The Mystic's Dream

Alexander Humperdink was a man who could not abide immorality.

It left a poor taste in his mouth, a film that covered his tongue and would not let his words slip free. Alexander Humperdink was in his middling years, his face could never be said to be fair, though he grew a beard that rivaled the best. He found himself stroking this beard of his, fat fingers through wiry gray hairs, he repeated again and again as he waited in the cold. His breaths puffed out, small clouds in the frigid winter air, he shuffled his feet along the dry dirt outside the erected tent.

The king has the right of it, he thought to himself. I can finally do my business here without worry from the guards. He tugged at his beard again and recalled the parchment that was passed from person to person throughout the town. From a raven's claws to his own dry hands, he passed it to his wife for he himself was never taught his letters.

Finally, the king had taken action. Finally, the king was seeking for something greater than a begrudging truce. The wax seal made it official, a divide was driven, and here Alex stood, with his hands tightly gripped about a cloth pouch, knotted at the end.

He waited, he heard the clamor inside. A language foreign to his ear, the sound of a small pop and the sudden applause from the mass huddled together beneath the pitched tent. Ever a patient man, Alexander waited.

And when the crowd started to pool out from the flaps of the tent, he waited still. He watched them all. He saw them as they truly were, saw past what he thought to be a clever guise. He could see the darkness underneath their eyes, the way their hands shook so, he could tell that their breathing was quick, that they would be back tomorrow. That before long his little town would be corrupt, that the glamor of an easy rush would catch them all in its net.

He took to the shadows as he watched, and he saw the fake smiles and the mumbled conversation. He tuned it all out until the last of the crowd left.

He didn't shake, didn't flinch, didn't hesitate for a moment before he drew that cloth bag into hand once again -- he found a fire near at hand, and once the bag had caught, it was simple. He peeled back the entrance to that tent, heavy canvas cloth, he passed the bag deep inside and stepped away, a child playing at a game he knew not the size of.

Before long, the black smoke filled the sky. The fire caught and the cloth consumed, and he could hear the ragged breath of the one left inside. He kept his hands inside his pockets, kept his thoughts inside his head, and waited.

Where is all that power now? Alexander wondered, and he nearly laughed in his triumph. All the good that those dark gods will do you, they abandon you in the flames. He made a note of this, he drew up his courage from it, and when the tent was not but a ruined thing only standing in some small sections, he bid himself entrance within.

The thick gray air gave him pause, and he coughed aloud, but he carried on. He had to make sure his job was done, and so he walked to the head of the tent, and there his boot came on the figure on the floor. A man who was young enough to almost be a boy still, Alexander shook his head. He nudged the body over with his foot, charred and black and full of soot.

Empty eyes stared up at him, and Alexander could see the blackness that had once been there. He saw what the man had left behind, a tattered cloak, a gnarled wooden stick within his hand, a top hat hardly touched rest upon the scorched stage. A man of curiosity, Alexander stepped up to the stage, drew a hand from his own pocket to pick up this hat of his. He turned up upside down and round again, and when he reached within he felt a magician's last trick.

A taste of magic, a taste of something beyond this life, Alexander could feel a rush, a sensation that tingled up from fingertip to toes. A bolt of lightning made of all the world, and there Alexander touched the life beyond his own, and he saw the faces of the dark gods he fought, and he could swear they laughed at him.

"I was just doing the king's bidding," he'd say. His voice would echo helplessly in the blackness that enveloped him. "You've no right to be practicing these foul things any longer!"

These were the protests of a man, but he was quickly becoming less. He could feel his flesh stripping away like so many ribbons in the blackness of the hat, enveloped by a magicians trap.

Alexander Humperdink was, and then he wasn't.

I'll Haunt You

The singer sat on a bed of rocks, the salt and wind caught up to mess his hair, he looked out on the sea. He felt about ready to retch, from his thoughts or from the view he didn't know, things were getting too wound up in one another. The blue expanse stared him back, maddening, it was everywhere he could see.

He dare not look back behind him.

"Salawan," she'd said, "sometimes I still miss it at night."
"How can you miss anything when I'm there at your side?" He'd remembered saying those words, but now he wasn't so sure, his voice sounded different and there was something odd about his eyes, he was sure that was another person. Or maybe he was a different person now, looking out over the sea, a shimmer of gold a preposterous thing in his dirty hands.

Salawan was the place she missed, but it wasn't a place he cared to look back on. Carved of rock by the see, the town was all crags, cold and hard and pitted by the weather. Buildings grew out of stone, or maybe it was the other way around, Tomas didn't care to dwell on it, didn't care to look back.

He could feel the eyes on his back, he could feel the ghost in his mind, and like a child panicked in the dark he cast away that glimmer of gold out into the sea. It swallowed it up without a word back of reply, only that same cold glare as it stretched out forever.

Maybe now it'll be over, the singer thought. All I wanted was a kiss, I never wanted this. He brushed his lips with his thumb and remembered her kiss, soft and sweet and nothing like this place she'd brought him too. This place where he couldn't find the music. Everywhere he went he found a beat, he found a rhythm, and with his lute and five helpers he could paint a picture.

Not here.

Maybe not ever again, he thought and he shivered, and for an instant he thought he could feel her right there beside him again like it always was. In the end, the night came and the singer got up and left. The sea swallowed a memory, but the girl followed him home.

A Beginning

So, here we have The Beat Path.

These days my time is filled with a million things: class, homework, gym, beautiful girlfriend. Okay, so that's four things, but it can feel like a million when the classes stretch on, the homework is too long, I just don't want to go to the gym, and I just want more time with the girlfriend.

Still, I want to find time in my day to be creative. I'm going to write at least a little something each and every day. It shouldn't be a hard task, I think of things I want to write down every single day -- but then, thinking and doing are never one in the same, and so this will end up being harder than I'd think it to be. Still, I'm going to do it.

Be it a short piece of fiction, a story of something interesting that happened to me that day, or rantings and ramblings of the insane (that would be me), I'll put my creative energies to some kind of use before I lose them.

Perhaps not the most auspicious start, but there it is.