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Deviation Actions
"FADE IN:
Black Screen.
Music Cue: Monastic chanting.
SUP TITLE: "And Cosp, first slave to the Eternal Work, reached out an hand, and on each disciple's head painted he the Sign, saying: "Unto you, my friends, I bestow these gifts. That there might be from every beast a guardian and a fast companion in every shadow; that the very blood from the ground might cry out, bearing witness to the faithful against the heretic, the liar, and the thief.”
The text quivers and blurs like CANDLE SMOKE. A woman's heady breath snuffs out every word but the last (THIEF). It smolders in the dark.
EXT. CARGULA-MIDNIGHT
BIRD'S EYE: Below, the subtropical lagoon OF CARGULA. Its outer shell is a Spanish baroque flotilla, suspended over the brackish water on stilts; looming above it, the "old" city, shaped from one block of golden cinnabar. Its palaces, domes and grand bazaars gleam dully in the twin crescent moonlight.
SUP. TITLE: CARGULA
The narrator's voice is young, dusted with Castilian Spanish.
ARLO V.O.
I never knew old Cargula when the Fu'Raaz-adi ruled, when their Undying Sultan sat his throne--
MED. SHOT: A train of ACOLYTES chant as a PRIEST waves INCENSE. Their LAMPS flash across the CATHEDRAL's ceiling, a seamless marriage of Gothic and Moorish architecture.
ARLO V.O.
Growing whole cities out of stone--Mastering every art, and race, in the cosmos--
MED. SHOT: In the LAMP LIGHT, we see a FRESCO depicting a FU'RAAZ-ADI, a slave-priest. An ELF, her ebony skin is ornately tattooed like a skeleton, her ink-dyed teeth bared as a shackled GIANT spits in her FACE.
ARLO V.O.
Sorcerer slaves "spreading the Breath of Cosp to every organ of His celestial Body."
MED. SHOT: In an adjoining fresco, we see the GIANT scream as a pack of MURSA--hairless, spindle-legged dogs---tear it apart. Their eyes are clouded silver-white, matching the smoke tumbling from the Fu'Raaz-adi's gaping mouth.
Arlo V.O.
They fucked off and died. Thank the Gods.
CUT TO BLACK.
Arlo V.O.
By the time I showed up even the dust on their tombs was petrified--
O.S. A HEAVY DOOR shrieks open!
CUT TO:
INT. CATACOMB--A Thousand Years Ago
SUB. A THOUSAND YEARS AGO...
A VAULT DOOR crawls WIDE open. Standing in its threshhold, back lit by their SIX TORCHES, are the first CORLOKS. A brotherhood of sorcerer heretics.
ARLO V.O.
And we've been gutting those tombs for everything they have, and I mean everything.
IMAGE: Touched by FIRE, sheets of COBWEBS WRITHE and crumble away from a SARCOPHAGUS of yellow obsidian--one in a DOZEN ROWS.
ARLO V.O.
Including their remains.
O.S. A LID CRASHES to the floor!
SLOW MOTION: CORLOK 1 tenderly lifts a BURIAL MASK to his FACE. The MASK is golden cinnabar, thin as eggshells and harder than spring steel. CORLOK 1 POV: He watches as the other five emerge from their SARCOPHAGI with handfuls of ORNATE JARS.
ARLO V.O.
Swaddled lumps of jerky, carved from corpses, and they sell like sex in the emperor's bedroom.
Image: A HEART barely twitches inside a LITTLE GIRL's open chest. Beside it, SHRIVELED AND BLACK, is another HEART; lifeless until it tastes a single drop of BLOOD from a CORLOK's FINGER. The vivid red of new LIFE spreads across its surface, as the HEART THUMPS and SWELLS into the bloom of health; as arteries, like tendrils, wrap and devour its twin.
ARLO V.O.
The implants hold enormous power, and everyone wants power...
The LITTLE GIRL gasps, leaping upright from the SLAB! Tenderly, the CORLOK ROBES the brotherhood's newest ACOLYTE.
Arlo V.O.
The Corloks...La Respiración...Everyone.
O.S. Dogs Bark!
