fogbound.net

It was bad luck that Ponderus, Fifth Imperial Lord of Varia, was born on a day with exceptionally light gravity. The Royal Minister of Standards duly weighed out the calibration stones, and a clockwork chain of events began: the Royal Metallurgist selected materials from her mineral store-room, and crafted the Standard Unit; from there, countless copies were cast at the Imperial Forge, endless couriers and emissaries spread out across the land, bringing the new metric to cities, towns, and villages alike.

Merchants groaned at the new metric, for, as luck would have it, the Fourth Imperial Lord had been born on a day of extremely high gravity, thus the old metrics had been small and easily carried. Now with Ponderus, the Fifth Imperial Lord, this convenience was gone. If someone purchased a simple quarter King of flour, it required seven large stones on the balance.

It was a mere four months later when Simon Waggoner, a potato farmer, had had enough. Over the course of the morning, he’d had to weigh out a thirty-king of potatoes twelve times, and something inside him snapped. In the middle of the market, he threw down his metrics onto the floor, shattering two of them. The entire throng of merchants, farmers, restauranteurs, household shoppers, and all fell silent and drew back. Inevitably, the word would get out, and soon armored legions of the Royal Knights would march in.

“Friends,” implored Simon. “I am nothing if not a loyal subject of his Supreme Majesty. But, if he loved his subjects, would he not give us a convenient weight, regardless of the day’s gravity?”

And thus the War of The Metric began…

(In order to better motivate myself to work on a novella that I started last year, I plan to occasionally post little excerpts, sketches, and ideas here. These may or may not wind up as part of the final work, if in fact, a final work ever is produced.)

Strutting along the antenna, twenty stories above the crashing sea, the crow was a moving painting, colored vividly by the light of the setting sun. Ruffled feathers, glittering eye, he was an agitated study in deep charcoal, cobalt blues, and oil-slick opalescence.

On many a day, this crow might be found here, admiring himself, studying his fine reflection in the glass of the control system dials. Or he might be frolicking in the stiff updraft of the winds rushing over the seawall, or croaking out territorial challenges, or flirting, soaring low over the rookeries, or talking history with the murder, recounting the histories of the surrounding places (histories that generally revolved around the memories of particularly fine scavenging). But not today.

The others were keeping distant. Earlier, they had fluttered away upon his approach. The crow paced, turned to peck at the itch of a mite. The morning, so recent, was a muddled confusion. Now images, fragmentary and alien, flashed into his thoughts. He contemplated briefly a sudden, unbroken dive down to the sea-rocks, shattering amidst the ruins of this waning day.

Words formed. Words that were unfamiliar, but their meaning was clear.

The crow didn’t dive. He didn’t look at his reflection in the machinery of the pumping station. He knew what he would see. He’d seen the glint of metal on the back of crows’ heads before.

He knew that he had been split apart from the murder forever.