Monday, May 28, 2012

Caesar the Troll Part 4

To any of you readers not particularly interested in the song of the troll... I have one thing to tell you.
GO VOTE FOR SOMETHING ELSE!
I got another vote for Caesar the Troll sitting over there, and so I decided to what I don't normally do and write a Sunday post... and write two in a row about the same thing. And now... Caesar the Troll. [I was writing this post last night on Sunday, but health problems kept me from posting. Do not fear, I do not believe I will die of this... so you will still get your Caesar the Troll and Sneak Peeks].

Caesar kept his most precious possessions down in the catacombs, which formed most of his imperial domain. He didn't have much for precious possessions, but as it said, one man's treasure is another man's trash, and Caesar liked trash.
One of Caesar's prized artifacts was a hairbrush. It had been his before the war, when he had had long hair that curled away from his neck and bounced as he ran. It had grown so long he had to shake like a dog after he bathed or showered in order to get rid of the wetness. Now though, his head was deformed and virtually hairless. and it was of little use. Still he would touch it and run it over his head, shaking his head back and forth, wondering if maybe he would look up and be looking out through the thin screen of hair that had obscured his vision as a small boy... though he could no longer remember what a boy was. To him he had always been as he was now, the king of the rocks.
Then there was the most prized possession of all. The bomb.
During the war the king's city had been bombed for day straight. In the first day of the bombing, one of the super-high-explosive bombs had dropped right into the king's bedchamber, but had failed to explode. Studying it later Caesar found that it was not a dud, simply a miracle, failing to detonate. Ever since he had prized the chunk of metal and explosive, and kept it in a little nook down in his catacombs. Each day he would rub his face against its cool metal before going to sleep with at least one arm wrapped around it. He felt that if he treated it kindly enough, it might not decide to go off.
Caesar never dreamt much when he slept, and if he did it was most often of himself singing his song in the theater, and often he would wake to find that indeed he had begun singing in his sleep, his sounds reverberating off the walls of the catacombs.
Every few days, or if anything remarkable happened, such as him finding another treasure, or an attack by the renegade mercenaries, he would go to carve in his catacomb a little more of the history of his reign. He never did anything as illustrious as he had done in the first few centuries, but still he sang.
Then came the day.
Caesar climbed out of his catacombs, having already brushed his hair and put his bomb back in the little nook for while he was away. He emerged in the camouflaged pile of rocks and I-beams the covered a large portion of his domain, and made straight-way for the theater. On his way there he saw smoke rising in great plumes to the left, and feared an attack, spurring him to run to the theater ever faster, leaping from rock to rock with complete immunity to the hard landings.
He scrambled up the vertical surface that had once been the back wall of his amphitheater, back when Caesar had commissioned it a few thousand years ago, and dropped down into the highest row of seats.
And there she was.

5 comments:

  1. Cliffhanger!

    Although I really should vote for you writing your novel, I caved and voted for sneak peeks...

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    1. Cliff-hanger indeed... muahaha. How many days should I make you all wait to hear the rest of it? I'll be sure and oblige you with sneak-peeks then.

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  2. The advantage of getting to this late is that I don't have to wait for the next installment when you write cliffhangers. ;)
    Very interesting. :D

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    1. Of course, you could be missing out on the experience of checking back to see if there's more... since there it's done now, at least for the first round.

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