[quote=TheThirdPolice]Haha, this reminded me I made up my own early days canon for a writing contest on these very forums. I never finished it — it overdoes the long-winded Victorian style and I reserve editing for my day job — but heck, here’s a pile of text that invents its own answers to this sort of question:
[spoiler]There was a city once, a grid of high stone walls cracking the earth with their weight. Its inhabitants built houses against them and treated the spaces between them as courtyards, but nothing took precedence over the walls. Amputees and weak-lunged foreigners, even royalty pulled themselves up thin rope ladders to reach the city streets, the accidental boulevards created when the walls grew to their final height. No one lives among the walls anymore, and no scholar knows what happened to their citizens. We do know the refugees never capitalized their Fall. The long history of their civilization ended before any human writing.
˚º|| A stale meal interrupted by warfare ||º˚
Three weeks ago I slept on the platform of Vauxhall railway station, and would have rolled onto its tracks rather than admit the fact. The bats made no deference to the vestiges of my gentle upbringing, and what seemed the all of my world matters as little as the frost moths we kill before we snuff our bedtime candles. My father's pocket watch has fallen into the Thames (or whatever it be), and though I have coin a-plenty I have taken no stroll past the Drownies' pawn stalls to purchase it back. Vauxhall itself remains another lost landmark in our brave new world, a useless jewel for the first mapping-boy to find it and survive.
Already the earls and landowners are closing ranks, guest rooms aired out and old feuds forgotten in face of the disastrous possibility of social mobility. But let them struggle to import champagne and rebuild mansions expensive enough to ward away the new nightmares. There is opportunity in this upheaval for power more lasting and terrible than a Cabinet post. Power that I, Herbert Greybrook, disappointment to my family, gambler of livelihoods, and betrayer of my fiancée, am well on my way to discovering.
By now even the Deniers (that feeble crowd which meets beneath sky-painted ceilings) are aware that we descendants of Adam are not alone. The self-styled Masters have issued three proclamations, the last scandalously bereft of Victoria's signature, and I cannot doubt the credit they take for these alien occurrences. But I have better evidence. Copper-eyed women purchase finery using coins forged of a scalding metal. Tradesmen of Spitalfields are robbed of minuscule valuables, without a door or window broken. And from the corpse of the 'squid' that made headlines washing onto our riverbank, I extracted my first sigil.
˚º|| Envy toward a bearer of parasites ||º˚
My mother would tell you — no, my mother would insinuate, or let it spread through the meanest gossip that I am the sole ruin of the Greybrook fortune, squanderer of estates on the gambling table. In truth, the Greybrook estate (singular) never reached a fit state to host a baronet, nor did I ever drink nor gamble with half the energy of my father. My sisters and mother pampered him with pity while he awaited his death. I was ever the closer to him, and the only one to arrive for his last moments, drenched in stolen brandy and clutching an absurd turkey's quill I snatched from an unremembered inkpot. My father could not speak in the final weeks, nor write with any alacrity, but through our shorthand more secrets and promises passed between us than during a lifetime of conversation dominated by the female tongues at our dinner table. In vino veritas, and in that sickly-sterile room I learned that ink could intoxicate. He wrote his will at last, seeing the gates of hell before him, and sodden fool that I was, I thought it moving that he used the language only we could understand. Those coarse scrawls still reside in my breast pocket, not as a remnant of my pretensions to the repulsive landed class, but for the symbols themselves. Although they proved weaker than the poisonous invective of my mother's barristers, they are the prime mover of my dark quest. They planted a seed of secret language in my breast, and this great gods-skull of a cavern shall provide the soil to nourish it into a thorny scourge.
˚º|| To benefit from a stranger’s love ||º˚
Did I love Charlotte? We refugees from our own city speak of love before we learn each other's names now, so many of us unable to take our minds off children on the Surface or spouses gone mad underground. We have abandoned our Surface propriety, or belonged to classes which never had it, yet I find cold shoulders still among these sufferers. A woman in trousers spat at me in the street yesterday. If I had loved my fiancée, she said, she would still be safe in England. She has no inkling of what I do.
Charlotte came from another family of pretend gentry, worse off than mine, and her frank admission caught my ear amidst the gaggle of socialites come to London to deceive someone wealthy into marriage. Charlotte was honest, brusque, and expected very little from me. We were rarely warm toward each other, but never unkind either. In my company she talked a little more boldly, and in hers I drank slightly less. We became engaged within two months of meeting each other, in a park that now serves as mapping boy quarters. The orphans have built a fort from the sun-starved trees, and trade illegal street charts for gossip and secrets. I recognize their word-worship by their blackened lips, and welcome them as inheritors of our old park bench. The syllables they’ve spoken upon it make "I do" a paltry fetish.
Charlotte's hate fills the mushrooms here. Their bitter taste is my unapologetic gift to the underworld, an antidote to the sigils obsessed with love. Their expressions of twisted tenderness crack skin and vomit acid. Any serious devotee shows signs of damage from their own work. But few know the secret to the most dangerous sigils. To scorch another's skin, or command another's mind, requires a rare ingredient: sincerity. I weep each night because each competitor I have killed, each pawn I have coerced, I love. I am a master now at falling in love. My pulse quickens as soon as the victim is selected. I cannot sleep at night for thinking of them. I pace restlessly in alleys for a glimpse of their face, and then, when the plan is complete, I pen them poetry. Charlotte's hate is a comfort.[/spoiler][/quote]
I am unsure of what I just read, but it is beautiful and I need more of it in my life.
Also, first Correspondent?