This week on the blog, we're featuring extracts from the creative work produced by 8th form students for their extended projects. Today's post is part of a collection of interlinked short stories, introduced by its author, Thomas Lamont.

For my EPQ I wrote a collection of fantasy short stories, Old Stories in Dark Places, based on the styles of authors such as Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, Neil Gaiman, and Terry Pratchett. This story, 'Three Magic Lizards', was the first story in the collection and served as a creation myth to the world I tried to develop for the stories.

Old Stories in Dark Places

    Orion sat at the bar, nursing his Souten. It sat in a hard earthen mug, the gray liquid a sweet fruity smell atop the worn wood of the bar. It was his third drink of the night, and he was getting ready to tell a story. The inn was in that ever so common midpoint of the evening where the musicians were taking a break and the customers were eating the last of their meals. Soon a silence would fill the taproom. Not a silence with no noise, but a silence of nothing important. A silence of mindless chatter without laughter, music without emotion, and the silence that is brought with the absence of a story.

    So, Orion had decided to tell a story. He knew a lot of stories and told a lot of stories, but this crowd was a hard one to tell a story too. You see, a story must satisfy everyone that listens, and in a busy inn in a busy city in a busy region such as this, almost no story will satisfy everyone’s tastes.

    Orion’s eyes had wandered throughout the night, focusing and unfocusing on the crowd. He had the eyes of a performer, assessing which stories people would enjoy and which stories would get him a fist to the face. He had noticed married couples from the West and mercenaries from the East, merchants that travelled the two-way river, warriors that had fought in the battle of Kreet, farmers selling their wares, and someone who suspected was a king from the way his hair showed the outline of a long worn crown.

    Finally, Orion settled on a story. It was an old story, but one that had been told many times across the lands. All knew it and all enjoyed it, as it was a story before the time of men. It was story before blood and war, famine and starvation. Most importantly, it was a familiar story. It was a story told by grandparents in front of a warm fire. It was the kind of story that evoked a comforting nostalgia. The kind of nostalgia that fills hearts and lungs and invites times long ago, times when everything was a bit simpler. It was a comfortable story, and Orion was ready to tell it.

    He spun around in his chair, Souten sloshing in his mug as he stole the silence of the room with a clearing of his throat.

    “Three magic lizards erupted from the maelstrom,” He begun with the line as old as time

itself, and the room immediately began to quiet. “They stepped out onto the plane of Earth, but at

that time it wasn’t called Earth. It was simply an infinite, living plane that had existed since the dawn of time. It was a canvas ready for painting, the sky above it an all-encompassing black, ready to swallow all it was fed.”

Chapter One: Three Magic Lizards

    “The lizards were shocked by the bareness of Earth, they had expected it to be…well, inhabited by more than a glowing white mass. They stole from the maelstrom, crafting first dirt and rocks, then moss and grass. Then they crafted toilets, and with them plumbing systems. The lizards knew what could go wrong with a lack of plumbing.”

This got nods and noises of consensus from the crowd which had been practiced many

times.

    “The lizards then crafted the eleven regions, beginning at the East and moving to the West. They begun with the Purple hills, scattering glittering spice throughout the lands. From there they dug deep into the ground, filling a deep, deep hole with water that tasted of salt, filling it with their first creation of life, fish. From there they crafted the fall forests, with leaves of the color of fire, living for as long as they died. The lizards then built spires reaching to the sky out of slate, but decided that the grey color of them looked foolish so they wrapped them in unmelting bright ice. They took the rock from these and crushed them, scattering them over a flat expanse of marble, creating a stretching desert to the West of the towering spikes of ice.

    “With the Eastern continent created, they set out to make the divide between the two. They formed a river, flowing with the strength of a thousand horses in some places and with the strength of a beetle in others. Still, they thought this was too simple and wanted to see more confused eyes turning brown on the humans they were starting to think of creating. So the lizards took this river and cut it in two, making if flow both ways from the North to South. And so the river flowed two ways, only diverging East or West for an island in the middle, which we know today as Central but back then was simply a piece of sky that had fallen. The sky was an interesting fellow back then, even more powerful than the lizards, but still hadn’t found its role to play in the formation of the planet. And so the great two-way river was formed, a black mass sitting in the middle of it, biding its time.”

