But they’ve embraced me, so I should stay, stay and see what I can make of their idiotic obedience.

Still as they sing their songs and dance naked in the flickering light of orange campfire and billowing frond smoke, I think about that last move in the jungle, against the young man with the axe.

I could have dropped the axe. I could have delivered the last blow with my elbow against his breastbone, knocked him cold, left him gasping in the muck I’d just climbed out of.

How might it have been different then? If he had walked into the village with me, a living symbol of mercy, what then?

And why did I kill him? Why?

Always questions, but somtimes I can’t remember the answers for a thousand years or so.

 

[Tambien]

Great Job!!!!!!!!!!!!
I love your writing style!

 

[Optical]

Don't normally come to the V forums - Tambien was talking about this. I think this is quite possibly going to be one of the best ever Civ stories

 

[Tambien]

I award Unbound the Second Super Story Cookie!!!!!!!

 

[alangtknox]

My daughters ask my sons and myself why we enjoy CivV so much. I had one of my daughters read your first three posts and said that is how we feel just getting to the first turn of the game. When your spawn is revealed and you move the warrior. Your city explodes and you choose a tech and production to work on. All she could say is that your tale was awesome. Maybe she will attempt a game now. Thank you for sharing a wonderful start of hopefully a long story thread.

 

[NinjaCow64]

THIS IS FRIKKIN AWESOME!

Subbed.

 

[Jehoshua]

 

[the unbound]

Thanks, all...especially for the cookie.

 

[Pouakai]

Just keep it up and we'll keep posting your praises. This story is freaking epic, keep it up

 

[the unbound]

Part I
Chapter III

For generations, they have told stories of a city behind the wall of the Southern mountains.

I march with them, following the wide band of the river, twisting around the foothills of the mountain range, quicksilver shine as the water snakes ahead of us.

South of the mountain the jungle is foreign. Thicker, darker. Leaves so drunk on sunlight they fan out like black umbrellas.

Then it starts to give way, and the jungle opens as if the single world of green stalks and writhing, living floor has been cracked and we can look through the fissure into something else, into some world of empty, beige dunes and a sun that never sets.

And finally we find the city that my Mexica followers have sewn into their imaginations through night-legends over thousands of campfires.

A ruin.

I walk ahead of the vanguard into its empty streets. It is a vast crypt turned inside out, like an animal splayed open to dry in the sun before a feast. The brick makers who had shaped the adobe plates we stepped on hadn't known, but they'd been forging their own grave markers.

Something has come ahead of my bloodthirsty army. They've come here to pillage the monsters of their ancestral memories, to crack open the skulls of their betters.

They were to have no such satisfaction.

As I step through the shadows of the dead city's spires, a strange familiarity comes over me. Did I build this? Was this once my city? Are all the flickers of the past I can't remember linked to places like this, empty husks of past civilizations?

"What is it, unholy one?" one of my lieutenants hisses in my ear. "What do you see?"

"I'm just wondering if I've been here before," I tell him. He slinks back, nodding to himself as if I've made any sense. They trust in their god-king so. Every paradox is a puzzle for their faith.

No, I decide. The things I remember are from other worlds. This city rose and fell before I fell into this one. It must have been like magnesium. Quick and bright.

Now it's just a monument to the myth of progress. It reminds me that I'm playing out my part in a farce. Civilization is just a virus in the body politic. A cancer that will eventually eat its way through the host. It's a fire that will go out.

What then? When the embers die? What then?

Then we'll be just shivering apes in the twilight.

We pick through the bones by day and by night there are vigils of disappointment. Long quiet nights of eating without boasts, without hoary tales of greatness. Only long still and cloudless nights, like a single tone of lament.

At last, though, a stone slab is pushed aside and we find an armory. A long hall filled with shield and spear that stretches beneath the broken stones of what I think was once a palace.

"I do not understand," they ask me. "Why would they leave their weapons behind? Whatever enemy destroyed them, why would they not use these weapons?"

I do not answer, only take them out to the courtyard and begin to train them in fighting with something other than bone axes. As I instruct them in the proper use of the shields, they lose their curiosity about the fate of the metalsmiths who made them.

Decay is the enemy. Time. Death. You have to pull the myth of progress close, like a woman with supple hips, and hold her, adore her, breath deep her fragrance until you forget she is a fiction.

 

[Optical]

:suspicious: Do you do this for a living?

Seriously, though, your writing is AMAZING.

 

[Suitaroh]

By far the best story i've ever read on this forum.
Please keep it up.