Publishers Marketplace: Fred Wellner

This writer is looking for an agent.

12.27.09

This was a land far from heaven. If angels watched it, they were surely fallen ones.--From Dead Again

NOTICE: Dead Again, is now available on Amazon!
http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Again-Fred-Wellner/dp/1442120118/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241217130&sr=1-7
So is SYN
http://www.amazon.com/Syn-Heaven-Begins-Single-Fallen/dp/0982491611/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245297373&sr=1-1
Edited...ready to buy...waiting to be read.

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(Somewhat-daily/weekly Improv Continuing Saga)
***I added more to the tail-end as this is the end of the first draft of this long tale***
Already she’d made a choice that surprised her, and the path of her unfinished business would lead back to facing that choice soon enough, she knew. The eagle was not truly gone; he was watching from afar to see what she would do next, what direction her heart would turn. Thus it hardly caught her off guard when she heard its cry in the treetops to her right. There was a nest there, a big one.
“Tell me about the cold room,” she quietly demanded. He would hear.
You fled from it.
“No kidding.” She grunted. “It felt like hell.”
Then why ask what you already know?
“Because…” She stopped short, gazing nowhere in particular. “You make a habit of getting me to answer instead of answering yourself. Our conversations are very one-sided. I hate that.”
Then ask questions you cannot answer yourself. That demonstrates strength.
The woman grimaced sourly. Thad did this to her too sometimes, and Victor. “Alright,” she resumed evenly. “Tell me how to shut the door for good on the place the cold room leads too.” She waited, and then added, “You think I should have done something there.”
It will not change the consequences of it being opened.
“I would finish what I started.”
You severed a rotten branch. Then you would do more?
“Why would I waste breath saying so if I wasn’t serious?” She commenced walking again, steering her feet towards the pines to the right where the eagle’s nest rested high above. “And what was it you said about asking questions you already knew the answer too?”
Prerogative of position. I exercise it as I will.
Yasha started to respond but upon entering the tree line, the focus of her attention shifted immediately. Where the tree line began it was cold, colder than she could have anticipated. And everything was gray, concrete, the light dim and flickering. Abruptly she wheeled and looked back. The sun shown bright behind her in contrast. Clouds drifted across the big blue sky in formation, heading lazily for uncharted places. She returned her facing forward towards what should have been the forest interior. That same gray she knew too well waited for her to make a decision.
The sun heals and gives courage. Darkness opens old wounds and cares not that you were once brave.
“I know,” she responded with a shiver. Mechanically she moved into the place she dreaded most now, feeling the sun go cold behind her. The way back was closed now. There was only forward, and what she needed to do.
The color of the stripes on the floor did not matter anymore. She knew exactly where she was going. The door, down this hall, was on the right, yawning in cold silence that could not be ignored. Yasha could have fled again. The impulse to do so was strong in her. Her legs plodded suddenly on, picking up her feet, setting them down, taking her forward despite the screaming protests of her primal instincts to preserve every part of herself.
From the door came noises now, groanings, cries of untended misery; torments and tormentors alike found no peace, for who could provide it? Who would dare to enter and give succor?
Now she began to understand, even in her terror, the true danger. Never before did she understand, for the nature of fear is not that of explanation but rather instigation.
“Close the door,” she told herself, her voice so quiet it took her connected thoughts to amplify them. “All you have to do is to close the door.”
But she knew better now. It was not so simple. This was not the door merely to hell. This was but the door to a single hell. Behind it would be others, and if she was drawn into it, it became a maze from which there might be no escape. Thus was the complexity of it. This was SYN’s hell. These groaning were his. The tormentors only he could truly know, but he was in some way unable to escape them himself. And that this hell existed meant only one thing.
SYN was not dead, not here, not anywhere, and this hell was his everywhere.
There the door stood, open and covered with frost. To touch it would invoke many things, the least of which was what it would physically do to her. It radiated a cold that indicated something about the deeper chasm of temperature the door itself could not entirely contain. She could touch it once and then it would rip the skin from her hand, freeze the sinews underneath, make brittle the slender bones within. This she would face were it the only concern.
