Light in the Gloaming (The Gloaming Book One) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - The Will To Live

  Chapter 2 - Crowning A Prince

  Chapter 3 - The Stab Of Survival

  Chapter 4 - The Mind Of A Prince

  Chapter 5 - The Enemy Of A Prince

  Chapter 6 - The Power Of A Prince

  Chapter 7 - Softness In The Night

  Chapter 8 - The Power Of Words

  Chapter 9 - Retreat To The Forest

  Chapter 10 - A Woman's Touch

  Chapter 11 - Joining The Soldiers

  Chapter 12 - The Traveling Court

  Chapter 13 - Unbridled Confidence

  Chapter 14 - Discipline And Calling

  Chapter 15 - The Muck And The Mire

  Chapter 16 - The Path To Battle

  Chapter 17 - Explosive Strawmen

  Chapter 18 - Glory Cannot Hide

  Chapter 19 - A Fine Grapevine

  Chapter 20 - Fear Mongering

  Chapter 21 - Becoming One

  Chapter 22 - The Scale Tips

  Chapter 23 - Descent Into Darkness

  Chapter 24 - Return To The Gloaming

  Chapter 25 - Light On The Fallen

  Chapter 26 - Epilogue

  Quotations Before Chapters

  Author Page

  LIGHT IN THE GLOAMING

  A Novel

  J.B. SIMMONS

  Copyright © 2013 by J.B. Simmons.

  All rights reserved.

  Names, characters, and incidents in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Resemblance to actual events, locations, or persons is coincidental.

  Cover by Soheil Hamidi Tousi.

  [email protected]

  www.jbsimmons.com

  For Lindsay

  Chapter 1

  THE WILL TO LIVE

  “For the state of innocence,

  the paradisiacal condition,

  is that of the brute.

  Paradise is a park,

  where only brutes,

  not men, can remain.”

  I was betrayed and banished to a society of nothing. We have no law but survival, and the only thing holding us together is the wall around us. It rises as high as twenty men, without seams or cracks and with enough grayness to swallow you if you stare too long.

  My resolve to escape had been slipping away before I met Lucian. Like the rest of us, he was cast down into the Gloaming alongside a dozen other poor souls and a bushel of scrap food. His welcome was a horde of men charging at him and the crumbs that fell beside him. He faced the onslaught like a seasoned sea captain staring down storm clouds on the horizon. I admired his calm.

  He chanced upon a small loaf of bread when he fell. Such luxuries are rare in the trash that feeds us. Some gaunt shape closed in on the edible treasure. Teeth bared, the man growled and leapt at Lucian, who dodged the attack and swung his elbow into the man’s head.

  As the assailant crumpled to the ground, other men caught sight of the loaf and ran at Lucian. Before anyone reached him, Lucian heaved his bread high into the air. The men’s famished eyes followed the golden blur upwards.

  Lucian seized the distraction to do the only smart thing. He ran. Finding a gap in the crude free-for-all, he charged out of the city’s center and into an alley. Something about him beckoned me to follow.

  Outside the central falling ground, narrow streets weave through shells of buildings. Some are one-story abandoned warehouses, but most reach up thirty or forty feet. Only the tallest building reaches half way to the ceiling. They are all made of gray stone blocks, topped with black slate roofs. Despite once solid construction, holes litter the structures. Inside, anything worthy of interest has been picked over a hundred times.

  Lucian had picked a tight alley for his retreat. He should have known that the darker the path, the greater the danger. I chose a broader road and sprinted to the small square where Lucian’s alley would lead. I hugged the crumbling wall of a low building and looked for movement. It was a desolate square, with a broken fountain trickling over bones.

  I turned up the alley, wading into quiet darkness underneath high buildings on both sides. I tensed as my eyes searched ahead. Before me, on the ground, was a twisted, facedown body. I prodded the head to the side with my foot. I heard a slight splash the instant I realized it was not Lucian.

  I spun too late and took a glancing blow to the cheek, enough to knock me into the wall. Lucian’s uncertain glare fixed on me. His hesitation was enough of an opening. I pulled an iron pole from my tattered pants just as Lucian lunged. The blunt weapon crashed into his temple. He went down limply beside the other fallen man. Their blood puddled together, and it was deathly silent.

  For the first time in many fallings in the Gloaming, I felt compelled to help. Instead of abandoning Lucian for dead, I dragged his body down the alley. We had to cross the open square with the fountain, but I sensed no one around. I stayed low and moved fast. We slipped into an unassuming warehouse where I often hid.

  Once inside, I checked for organic shadows. Finding none, I pried open a dusty metal gate on the floor with my pole, and slid Lucian down into the pitch-black cellar.

  As I sat over him, I questioned my decision. I had not stored enough food to sustain us both for long. It would be safer to cast him out on the square. He would not survive there in this weakened state. Or maybe I could abandon him here. We battle over places to sleep as fiercely as we kill for food. Nothing good would come of this god-forsaken place.

