First 500: Dustria by Madhurika Sankar
WELCOME TO THE FIRST 500: Dustria EDITION, WHERE WE AT VRAEYDA LITERARY SHARE THE FIRST 500 WORDS OF OUR PUBLISHED WORKS.
BELOW IS THE FIRST 500 WORDS OF Madhurika Sankar’s Dark Fantasy NOVEL Dustria, CURRENTLY ON SALE AT THE VRAEYDA STORE AND WHEREVER NOVELS ARE SOLD.
Prologue
Sri Rojourha
Alacrinth was famous for its beauty. The city sprawled below, a glistening jewel bathed in the pink hue of sunset. Seagulls swayed over the horizon painting the sky with their milky white and kissing the ocean at times, breaking the calm of an otherwise perfect dusk. Once that pink hue meant the afterglow of bloodshed, but now it brought to mind the pearly calm of a slowly formed seashell. The city wound down beneath him.
“Sri Rojourha, you have visitors.” The voice interrupted his reverie.
Not another long evening, Immortal Rojourha was immediately awash with guilt. Perhaps not. Perhaps, it was Prince Ilayath wanting to talk of his imaginary problems with the Ministry of Sobriety and Social Welfare, he mused. That could be quick. Or how to fix the situation with the farmer’s union strike without dipping into the coffers. That would not be so quick.
As if reading his thoughts, his valet offered, “It’s the Ministry of Magic. Minister Filit wants a word.”
Rojourha groaned. No doubt, wanting further insights into the mysterious ways of the preternatural. This is what happens when you set up a ministry that serves no practical purpose.
How the old civilization lost track of Time. The darkness that descended on the world seemed a distant memory. A Time when people ruined their lives with consumption.
Perhaps it was the peace the vista inspired. He closed his eyes, but his thoughts meandered, as they often did, back to those terrible days. People slept with each other’s neighbours, forgot pledges to shield the old and young, drank Sapphire to oblivion and, above all, allowed themselves to forget where they came from. Books, the gatekeepers of accountability, crumbled and wrinkled into the flames of eternal amnesia.
A cool evening breeze wafted and rustled his robes. Rojourha’s eyes remained closed, imbibing everything through his other heightened senses. This paradise, the city spanned out beneath him in a soothing rhythm of life and love and industry. The pink sandstone used to construct its carefully planned architecture glowed in the waning evening light, and even the most dastardly crimes could almost be forgiven in the calmness of its lambent hue.
The Immortals fought so hard all those many thousands of years for this present. The people assumed they were gods in return, sent to save them. It all happened so long ago no one remembered how the Immortals kneeled before the Orb, promising obeisance to her Magic. How they plead and prayed to be saved. No one bloody remembers. The history. The bloodshed. And thank the Seven Suns for that, he gritted his teeth.
The world functioned because of that necessary amnesia.
Like a runt sapling of a birch tree that still kept growing into a malformed entity, the Sickness arrived, in the midst of an already crumbling planet. How it descended upon the world like a thunderclap of misery!
Too preoccupied with their ruinous profligacy, drinking and fornicating and letting the world rot, one industry at a time, the spreading rain cloud of malaise, pregnant with torture, further darkened a wounded civilization which took thousands of years to build with steel and gold and glass and mortar.
They say civilizations collapse at their peak.
We did not disappoint, he rued. I did not disappoint, he continued down the rabbit hole of self-loathing. I drank. I still drink. Now I have to. And even then, we did not stop.
Due to the Canada Post Strike, please consider purchasing an ebook or using one of our distributors via the button above.
