[The Spartan King] Leonidas most certainly had in his mind that response which the Delphic oracle had earlier given at the outset of the Persian campaign:
Hear your fate, O dwellers in Sparta of the wide spaces;
Either your famed, great town must be sacked by Perseus' sons,
Or, if that be not, the whole land of Lacedaemon
Shall mourn the death of a king of the house of Heracles,
For not the strength of lions or of bulls shall hold him,
Strength against strength; for he has the power of Zeus,
And will not be checked until one of these two he has consumed.The Spartans, no doubt, their great helmets laid aside until the first attack came on, found time to comb their hair. Leonidas looked at them with the dour affection of all last-ditch commanders: 'Have a good breakfast, men, for we dine in Hades!'
- Ernle Bradford, Thermopylae
Welcome to yet another HTML extension of my home page. This particular section houses all the stories that I started in earnest but have yet to finish. In all probability, it's doubtful that I'll ever return to them (unless I'm really in a creative slump). I'll also add basic story ideas to this page. I encourage anybody out there to either continue writing where I left off, or even start writing their own stories from any ideas that I might provide. After all, why would I put up anything on the World Wide Web unless I intended others to use it? Just try to add a little tag to show that it originates from my idea - or add the URL of my homepage to the bottom of your work - in the style I've done for 'Diabolic Machine'.
Update! I've turned this into a summaries page, instead of a container page for the actual stories. In here will go all my thoughts, interesting facts and so forth about each piece. Hopefully, I will soon upgrade the text links to images that will give you some idea of the stories they contain...
The origins of this story actually go way back into my childhood, when my parents bought me a thick compendium called '1000 Stories'. In retrospect, they must have thought it contained a collection of fairy tales suitable for an impressionable little seven-year-old. They couldn't have been more wrong. What this fiendish masterpiece actually contained were such classical works as 'The True Account of Jack the Ripper' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart'. I still have nightmares about it today. Anyway, to cut a long story short, this piece of fiction was inspired by one of the tales of that insiduously evil volume. In Wilkie Collins' A Terribly Strange Bed, an unsuspecting foreigner falls victim to an elaborate murder plot. Drunk and flushed with gambling, our hero is lured into a bedroom for the night - never realizing that the four-poster bed has been designed to slowly descend and crush him as the hours tick by...
Even as a young boy, though, I felt unsatisfied with the story. It was easily the most boring thing to have come out of 20th century literature, despite the great premise. Characters were turned as blunt as a spoon by the first-person narrative. The story lacked imagination, lacked the environment for its horror to take hold. So, by the time high school rolled up, I was ready to tackle my own version of this chilling tale. And here it is...
This story arose out of a simple challenge that was put to me in creative writing class: write a story based on a popular song. This sounds a lot easier than it actually is. I mean, honestly, how many of you could write a developed story on a Beatles song? Or even on a Nine Inch Nails' offering? Let's face facts: most songs can be divided into two groups - love ballads and angry youth anthems. Everclear's Local God somehow manages to straddle the line, however. It gives an interesting concept - a singer who, although of great power and confidence, has a certain hollowness about him.
On a completely unrelated tangent, at the same time as I was coming up with a story for this song, I had developed an interest in 'mature' role-playing games. Such fare as White Wolf's Vampire: The Dark Ages is a far cry from the light-weight fantasy of AD&D. Somewhere along the line, my two modes of thinking got crossed, and I found myself thinking, 'how would a powerful society of magicians exist in the modern world? And what would happen if we introduced a rebel without a cause into the status quo?'. I hope you enjoy the result.
This work actually began when a friend of mine (Jon Brown, maintainer of the delightful 'Class of 97' webpage) introduced me to certain cyberpunkish novels - William Gibson's Neuromancer among them. Let's just say, I wasn't too impressed with the writing (although the ideas were often gems). The garble of techno-language, combined with an inability to construct simple sentences, left me with a headache. And a desire to write a cyberpunk story which actually made sense... Here's my go at it.
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