THE RAZED RUINS

Castle of New America

It is 1,692 years since the mysterious "Great Death" nearly brought North American civilization to its knees. Humanity has now risen from the ashes. The Union of New America (a tenuous agreement between four semi-autonomous kingdoms) has reached its Tercentennial. With the expiration of the term limit of the wildly popular Supreme Chancellor at hand,, the lords and ladies of the realm coalesce in the capital to vote for her successor. Many, however, fear that chaos may reign unlike any the realm has ever seen.

Vallario Roberts is the youngest prince of a powerful house who prefers the comfort of his family’s vast library of books to travelling and adventure. Val parries criticism from his twin sister and older brother for his obsession with the “Forbidden Chamber,” a Holy-Grail-like myth. Just when it seems he might unlock the Chamber’s long-hidden mysteries, however, his family’s castle is overrun by surprise enemy. 

Jeffrey Greenborne was born a commoner with a dubious backstory but his record-shattering scores on the “K-Plan” examinations ignite a meteoric rise to power, leading ultimately to his appointment to the executive throne of the Kingdom of Pent. This unprecedented promotion engenders a surge of controversy, and Jeffrey faces widespread criticism and protests. As the war progresses, Jeffrey reveals an invention he hopes could change the tide of war in their favor. 

Allison Rose is the sociopathic daughter of a vicious tyrant. Disgruntled with the disgraceful behavior of his daughter, her increasingly powerful father punishes her with a marriage to the unattractive son of the

poorest lord in his kingdom. 

In the northern kingdom of Dehn, Karloh Haldar, a black-skinned captain of an elite fighting unit, leads two companions on a “supreme secret” spy mission. Using his immense skill, Karloh uncovers a secret fortress  and barely escapes with his life. With his loyalties torn, he sets course across the war-torn realm, searching for his nearest ally . 

A young commoner named Josafina Clarke laments her arranged engagement to the awkward son of a low-ranking baron. Though her friends and parents can’t understand why she isn’t excited to join the nobility, Josie wishes only for the freedom to marry who she wishes. In the meantime, she discovers a mysterious book in her family’s attic that seems to be written in the language of the long-dead culture, the “Vegar.” 

On the open oceans, a famous cartographer named Hagar Ahnalli moonlights as a drug smuggler. His latest load of contraband promises to bring him enough wealth to retire from smuggling forever. To be successful, however, he must elude mutiny, dangerous enemy ships, and, worst of all, the dark depths of his past. 

Deep in the derelict ruins, Djhaka Hes’ah is the female chief of an unaffiliated tribe of cannibals. Constantly fighting against the doubt and criticism for being a woman and for her efforts to upend old customs she views as archaic (i.e. cannibalism), she displays her strategic and military brilliance. 

A poor merchant named Franco Mulberry is travelling with his recently orphaned 10-year-old niece, Trisha, to a tournament that promises rich financial rewards. Franco steps uneasily into his role as a surrogate parent and struggles to strike a balance between his duties to her and his desire to take advantage of the rich economic opportunity. Franco and Trisha become embroiled in a besieged city and are caught between the realm’s biggest warring armies. 

In the farthest southern region of the Union, Jewel Hernandes is the daughter of a deposed king who was executed for alleged high treason. Resentful by the erosion of the language and culture of her people, she and her cousin-turned-lover are plotting to overthrow the “White Usurper” who’s been put in her father’s place. 

Prologue- The Letter
A messenger rides deep into the desolate North to deliver a letter from the Supreme Chancellor to a most terrifying destination.

Chapter 1- To the White City
Vallario Roberts and his family arrive in the White City to take part in the Five Years Fair, a massive festival whose ultimate conclusion will be the election of a new Supreme Chancellor 

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Stranded: Near Epic on Monitor Rock of Independence Pass

The author on the Pitch 4 traverse

We’re going to be on the news….

It was the only thought my adrenaline-charged, near-panicked mind could summon. “Three rock climbers had to be rescued last night off Monitor Rock near Twin Lakes just east of Independence Pass. Reportedly, the group was stranded when their rope became stuck as they were rappelling from the 450-foot-tall rock.” Something like that. People on their couches at home would guffaw and grumble “idiots” before clicking around for something better. Now that we’d been in our predicament for over an hour, this scenario seemed not just possible, but likely.

On the positive side, we were on a solid ledge that had not one but two bolted anchors. At ten feet long, two feet wide and three-hundred and fifty feet off the ground, was it comfortable? No. But at least we were in no danger of falling. It was autumn, however, and evening was approaching. Though it had been a warm, bluebird day, once that sun went down it was going to get cold.

“We can think this through,” said my wife, Ella, sounding much calmer than I felt. ‘There is no reason to panic.”

“I also have this,” added my friend and often climbing partner, Trent. He reached into his backpack and retrieved a Spot Satellite GPS messenger. With one touch of the panic button, this little device would transmit an S.O.S along with our coordinates to emergency dispatch, and the finest in backcountry rescue services would be deployed to save us. But how long would it take them to arrive? Monitor Rock was 26 miles from Leadville, where it was likely any such rescue operation would be staged. The amount of time it would take to mobilize and travel here alone could be hours. Then they would have to climb to us, and get us down, and do whatever follow-up was required. I was guessing we’d be lucky to get home by midnight.

“Are we at that point?” I asked, watching his finger edge closer to the button. The three of us were silent. There was only so much pulling one could do on a stuck rope before giving in to the harsh reality.

Ella sighed. “We might be.”

I swore out loud, which didn’t help anything. The climb itself, a historical multi-pitch traditional route known as the Trooper Traverse (5 pitches, 5.8+) had smooth. We’d swapped leads and made our way up the enjoyable line in decent time, even taking the more-difficult 5.9 crux variation for the final pitch. The setting for Monitor Rock was breathtaking, especially with the golds, oranges and yellows of fall at their peak. The cobalt sky was dotted with friendly, paintbrush clouds and the perfectly warm air was so still we could hear calls of “take” and “lowering” from the climbers cragging on other routes far below us at the base of the wall. I hated the stark juxtaposition of all that beauty against our current predicament.

“All right,” I said to Trent with a deep breath. “I guess we have to do it.”

Trent nodded and touched his thumb to the panic button.

*

Ella on rappel right before the accident

It is a common mountaineering axiom that the way down is the most dangerous part of an expedition. The descent occurs later in the day when we are exhausted and weather is more likely. And while going down, we are leading with our feet instead of our heads. Then there is complacency. Feeling that the summit, and the worst, is behind us, we lower our guard.

Rappelling is a special type of descent that can speed up our progress and allow us to cruise past gnarly sections that would be difficult or impossible to downclimb. Duane Raleigh, publisher of Rock & Ice magazine and first ascensionist of many Western Colorado rock climbs, asserts in his article “Rappelling- Surviving Climbing’s Diciest Business” that “of the myriad ways to kill yourself climbing, rappelling is the quickest.” This grim truism echoes through my head every time I fix myself to a rope to begin a rappel descent.

When done properly, however, rappelling is quite simple, easy and generally safe, but the consequences of any broken link in the chain are disastrous. There are many ways rappelling can go wrong, including anchor failure, knot failure, improper connections with the belay device, loss of brake-hand control, failure to tie backup knots, rappelling off the end of the rope, and more. One of the most common rappelling faux pas, however, is getting a rope stuck when pulling it.

Now, there is an advantage to this mistake over the others: you are at the bottom of the rappel when it happens. If it were just a single rappel then at worst you have to leave your expensive rope behind and hope you can come back for it later. But on a multi-rappel descent, getting your rope stuck up high can leave you stranded with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of feet still to the ground.

*

“Let me try it one more time,” said Trent, slipping the GPS tracker back into his bag. Taking both ends of the rope, he began to saw the two lines back and forth.

At first, nothing would budge. Then suddenly, a hundred feet above us, the knot popped free from whatever it had been stuck on, and began pulling through the anchor. A minute later it hiss down the smooth granite and landed our feet.

We stared at it with our mouths hanging open in shock. After more than an hour being stranded, we were free. We cheered. We hugged. We celebrated. No hours-long rescue. No Channel 5 News story. No being benighted on a two-foot-wide ledge at night at 10,000 feet elevation. We were going home.

Monitor Rock on Colorado's Independence Pass

There was still two rappels to go, however, and we couldn’t lose focus. The last thing we wanted was to get out of one bad situation by the skin of our teeth only to end up in a worse one. The best moment, however, of any rappel is when your feet and rope are back on the ground, and an hour later we were there. At the bottom of the rock we laid in the grass and gravel and tried to laugh off what had just happened. It seemed surreal the sudden transition from danger to safety.

“Let’s get out of here,” Ella said after we packed up our bags. She started the march down the trail in the direction of our car.

“I couldn’t agree more,” added Trent and followed.

I looked back at sweeping heights of Monitor Rock. Evening was already almost at hand and the glistening gray rock was falling into shadow. I could still pick out the ledge where we had spent an hour stranded. I couldn’t help but think how close we’d come to still being up there.

“Maybe we need to go get a beer,” I added. I turned away from the rock to follow the others, and didn’t look back.

