Keyen

Keyen.

The knock came suddenly, midway between the first and second sunset. Kayen growled and turned away from the cave's entrance, pulling the shabby cloth closer to himself, and shifted his exoskeleton in a futile attempt to ward off sudden wakefulness. The knocker, undeterred, knocked again, and Kayen swore.

"I hear you in there, Kayen," The creature intoned. "Come out. We need to speak."

"Leave me be, monster!" Kayen shouted, sitting up. He gestured angrily with his long thin fingers, though he knew he couldn't be seen. "Come back when both the suns are high in the sky, or not at all if it suits you."

The creature outside sighed, and Kayen let himself believe that his argument had succeeded, and collapsed with a sigh back onto the mat. His cave was not large, and he wasn't allowed to leave, and this made Kayen very happy. He wasn't one to make friends, and cared little for the outside of his cave. He had been living here for many days, too many for him to count even if he had wanted to. In that time, his location had become noticed by the outer world. They would come, and they would ask him questions. He would answer and they would leave. It was a pleasant experience. In the more recent days, Kayen had instituted a new rule: questions came only when the sunlight from the red and blue shown into his cave. The rest of the time (the red time, the blue time, and the black time) he was to be left alone.

It was a pleasant experience.

Just moments before he was asleep again, there came something of a shake, much like an earthquake. Kayen knew about earthquakes from a different planet, and a different time. He did not care for them, and had never come to his cave. Panicked, he sat upright, and checked to see if his cave was in danger of collapsing. The dust fell, but the wall seemed stable enough. Blackness suddenly enveloped him and Kayen screamed. Insticts, from a time when such things were needed, kicked in, and Kayen took to the air, seeking to fly up and out of danger. He bounced off the ceiling, collided with wall, and landed in a heap on the floor, his legs tangled in his blanket.

And still the shaking continued. Kayen covered up his eyes and shiverred, too dazed to attempt to fly, and too scared to do much else. He held himself close, his exoskeleton shifting into it's most defensive form. And he sat like that while the world continued to shake.

He didn't die.

Kayen was suprised by this realization. The shaking had stopped, and he was still alive. He looked around, but the blackness was still thick. Still, Kayen could tell his cave was not destroyed. He was still alive, for one, and though there was some dust in the air, there wasn't nearly enough to indicate a cave in. So he was alive and, for the moment, he was safe.

And nearby someone was pulling on the void. He could sense it with his antenne. The void was being shaped. The void was something Kayen knew a lot about. It was what existed between the planets and suns, and at all times tried to pull all the matter apart. There was magic that could hold reality together, and there were some who could craft the void, pulling matter and energy from it as a one might pull dirt from a pot. It was a skill beyond Kayen, but one he understood well. A world-builder was outside his cave.

Kayen made his way to the mouth of the cave, something he had not done in many many days. He took a deep breath, and glanced out, expecting to see the faded void, with the thick black clouds of reality squirming through it. Instead, there was just black. No light at all. Kayen reached out, hesitantly and tried to probe the blackness. The atmosphere near the edge of the cave was painfully shallow, and his breath came in short labored breaths as he groped for the edge of his reality.

Instead, his fingers touched something cold and clay-like, which covered up the mouth completely. He recoiled, then tried again. There was some give, much like the fleshy parts of some creatures. He touched a third time, and was bathed in a purplish light as the creature's hand pulled away. Kayen winced and covered his eyes, blinking with both sets of eyelids to let them adjust. Finally, dropping his head, he beheld the creature.

Kayen knew his world was not large -- he preferred it that way -- but the creature was several times larger. It floated in the void, with arms and legs (2 of each) and a set of wings that vaugely resembled a bat. It looked at him calmly, it's body somewhat sillohuetted by the two suns which now hung in full brilliance in the sky.

"Now," The creature began. "The suns shine into your cave. We need to talk."

Kayen stared at this creature, then glanced at the shadow it was creating on its wall. "Yes. Yes I know you. We have spoken many times. You are the one known as Pik."

"I am." Pik said. "And we need to talk."

Kayen smiled, grimly. "You are a world-builder, Pik. If I refuse, I do believe you could destroy my home, forcing me to flee... again. I do not wish to lose my home. So we will talk."

"Good," Pik began, "It started-"

"No!" Kayen called. "I must sit. I do not like the light. We will speak as we always have." And with that he stepped back into the depths of his cave. The creature waited while Pik pulled his blanket onto the floor and sat cross-legged upon it. "Now, World-builder Pik. Tell me what has happened."

"Very well," Pik said, and began...

Creatively, I'm drained.

It's really hard for me to talk about myself without feeling like I'm climbing up onto a soap-box and proclaiming that I hold some deep knowledge that everyone is going to be wowed by. I don't feel that way, and I don't mean to project that self-assured, cocky, know-it-all vibe. It always happens, though, and it bugs me.

That's not really what this blog post is about, though. I just wanted to preface what I was going to say with that, or rather, letting my mind wander, that was the first thing that I thought to write. I'm trying to just let my fingers and my brain do the talking. The rest of me is kinda numb.

Usually when I sit down to write, I have some little idea I want to write about, or some scene that's just begging to get onto paper, or some odd and abstract setting that I want to scribble about. I don't tend to take my writing very seriously, and I do it often without even thinking about it.

Except when I'm stressed out. When I'm stressed out, the time I spend writing is, at the same time, time I'm trying to spend mentally relaxing. I carry a lot of stress in my head, and the more crazy I get with work and my home life, the more difficult it seems to let the creativity flow. I want to be writing every day, but right now all I really feel like doing is laying down. I fight it because I know I'll never write if I let myself get away with that, but at the same time, what I write in this frame of mind is usually not that useful.

The last four times I've gone off to write, I've started something new that I didn't feel like working on later. Each of the things were interesting in their own way, but none of them linked very well to anything else. They were just thoughts without ending and sometimes without beginnings. Some of them were fictional, and some of them were decidedly autobiographical. None of them are suitable for consumption by the masses, which has made me a little depressed. It's been a month since I wrote anything worthwhile outside of my comics.

Even now, as I'm writing this blog post, some part of me is trying to make me find out what I need to do get Jaimee's contacts reordered. It's not a process I'm at all familiar with, and it's exasperated by the fact that when we last got her eyes checked, we didn't leave with a prescription. For some reason, Firefox doesn't seem to believe that didn't is a valid word (except now it does), and now it's assuming that "doesn't" isn't a valid word (except that the second time it accepted it). My computer is going all kinds of weird lately. Ah well.

I just want to be writing now, but some part of me feels like I have nothing worth saying. Part of this stems from the fact that I cannot write sci-fi. Or, rather, that I'm scared to. I am not a physicist, and though I keep myself pretty well read, I am very much a layman when it comes to what the future is going to be like. I hate the feeling that people will read my work and scoff because it's not "hard" enough, and that I neglected some all-important development that's almost guaranteed to happen.

And part of me knows I'm just being silly (it's in the same vein as worrying about the hard-core fantasy buffs who want something to be exactly like Tolkein but exactly different from it as well, or even me who wants the system and process of magic to make sense). My goal should be to write, and not worry about what people might say. But when I'm stressed, it seems to be all I think about -- the audience. Who will want to read what I write? Who cares what I have to say? What can I say that's in any way unique?

These fears are stupid. I know they are, and I should just stop.

... I kinda wish it was that easy.
--Joe

(I'm gonna see about getting those contacts now).