The Forever Ones: the first pages
Hello everyone! For Slave Pits and Descent, I wanted both products ready for the day Calima Saga opened to the public. It turned out to be a very hectic time, pushing on two mediums at once. It was fun and worth it, but for the next game and book in the pipeline, Age of Frontiers and The Forever Ones, I wanted to focus on one first and then on the other. That was the plan, at least.
Age of Frontiers is going to take a long time to be released. It is a game with a big scope, of a kind very few games offer nowadays, and I have learned so much since the days of Slave Pits that I'm pouring a lot of ideas and features into it.
But Descent has gathered a few reading fans around it. One of them taunted me with a bet to write some pages of the next book, The Forever Ones, and winter seemed a good time for it. I had forgotten how much I love writing, and I had a blast preparing the final outline of the book and writing some of its first pages. The book is not going to be finished any time soon, but nothing stops me from teasing you with its opening pages!
She woke underwater. On instinct she freed her legs, caught in some structure that was sinking into the depths, and twisted around, searching the darkness for any point of light. Far away, she made out the faint reddish glow of the surface and began to swim frantically towards it. She had not been holding her breath, and she could feel no air in her lungs, yet for some reason her body suffered none of the effects of drowning. At least for the first few metres, until she had almost reached the open air...
She came to on the rocks of a beach, her body still half in the water. She retched up the water in her stomach and lungs in spasms, clouded with a blackish mud, as she dragged herself painfully inland. After a few moments lying among the pebbles, she found enough strength to get up. It was night and drizzling: cool rather than cold, but she was shivering in her weakened state. Despite the ever-present fog, she suddenly recognised the place: she had been there before, and she knew that a small grotto opened into a nearby cliff. Clinging to that thought, she staggered towards it. She soon sighted the narrow entrance and, with more effort than she had expected, climbed the barely two metres of rock and crawled into the cramped space inside.
She tensed as her hand came down on the coarse texture of a canvas on the floor. She stayed still while her eyes adjusted to the dark, until the scant light filtering in through the crack of the entrance outlined only the shapes of an old fire against the far wall of the hollow, and a small pile of dry wood at the back, stacked on the other end of the cloth. She crawled to the woodpile and, feeling around its base, found a piece of quartz, a piece of iron and a handful of dried fungus fibres: someone had stocked the place for a possible return.
With a sigh of sheer exhaustion, she pushed away every thought but lighting a fire. She set about the mechanical task, which she found she was used to: before long, a lively, reddish fire lit the chamber and warmed it a little, while the dense bluish smoke of the wood drifted out on its own through the opening. After setting the biggest, longest-burning logs in the flames, she lay down on the canvas and fell asleep almost at once.
She was so exhausted that she forgot what happened when she dreamed.
More of her story will come, one day. Until then, thank you for reading... and for the bets!
Om