It’s no surprise, I like to write. I’m always looking for new ways to spark my creativity and write new and epic things. A creative writing exercise that I find entertaining to engage in from time to time is to try to compose interesting, random story beginnings as quickly as possible. Usually they’re just a paragraph or two, just to see what my fingers write down. I don’t revise or plan them out (much), that would defeat the purpose of the exercise. It’s a neat little diversion to get my writing juices flowing, and to demonstrate this I’ve written a few of them in about an hour, for your reading pleasure, and they seem to have taken a life of their own. Slightly disturbing and sometimes macabre, true, but they were the ones that fought their way out of my fingers.

~1~

It all started with a name. A name that will forevermore send chills running down my back like rats from a burning building. A name that can turn my legs to jelly and my heart to jam, ready to be spread out on two pieces of bread like a fear sandwich. A name that I never want to hear or see again. And yet it echoes in my thoughts and reverberates in my mind until speak it I must, or else I go mad.

Ironthroat.

Perhaps I’m mad anyway. But it truly is a terrifying name. A name that signifies… Well, let me tell you exactly what it signifies.

~2~

Rain tickled the back of Her neck as She ran, sliding down Her collar and soaking Her shirt. The cold set in immediately, but She was far too busy to worry about such things. After all, within two hours She’d be out of the country in an entirely new, warm set of clothes, while Her old ones would be carefully discarded in a nearby house fire. One that hadn’t been set yet, of course. House fires aren’t much good if the owners aren’t inside, and She very much wanted to be sure these particular owners were inside.

Few knew Her, and even fewer knew to never speak Her name, real or false. La Mujer Serpiente was Her identity in this corner of the globe if it had to be mentioned at all, and it suited Her well. The Snake Woman. She’d picked it Herself, remaining faceless as whispers of Her coming had spread to every corner of the continent in the surprisingly short time it takes a plane leaving Brussels to arrive in Rio de Janeiro, give or take a handful of hours. Of course, that’s not where She was at the moment. Always good policy to spread disinformation and fear among those who wish you dead, or cross themselves when they hear your name. Especially among those people.

~3~

“You can’t do this to me! I have rights!”

I turned my head slightly to the left, to better catch the faint voice of the shouting man six floors above my hotel room. Momentarily distracted, I gazed out over the patio railing at the spectacular ocean sunset. One of my favorite parts of visiting the H.M. headquarters in sunny California.

“I paid good money for this room. You can’t… you can’t just toss me out!”

I turn back to my guest. Resident disputes with hotel security always end in the same, uninteresting outcome. I’ve never seen the staff lose yet, and when you know how a fight is going to end, it ceases to have meaning. It’s merely a play, a boring facade of originality. The woman sitting across from me, however. Now that I found very interesting. Despite my never having seen her before, the powers that be had declared her to be this year’s project manager. Considering the highly temperamental, some might say volatile nature of our projects, it was no small surprise to find out they were bringing in an outsider to head up the team assigned our very unique duties.

“I’m sure you must have a lot of questions. Never fear. I’ll answer all of them in due time, Mr.-” She fished for my name in such a pathetic attempt to catch me off guard it almost made me laugh. Something stopped me. Perhaps it was the deadly way she almost breathed the words, like a hiss of something creeping up behind you in the dark…

“It’s Coppersight, as you well know. A title I’ve earned over many years. Sadly the same can’t be said for you, Aurus.”

~4~

The sun set hours ago. The park emptied long before that. The shape saw it all. It had been on the bench since what seemed time immemorial, watching the families frolic and pretend that it was not there to watch their every move. But it was. And it watched. It watched everything. And after it had watched everything the city had to offer-

It watched some more. This was not an accident. It was by design.

Even when the street lamp gave out and no illumination could be found for a good two hundred meters from the bench where the shape lay, it watched. And continued to do so, even as the sun broke the horizon and appeared above the city’s vast imposing skyline, beginning another day in the endless march of days.

If any of the numerous passersby knew that it was watching, they might have wondered what it was looking for. And the answer would have been:

Nothing. This was not unintentional. It was by design.

Watching isn’t the same as looking. Looking has a purpose, a destination. Watching, on the other hand, has a considerably less urgent objective. Time slows to a crawl when one watches, with no sense of needing to rush, while it spites those who seek for something.

