Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Caesar the Troll

"The Song of the Troll"

The old, greyish, bluish, traces of greenish, thing lumbered around his playground. Old stone ruins, I-beams lying across rubbish, such was the domain of the sole survivor of the war in this ancient city.
Caesar, king of the...
rocks.
The king had once been a very recognizable human being, a normal young man. Then the war had come. That war had wiped out all but a few of the human habitations once called "cities." During this new era of re-population, the concept of a city had died, and thus it is a purely historical term to describe a population center. In this era, a city meant a pile of rubble, waiting to be reclaimed and recycled.
The war had left poison all over the earth, a slow-acting poison that what scraps of science books remained called "radiation." It had a rather quick half-life, resulting in an intense burst of lethal radiation upon detonation of the old bombs, but anything that survived would have little reason to die thereafter. Such was the king.
Tumors had grown all over his body, his nervous and endocrine systems being now forever out of balance. He now looked more like a troll out of ancient folklore or old movies than a king, certainly more like such than like a man. His head was now roughly spherical, depending on how you counted the lumps and dents, his chin enlarged, and his teeth grown large and flat.
But he was still king. His domain stretched from the tunnels to the theater, with all the land between. Of course, the borders were somewhat arbitrary, bounded mostly by his reclusive personality, and only somewhat by the brigands.
Certain of the warriors who had prosecuted the nuclear conflict in the past had survived and kept their weapons. Favored for their ability to roast unprepared humans, the weapon of choice was a gun which spouted an intense beam of highly charged ions, delivering heat and shock to the target at once. The king hated those. They hurt so badly, but he never died of them. The excess tumors over his skin prevented the damage from reaching his vitals.
The renegades that still ran about with their guns loved to torment the monarch. If the day was ending and there was still charge in their guns, they would take a few shots at the king if they could. Whenever he was hit he would freeze-up and convulse, or else just cower in a corner whimpering at the pain. His mind had never grown much past that of a child, his development in that regard being arrested by the war.

6 comments:

  1. Awesome world-building.

    Poor guy.

    Nice writing.

    I like this...

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  2. *loves*

    That last piece of information at the end makes the story /amazing/. Totally wasn't expecting that. :D

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  3. *is determined to comment on every single installment of Caesar* ^_^
    You have hooked me. ;)

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  4. Your attention to detail makes it easy to visualize the story. Good opening.

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