EXT. STREET--PRESENT DAY
Low angle: A CITY WATCHMAN snaps his head, raising his SCABBARD against the DOGS SNARLING distantly off screen; continuing his route as TWO SILHOUETTES-- ARLO (21) and his brother, MARCO (19)-- leap silently between ROOFTOPS.
ARLO V.O.
Including a street level pube with something to gain, and no clue what could actually happen; so there I go, now. A weedy little bastardo doing his best impression of a shadow..."
That's about the first three pages of my first draft of 'Seizure'. If anyone wants to leave comments or ask questions, feel free!
The rest of this journal is just me scratching an itch. Every writer wants to talk about what they're writing, that is all the rest of this is, reflections, world building and lore dumps for my own amusement.
I'm hopelessly in love with this setting, which was modeled after the Spanish Inquisition and the Ottoman Empire: with a Vancian twist . The fantastical species in this Mediterranean proto-steampunk setting are actually aliens. They're the remnants of a multi-cultural empire, an eldritch caliphate that conquered the known galaxy centuries ago that has since collapsed. The reason for the disaster is hotly debated, even among the most pious of Carguli theocrats, and, like everything, its details are second-hand history garbled by dogma. (It comes up in the story--it's actually the garden bed from which springs the entire effing plot--so I'm not gonnuh go into details about it, here.) I'm just gonnuh content myself to happily babble about the world the story takes place in; because I'm super excited to write it!
Cargula is "Vancian" because it's a post-apocalyptic city in this world's history. It's also "weird" fiction because the lore and magick is semi-realistic, at times even "scientific", but both remain wholly bizarre. It's that blend of fantasy and science that made weird fiction "weird".
(As an aside, I haven't decided if Arlo is human or not. Originally I thought I'd make him my version of an elf or a goblin.) I'm just letting the audience assume he is for now, because a human rogue is everyone's mental default. Though there are goblins, hobgoblins, dark elves, and light (ref. olive-skinned) elves, after a fashion, as well as new species like werespiders, gargoyles and spindle-hounds (also known as "Mursa"). There're also dragons, however they're not classical dragons; they're small, about the size of a ferret, and covered in feathers. They're more serpent-like in the vein of Quetzalcóatl. A Carguli colloquialism for dragon is "tube snake"; they can be trained, but they're mostly just treated like pigeons: pests.
I try not to put too much emphasis on the races, because those details don't really factor into the story. The facts are just bits of information I know; their function is to make the races feel contextualized by a history the audience knows exists, but doesn't need to know. In the same way you don't need to know where the Xenomorph came from in 'Alien'. It's alluded to that the werespiders were the last inhabitants of this planet to bend the knee to the caliphate, when it first colonized it, before the collapse. As a result their "heresy tax" is the highest of any race, more so outside of Cargula's capital city, Cargula proper; the original point being to force the werespiders, under the direct governance of Cargula, to assimilate to the theocracy.
The "werespiders" are actually just an albino race of elves that evolved to have four arms and no eyes. They're subterranean carnivores, hailing from the deep north, subsisting traditionally on a diet of meat, blood and milk. Their fangs release a toxin that paralyzes their prey but leaves them in a lucid state; their natural strategy is pivoting/ dropping from high cavern ceilings, crushing their prey to conserve the blood (which they prefer spiced with adrenaline or dopamine). Their super human senses, speed and agility mean their preferred method of combat is bludgeoning damage.
They're in Cargula, but only one character (so far as I know) is a Werespider, so you don't get some big, grandiose macrocosm to contextualize her. She's just my "weird fiction" version of a femme fatale--because I wanted to make "dark elves" (elves that live in the dark) but I didn't want them to be generic Elric Clones. I based these off of the Falmer from 'Elder Scrolls', the eyeless hunting spider recently discovered in Laos, and the vampires from 'Fevre Dream'; also on a carnivorous tribe in Africa. Their gristly history with the Caliphate, as of now, is going to be inspired by the Roman empire's failed campaign in Germany, and Romania blocking the Ottoman incursion into Europe (the history of Vlad the Impaler). I mean, sure: that shit is pure lore, and will never feature in the story proper--none of it, it's just for the werespider's cultural backstory--but I want it, because it's fun to write.
Kind of like this journal, honestly.