Evil Arises
By B.R. Stateham
But I was not ascending the spiralling stone steps in the East Tower to observe the storm. Another dread compelled me to leave my cubicle, warm and comfortable with a brazier filled with glowing red coals for a fire. The mass of blankets and coarse cotton sheets that softened the hardness of the cold slab I had been sleeping on moments earlier—a cold, stone slab like that all Bretan monks slept on in their cubicles here in the monastery—nevertheless had felt warm and luxuriant to me.
For you, Pilgrim, sleeping on hard stone only marginally softened with blankets and a thin pad may seem barbaric as you read these words sitting in the comfort of your favourite chair beside a burning fireplace. But for a warrior monk like myself, sleeping quarters, which I had only moments earlier occupied, was a luxury rarely experienced by me. It had been years since I had last slept in this monastery. The suspicion that stirred me out of my deep sleep compelled me to dress and find my way to the East Tower, suggesting I might never have the opportunity offered to me again. In the clinging darkness of the tower, the oldest bastion of strength built in the Bretan monastery called The Knave, the feeling of approaching evil pulled me out of my slumber and sent me here.
Above my head, a giant burning torch hissed and sputtered, glowing embers into the darkness yet creating a big enough bubble of illumination that enveloped me like a protective coat of armour. The torch and the bubble of light slowly ascended toward the deserted topmost chamber.
Genre: Fantasy
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B.R. Stateham
Biography.
About the author – My name is B.R.Stateham. I am a seventy-four-year-old kid who never grew up. I write dark noir police-procedural and even darker fantasy sci-fi. And although I look like a second cousin to Frankenstein, I’m just as stubborn. Over the years, I’ve tried to do two things with my writing. First, I want to clarify and make my imagination more visual as it is transcribed onto the written page. I do not like the ‘bare bones’ approach to writing fiction. Just telling a starkly plain story with no visual cues to stir the reader’s imagination seems akin to a scam perpetrated on the reader.
The balance between too much imagination and too little is a battle that is always constant in a writer’s efforts. But, as in almost everything else, years of experience help tremendously in finding that balance. Secondly, telling a story with short, clear sentence structures is another nut to crack for any writer. The natural tendency for a writer is to write long, meandering, complex-compound sentences that stretch on forever and seemingly never end (like maybe this one?). Too long a sentence, and the reader becomes lost. Too little in a sentence or too stark in its construction, the reader is like a man in a small boat out on a storm-tossed sea bobbing up and down and distinctly ill at ease.
Well . . . so much for a writer’s woes. I plan to keep on writing what I love to read. Since I can’t find the writing style I like to read–I might as well write it. Maybe you might find that you want this particular style as well. Who knows? Stranger things have happened.
B.R. Stateham