Unfortunate for those who spend their time looking, but convenient for the shape on the Mill Springs City Park bench, which finally, slowly, purposefully moved at 7:33:46 AM. This was by design.

~5~

They were late. This was normal. In fact, it was necessary. Each of them had to arrive between an hour and two hours late, otherwise… there would be consequences. Except for him of course. He had been early. He was always early, not that any of them would ever know that. They followed the Rules, and were far too trusting of them and the security they promised. He, on the other hand, knew better. After all, he had written them.

He fiddled with the shiny, ornate ring on his finger. It was the only piece of jewelry or any other kind of ornamentation to be found on his person, but it was highly ostentatious to compensate. An extremely detailed silver band with minute carvings on the outside and interior, it had cost several fortunes in its making. Three triangle-cut sapphires could be found on three different sections of the ring, each equidistant from the others. The engravings were too small to be read by the naked eye, but it did not matter to its owner. He knew every word they contained, for they were the Rules. And he never forgot the Rules.

~6~

He died well. No bribe attempts or blubbering. He simply said, “Please… please, I need to live.”

The line from the film he had watched the day before with his children rose to his mind unbidden, demonstrating how ironic the brain can be when faced with its final moments. Had he been given the chance, he wouldn’t have even said those words. There would have been no point. When the Golden Serpent came calling, you didn’t waste time with threats or pleas. They all ended the same way- unpleasantly for you.

It was the “please” that caught my memory. I asked him what was so important for him here. “True Love”, he replied.

The quote continued to run through his mind, even as he heard his wife wake up behind him. He felt her struggle against the ropes that bound their chair backs to each other, before she realized what had happened and began to cry, silently, the quivering of her shoulders betraying her emotions. Yes, he loved her more than anything he had ever known, more so than even his own children. He loved them as well, but even though he would move mountains- no, the world for them, nothing could compare to the love he held for her. The love that had put them in this very situation.

He knew what had happened to his son (George, age 12), as well as his two daughters (Serra, age 9, and Juniper, age 5) even as he looked up at the wall facing him. The pair of paintings his wife had picked up for a song at the flea market they visited during their fifth anniversary were in shreds on the floor. In their place was a message. A message written in crimson drips, smeared onto the pale yellow drywall by a petite yet deadly hand.

You could have done better. Farewell, Leadsmith.

It had taken quite a bit of the makeshift red ink to compose the message, and strangely enough, he was certain he knew precisely how many pints of the material had been used. And with the same complete certainty, he also knew that neither he nor his wife was bleeding.

A glow cast his shadow onto the wall as the flames began to devour everything he ever valued on the earth.

~7~

The Tinker. The name needed no explaining. An uncertified demolitions expert in 23 countries (and rising), her skill with explosives and other entertaining substances had, unlike her, left their mark on landmarks and moguls’ wallets alike. Her precise identity: Unknown. Her reputation: Feared. Her location:

It was raining. She loved rain. As a child she had lived for rainy days. There were so many things you could do on rainy days, and the downpour just made everything so much better. She treated each rainy day as a holiday, a vacation from her dreary, plain existence in the sun. On the days when especially powerful and noisy thunderstorms reared their majestic grey heads, she liked to spend her time on the couch that lived on the front porch, reading one of the many books that traveled with her everywhere. On days where the rain was so heavy that it seemed like every drop was made of iron, she liked nothing better than to dance and spin in the largest puddles she could find, providing no end of amusements to herself or aggravation to her father, who spent most of his time cleaning up after her glad gloomy excavations into the muddy countryside. She always thanked him for his troubles, giving him a kiss and running away before he could scoop her up into his great arms and tickle her until she begged for mercy. Of course he would always chase her. Of course, she would always let him catch her- eventually.

This rain was different than those of her childhood. It had a somber quality to it, and a musty smell lingered in the air that reminded her of a home long lost to time. She shuddered. Not lost enough, not yet. But soon-

A hand gripped her shoulder. She turned, and gazed with some amusement at the bespectacled face peering at her. It was a deceptively cheerful face, full of deception in general. It was a face that should be trusted under no circumstances, and yet she had no choice but to trust it. A very perplexing quandary, she noted, but all of her quandaries were perplexing these days. Nothing unusual about it.

“It’s time to go,” the man in the bronze-colored glasses said. “We’re over an hour late.”