If my memory serves me well, it is on this board that I made my first post on this forum, and it is today that I return.
Well, this is the first time I've really showed anyone any stuff that I've written and it's only because Hermy (or 'Rumford' as some of the hip new kids might know him) that I'm posting it, but... here goes. This is the first story I've written concerning a fantasy world that, till now, I've only made notes on here or there, and only recently did I actually decided to type something out about it. Along with that, I also drew a map of the world, an idea that I shamelessly stole from Hermit's thread here, as he well knows. Here it is:
The following story takes place in Skelmhein... I hope you enjoy. (note - it's a bit long)
Chapter One
Vinny sluggishly flopped his body onto the cold, splintered wood that constituted his front door. Lazily tracing his finger up the door to the lock, he ran it through the dry cracks and grooves that had burst their way out of the wood, as if the door itself was making a very slow and laboured attempt to explode. These days, the door was less of a solid plank than a tightly compacted pile of sawdust.
Eventually, his finger reached the lock. Slightly misjudging its precise position in the door, he ran his finger just past it and straight into the path of a particularly discourteous splinter that seemed to have been eagerly awaiting the chance to propel itself from the depths of its dusty confines and embed its maliciously sharp length right into the fleshy knuckle of an unsuspecting door-user.
"Sh*t" mumbled Vinny. His body convulsed angrily in response, and he felt the copious amounts of ale currently sloshing round his belly do the same a few seconds later. He quickly thrust his finger into his mouth and began to suckle tenderly, as if to shield it with motherly compassion from the splinter-related horrors of the outside world.
With his other hand, he dug into the pocket on his tunic to withdraw his heavy iron key. Not that it was really of much use anymore; the door, and indeed roof, walls, and windows of the house were now so dolefully weather-beaten by generations of exposure to the harsh winds and pummelling rain that frequently tore their way through his mountain village that any prospective burglar should have no real trouble overcoming these woefully outdated obstructions, and the act of locking and unlocking a door every night was really just a formality. After one or two false starts, Vinny finally managed to ram the key into the coarse iron lock. The familiar rumbling clicks that the key's serrated edge made as it slid over and interlocked with the door's inner mechanisms released a glow of comfort into Vinny's body, momentarily numbing the effects of the blisteringly cold currents of air that ripped through the night sky that could not be countered even by the powerful effects of his beer coat.
This feeling of warm hospitality burnt softly within Vinny whilst he forced the door open with a satisfyingly firm judder. It stayed with him whilst he relocked the door and stamped the grey-brown sludge that had once been snow off of the lining his thick fur boots. It stayed with him even when he threw his long coat over the white horn that had been bolted into the wall to serve him as a rudimentary hook, and it only left him when he turned around to see his mother standing, arms crossed and lips unmistakeably pursed, in the hallway behind him.
"Oh" said Vinny.
"'Oh' indeed" she replied.
"Well" he said, looking irreverently round the inside of the ill-lit house, suddenly finding intense interest in the most mundane of wall cracks and stray pieces of straw in order to avoid meeting his mothers hostile gaze. "Off to bed then"
"I don't think so, Vinny" she said. The sternly authoritative edge in her voice was enough to send a pained shiver down the spine of even her self-indulgently rebellious son. "We need to talk".
"Talk?" Vinny moaned, swinging his arms down to his knees in exasperation "but it's so late!"
"I know!" his mother said, the hints of satisfaction unmistakeable in her otherwise purely accusatory tone. Vinny frowned and quietly clenched his fists as he realised he'd unwittingly provided solid evidence for the argument against him that he'd heard all too many times before.
"Well, it's not that late..." he began in a flurried attempt to save himself from the onslaught that was to come, but it was too late, and his mother, jabbing her finger aggressively into the air, had begun her almost nightly tirade.
"Vinny, I am absolutely sick to death of your completely unacceptable behaviour. I know you've never cared much for putting any effort in - couldn't be bothered with school, couldn't be bothered to learn tree felling from your Fa - you've never even shown anything as much as a vague interest in any other skill or hobby except going out boozing with your mates every bloody night. And you know, I thought that with your father moving out of the village to Skarvendale, you might finally - finally -buck your ideas up and take his place as the man around the house. But no! Here you are, two months later, still the same old useless, skill-less, drunken lout that comes storming into my house every night at well past midnight, waking me up before I have to work - because you certainly won't - and, despite contributing what I can frankly only describe as sweet f*ck-all to the running of this household, still refusing to start learning a skill, paying rent, or even helping out around the house a bit! Something here doesn't seem to add up"
Vinny's mother ended her well-practised speech and tapped her foot, looking at Vinny expectedly. Vinny himself had just finished subtly mouthing his mother's lecture as she'd said it to see how much of it had become embedded in his drunken memory as she'd rehearsed it to him over the past few weeks. She seemed to have changed to 'buck your ideas up' from 'pick up your slack', but the basic rhetoric and message of the piece remained fundamentally unchanged.
