Tag Archives: fantasy

Surrendering to the Wraith

shadow man

Image: jimharold.com

The Wraith woke up as a man this morning. The Wraith’s wounds have been healing and his body is slowly becoming whole. He no longer bleeds. His voice has returned.

The Wraith woke up as a man but he doesn’t stay that way.

The Wraith sleeps, but not well. He sleeps, awakens in the dark, drifts off into the arms of Morpheus, or sometimes into the nothingness.

He awakens again all too soon and time does not allow him to sleep again.

The Wraith wakes up as a man but the man degrades as the day progresses. By noon, he descends and the Wraith takes over more of his mind. There’s nothing the man can do about it. Neither food nor drink nor force of will affects the power of the Wraith to control the man.

The Wraith longs for the quiet and darkness but is surrounded by noise and light. The noise and light and people do not allow the Wraith to descend into darkness and peace. He must pretend to be the man, although the man has long since surrendered to the Wraith.

The surgery is healing but sleep does not let the man stay a man for the entire day. The Wraith lives and acts through most of the day, though he tries to hide this from the people around him. They are human. They wouldn’t understand the needs of the Wraith.

I am the Wraith. I woke up as a man. When will I be able to finally conquer the Wraith and possess all of my waking day? Let the Wraith take the night. I need the day.

The Wraith

shadow man

Image: jimharold.com

The wraith arises when it’s quiet and peaceful. When others are not near or when they still sleep. The wraith does not care if others are near as long as they are unconscious.

Precious is the wraith’s time of peace. All too soon, the others will return or they will arise. In either case, peace will turn to chaos, silent joy to suffering and turmoil.

There is no hunger for the wraith when it is quiet. There is no desire for sustenance. Only the calm of being neither hungry nor full, merely satisfied, as if there were no such thing as desire.

Near the open windows, the air is cool, but the wraith must not leave the protection of these walls. The cool air is pleasant, but the sky is too bright, too painful for his eyes. The beauty of green can only be enjoyed from within the shadows.

The wraith bleeds, not all the time, but periodically. The injury was deliberate, to correct a greater injury, but recovery is slow. The wraith does as he can to slowly purge old blood and mucus, but it reforms. How much of this is left for the wraith to endure?

Footsteps. Chaos returns. If he is minimalist, perhaps the others will be minimalist as well and not overly address the wraith.

The wraith has almost no voice. He wishes this of the others as well, not because they speak ill of him, but because they speak to him at all. When they speak, the peace recedes. He must leave his own mind. He must consider the thoughts of others rather than his own pain.

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The First Set of Ideas

the planet venus

Image: space.com

Ideas. I get ideas. Some of them are extensions of my earlier robots stories, but others have been knocking around inside my brain for quite some time. Now that I’m becoming more comfortable in giving those thoughts a tangible expression, I want to branch out and try different types of stories.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. All of the titles are provisional.

The Problem With Ethics

If you’ve read The Rescuers, you know it ends with a lead in to the next story in this series. What happens when a Three-Laws driven Positronic brain is put in charge of automating many or most of the administrative and security functions of the main campus of a major business, the National Robotics Corporation, the company that created the brain in the first place? It may sound like a boring premise, but remember, how humans do business, the good, bad, and ugly of it, is very different from how a Three Laws synthetic intelligence would.

The Man Who Woke Up

This is the start of an entirely new and original series. A man wakes up in an unfamiliar room. He doesn’t know his name and the person he sees in the mirror looks “wrong” to him. He discovers his only hope of finding out about his past is a mysterious woman called Zoel. But she’s not interested in his past, only his future.

The Adventures of Jimmy and Grandpa

My seven-year-old grandson has a terrific imagination. His favorite game to play with me is to act out elaborate scenarios based on games, TV shows, books, and comic books. He’ll start out telling part of the story and then I have to tell the next part. We go round and round until we come up with a resolution to our problem (which typically involves defeating some sort of monster). I’m thinking about writing a series of children’s stories based on our “adventures” together. Oh, I’m not comfortable using his actual name, so I chose an adaptation of his middle name (yes, he’s named after me…awwww).

The Flight of Havoc Two

This tale will be part of my robots series, but it’s set some years in the future compared to the other stories. One of the concepts of manned missions to Venus is not to send astronauts to the surface where they would face hazards that would almost certainly prove fatal, but to have them explore the planet from an airship sailing high in the atmosphere. My premise is to have the first airships be flown by Positronic robots whose task is to build long-term flying platforms for later human explorers. Of course, something goes wrong.

Let me know what you think and feel free to make suggestions.