Exercise 3: Unreliable 3rd Person

Exercise 3: Write a fragment of a story from the POV of an unreliable narrator--3rd Person Limited (or attached) narration.  500 words.

So, this one, I have to deliberately be unreliable as a narrator.  I've done this a little bit with The Dustfinders, and perhaps a little bit with the sequel hook to it.  Then again, I did it again some with The Afterknight.  But to be deliberately deceptive can be tricky.

Stipulations: It says the narrator has to be unreliable, but not an out and out liar.  How difficult this would be in a fantasy setting.  But I've done it before, and I guess I can do it again.  It shall be even trickier, now that I've discussed it.

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The words of the stranger had been jagged and piercing, like a rusty blade through his ear and directly into his brain.  He wasn't even sure he'd heard it, or even should have heard it.  It were as though he were a boy again and carrying unwanted, stolen goods, and yet he turned and twisted the words around again and again in his mind to make sure they all were still inside.  He translated them this way and that, backwards and forwards, toyed with them.  Why had the stranger come sidling up to him?  Why the message?  What did it have to do with anything at all?

And how was he wounded?  When the stranger fell away, falling onto his rump with a great gasp of air from his mouth, like an exhausted, winded runner, Brummen found his hand covered in blood.  It turned out these strange words were the man's last.  The final words of a dying man are made of gold, are they not?

Brummen decided they were.  While tinkering with them, he wrapped them up in explanation and presented them to himself again and again on more and more elaborate plates.  Served with enough spice, they became a sumptuous banquet for his long journey's duration.  A mindmeal, he thought with a laugh to himself.

The stranger hadn't been armed, and neither was Brummen.  Well, not really armed. He had his knife for eating and he had...well that's all he had to defend himself from brigands, his feasting dagger and that was really it.  Brummen wasn't a knight, nor a rich man.  He had enough, to be sure, but not much more than that.  He and his entire family'd been cheated out of knighthood and nobility a long time ago by those damned Keleveks out of Sourston outside of Larnale.  Their legal skullduggery was enough to ensure no member of Brummen's family, the Xennises, could ever attain the High Council again, nor continue their inheritance.  The Xennises had been once prosperous had it not been for a mistaken choice of bride...or affair...or whatever it was.

And then suddenly, Brummen stopped in his tracks.  A mindmeal, he thought.  For his journey.  Where was he going now?  And why?  Around him the wind gently passed like a stranger through the pine thickets on either side of the dirty, unkempt road.  It, like almost everything else on this road, had completely ignored him, not even really bothering to tickle his nose with the smells of farms or whisper the sounds of limbs in his ears.

How long it had been since he'd even thought about that story his father used to tell.  No, how long had it been?  Twenty years?  Thirty?

It was all just a mistake, what happened to his family, how they went from nobility to yeomen and merchants and opportunists.  They backed the wrong man, fell in love with the wrong woman, thought the wrong thoughts.  They pled mercy on a court with no appeals, the court of after-the-wars-were-over, when anyone tainted with the enemy's kiss was tainted with the enemy himself.

The ancient Xennis progenitor had fallen in love with the daughter of a Xenoreth supporter who had advocated and attempted to reproduce the, now-considered-horrible-sinful-and-completely-abominable, experiments that allowed Xenoreth to people his farms, ranches, and even offices with his undead 'puppets.'  But mistakes and sins fell down from father to son, and mother to daughter, and even through chains of cousins and nephews, until now...what was Brummen doing here?

The stranger, the man he'd found bleeding back there, the one who whispered those odd words into his very soul, had shaken everything else out of his brain.  Those words were on the table, and now they filled the stomach of his mind, and he could think of nothing, so glutted he himself on those words.  A mindmeal.  Hah!  He'd tell his father about that.  How clever, to think of a simple message like that.  He wasn't usually so much for metaphors, had no aptitude for poetry at all, but he kept that image in his brain, that he could eat words, that he could digest them.  He'd go home one day soon, or perhaps to an inn somewhere, and he'd eat a real dinner, and have a wench on his lap, and he'd tell her about this.

If only he could figure out why he was here.  He was sent here.  His father had sent him.  His father had sent him to go and fetch something.  What was it?