  I quieted the thought, cracked open the cellar gate to let a little light in, and studied the man. Blood had matted over his right temple and ear, but he was breathing regularly. Even in the dark of the basement, I could see that he was not like most that fall in the Gloaming. He almost looked familiar. Perhaps he had been the son of a noble. I raised one of his eyelids and saw a piercing blue eye. While lean and delicate, his frame suggested plenty of practice with the sword. He had to be strong to have survived to this point. He certainly had not weathered as many days of decay as I had before falling here.

  It was hard to judge his age. His face was unwrinkled, framed by light brown hair and somehow radiant. My skin was chalk to his bronze. I wondered how long it would take for his tone to corrode like mine, but for now, seeing his vitality brought a glimmer of hope.

  I settled into a corner, where I had built a bed of ragged cloth scavenged from abandoned bodies. Sleep came upon me more easily than I had expected. My dreams were bright, like a raindrop of light splashing into a sea of darkness. I was on my back. The ground was covered in something lush and green—grass. The sun’s warmth shined on my face. Clouds drifted high above. A gorgeous woman was lying at my side, reclined like a queen. She had long brown curls, and her laughter was like honey. I felt her hand in my hand. The feeling was warm and soft as the name Lorien came to my lips.

  Darkness suddenly slid in front of the light, and the woman disappeared. I awoke sensing the shadow. Lucian was looming over me.

  As I coiled, clenching my blunt weapon, I saw confusion in his eyes.

  “Where am I?” he asked.

  It was an obvious first question with a tragic answer. How could I tell him what horrors I had seen? With my tongue dormant for so long, I was reluctant to unleash it. The sound of his voice was music to my word-deprived ears.

  I answered with silence. Instead of words, I began to rise to my feet, lifting my pole as a warning. He clenched his fists as I stood.

  “Who are you?” he asked and took a step back, outside the range of my weapon.

  “One question
at a time,” I attempted. My voice was harsher than I had wanted. “We will get to the questions of where and who, but you should be asking why.” My answer sparked fierceness in his eyes; the same I had seen when he first dropped in the Gloaming.

  “I know why I am here,” he said. “I committed crimes against Prince Tryst, something to do with not respecting his laws. Laws that no free man could obey.”

  “What laws?” I asked.

  “He ordered that all boys between seven and twelve years old, and every firstborn son who reaches seven in the future, be handed over for a life of service in his new army. He calls it the Lycurgus. He commanded me to give away my seven-year-old. I could not do that.”

  He did not continue in words, but he wore a painful story on his face. His expression reminded me of why I had saved him. I could see that his mind had sharpened his spirit, caging the beast until its prey was in sight. It was clear that he had not been beaten down before he fell to this place.

  “Where were you yesterday?” I asked.

  His eyes opened wider at the question. “Why do you ask?”

  “Please, tell me who you are and how you got here.” The word “please” played nicely on my lips. It brought a tiny grin to my face. Facial muscles strained at the now-foreign effort. He seemed to relax in response.

  “My name is Lucian.” He paused. “That is enough for now. Yesterday I knelt before Tryst, expecting to be named a knight. He questioned my obedience because of certain things I had done, like hiding my little boy. Perhaps I reacted too strongly against him. It did not end well.

  “Next thing I knew, I had a bag over my head and my hands were tied behind my back. I was dragged out and down more stairs than I could count. Then someone ordered me to stand and pushed me forward at sword point. Just as I stepped over an edge, the man behind me cut the rope binding my hands. I lost my footing and began sliding down. It felt like a smooth tube of metal. There was nothing to grab as I slid down hundreds of feet. As the slide began to flatten out, and as I was slowing down, the tube ended in mid-air. I fell a short distance onto what smelled like decaying trash and sounded like moaning men.

  “Before I could make sense of any of it, the floor beneath us fell away. Everyone and everything in the pile crashed down into this place. That is when a bunch of starved-looking men ran at me and tried to kill me. It is fuzzy after that, but seems like you knocked me out and brought me here.”

  He rubbed his temple and winced. “And what about you?” he asked. “Why and how did you get here?” His voice sounded curious and somehow innocent.

  “My tale is similar in some ways,” I said. “Unlike you, I was imprisoned in a hanging cage for a long time before I was cast down into that long shoot. What I was before that does not matter anymore.”

  “What you were before the cage matters. Who are you?” He tried to study my face, and I was thankful for the dim shadows. “I think I have seen you before,” he said.

  “No.” I shook my head. “I am just a man trying to survive here. I have been here a long time, and it is good to be talking to you now. You can call me Damon.”

  He pretended to accept the answer. “Damon, you have my thanks for bringing me here alive. It is good to meet you.”

  Lucian put his hand out. I looked at it, confused for a moment, before realizing he meant to shake my hand. He seemed sincere, but his healthy body made him dangerous. We could unite for now, I decided, because his anger pointed in the same direction as mine, and because I still had the weapon.

  I reached out and clasped his hand. Human touch. I breathed more easily, and he smiled in return.

  “I understand your issues with Tryst’s reign,” I said. “You have to harness those memories. The anger can fuel your fight for survival, but it can also fester and lead to your death here.”

  “So Tryst has hurt you as well?” Suspicion laced his voice. I offered no answer, and a moment later he had an easier question. “How long have you been here?”

