Something new

I've been fighting my muse recently.

I have four projects begging to be novels. One is in rough draft form and I've only skimmed over it. Another is a sequel to my recent novel "Hell to Pay". One is a short story I'd like to make longer (going into the realms of Sci-Fi) , and finally this.

Aristid is the story I came up with one night while playing D & D. It was one of those moments when you make up a character and suddenly EVERYTHING came to me. Out of the stories I'm contemplating, this is the one that might write itself. I created a comic of it years ago and tried to find a home for it with no success. So using issue one as an outline, I'm playing around.

Here is the first page:

Chapter 1

My birth was eventful for my small village. Rumors surfaced of my mother dancing in the forest with devils and strangely shaped animals under the full moon. Her pregnancy, devoid of any local man, was faced with fear and dread.

Ripe with birth, she stumbled through the village. No one helped although they all saw her huddling and huffing with the pain of my delivery. The local church bells rang in warning, a three bell melody where the third bell’s tone off — the tempest warning.

They watched her go to her small straw house on the edge of the woods. They followed her like wolves tracking a screaming injured horse and surrounded the house.

An old woman passed through the crowd, slow of gait, withered with age, and covered in a funeral shrouds. She passed them into the house where my mother lay and midwifed my beginning.

My cries blended to my mother’s final breaths and I came into this world. The old woman’s clawed hands my only salvation. After ritualistically cleansing me, she blessed my mother’s passing. Then walked out and presented the angry townspeople with what they feared most.

They say I looked normal except for the horn buds jutting from my scalp.

The villagers had exchanged their farming implements and labor tools for weapons and torches.
The old woman lifted her milky eyes to the local clergy and shouted a long stream of curses that ended in my name, Aristid. The priest simply pointed and my captors claimed me in my first hour of life as my savior had hers ended. They say any plow shears used that day, reused in the fields, caused the grain to decay and the soil to refuse to grow. The flails, speckled with her blood, caused madness in those who consumed the flour.

How different it would have turned out if I had a normal childhood.

I traveled the backroads wrapped in the chains of swaddling. When I arrived at my destination they left me to the darkness, perched on a stone slab, in hopes that animals or exposure would claim me before the High Father’s decision did.

The High Father stood command over the churches vast power, and if for the sympathy of his young daughter, Elisabeth, I would have been lost.

Yup, rough draft.

The story is about a half demon boy, raised by the church to be a super weapon during their crusades, turning against his training and his upbringing when it turns on him.

Dare I say an Anti-Hero story.

This was the intro for the comic . . .

Honor, Truth, Fidelity.

This day I betrayed it all. All that I was raised to believe, the very aspects that would have destroyed me if I had not struck. Do not sorrow for my tears, they are simply a byproduct of the freedom that I have never felt.

Tell me what you think.