Rings of Yesteryear

Scott Tierney

Description

In this prequel to the sci-fi novel Tomorrow is Another year, an intrepid young man looks back across the multiple lifetimes he has survived through - lifetimes ingrained within the rings of an old tree trunk...

Sujets

• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 22 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789821437
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Rings of Yesteryear
An Introductory Prequel to Tomorrow is Another Year
Scott Tierney




The Rings of Yesteryear
First published in 2019 by
Acorn Books
www.acornbooks.co.uk
Acorn Books is an imprint of
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2019 Scott Tierney
The right of Scott Tierney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.



The Rings of Yesteryear
Michael awoke to find himself still slouched ungainly on the floor against the partitioning walls which segmented his musty and idle apartment. His neck ached, his lips were cracked, his chin unshaven, his palms blistered from toil. His old suit was scuffed at the elbows with sand, the black shirt half-unbuttoned and wrinkled – his tie, shoes and socks were strewn elsewhere.
He both looked and felt older than his thirty-one years.
It may have been morning, it could well have been night, for the blinds were drawn and clogged with dust, and all the clocks in his derelict apartment had long since succumbed to inertia. Every radiator in every room was cold – every surface had been pervaded with mildew. Accompanied by the rhythmic tremors of nearby thunder, a fierce wind scratched at the windows as though a predator testing for chinks in a boundary.
Still smouldering between Michael’s fingers, with a scattering of stale ash beneath it, was a cigarette of Dust – an intoxicating and sweet-smelling soporific, which, although once prescribed by the state, was outlawed in this present century. This illegality did not perturb Michael, however, for he brought the cigarette to his lips with a wayward loft of his arm, and took his first drag of the day.
He inhaled deeply before holding the smoke in his throat, for this would increase the effects: numbness, the suppression of anxiety, and a detachment from one’s awareness to the advancing of time – he then exhaled until his lungs were entirely empty, as this would prolong the drug’s potency.
Behind the mists of lemon-tinged smoke, Michael saw before him, still propped against the front door as though bracing it from an intruder, a round slice of wood which had been cut from the belly of a large tree trunk.
With a heavy nod, Michael acknowledged the slab of wood as one would a fellow prisoner from across a cell – for their incarceration, in one form or another, had begun at approximately the same time...
A faraway afternoon in 2017 had been both a sodden and perplexing one. Rain had fallen incessantly across London for the entirety of the day – yet Michael, despite getting soaked, had barely noticed. Instead he was both overwhelmed and dumbfounded by the realisation that he’d been “Blessed with a remarkable gift.” – for this was how his towering, besuited and mysterious employer, Greenwood, had described it.