In the same way that his mother had taken a long time to perfect (what she believed to be) her damning yet thought-provoking lecture, Vinny had had a fair while to construct his perfect response. As he did every night, he mimed his well rehearsed act of squinting as if in disbelief, unable to possibly comprehend his mother's point of view in the situation. In a sense, this was his greatest act in the whole charade, as he understood it completely, just didn't care. After this, he raised a hand in an violently angry manner and looked ready to crush his mother's argument into oblivion, leaving little but some charred ash on the floor and his triumphant figure standing with his arms on his hips.
However, just as abruptly as this wave of fury appeared to hit him, he appeared to then be hit by one of remorse. His hand lowered and he threw his hands up as part of a floppy, helpless shrug, staring dismally at the floor all the while. He gave a quick intake of breath, as if reinvigorated with a new argument, but then waved his hand dismissively, and, to round off the act, wore a defeated and vulnerable look on his young face and turned away from his mother to face the door, arms folded in defensive self-pity.
This was usually all it really took to convince his mother to drop her angry facade, sigh heavily, and insist that this was all for his own good and that she'd see him in the morning. On nights when he'd really p*ssed her off, like when he threw up on the mogryr-pelt coat she'd got for her birthday a few days before, he occasionally had to throw in the action of burying his head into his hands and loudly declaring "what am I doing with my life?!", but on the whole, these short actions seemed to effectively wipe his record clean, allowing him to go and do the exact same thing the very next day.
"That's why we've decided to send you to Draemundor"
That wasn't what normally happened.
Vinny span round in sharp shock, mouth hanging open in a terrible mixture of disgust and disbelief.
"I'm sorry. What?"
His mother continued relentlessly, showing not a shred of the guilt she'd shown on so many other nights before.
"Your father and I have been writing to each other you know, Vinny. He's about as impressed with you as I am, and frankly, we've both decided that something needs to be done. So we've made arrangements and there's a wagon coming to pick you up tomorrow"
"A wagon?" Vinny stammered "to Draemundor?" The utter unexpectedness of the news seemed to have sent him into such a state of shock that he was no longer capable of forming his own words, instead having to borrow other people's to communicate.
"Yes, Vinny..." his mother sighed, and casually examined the back of her hand. She didn't seem angry or vindictive anymore, just tired.
"So - so - so what in Brol's name am I supposed to do when I wind up in Draemundor?!" exclaimed Vinny, swinging his arms out wildly "Just knock on the big old gates and say, 'Oh, hey there, one skinny, inexperienced nineteen-year-old looking to start a new life in your wondrous city of dreams!' 'Hmm, what's your trade, sonny? Oh, nothing? Well, we don't need someone to do nothing, buster, we got plenty of people doing that already. No thanks. Bye!' So then they won't let me in and I'll basically have to hang around outside the city until I die of starvation, or get eaten by a troll, or being pelted to death by rich kids who like to stand on the city walls and fling stones and sh*t at anyone they see wandering around down below. So yeah, thanks a bunch, Ma. Shall I pop off now to get my coffin fitted?"
"Oh, shut up, Vinny" she replied scathingly, showing what Vinny thought was a worrying lack of concern about his almost certain death "We've got clearance to get you in there. We've arranged for you to become an apprentice for your Uncle Ludlen, do you remember him?"
"Yes" said Vinny "he's a knob"
Vinny's mother was used to these kind of petty taunts after nineteen years of dealing with them. "Well, you'd better get used to him, because that's who you're staying with for the foreseeable future. He's a blacksmith, you know. I won't bother telling you how useful a skill like that will make you, because I know you won't give a toss, and I know you probably won't be bothered to get out of bed some days, but at least that'll be his problem then, not ours. Right then." She clapped her hands conclusively, and suddenly she looked younger and brighter than Vinny could remember seeing her in a long time. "I've packed your clothes, your satchel is by your door. I'm off to bed now. Good night!"
With that, Vinny's mother licked her fingers, put out the one small candle that was illuminating the small house, and strode victorious through her bedroom door to have what would probably be one of her best night's sleep in a long while.
Vinny, on the other hand, could not share this feeling of euphoric release. Indeed, the weight that had been lifted off his mothers shoulders seemed to have settled neatly onto his, and Vinny felt a sense of gross sickness brewing in his stomach as the horror of the situation became more and more embedded in reality the more he thought about it. Feelings of dread swirled round his drunken brain, and he felt like someone had attached a 200 pound weight to the bottom of his heart. A crippling wave of despair hit him, and although his mother had already burnt out the only candle in the house leaving it pitch black, he felt a blanket of cloying grey wash over the world, depriving it of all but friendless misery, exhausting toil, and - worst of all - permanent sobriety.
