HOW TO MAKE THE UNREAL REAL

"Write of the unearthly in the night. The morning sun snatches the magic away." 
 - .Roland Yeomans

Once I wanted to write of a fallen angel ...


But how to do it and draw the reader into the mind of the anguished being?

First person POV helps the reader identify with the narrator.  

Ever try to write through the perspective of a being who tasted the first rays of the sun, 

who embraced the void as Kings wear purple, 

and who wept hearing the first song of the stars?

Here is the beginning of the chapter: LIES LOCUST TELL --

The spark of an anguished soul flew past me in the night.  I shivered as her light drew back the curtains of my mind.  

 I would have cursed her had she lingered.  But Death was impatient.  Words breathed through the mists of my awareness.

"Darkness yet in light.  To live half dead, a living death.  And buried but yet more miserable.  My self.  My sepulcher."

My mind roughly brushed aside the dry leaves of Milton's broodings.  No time for self-pity.  Yet too much time for all eternity.  Enough!  I was here for a reason.   

And as always that reason was death.  Always death.  The why was unimportant.  There was always a logical why for Abbadon.

The where, however, was another matter.  And when might illuminate the present darkness of my mind as well.  Keeping my eyes closed, though tempting, would but delay the inevitable.  I opened them.

Only a peek through slit eyes.  After all, my ears told me that I was not alone.  I frowned.  A hospital room?

I reached out with more than my ears.  My spirit shuddered as the ragged claws of madness raked it from down the hall.   An asylum.  

 A Sidhe imprisoned within a madhouse.  How utterly fitting.

I ran my long fingers along the rough sheet beneath me.  A state asylum obviously.  Even better.  But what state?  My awakening consciousness was stubborn in its ignorance.

I bunched up the sheet in my fist in hot frustration.  A sharp intake of breath from the next bed.  Her scent came to me.  I smiled.  Only a human.

And I?

What was I?

From the corner of my eye I saw the human in the next bed begin to shiver.  No matter.  The human was not important.  Time and place.  They were.

I flicked my eyes to the barred window.  The glass.  Thick, dense.  Like the humans who made it.

Under my fingertips a pebble.  I nodded.  A mere speck of stone.  But it would do.

The pebble shot from between my thumb and forefinger like a bullet.  An electric circuit died, wailing its death song in tones higher than humans could hear.   I smiled like a wolf.  We would have visitors soon.

More the pity for them.

I drew in a breath from the cold breeze bleeding from the wounded window.  The sharp tang of Autumn.  Oak.  Ash.  Thorn.  Decay. 

 Rotting leaves, mottled in bright hues of strangled life.  The dark and bloody soil beneath them breathed out its lineage.  An aching sadness hollowed out my chest.  The Misty Isles.  Albion.  England.

I whispered, the words feeling like dewdrops of blood on a wounded doe, "The lonely season in lonely lands."

So did you feel the fallen angel's angst, her otherworldly perspective of the world we take for granted?

In the sequel to THE NOT-SO-INNOCENTS ABROAD, the cursed Texas Ranger, Samuel McCord, finds himself in a forest of death in Avalon.

Did I describe his perceptions in a way that brought you to a realm where no mortal should ever stray?

Moonbeams danced upon the clouds like flames of ice.  The lake breathed electric blue fires from its rippling surface.  As if made of snow, a bright white boat floated towards me without making any wake or sound.  

 Shaped like a gliding swan, the craft held one standing figure in long robes of startling brightness: Queen Oyggia.  I sighed.  This would teach me to stay the night at Buckingham Palace after offending the High Queen of Avalon. 

Queen Oyggia laughed, and it was the sound of icicles amused at the freezing to death of a child lost in the woods.  I gave her back a skull smile.  I was no lost child, nor was this merely a dream.  

 She might have drawn me here, but this was my Vision Quest.  It was not my first.  My smile grew wider, but it might prove to be her last.

Midnight’s breath moaned through the gnarled branches of the withered trees bordering the lake.   

As if its hull were greased, Oyggia’s boat slid upon the shore, crunching the particles of sand that I realized were not sand at all but crushed skulls.  Her winter grey eyes narrowed as they locked upon mine.

I sighed.  The world was a mirror of exquisite beauty that few ever saw.  I wonder what this Sidhe saw: the haunting truth of her wasted life or what she needed to see … or what she thought she needed to see.

The air was crisp and stale as if this place was long dead or as if until we arrived no other lives had been lived here. It made the air that much thinner, that much more bleak.  It felt as if the very particles of the breeze paused, waiting for permission to enter my nostrils.

There was a strange expression to the too-long face of the queen.  She appeared to contemplate me with the look of an old woman who sees the lost face of her youth  eerily in the mirror before her. Whatever countless centuries lay behind her had not dulled her mind.  

 Her physical mind, like her moral one, was guided by her strong will and character, and this was etched in her long, angular features … though her insane eyes plainly said her moral compass seldom pointed North.

How do you strive to make your stories live in the minds of your readers?