ECCLESIA: Episode Zero: "Rise"

This is my new first chapter, which is actually the ending on the book, however, there's still a lot that's not explained so don't feel like its going to ruin it.

ECCLESIA

Episode Zero: "Rise" (Prologue)

The world collapsed one pillar at a time. The Final Surrage was only the beginning of a series of tragic events according to the Suns that circled a wide sky. The Sun that rose in the east beamed as the brighter and earlier star and marked the beginning of a thirty minute gap for the dim west sun to follow. I once paid them little attention for they were meaningless to me in all ways except the telling of time, but now I marveled at them and their dim glow, their troubling beauty and life a representation of unanimous beings that I had yet to comprehend.

"Kaze," I called the name of my last and closest friend. "Do you really believe what your sister explained to us?"

The wind whispered a strange lie as Kaze finished collecting water from the red river, commonly referred to as the Scarlet River, and the only river to my knowledge that ran wild throughout the known land.

His false smile came and went. "Serenity, all we can do is pray that things make sense one day."

The wind followed Kaze as he sped passed me, my eyes following him into the single roomed cabin at the rivers edge. He slammed the door just as troubled, if not more, than I by the accusations his defiant sister had made. I wrapped my arms around my chest, and turned my attention to the river for a distraction. It's copper banks shriveled at the horizon with a stream of deep green leveled above it. The large volume of water, its surface full of rippling detractions of the red and orange stones at its bottom, weakly pulled me in its direction like old magnets no longer capable of gripping a metal surface.

My eyes hardened to a gray spec of movement just beyond a protruded stone. The pit of my stomach shrunk, and my heart thudded the drums of my ears, taking off to the cabin. I slammed the door behind me, Kaze's eyes growing as the spark of a small fire grew in the midst of leaves and twigs within the fireplace.

"What's wrong?" he asked with the fire-starting stones in hand.

"No!" I yelped, and ran. "Put the fire out, now."

Kaze grabbed the pail, and dumped the water into the pit. "What's wrong?!" he rose with wide eyed.

I pointed out a tiny window sheathed in white. "There's someone or something across the river."

Kaze pealed back a corner of the curtain, and silence followed. I shrieked within my head, my arms still crossed, waiting for him to come back to me with alarming news, then he said while his face was still against the window: "I don't see anyone."

"Keep looking," I urged him with my hand. "There was someone over there."

He let the curtain down, the simple lace waving still. "Are you sure it wasn't a Wind Hound or some other animal? I've been seeing a lot of them lately."

Considering Wind Hounds were indeed gray, I explained: "Well, it was gray. But weren't some of the soldiers wearing gray armor?"

Kaze became silent and expressionless, his arms held out. "Do you feel that too?" he asked with a jerk to his sharp jaw.

I squeezed my arms together, throwing my hair across my neck, and thought: "Feel what?"

Two legs of a chair sitting beneath the dining table began to rise. Following it a wooden cup rose, it's contents pouring out and bubbling within the air. My shirt began to rise, and the locks of my hair knotted into the air as if an outburst of static had shocked me. The wood in the walls creaked, and moaned under a huge amount of stress. My insides turned as Kaze jumped to grab me, cursing.

The floor crumbled and fell up while the walls were still hardly moved. My legs gave out once the floor struck the souls of my feet, and I screamed: "Kaze!"

Dust clouded the room as glass shattered, and wood splintered. I watched the greenery through the broken cracks and holes of the cabin where it once sat in the shade of the wild vanish, blur, and disappear.

The cabin turned over, and I slid on my backside to a corner, my bare skin burning against the wood floor. I screamed helplessly.

"Sere!" Kaze called me. I didn't have time to respond, the force of movement pinning me against a wall. I struggled for breath while glancing out a glassless window, the outside world turning blue, then the red of the Scarlet Rivet blurred. The blue of the sky came, then a flash of sunlight, then red. Blue, Sun, red, blue, sun, red, my gut crumbled and churned as the adrenaline filled my veined and sped up my heart.

Red, red, and more red water came heavy and more closely as we stopped spinning. Gravity vanished and the g-forces of the spin were no longer an issue. My arms and legs became light, my shirt fell up to my chest, and the impact followed abruptly.

Pain could not be worried with at the moment my body as well as every other loose object collided into the same wall. I gasped and pushed myself up as water rushed through the wall beneath me. "Kaze!" I screamed. His body sat beneath the surface of a small table, lifeless just an arms length away from me. The water rose to my elbows, Kaze caught beneath the water.

I flipped the table over, and held his face above the water. He suffered a gash across his cheek, but it was nothing severe. "Kaze!" I screamed again with shaking bursts of panic in my voice. "Wake up!" I shook him. "Wake up!"

