Warning: If you are easily disturbed by violence (implied or otherwise), you may not want to read this. I am doing this so people know ahead of time. Chapter one: Union of Sorrows Spoiler " Everything that we know and love is part of a great balance, for the heart, the soul, even the very earth that you walk upon is made of both light and darkness. It is the principle the Chinese call yin yang, where light and darkness are always equal in power anywhere you look. This is what keeps the universe in perfect balance." " A long time ago, a great shift upset the balance of the earth. Darkness soon swarmed over light, engulfing the whole planet. Despair and doom seemed to be the only thing anyone ever felt in this lifeless age. The poor planet's soul was dying." " But there was still hope. In a very small house in a very big city, a young boy lived only with father. He did not have any friends, nor did he ever know of kindness. This was because his father had seen Ictheaus, the great angel of life and light, come to the boy as a newborn and grant him with special powers. The father of the boy knew that in the new wave of despair that so thickly covered the earth, the boy would lose his perfect innocence, which he worked so hard to preserve. " " One day, a terrible storm of darkness swept through the boy's city, and his father had been caught outside. The boy grew very worried, so much that he directely disobeyed his father's orders and went outside to look for him. And just as a tiny spark will light an entire pitch black room, the spark of light inside the young boy caused the darkness to recede from the whole earth, so dark was it that it all vanished in a split second." " The boy spent four days and nights looking for his father. He was so determined in his quest that he did not even stop to eat, sleep or bathe, with each passing moment he looked and felt worse. He had never experienced pain before, and his worsening condition along with the people who looked down upon him with scorn and disgust Made him corrupted. With each passing glare he felt more disdain for this world, his innocence was gone." " Then, on the fifth day of searching, he finally found his father. He lay crumpled up in the shadows of a particularly beautiful tree. The boy rushed to his side and cried out his name, over and over and over again, but it was no use; the man had died." " The light in his heart still weak from the lifting of the darkness, the dark in his heart easily took over. It swallowed him up, turning him into some sort of hideous being that was neither man nor beast. He was bent with it's power. He wanted nothing more than to kill the world, if not to avenge his father, then to punish the world for being so cruel to him. He was now Neothaeus, the bringer of darkness." " Alas, there was a cage holding Neothaeus back, for the light still in the world from the boy's actions were too great for the creature to handle. Until the light had faded enough, he would have to make this tree, which bowed down and died in his presence, some kind of wreched home." "He has lived in that tree for hundreds of years, with nothing but the weak old tree, only still up out of pure dark energies, and the skeleton of his own father. Every once in a while, travelers would happen by the tree; the monstrocity-" Paine had slammed the book shut, and she refused to read aloud anymore, no matter how badly the other orphans begged and pleaded, and though she was the only one in the orphanage.. She also wondered what had happened after that, but she was so angry at the book that she didn't care right now. Who the hell, she thought, would raise their KIDS on this crap?! A children's fairy tale where a barely living boy had to stare at his own fathers skeleton for an eternity? She rapidly (and rather distastefully) scanned the book for a title, an author, anything that would help her find the vile people who had intended that for children, but nothing was found. There was only a strange mark on the cover, a perfect circle with two lines through it, one was vertical, the other one skewered twenty degrees to the right. She noticed that the lines intersected at the exact center of the circle. By now she was so furious at this book that she wouldn't have thinked twice about burning it, were it not for the other orphans wanting to hear more. They were the only company she had, and the only company that she would ever have, she knew this for a fact because it was obvious that she would never get adopted. It was obvious just by looking at her. For one, she was twelve years old, hardly a cute little kid anymore. She was also stuck in an old, broken down orphanage building in New York City. Nobody would even take a second look at this dump before deciding to go somewhere else. The paint on the walls was peeling, where there were walls; sometimes there was just a big hole in the side of the building. The lawn was dead, nonexistent, they had a weed-filled patch of dirt. None too impressive of a layout. Her whole self was wrong. The hair, the eyes, her clothes, shoes, hands; she was just so boringly, ordinarily, normal. It was obvious that she was never getting out of here. Bringing her thought back to the book which infuriated her so, she decided to give it another try, not out of the mercy in her heart, but for the ending which she so desperately wanted to know. She just had to know what happened... ...silently, in a small field in Pennsylvania, a young man was playing the guitar under a flowering cherry blossom tree. It was a sweet, intoxicating melody, and while adults sensed the danger and stayed a safe distance away, the children were not so wise. As a group of young schoolchildren were listening from a tree at the other side of the field, he stopped abruptly. They knew they should leave, it was getting late, but they recalled the music as beautiful. It was so beautiful that all twelve schoolchildren came to ask him to play another song, so beautiful that they did not notice as his pupils became slits and his mouth curved into a smile of pure malice, so beautiful that as the passers-by came and went the next morning, they each saw twenty-four severed hands on the ground, from where he could not get the meat off of the skinny bones...
Not bad at all really. It's a tad bit too graphic for some people but if it gets a point across I say by all means go ahead and do it. However, there are a few things I would change. Where you said bent to refer to the kid losing innocence and going mad, I'd have gone with twisted or warped, because they have better connotations for the context. I also would have to say you use the word "because" a little more discreetly. For some reason I didn't like where you used it once or twice. On that note you said playing THE guitar when it should have been A guitar because saying "the" makes it seem like it was an aforementioned guitar when it wasn't at all. I would also like to say you lack clarity at some points, but it's not exactly a problem, it just means I have to infer a bit more than I usually would. So better description would be nice if you intend to continue.
i read this a while back, and i think that how the story is going its good, i liked it, even though its a bit rough , and not for those who want something less gory.