Well, this is the first time I've really showed anyone any stuff that I've written and it's only because Hermy (or 'Rumford' as some of the hip new kids might know him) that I'm posting it, but... here goes. This is the first story I've written concerning a fantasy world that, till now, I've only made notes on here or there, and only recently did I actually decided to type something out about it. Along with that, I also drew a map of the world, an idea that I shamelessly stole from Hermit's thread here, as he well knows. Here it is:

The following story takes place in Skelmhein... I hope you enjoy. (note - it's a bit long)
Chapter One
Vinny sluggishly flopped his body onto the cold, splintered wood that constituted his front door. Lazily tracing his finger up the door to the lock, he ran it through the dry cracks and grooves that had burst their way out of the wood, as if the door itself was making a very slow and laboured attempt to explode. These days, the door was less of a solid plank than a tightly compacted pile of sawdust.
Eventually, his finger reached the lock. Slightly misjudging its precise position in the door, he ran his finger just past it and straight into the path of a particularly discourteous splinter that seemed to have been eagerly awaiting the chance to propel itself from the depths of its dusty confines and embed its maliciously sharp length right into the fleshy knuckle of an unsuspecting door-user.
"Sh*t" mumbled Vinny. His body convulsed angrily in response, and he felt the copious amounts of ale currently sloshing round his belly do the same a few seconds later. He quickly thrust his finger into his mouth and began to suckle tenderly, as if to shield it with motherly compassion from the splinter-related horrors of the outside world.
With his other hand, he dug into the pocket on his tunic to withdraw his heavy iron key. Not that it was really of much use anymore; the door, and indeed roof, walls, and windows of the house were now so dolefully weather-beaten by generations of exposure to the harsh winds and pummelling rain that frequently tore their way through his mountain village that any prospective burglar should have no real trouble overcoming these woefully outdated obstructions, and the act of locking and unlocking a door every night was really just a formality. After one or two false starts, Vinny finally managed to ram the key into the coarse iron lock. The familiar rumbling clicks that the key's serrated edge made as it slid over and interlocked with the door's inner mechanisms released a glow of comfort into Vinny's body, momentarily numbing the effects of the blisteringly cold currents of air that ripped through the night sky that could not be countered even by the powerful effects of his beer coat.
This feeling of warm hospitality burnt softly within Vinny whilst he forced the door open with a satisfyingly firm judder. It stayed with him whilst he relocked the door and stamped the grey-brown sludge that had once been snow off of the lining his thick fur boots. It stayed with him even when he threw his long coat over the white horn that had been bolted into the wall to serve him as a rudimentary hook, and it only left him when he turned around to see his mother standing, arms crossed and lips unmistakeably pursed, in the hallway behind him.
"Oh" said Vinny.
"'Oh' indeed" she replied.
"Well" he said, looking irreverently round the inside of the ill-lit house, suddenly finding intense interest in the most mundane of wall cracks and stray pieces of straw in order to avoid meeting his mothers hostile gaze. "Off to bed then"
"I don't think so, Vinny" she said. The sternly authoritative edge in her voice was enough to send a pained shiver down the spine of even her self-indulgently rebellious son. "We need to talk".
"Talk?" Vinny moaned, swinging his arms down to his knees in exasperation "but it's so late!"
"I know!" his mother said, the hints of satisfaction unmistakeable in her otherwise purely accusatory tone. Vinny frowned and quietly clenched his fists as he realised he'd unwittingly provided solid evidence for the argument against him that he'd heard all too many times before.
"Well, it's not that late..." he began in a flurried attempt to save himself from the onslaught that was to come, but it was too late, and his mother, jabbing her finger aggressively into the air, had begun her almost nightly tirade.
"Vinny, I am absolutely sick to death of your completely unacceptable behaviour. I know you've never cared much for putting any effort in - couldn't be bothered with school, couldn't be bothered to learn tree felling from your Fa - you've never even shown anything as much as a vague interest in any other skill or hobby except going out boozing with your mates every bloody night. And you know, I thought that with your father moving out of the village to Skarvendale, you might finally - finally -buck your ideas up and take his place as the man around the house. But no! Here you are, two months later, still the same old useless, skill-less, drunken lout that comes storming into my house every night at well past midnight, waking me up before I have to work - because you certainly won't - and, despite contributing what I can frankly only describe as sweet f*ck-all to the running of this household, still refusing to start learning a skill, paying rent, or even helping out around the house a bit! Something here doesn't seem to add up"
Vinny's mother ended her well-practised speech and tapped her foot, looking at Vinny expectedly. Vinny himself had just finished subtly mouthing his mother's lecture as she'd said it to see how much of it had become embedded in his drunken memory as she'd rehearsed it to him over the past few weeks. She seemed to have changed to 'buck your ideas up' from 'pick up your slack', but the basic rhetoric and message of the piece remained fundamentally unchanged.
