SFW's FEATURED FICTION
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THE GREAT FORBIDDING
Simon Kewin
Genre:
Dark Fantasy
Format: PDF
Words:
11,600
Price:
$1.99
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SHORT EXCERPT |
And the Great Mother, the Spider God of the billion legs and the billion eyes, Xi the infinite and the eternal, began to weave the web of all creation, drawing the gossamer thread from which everything is created out of her own body, spinning the infinite lattice work which makes up the whole of the universe but which is hidden from the eyes of her children. And as she wove so did she create the world, and all of the worlds, for wherever two threads crossed on the Great Web, there was set another land, another of the infinite realms of existence. For an eternity she laboured, weaving the great spiral of the cosmos, the tapestry of the universe, until the great task was finally completed. And now at the very centre of the web, at the heart of all creation, sits Xi herself, creator of all, unknowable, limitless, perpetual, a leg on each strand of the great web, an eye contemplating each world, Mother of all. And so it is that all of creation is one, all worlds are connected to all other worlds and none exist in isolation. In the universe there is balance; for each life a death, for each good an evil, for each creation a destruction. Everything is inter-connected, everything joined by the unbreakable, unseen, unseeable, silver threads of the Great Web and nothing and nowhere outside of the seeing of Xi, the infinite and eternal.
--from The Dhumagion, sacred to the Eloii.
... Sen-Mandach, elder of the Tain, the lost people, spoke next, in sombre tones to a hushed council chamber. It was they who had opened up the Breach, they who had unwittingly leashed upon the lands the horrors from the Land of Night. In their shame, to make some small amend for what they had done, his people had determined not to take their place inside the Great Forbidding once it was created. Vast although the magical sphere was to be, there would only be room within its walls for a small proportion of all the peoples of the land. The sacrifices all would have to make were already too terrible; they could not add to them by denying room within to others. They would stay outside and survive as best they could, fighting the nightmares who poured through the Breach, trying to find some way to undo the damage they had done to the world. When he had spoken, there was quiet for a few moments. None of those assembled tried to dissuade him from the course of action he had described, knowing to do so would be futile. And so it was that the Tain became the lost people, dwellers of the Darklands outside the Great Forbidding, and were never seen again in the free and fair places of the land ...
--from The Chronicle Varnaium.
Meagaidh stopped to rest half way up the stone spiral staircase, short of breath, heart beating too quickly for comfort, head dizzied by the seemingly endless ascent up the tower. For a moment it had seemed to her that the stairs were unending, infinite; she seemed to have been ascending for an eternity, going around in circles but making no progress, as if she was caught in some nightmarish, labyrinthine, Ghaiahg spell such as the Dthudachai took great delight in.
The floor, the walls, the ceiling--all were made of the same ancient, Mage-crafted blocks out of which all of Maich Fastness was constructed--massive, body-sized stones of hard, unyielding, gray granite, usually reassuringly strong and impervious, now suddenly uncomfortably harsh and unyielding. And each identical too; there was no way of telling whether she was making progress up the stairs or whether she was, indeed, passing the same stones over and over again. Only a small flame set in a sconce, one on each revolution of the spiral, broke up the featureless monotony of the wall, and even these appeared to be in-distinguishable from each other.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
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Simon Kewin writes fiction, poetry and computer software, although usually not at the same time. He lives deep in rural Herefordshire (in the UK) with Alison, their two young daughters Eleanor and Rose, as well as one and a half black cats.
Author's site:
http://www.simonkewin.co.uk |
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