He patted along his chest and belly, along the sides of his pants.  His hands went into his pockets, searching for whatever it was that commissioned his journey just now.  How could he forget?  His family were merchants with a proud tradition, even though they had been publicly shamed out of their nobility so long ago.  Tradition and reputation were harsh, harsh mistresses, infinitely displeased, so no matter what a man did to redeem himself and appease them.

His hand fished out from his pocket a tattered, letter.  This must have been what he was about today.  It had to be, for it was the only thing in his pocket of note, other than a few odds and ends he'd put there to examine later.  The note was smeared with blood now, because Brummen had forgotten it was on his hands.

Surely his father had sent him to deliver this note to someone, somewhere.  But who and where.  Perhaps the note would tell him.  He perused the letters, but he could not get the image of eating words on plates, bleeding rare and covered with sauces, and drinking wines made of punctuation, from his mind.  Would a misspelled word taste bad?

Focus and determination strangely eluded him.  Carefully, despite the dreadful state of the letter, Brummen opened it.  The words didn't make much sense to him.  Had they ever?  They weren't nearly as important as the message the old man gave him just before dying.  Nothing ever could be.  That was a secret of the universe, after all, and this...well, this note could have been anything.  Maybe all it was was hiring more peasants to come work the fields.  They wouldn't be able to read the blood on the note, much less the words there.  Still and all he would have to read it.

"...Ithiots and other undead...necessary to contain...farms...animals dying mysteriously...a ghoul...."   Gah, this was boring, dry stuff.  Just some nonsense about ghouls and things, some farmers complaining about their crops being trampled by the undead.  Who cared?  Just shoot the things, or burn them, or call a restman, or whatever it mattered to do.

Brummen had seen a ghoul once.  Maybe when he was eleven or twelve, he thought.  It was from a distance, and it was hanging in a tree by its head, the head wrapped up in a bag.  The farmers couldn't kill it.  Farmers...there was a farm near here.  Brummen shook his head.  No, he wasn't being sent to a farm.  This was more important.  He tried to read again, but only yawned and groaned and continued to roll around those words the stranger said in his mind.

He thought maybe today he would speak nothing but the Morrigari language today.  It might be fun, even though most of Larnale and the surrounding ex-Xomirian empire spoke Xomirian.  Maybe they would think him a spy, and when he decided, he would tell them he wasn't in the right language.

No matter what, though, he had to tell someone what the old man told him.  The secret of the universe.  It was true.  This was some very terrible knowledge he had, and he could not possibly keep it for himself.

"A mindmeal must be shared!" he decided out loud.  "One cannot feast oneself, unless one decides to feast on oneself, which...would be silly...to eat oneself to keep from starving.  To feed one hunger is to make another, isn't it.  Feed the hunger in the belly, and you feed the hunger in the veins, or you feed the hunger in the brains.  That rhymed."  Maybe he was a poet after all.  Brains, veins, intest...ains.  He'd heard musicians stretch words to their utmost like that in pubs and taverns.  Why not.  Brains, pains, veins, intestains, felicitashanes...of course that last wasn't a real word, was it?  He had to move on if he ever expected to share anything with anyone.

The crunch of the gravel on the road beneath his feet was interesting now.  He'd never thought about gravel before.  Chickens eat gravel, he thought.  And gravel complains a lot when you walk on it.  Does gravel just turn to dust?

Why was he thinking about gravel?  What nonsense.  He had a party invitation to carry onwards to Lord...something or other.  He was sure to know when he got there.

"Oh, here's someone with all the questions," Brummen decided as he saw someone riding up on horseback towards him.  The man was dressed in beautiful, dark colors, and he wore upon his head a strange cap like a stocking that only allowed his eyes to be seen.  A cape flowed down like black and red water over the back of the reddish horse.  Over the coif, he wore an even stranger helmet, which had spikes along the sides.

He would want to hear the stranger's words.  Of that Brummen had no doubt.  This was important.  This was very important, more important than all the notes and letters and talk of weather that could ever pass from one breeze to the next.  The words came bubbling up in his mouth readily.  They were birds stepping up to a knothole that was his mouth.