In the same way that his mother had taken a long time to perfect (what she believed to be) her damning yet thought-provoking lecture, Vinny had had a fair while to construct his perfect response. As he did every night, he mimed his well rehearsed act of squinting as if in disbelief, unable to possibly comprehend his mother's point of view in the situation. In a sense, this was his greatest act in the whole charade, as he understood it completely, just didn't care. After this, he raised a hand in an violently angry manner and looked ready to crush his mother's argument into oblivion, leaving little but some charred ash on the floor and his triumphant figure standing with his arms on his hips.
However, just as abruptly as this wave of fury appeared to hit him, he appeared to then be hit by one of remorse. His hand lowered and he threw his hands up as part of a floppy, helpless shrug, staring dismally at the floor all the while. He gave a quick intake of breath, as if reinvigorated with a new argument, but then waved his hand dismissively, and, to round off the act, wore a defeated and vulnerable look on his young face and turned away from his mother to face the door, arms folded in defensive self-pity.
This was usually all it really took to convince his mother to drop her angry facade, sigh heavily, and insist that this was all for his own good and that she'd see him in the morning. On nights when he'd really p*ssed her off, like when he threw up on the mogryr-pelt coat she'd got for her birthday a few days before, he occasionally had to throw in the action of burying his head into his hands and loudly declaring "what am I doing with my life?!", but on the whole, these short actions seemed to effectively wipe his record clean, allowing him to go and do the exact same thing the very next day.
"That's why we've decided to send you to Draemundor"
That wasn't what normally happened.
Vinny span round in sharp shock, mouth hanging open in a terrible mixture of disgust and disbelief.
"I'm sorry. What?"
His mother continued relentlessly, showing not a shred of the guilt she'd shown on so many other nights before.
"Your father and I have been writing to each other you know, Vinny. He's about as impressed with you as I am, and frankly, we've both decided that something needs to be done. So we've made arrangements and there's a wagon coming to pick you up tomorrow"
"A wagon?" Vinny stammered "to Draemundor?" The utter unexpectedness of the news seemed to have sent him into such a state of shock that he was no longer capable of forming his own words, instead having to borrow other people's to communicate.
"Yes, Vinny..." his mother sighed, and casually examined the back of her hand. She didn't seem angry or vindictive anymore, just tired.
"So - so - so what in Brol's name am I supposed to do when I wind up in Draemundor?!" exclaimed Vinny, swinging his arms out wildly "Just knock on the big old gates and say, 'Oh, hey there, one skinny, inexperienced nineteen-year-old looking to start a new life in your wondrous city of dreams!' 'Hmm, what's your trade, sonny? Oh, nothing? Well, we don't need someone to do nothing, buster, we got plenty of people doing that already. No thanks. Bye!' So then they won't let me in and I'll basically have to hang around outside the city until I die of starvation, or get eaten by a troll, or being pelted to death by rich kids who like to stand on the city walls and fling stones and sh*t at anyone they see wandering around down below. So yeah, thanks a bunch, Ma. Shall I pop off now to get my coffin fitted?"
"Oh, shut up, Vinny" she replied scathingly, showing what Vinny thought was a worrying lack of concern about his almost certain death "We've got clearance to get you in there. We've arranged for you to become an apprentice for your Uncle Ludlen, do you remember him?"
"Yes" said Vinny "he's a knob"
Vinny's mother was used to these kind of petty taunts after nineteen years of dealing with them. "Well, you'd better get used to him, because that's who you're staying with for the foreseeable future. He's a blacksmith, you know. I won't bother telling you how useful a skill like that will make you, because I know you won't give a toss, and I know you probably won't be bothered to get out of bed some days, but at least that'll be his problem then, not ours. Right then." She clapped her hands conclusively, and suddenly she looked younger and brighter than Vinny could remember seeing her in a long time. "I've packed your clothes, your satchel is by your door. I'm off to bed now. Good night!"
With that, Vinny's mother licked her fingers, put out the one small candle that was illuminating the small house, and strode victorious through her bedroom door to have what would probably be one of her best night's sleep in a long while.
Vinny, on the other hand, could not share this feeling of euphoric release. Indeed, the weight that had been lifted off his mothers shoulders seemed to have settled neatly onto his, and Vinny felt a sense of gross sickness brewing in his stomach as the horror of the situation became more and more embedded in reality the more he thought about it. Feelings of dread swirled round his drunken brain, and he felt like someone had attached a 200 pound weight to the bottom of his heart. A crippling wave of despair hit him, and although his mother had already burnt out the only candle in the house leaving it pitch black, he felt a blanket of cloying grey wash over the world, depriving it of all but friendless misery, exhausting toil, and - worst of all - permanent sobriety.
Last edited: