Huh. I don't feel 2 years older, but perhaps I am. I think what's probably happened was that I locked everything I wrote in the past two years, filed it away on a hard drive somewhere.
Anyway, enough of that.
The other day, I started writing something, however needed to hack out in my head what the background to the story was, which became a little story in itself. Behold: le Hack's Prologue.
***
The story begins with a wedding. The first wedding that this particular family had taken any part in for generations. The groom, a rich and evil old man with a bad heart. The bride, a succubi demon from the ninth circle of hell, or so she told her mother-in-law who thereafter approved of the match. The ceremony took place in the city cathedral, the bells drowning out the brides’ protests that walking on hallowed ground burned her and the groom’s even louder protests at the cost of his rented suit.
Despite their assorted complaints, both physical and fiscal, the two were marrying out of love. Love of money and love of power. Pooling their resources at least once, they managed to produce one child before the man’s heart became too full of gluggy yellow fat to pulse any further, and the woman disappeared off the face of the earth, presumed to have died of preventable diseases.
The child of their pooling found himself prematurely liberated and rich, and sought to continue this upward mobility with the acquisition of a bride of his own.
Little did he know...
In the ninth circle of hell.
“Mother I’m home!”
Granny Snook stuck her head out of the cave door to see her daughter casually skipping down the garden ledge as if thirty years hadn’t passed.
“Where have you been? You’re late for dinner.” Granny scowled, and turned to shuffle deeper into the cave. Inside, a skeletal man chained to the wall moaned and reached weakly towards her. The young woman hopped inside the cave, leaning close to the captive to briskly kiss his cheek then spin away before he could turn his desperate grasp to her.
“Hello Papa, how’ve you been?”
He replied with a tortured moan. Quickly, the woman settled at the table and Granny Snook placed a steaming bowl of pinkish stew on the table in front of her daughter.
“You’re too thin. Where have you been?”
“I’ve been in the human realm mother. I got married, I sent you an invitation.”
“Oh is that what that was.”
Granny and daughter both turned to look at another curving cave wall, where a chained human hung with his back to the room, delicate cursive carved bright red wounds into his back. The words “You are cordially invited” over his shoulders visible in the half light of a nearby flickering torch.
“Well I suppose I’ve missed it now. Who was the groom then?”
“You’ll like him mother. I expect he’s around here somewhere, he set off down here a few days before I did. Of course, he was coming by the human immigration, but I’m sure he’ll have no trouble getting in.”
... and so it begins.