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A Millionth Universe

No matter how much you zoom in on a fractal it simply
repeats and repeats

There was a man who stood on the great stone steps of a Victorian library, or maybe it was a mausoleum, staring out into the sea of a city. The mathematical skyline was punctuated by great masts that penetrated high into the troposphere where airplanes drew equations across the sky. Cars and buses and trolleys and hot dog stands on wheels and people and pigeons navigated the streets in one great, multi-directional migration measured by perfectly quadrangle grids (north to south growing progressively by number; east to west in single, alphabetical leaps). There was immensity beyond calculation.

                As the five o’clock hour waxed the numbers bulged exponentially until the entire sea became one living beast or monster swelling and ebbing and swelling and ebbing as if following the moon. And in the cracks in the sidewalk at the man’s feet other tiny worlds existed. Ants the shape of buses or trains, pebbles magnified into mountains, fractures like great chasms or fjords and rain-drop rivers. And even deeper where tiny mites clung to the ant’s backs and took rides and crawled to the top of the pebbles and planted colored flags like Edmund Hillary. On the mites were horizons of bacteria hording, procreating, feeding, developing. They forged cultures of their own, complete with customs and laws and Newtonian physics. Inside them were universes of protons and ions and electrons revolving spastically around bright, sun-like cores of energy. And if, with the world’s tiniest knife, he could sever these electrons, things too small for names would spill out and squirm into existence. Nano-universes that everyman crushed with each step he took. The man could gaze even deeper still until everything began to repeat. Fractal universes expanding, withering, duplicating, and expanding again.

                The sun, with the power to illuminate universe after universe, cast a certain five o’clock shadow that defined the square of the man’s jaw, the flex and relax of his temporomandibular joint. And if he turned just the right angle he became a woman. A little further, a man once more. The spiked buildings above spun and oscillated around him like the pulse of the ocean. The liquefaction of the universe.

                The water refracted the buildings. Added a certain shimmer, a crepuscular focusing then dilution of the sun that exacerbated color and portrayed a certain splendor like the speckled fish swimming elegantly that the man had caught when he was young and lifted out of that water. But out of the water the colors weren’t the same and there had been nothing graceful about the way it flexed its lips and drowned in the air.

                By evening the light fell and the outline of the steel monoliths and towers of the city became one ominous form, blacker even than the sky above. The tallest masts maintained their distinction even until the very last moment.

                The man still stood on the steps, each foot on a different level. He was halved. Divisible by two. But the night fell and the shadow that defined his cheeks ruptured and expanded until he was reduced to form without gender, without self, divided between a million worlds. When the darkness was complete and the streetlights failed to ignite, someone approached the spot where the man stood until he could reach forward if he wanted and touch him.

But the man had become invisible.

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On Top

Broad vistas of tall monuments

sweep across barren hillsides

and checkerboard roads:

The insectile progress of life.

Cirrus clouds like paintbrushed smoke

drift east. Birds waver in the skies

and dive, wings beating soft

whistles. The hollow rasp of 

breath accompanies the chorus of wind

tracing hollow cliffs. The sandstone beneath

like the jagged stab in my lungs.

The air is polluted with

the cologne of sand, the dryness

of the desert, the faint musk of dead

juniper. The salt of sweat

trickles down to my lips.

I’ve reached the top. 

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Less Than an Half an Hour

The men didn’t know that they had less than half an hour to live.

The Captain stared out at the undulating haystacks of the Bering Sea and sipped coffee with hands blackened by grease and oil. It was that painfully late time of night. The time when normal people are home, twisted in their bedsheets and dreaming. The Captain hated delays like this storm. In the age of derby style commercial fishing, time lost was money lost in the most literal sense. But this storm ranged across the entire Bering Sea, and though Alaskan fishermen were recognized around the seas for their toughness, not a boat in the fleet would be working tonight. The Captain tipped a plain black mug to his mouth and let stale, cold grit pour between his lips. His eyes never left the ocean.

Seas had reached forty, maybe fifty feet. The captain watched them approach in the sodium running lights like faceless monsters, one after the next. When the boat climbed to the peak of any wave, he saw only an endless mountain range of heaving, boiling water.

The other men were below, sleeping if they could. His oldest son, heir apparent to the Homebound’s captain chair, was among them. They knew the dangers inherent to the profession, but none dared imagine the inexorable truth. They were lined up before Saint Peter unknowingly in the dark bowels of their Bering Sea ship.

Outside the snow streaked by in sideways tracers turned orange by the boat’s lights. White shags of ice grew thicker on the deck with each subsequent wave that breached the rails, leaving part of itself frozen behind. If the ice were to get much worse, he would have to wake the crew and force them to hammer and chisel it away storm or not. Crabbing was dangerous business. They all knew that. One mistimed wave could easily wash a man over into the black wilderness of the ocean. The only thing out there was the inky denouement of death.