The water held us afloat as the mangled structure sank. I lost everything as I pulled his loose body against mine, weeping, shaking, wet, and cold. I wiped his hair back out of his eyes, and saw no signs of life, no signs of movement. The water droplets beneath his nose failed to move in the heat of his breath, and his mouth was slightly ajar.

"Don't go," I pled with heavy eyes. "Please don't leave me too." My finger tips clenched to his white shirt, and I pushed my cheek against the blood of his. "No," I called and called....

Author's Note

It's obviously not finished, but I write from my phone and need somewhere to save it. Thanks for viewing!

Reviews

[dw817]

⊰ℛℛ⊱
This is an unusual story and you have great command over the vocabulary describing the effect of reversed gravity. Honestly, if this were me, I would hang on to something that I know is connected to the ground, like the side of a stone fireplace.

I'm a little confused as to what is causing the gravity shift, however ?

[Christoph Poe]

Well, considering this is written in first person, if my main character doesn't know the cause, then my readers aren't supposed to know this either. She figures it out though.

[dw817]

I consider myself a bit of a teen writer and keep dialogue and always simple to understand.
read moreI consider myself a bit of a teen writer and keep dialogue and always simple to understand.

You might consider verbal dialogue like Kaze yelling, "Sere, what's going on ?" and they hear a reply from Sere, "I don't know, but hang on !"

Anything that unusual happens I always emphasize in my story so it is not just the readers but the characters in the story as well who are confused and often asking the same questions as the reader to let them know they are not forgotten. :)

[Christoph Poe]

That makes perfect sense, and I'll definitely go back to throw those details in. :) Thos will probably lean towards teens if anyone decided to publish it.

Thanks again!

[dw817]

The simpler and easier the ride you can make for your readers, at least I feel, the better it will be in the long run. If you get too bogged down in details and tricky writing, while you may have loud appreciation from the intellects, the ones who just read casually will be shaking their head in confusion. And that's me, as I consider myself a most definite casual and not very intelligent reader.

Better to have a full-house of quiet applause than thunderous from only a few. :7

[Vicky Carter]

I have got to know what these people look like. I have their faces in my mind but i don't think they are what you would paint. Love the idea of blue hair and the fact the being 'human' appears to be the minority. Very appealing book. Great hook. I am ready for more.

[Christoph Poe]

Thank you Vicky! :) I'm going to head over soon and give yours a review soon.

[Vicky Carter]

Take your time. You are on a roll with your work. Don't stop. Do you really write on your phone? Amamzing

[Christoph Poe]

Yeah, I don't have a computer, so I just type it in my "note" on my cell phone and save it here. (Ill save things to my email too until I can find a computer to save it to a hard drive.)

[Vicky Carter]

You have much better eyes than I do:)

[ZZBrent]

Awesome prologue! Great descriptions really allowed me to imagine the events as they occurred. I hope the rest is just as great.

[Christoph Poe]

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it. My goal was definitely to 'hook' people in with this prologue.

[Sam]

I love it. I cannot wait to read the rest. You write amazing. Thank you for sharing.

[Christoph Poe]

Thank you for reading! Glad you liked it.

[Sam]

Always do. You write very well. I hope when I am done with my story it looks a well thought out as your lol. :)

[Christoph Poe]

I'm sure it will be! Send me a message when you've got a good proportion of it finished, and I'll give it a read.

[Sam]

Wow thank you so much.

[Christoph Poe]

I don't pay much attention to my RRs, sadly. I'm sent WAY too many.

[Sam]

I will message you no worries. I am too.

[Christoph Poe]

Oh, and I have the next two chapters uploaded as well. (Not sure if you've read them or not. I have received a lot of reviews on them, and yet to respond to all of those as well. Lol.) Either way, thanks again, and take care. :)

--Christoph

[Sam]

I will sit and read them. Any time thank you for the small yet valuable conversation.

[Hikaru01]

this is great and i can't wait to read more

[Christoph Poe]

Feel free to move on to episode one. :) I'm currently editing it though, so it may first appear a bit choppy.

[Riding the Rainbow]

Really good piece..Can't wait for more..

[Christoph Poe]

Thanks. :)

[Riding the Rainbow]

Hope you'll enjoy my stuff, too;)

[John Alexander McFadyen]

A compelling write in the fantasy fiction camp. It moves smoothly and provokes many questions as we wait for the answer. A few areas in need of edit but all in all compelling!

[Christoph Poe]

Thank you for giving it a shot. It's a bit shorter than of like it to be, but maybe it will keep people interested.

[John Alexander McFadyen]

I think that is wise on WC Christopher as people tend to get a lot of requests and shorter pieces seem to go down better. Not many read chapters in any case.