It wasn’t.
Standing there, on the threshold of perhaps the greatest darkness she’d ever known, Yasha knew she could not close this door. Not because she was afraid, though she was very much so. It was because she knew that she should not do this. To do so would make her the architect of damnation, worse than what SYN had once become. He had learned; she was certain of that now. He had risen above the evil of his primal beginnings. Should she close this door to his torment, he was forever bound to it. Everyone needed a god, she concluded warily, no matter where in existence it resided. For this one moment, she was his, the focal point of his appeal, the only one who could properly judge.
She left the door behind, knowingly putting it to her back and proceeding further down the tunnel. With each step she felt some of the coldness fade, and the maddeningly irrational fear release its frigid grasp. What she had decided took stronger, surer root and she did not regret having left without closing the door nor her not entering within.
There was a path to follow here now. It was fairly clear to her though she needed to make sure. In the great hall she found her affirmation. Belarius’ panicked path marked itself for the foreseeable future, every fallen mummy exactly as she remembered it. She almost smiled in recollection. The way now was not back and through the platform’s portal but forward through the corroded doors to the surface. Yasha found each and passed through into a day mixed with gray and sun. Winter was in some remission; perhaps it was that early lie that whispered falsely of spring, she mused. Wet snow blanketed everything incompletely. Leaves underneath bore that familiar consistency to cereal in the morning when soaked with earthmilk. And in a broad stretch of snow she spied footprints that made her heart leap. Tears welled and she rushed to follow them, for they were fresh.
She spotted him fifteen minutes later, half slipping down a muddy embankment, his hands scrabbling at exposed tree roots for support. It is why he neither saw nor heard her rushed and careless approach until she was nearly on him. His expression of surprise turned to glad panic as they crashed happily together, falling into the bole of an oak which spared them both a roll in the wet melt of the low, wooded hillside. They fumbled for seconds, and then minutes, speaking almost unintelligably in their disbelief. Faces wet with more than snow pressed together so tightly they wondered if their souls would meld into one.
“I thought you were gone forever!” He whispered. I thought you were fucking gone for good…”
“Me too.” Yasha pulled back a bit and stared into Thad’s sea-water eyes. Her thoughts suddenly turned to Belarius, the one responsible for her separation from the others. “You didn’t hurt him, did you?”
Thad looked away, not meeting her gaze and frowning hard. There was conflict there in his expression, and pain. “How could I?” When we wrenched away from him finally, he fell back and just sat there waiting for it. I wanted to kill him. I never felt like that before…”
She pressed fingers to his lips, relieved. “Where is he?”
“Sarah drove him off.” He pressed his lips together decisively. “Enough of him. What happened to you.”
“Not yet,” she shook her head. “How long was I gone?”
“Three days,” he answered. I came up here looking to get in the portal and then lost my nerve. There are a billion worlds out there…I’d never find you if I went through it.” He looked suddenly very shaken. “I almost missed you.”
“But you didn’t.” Yasha hugged him tight again, afraid he might turn into smoke. Suddenly she pushed back, still clinging to the sleeves of his leather jacket. “You’re not him, are you?”
“Eh?” Thad looked clueless. “I’m a him. What are you talking about?”
Her next word came as a faint whisper. “SYN.”
Thad blinked twice. “Am I SYN?”
“That’s what I asked.”
He smiled and relaxed. “No more than you, honey.”
For a few seconds Yasha studied his eyes, attempting to read something in them. Her thoughts heard thunder, and granite blocks crashing together, smotes of lightning frying rivers of air. And then, she remembered the eagle and smiled back. “I want to find out what happened to Victor. And we should find Belarius before something finds him. He did what he had to do. I know that now.” Thad’s sudden discomfort prompted her further. Come” She took his hand tightly in her own and led him on through the woods and in the direction of their distant, unseen city, wondering how they would leave the island, and then remembering that Thad must have had a boat. “I’ll tell you everything on the way.”

Upcoming: Native Sun Trilogy

Native Sun: Part 1 - Genexile
Native Sun: Part 2 - Edict
Native Sun: Part 3 - Heretic Damned

"Dedicate yourself to upsetting the applecart just enough so that everyone may eat of the tree of knowledge."
--The Author