Rust Chronicles

Morgan Quaid

Description

People in the waking world are beginning to share dreams about a mythical city called Rust which sits at the heart of a world of dreams. This obsession grows, pulling dreamers in and forever changing the waking world. The city itself is caught in the midst of rebellion, the waring of gods and mortals threatens to spill over into our world.

Sujets

• Short Stories
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Markosia Enterprises Ltd
• Date de parution: 24 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781914926556
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

Writing
Morgan Quaid
Editor
Tori Ladd
Artists
Willi Roberts
Moises May
Piotrek Antoniak
Charidimos Bitsakakis
David Sparvero
Karthik Arvind Kumar
Doan Trang
Gabriella nagy
Pavel Tymoshenko
Elisa Meneghel
Baracceanu
Queenmercedes
Renflowergrapx

Rust Chronicles Vol 1: A Compendium Of Rebellion And Sorrow TM & © 2021 Luke Gartner-Brereton & Markosia Enterprises, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of any part of this work by any means without the written permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden. All names, characters and events in this publication are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
Published by Markosia Enterprises,
PO BOX 3477, Barnet, Hertfordshire, EN5 9HN.
FIRST PRINTING, December 2021.
Harry Markos, Director.
Paperback: ISBN 978-1-914926-54-9
eBook: ISBN 978-1-914926-55-6
Book design by: Ian Sharman
www.markosia.com
First Edition
Reading Rust: A Note from the Chronicler
Before you continue, dear reader, it is incumbent upon me to raise a note of caution. What follows is a collection of tales and confessions gathered from scraps of surviving manuscripts, dutiful recollections penned by faithful comrades, and the various suppositions and fabrications which are a necessary evil in the compilation and binding of any such work. I, a simple man of letters, a devotee of the Shackle and his cause, have taken it upon myself to gather this compendium of recollections, this chronicle of the red city, for reasons of posterity and practicality.
I am no warrior, no orator or intellectual luminary. I am gifted with the love of letters and sufficient imagination to sew a tapestry of words and deeds when the need arises. So, it is this self-same gift that I now employ in service to the Shackled Man, the rebellion, and my fallen comrades.
Read, therefore, but be wary. The mere act of possessing such a volume would warrant execution were you now under the Red Queen’s purview. While we who live in the waking world may think ourselves free of such oppression, the veil between this world and that other grows ever thinner and each reader must stay vigilant, lest they fall victim to the mercurial agency that governs the passing between worlds.
In piecing together the fabric of this volume, I have sought aid from artisans and creatives of like mind and affiliation. Pictures have been painted, songs composed, all to imbue the written word with sufficient power to move the heart and stir the mind. This is no mere flight of imaginative fancy, nor is it the simple proselytising of recruits for some political agenda or juvenile philosophical ideal. The war for the red city has been joined and already spills out into our own world. Casualties abound on both sides, and the insidious nature of this war has taken a bitter toll on fighter and observer alike.
I and my companion artisans have worked tirelessly to produce this compendium of truths, to safeguard it whilst ensuring that it finds its way into as many hands as possible. For it is only through the reading of such words that the heart may be moved and the eyes opened to the frightful truth which stands before us all.
Read, listen, watch, but keep your wits, dear reader, lest the temptations of the Traumwelt draw you too close. I warn you, close not your eyes when dwelling upon the machinations of the red city and its inhabitants, lest that strange, unpredictable mechanism which has robbed so many from this waking world be set against you.
If you should find yourself pulled thus into the red city, seek friends among the outcast and disenfranchised. Seek the Shackled Man and join the rebellion while there is yet the will to fight.
- The Chronicler