    “What are you talking about? The lizards created central as the kingdom of the humans!” shouted someone from the crowd, people yelling in agreement as the inn erupted into chaos.

    Orion slammed his mug down on the bar to incur silence once more, gray Souten splashing onto the fine wood. After silence had returned, worming its way into the room, Orion calmly spoke once more.“This is the way my grandmother told it to me, and how her grandmother told it to her. You may still hold your own view of the story while enjoying mine.”

    This got rumbles of agreement from the crowd, though the original one who made the complain still wore a clear frown. Orion continued, putting distance between the story and the objection.

    “The lizards moved on, pulling more and more mass from the maelstrom to the point where it was half depleted then. They sifted through it and took only the gold, carving out a giant valley in the white Earth and sprinkling that gold along it, a glittering divot in the ground. From there they continued to work underneath surface level, the right lizard becoming lazy and deciding not to build aboveground. This caused the left lizard, as cunning as he was, to build a city upside down, both because it was fun and also because it would hurt the humans soft skulls. The lizards then did the opposite of this for the next region, creating huge stones that reached out towards the bottom of the ever-dark sky. The great mountains as we know them now sat above the lands then, a beautiful vision obscured by clouds travelling West to the lizards next construction, the great lakes. The great lakes didn’t have the name back then, but the rains had already begun hitting them, turning a beautiful hilly plain into wet and cold expanses of wet. Finally far off to the west they constructed the last land before the vast oceans, The Plains. The grass seemed to stretch on infinitely, trees far and few between. This is where the lizards placed their second iteration of life, pigs. Large, pink animals that rolled around in the grass and mud when the rain from the great lakes leaked over onto the plains, they made the lizards laugh a deep, booming laugh that came from their chests, shaking the Earth.

    “Finally, with the land created, they molded humans. Then they simply watched what they had created, and quickly grew bored after realize how painstakingly boring humans are. And the souls of dead humans, they just took up multitudes of space. So they pulled the last of the maelstrom out and offered it to the white mass that still lived below the Earth and asked if it could store the souls. It laughed at them. So they went to their second choice, although it was a distant second, the sky. He accepted the souls, so as long as the lizards let him split into the two halves of his personality, which he swiftly named Heaven and Hell. Hell decided to be flamboyant, forming a great yellow ball of heat to sit in it’s half of the sky while making the rest the blue that creeps into peoples eyes when they’re calm. The great ball of fire lit up the Earth below while it lay in the sky, ridding the sky of its ever-black quality. All the dead souls it got sat in the ball of fire, a warm and comfortable place, even though the dead souls it got were the ones the sky judged as having lived ‘bad’ lives on Earth. The other half of the sky, heaven, was a lonely being and projected that loneliness out onto the ‘good’ souls it received. It gave each person their own personal cloud, its color reflecting the color that each person most commonly had painted on their eyes.

    “From there the lizards crafted a castle atop the highest mountains in the great mountains, building a huge platform at the top of the silver steps with three human-sized thrones sitting upon it. Of course, the lizards could shrink to fit the size of the intricately carved thrones. And they sit there to this day, watching their creations grow and die out, occasionally causing a natural disaster or two or speeding up evolution in order to find a new lifeform to mess with.”

    A round of applause filled the room as Orion took a short bow. Warm smiles blossomed, eyes turned a happy and calm yellow-green. The innkeeper, quite a large man with a soft, gentle face walked up to Orion. He wiped his hands on his stained apron, which might’ve been a distinct color once, but now one could not tell where one stain ended or started. He slowly poured Souten to the top of Orion’s glass, with a simple nod and smile as thanks for the story. Orion smiled a pleasant smile back, the smile all storytellers have after a story well-told ...

Many thanks for Thomas for allowing us to publish this story.  We hope you've enjoyed this week of creative writing on the blog: we're always happy to publish your stories, plays or poetry here, so if you have something you'd like us to post, please contact any member of the English Dept.  Have a lovely half term!