Suddenly on the cusp of fatherhood. He has never felt this way before. The anticipation, the excitement. It is even more wonderful than he had imagined. He’d thought his line had reached its end, that one of the younger branches would lead the family after he was gone. And it will be a boy, he is told. A son.
This is fate. It must be. He has never much cared to believe in such things until now, but there is no other way of explaining this avalanche of joy. Fate has blessed him after testing his family with hardship.
Nere’s spirits are not quite as high, but he is only too glad to be the doting husband. He wants to do everything. Often, he sends her attendants away so that he can be the one to bring her whatever she desires. It annoys her, sometimes, and she tells him that he should concentrate on his work with the Vanguard; other times, she tells him she was wrong, and she cries as she urges him to stay with her. She is all over the place, even more unpredictable than usual as her hormones play havoc with her body.
And then the day comes. Ibai is born.
The moment he lays eyes on his son, his heart swells with such pride and joy that he can feel the change coming over him. He feels that he is no longer the same man. He is a father now, but it is also more than that, he realizes. He is a father by blood, but he has already been a father in spirit for some time. After the loss of the previous generation and the departure of Melchor, he is the one everyone looks to for answers and guidance. Rholtam has been trying to help him see this all along, and now he understands the depth of his responsibility. Ibai has shown it to him.
However.
Ibai is very strange. It first becomes clear when a doctor attempts to vaccinate him. The needle cannot pierce the boy’s skin. A solid splotch of dark brown appears in its path each time piercing pressure is applied.
And they do not know why. They do not know what Ibai is. But they can tell that the brown shadow is a construct of imaginary power. The boy receives his vaccines with the aid of a soul-empowered needle. They take him home and attempt to understand what makes their son so special.
A dark serial novel. Set in a modern fantasy world called Eleg. Mature language. Updates every night at midnight PST by ~400 words.
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Can someone link to the chapter where abominations are explained?
ReplyDeleteChapter 23 is probably what you're thinking of. Page 213 and Page 214, specifically.
ReplyDeleteThanks... Huh, there's more going on here than we realized earlier - that or the problem wasn't with her getting pregnant, but with the embryo surviving, so an abberation gamete would be able to survive.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the Blackburns are the same story as Joseph Rofal's sister. Someone deliberately matchmaking reaper carriers, then "infertility" that's actually a series of embryos being destroyed by failed attempts to implant a reaper.
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking the same thing now that you've said it, it makes sense
ReplyDeleteI wonder what happens to the reapers that don't implant properly? Do they die along with the embryo? Also, being as psychotic as they are once reborn as an aberration, does any trace of their original personality remain?
ReplyDeleteDoes the reaper have to be a volunteer?
Agh god, my heart aches for him when he discovers.
ReplyDeleteIt is specified that they use a captured reaper not a volunteer (not enough self-sacrificing fanatics, even in Dozer's Abolish faction), and no, the reaper's personality has no effect on the aberration's. Genetics might play a role, and upbringing definitely does, along with either the will of the void or severe damage to the aberration's soul, depending on who you ask.
ReplyDeleteWe'll find out the story, perhaps soon, but my guess is that Parson was responsible (or at least blamed), and that House Blackburn wants to bring him close so that Melchor can try to kill him. With the right circumstances, its probably possible.to trap him and then use a gas (probably hydrogen or something) to burn and consume him.
Some issues with tense if I'm not mistaken:
ReplyDelete"He is a father by blood, but he already been a father in spirit for some time."
Needs a "has" somewhere; "he has already been" or something (adverbs and sentence structure are confusing).
"It is even more wonderful than he [had] imagined. He[’d] thought his line had reached its end"
Main tense in this passage is Present, so one step into the past should be Simple Past. I don't really know about the second sentence though. If the time of the flashback is Present, and one step in the past when he was thinking, the ending of his line might very well have been two steps in the past.
On a slightly related note, maybe you shouldn't do flashbacks in present tense. The sudden change in tense somehow breaks immersion (at least for me). Doesn't seem to bother anyone else, so feel free to ignore me.
First one should've been "he has already been" yes. Not so much a tense issue as just a missing a word. Which. Yeah. Happens to me a lot, unfortunately.
ReplyDeleteThe second one isn't actually an error. Simple past tense and perfect past tense are both acceptable usages here. I mean, you could argue that simple past is more appropriate, and you might even have a point, but it doesn't really make much difference because both tenses are occurring in the past and there is no specific order of events beyond that.
Generally, perfect past is used to denote things that were already "completed" in the past, while simple past just denotes things that "happened." That's why perfect past also tends to be seen as "two steps into the past" as you put it, but that's not strictly necessary, especially when the specified events aren't demanding any kind of chronology in order to be understood.
In regards to last note, I do them in present tense because I want them to feel like a break from the rest of the story. So yeah.
"both tenses are occurring in the past and there is no specific order of events beyond that."
ReplyDeleteOh boy, should have told that to my English teachers in school. Then again, I have noticed by now that school learning and real life language usage have little enough in common.
Thanks for the long answer.