"I need to tell you something important, something I was told just now, not long ago," Brummen said.  The rider stopped.  Oh good, a convert, a supplicant, a fellow wanderer wandering through the philosophical thickets of this insane world.

"I found it out from a man not far back there, a man with a hole in his guts, which bled and bled.  I didn't make the hole, though.  He came up to me and told me something, and I have been gnawing on it ever since.  It has been my mindmeal, and I cannot keep it in."  Just at that moment, a flash of unpleasantness struck Brummen, like a sudden kick to the guts.  He remembered something terrible.  It was something about the man.  He had been on his way somewhere he thought important and the man came up to him.  He grabbed him.  He remembered the man's lips so close to his cheek, his grunts so raw and besmirched with dread and passion and stinking breath he thought they would have kissed.  The tickle of his beard went up the side of Brummen's face, and the hot breath steamed his cheek like a morning apple.  And then he'd said those words.  Brummen remembered having his knife out, he remembered wanting to push the man away, but those words. They slithered out from the man's rotten face, and out his rotten throat, and into Brummen's ear and they writhed their way right into his brain.

Important words.  Words like none other.  Words that had the meaning, the only meaning, compared to which all other things became as fragile and as worthless as fog in the dawn.  Maybe the words were poison.  Maybe he needed to get rid of those words.  Maybe if he told them to someone else, they would carry them on a ways.

"Oh well, either way I must tell you.  This man told me about the gods, though I think I may have accidentally murdered him, more or less on purpose, but without real intent.  You see, when I chicken finds a snake while it's looking for gravel, it is not fit to eat, and when the snake bites the chicken, it is difficult for the man who comes upon it to know exactly how it died."

These weren't the words.  The man would have to dismount to hear the proper words.  They weren't just words a person throws around, but proper ones, that have to be breathed right into the very heart of the soul of a man's brain.

"I'm not speaking this quite right.  Can you come down from that horse and listen to what I have to say.  It is important, I think.  You'd thank me for this knowledge.  Like I was saying, it's about chickens...I don't know why chickens, though...but if a chicken grows up in a henhouse, and still dies, but then is bitten by a snake, it's still dead, and both ways it dies, but one way it entertains mankind and becomes a meal, and another, it becomes a waste, but the chicken is still dead."

The man dismounted.  He pulled a sword from a scabbard on his belt.  Brummen knew he had nothing to fear, this man, because all Brummen wanted to do was explain the universe to him, the words the man had told him on the road, before Brummen had accidentally stabbed him.  Maybe if Brummen had not been so hasty, the man would have told him something even better....

Brummen was hardly aware when the sword cracked his skull open like an egg and lodged itself deep inside his brains.  His mindmeal was ruined, though, and for that, he was very cross.  But only for a moment.  He remembered liking the blue sky through the green trees.

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This is based on a creature I created for another story.  The creature is called an Ithiot.  It is based on the concept of Ith from the Qwadro.  Ith is a demon of chaos, insanity, and lack of self-control. The undead/monsters he usually inspires are people who lose their mind and try to drag others into their insanity with them.  The Ithiot is one of the powerhouses of Ith's armies.  While it is not technically an undead, it is instead a tortured soul.  Ithiots do not die by themselves, nor starve to death, nor catch diseases.  They are killed normally, however.  The danger of an Ithiot is not recognizing one until it has spread its message to another person.

Ithiots are tainted by poisoned words spoken in the ear of a victim which, like some kind of insidious earworm song, stick and burrow deeper and deeper into the psyche, until the person is driven completely insane by them.  The person who hears these words automatically assumes that he has heard some great and terrible truth about the universe and the meaning of life, and will attempt to share these words with whomsoever he can.  Being tainted by an Ithiot is called being "Whispered" because a person has to be very close and the words have to be whispered into the ear directly to be effective.

It is believed there is no cure for someone who has become an Ithiot; however there are preventative measures that can be taken, and which have unfortunately been taken too often.  In Trithofar, they have had a few Ithiot plagues take root, and it became difficult for people to tell whether or not a person was truly whispered, which led to the insane or the mentally unstable, or just people who wanted to whisper, to be treated with special care and/or violent reactions.