The radio crackled, reports from distant quadrants of the sea. The Alaskan Homebound, it seemed, was not the only boat struggling in the storm.

“—ty foot seas and…—ounting ice.”

“Roger that, Jonathan. We got…ice pack…all around…hull…—angerous.”

“Ten-four.”

“Kodiak Queen, what’s…twenty?”

“Twenty-six miles north, northeast of Dutch, over.”

The Captain tipped his coffee mug to his lips. The tremble in his hands was gone. His anxiety was replaced with numb exhaustion. 

“This…Duchess. –e got a…south behind us. Can you…your status?”

“…having a…situation…got…—gine room…stalled.”

“Sho—…dispatch…—oast Guard?”

The Captain growled and dimmed the volume. Even radio waves can’t get through this storm. He kicked at the nylon survival suit at his feet.

SLAM!...a wave crashed hard over the bow, knocking the boat off heading and smothering the deck with swirling, writhing snakes of foam. The shaking in his hand redoubled. He steered the boat back onto course against the wind and fought his breathing back under control. He checked and re-checked his position. If we could only make it to the lee side of Boxer Island. By his calculations, it was only fourteen miles north-northwest. They could make it there and drop anchor to hide from the worst of the storm.

In thirty years of Bering Sea work, the captain had seen things that would whiten the knuckles of even the hardest men. Fishhook eviscerations. Protruding bones. 100-knot winds. Translucent, frostbitten fingers. Yet never, not even once, had he felt as he did on this night. This was no place for a boat. And this was no night to die.

Through the escalating squall the captain steered his boat. Progress was slow fighting the wind and waves. The boat, leaden with ice, was heavy and stubborn. Soon it would be as if he were driving an ice sculpture of The Alaskan Homebound and not the real ship. And he could have been Coleridge’s ancient mariner: one man alive in a world of frozen souls. Punishment for some albatross or another. Lord knew his sins were numerous.

The Captain waited for his time. His coffee and smoldering cigarette rested in his right hand. On a clear day he would be able to see Boxer Island just a few miles ahead, but crooked lines of snow superimposed on a death-black background was all his aging eyes could see. That’s all there is to see. He rolled his fingertip gently over the dimpled surface of the alarm button gently but didn’t quite press.. Just a little more pressure, five maybe ten psi, the shriek of the alarm would sever the night, and the men would be awake and in their survival suits. They regularly practiced this drill. They could be ready in under two minutes. Then they might have had a chance then. Might.

But he didn’t push. The men deserved rest. The night was tense but not quite a crisis. The men were scheduled to arise in an hour anyway, and in only ten more minutes he would have them all safe behind Boxer Island. They could break ice in the morning with relative leisure. The captain smiled, imagining himself telling this story over beers at The Lighthouse when they were back in port on Friday. It was in that saloon, he was well-known for proclaiming—especially too many drinks into a late night after returning from Dutch Harbor at the end of opie season—that he felt most at home.

Motion caught the corner of this eyes. He had only enough time to register a solitary thought: rogue wave.

He’d never seen one, though he knew the stories well. Fishermen’s tales, mostly, often as sensational as fantasy. But face-to-face with the real thing, he found the truth more terrible than any legend. He reached down, stabbing the alarm button at last, but it was too late.

The wave struck the ship with the wrath of God. The three-inch glass of the wheelhouse, forty-seven feet above the deck, shattered on impact. The captain’s sanctuary was suddenly filled with cold and dark. He was contortioned as if in a washing machine. He sensed great movement and heard low groans from the boat underneath him. Something hard bit into his back. He heard himself screaming and tasted the salty tang of ocean. Thoughts came to him with astonishing speed and clarity: His wife and children. His crew, his son among them, being jerked awake into this cold Hell.

In a moment, the violence was over and he was able to break the surface. Two feet of water sloshed back and forth across the cabin. All was dark. A strange buzzing sound filled the wheelhouse and it took him a moment to realize it was the ship’s alarm, tripped most likely by water in the engine room. A little late now. He felt around to orient himself in the darkness and realized the boat had been knocked onto its side.

And the water was coming back. Slower this time. His hands closed around a stiff, pliable material in the water: his survival suit. Too late now to put this on. And too late to pray. He was bound, body and soul, to this fate. The sounds of the waves and the storm outside were deafening through the shattered windows.

He was alone.

All writing is the original work of Brian Wright and may not be copied, distributed, re-printed or used any form without express written consent of the author. 

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