1. The Red City
The city Rust sits upon the cusp of possibility, a fetid sore at the hinge between worlds. Sunburnt, driven by crimson dust, and surrounded by a vast expanse of lifeless rock and wasteland, it stands stalwart. Rust lies at the heart of the dreamworld, binding the impossible substance of imagination to itself; distorting fact and fiction and making the monstrous real.
Ruled by five sisters—midnight spires that stretch skyward at the city’s heart like the crooked fingers of some gargantuan deity—the city remembers itself by the myriad decaying walls, the blood-soaked cobblestones and rotten clockwork that speak its long, violent history.
Once christened New Dawn, the red city has long settled into its new name, its new identity. Despite the decay, the pitted iron and crumbling stone, this city is a prize of inestimable worth, bitterly contested by titanic forces and petty criminals alike. The city streets cry out to the footfalls of gods, demons, and beggars. It draws the dreamer to itself, selecting those precious few from the waking world who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Most who are drawn to the Traumwelt are merely passing shadows, only briefly materialised upon the red rock shores of Rust before their fleeting images vanish, never to return.
Some, though, do not return. Through the mystical power wrought by the city and her great patron, Rust draws the dreamer like a flycatcher. Dreamers emerge confused and at odds with their surroundings. Many do not survive the journey. Some are driven into the red wastes, their minds made playthings for the monstrous creatures who inhabit those Shadowlands. Some very few adapt and live on.
Those who come to the red city in their youth grow and develop as normal until the age of maturity. Then, once more, the etheric mysteries of the Traumwelt exercise their strange influence upon the dreamt dreamer. On reaching maturity, the denizens of Rust are held in a kind of stasis—the decay and aging of flesh and bone are halted or slowed in defiance of all reason. On coming to the city Rust, a soul might live a thousand years before bone and sinew shrivel and fade. Yet, for each year of life, that soul will carry whatever scars it has accumulated, both in flesh and mind.
The red city is a crucible. In it the weak and strong alike fight with tooth and claw, some to survive, some to rule. At the heart of this milieu of intrigue and brutality lies an epic struggle between the Red Queen and her would-be usurper, the so-called Shackled Man.
She of the red throne sits at the heart of the citadel, hidden and mysterious in her boundless malice. She rules the red city by force of will and cruel weaponry. Tendrils of power stretch outward from her hidden throne, infusing the brute force of the Red Guard with wicked intent and empowering the bureaucratic machinations of the Administratum; Red Priests who apply the Queen’s justice with exhaustive pedantry.
Citizens and dissidents alike are sent to the Apothacarian, known colloquially as the Fleshworks. Here poor souls are remade by Calaban and his Acolyte fleshmancers, twisted and malformed by cruel caprice and wicked curiosity. Infused with steel and steam, iron and clockwork, flesh and bone, the Queen’s enemies are made a mockery. They are sent to work the salt mines, or fused to cranes or dry docks, enslaved in a life of perpetual service. The strong and weak alike fall victim to the Red Queen’s whim. Those who serve the blood throne faithfully are rewarded. Those who fail are snatched from their homes or slaughtered by Avernath’s butchers.
A cadre of lieutenants surrounds the Red Queen, the so-called godling princes. These demigods are creatures of unmatched cruelty and ambition. They each possess unnatural strength and cunning and grown viler with each new century of existence. Calaban the cruel, Avernath the Red Queen’s Warmaster, Salik the Twinned; each pays homage to their mistress while seeking their own inscrutable ends.
Once devotees to the Red Queen, the Clockwork God and his allies have set their will against her, departing Rust and setting forth their own kingdoms elsewhere in the Traumwelt. Now and then battle is joined between Rust and her sister cities, the hard earth of the Traumwelt made moist with the shedding of blood, the rending of flesh and bone. With the passing of years, though, bitter fighting has waned, and the wheels of polity have been greased by mercantile exchange and the disparate interests of the godling race.
Opposing the Red Queen and her allies stands a shadowed figure known only by the appellation, the Shackled Man. Mysterious, enigmatic, and imbued with terrible power, the Shackle rallies an army of the discontented; those dispossessed by the city guard, punished in the Fleshworks, or crippled by Administratum prohibitions. The city’s downtrodden flock to the flag of the broken shackle in the hopes of deposing the Red Queen and gaining some semblance of freedom.
The Shackle, too, has his lieutenants, those imbued with etheric power or the cunning wrought from long years of survival in such an unforgiving land. Slum bosses of the Fens ally their crooked paths with the shackle as do the biomechanical hybrids of the docks and shipyards, the salt mines, the subterranean woodlands. Counted among his allies are such esteemed personages as Absinthe Annie, Madame of Sparrow Boulevard and the host of pleasure houses and gambling dens therein. So too the Calligrapher, formerly Litmus Shule, who raises his banner to the Shackle’s cause.
Rebellions have failed in days past, crushed with bitter finality. Yet the seeds of revolt now stir among the disenchanted and the broken. Rumours abound, circling the Shackled Man and his cadre like the winds of a storm. While the Red Queen fixes her eyes to the northeast, to the vast broiling skies of the Shadowlands, the Shackle and his followers make ready.
Above and beyond the petty concerns of rebellion lay the machinations of titans. What of Eve, the R