  I held out my right arm, the one without the weapon, to show him my tally. Two parallel lines of shallow white scars stretched from my wrist to my bicep. I had started a third line at my wrist—it was up to seven marks.

  “This is how you track time?” His expression slid to pity and fear. “How much time for each scar?”

  “I do not know.” This is where hope comes to die, I thought but did not say. My mind filled with what I had done to earn the scars. But the words froze on my lips. He was too fresh to understand the Gloaming. He would learn, just as I had. “The light never changes here. I carve a mark on my arm every time I survive a trip to the central square, where the scraps of food and men drop.”

  “Well there must be a way out,” he declared.

  I felt a surge of some foreign feeling at his demand. It rose up from my empty belly and escaped from my parched lips as laughter. Its source was cynical, but the sensation of humor was sweet.

  “I will not stay here.” He growled the words like a threat and looked ready to charge out of our hiding place. He was not accustomed to failure, it seemed.

  “I have tried escaping. I have tried again, and again. What will we do? Jump over the wall? Dig under it? There is a hope-consuming stone ceiling above us. The only light seeps in from the slits at the top of the wall. Trust me, there is no way out.”

  “We will find a way,” he insisted.

  He was as admirable as a child on a quest to slay a dragon. I did not want to beat down his bright spirit, remembering that when I had first arrived, I too had expected to escape and exact my revenge. Time here had destroyed that expectation and left only bitterness, emptiness, and an unfulfilled thirst for justice.

  I took a deep breath of the dank air and gestured for him to sit. “Let me tell you more about this city,” I said. He needed to know more, but I would leave out the sins I had committed to stay alive. Giving words to evil acts would not help anything.

  “I call it the Gloaming,” I began as we sat across from each other. “Everything devolves into chaos down here, like in some swamp of man’s worst. You cannot help but lose track of time, because there is no hint of sun or moon. You fell at the center of the city, a perfect square. It pulses like the heart of a beast whose skin is the wall around us. Men who survive the first fall disperse into the city from there, only to return when they are starved. All of us have to go back there for the food that seems to fall at regular intervals—bones, half-eaten loaves, rotten fruit, or whatever rubbish. I count the time between each fall as if it were a day, and I reward myself for surviving each day with a deep scratch into my arm.” I held out my arm, the scars dull and lifeless in the weak light.

  “My tally is at ninety-seven. I started carving these after the seventh falling, because I had begun to lose track of all time and dimension. Each one could mean a day, a week, or a month. I hope it has not been longer. My arm is running out of space. I do not know of anyone who has survived as long here as I have. But then, I do not really know anyone here.”

  “In a way,” I continued, “life begins with the fall. Before then, I was locked in a tiny, floating cage for days. I had no food, but thoughts of revenge sustained me. I received water only from rare blasting sprays into my cage. Before my life faded someone opened the cage’s door, inviting a leap into the unknown, which leads to here. I think most men suffer something similar before they are cast down, judging from their pathetic state when they land.

  “If the hanging solitude begins the obliteration, what follows might be even worse. The men here attack newcomers as if they were viruses, while trying to steal away some piece of newly fallen food. The fittest survive that first critical moment, and they become a part of this world. Life then becomes brutish and simple, a slavish need for sustenance. I learned from early years in an orphanage that boys will sin freely if they lack restraints, so imagine the evil here when grown men have neither restraints nor food. It is amazing how quickly virtues succumb to hunger. The scarcity makes that a reality for all of us.
More and more men arrive with the same appetite, but the amount of falling food never increases.”

  “That means…” Lucian hesitated.

  “Yes,” I said, “many die, probably dozens every few days. No one survives without killing, but our population remains constant, because of the forlorn souls who drop with the food. They drop from the black pipe that stretches up into the ceiling above us, like a road to memories of the brighter city lost to us above. You are a rare example to have avoided the cages. I think many of these men were murderers and thieves sent to rot here. Others were Tryst’s opponents, but I think he has avoided sending men I would know. Down here, the past is irrelevant unless it equips you to survive. My past is probably the only reason why I am still breathing. I believe you have that same kind of will. I sensed it when I first saw you. Perhaps the two of us could help each other stay sane. Surviving down here with the mind intact is no easy task.”

  I sat back after those words, my mouth dry. Only then did I notice that Lucian’s mouth was hanging open, stunned. I turned my face away, but I had already revealed too much.

  “I think I know who you were,” he stammered, “but what have you become?”

  “Survival has become my reality.” I ignored his first comment. “And fury at being here made me willing to do anything to survive. I have fallen a long way.”

  “This place is breaking you.” He paused uneasily. “There must be a way out of here. Could we signal for help from outside? Many remain loyal to you, but they have no idea you are alive.”

  I shook my head, but no words came.

  “I know who you are.” He leaned forward.

  “No, you do not.” My voice was firm, as if the words could change reality. “You think you know who I was, but that man is gone.”

  “I know who you are.” He kneeled before me. “You are my prince, Andor Vale, and I live to serve you.”

  Chapter 2

  CROWNING A PRINCE