i dunno if any of you have read the begining of my short story, Arc, but here they are, parts one and two. Its been around for almost six months, but i forgot about it till now. I'll finish it soon enough.

ARC - PART ONE

The light burns.
Standing framed in the window, a dark sillouette shifted its opaqe form farther into shadow. Some of the light which had clung to it slid from its shape and spilled to the floor, splahing its brilliant white gift into the dark room beyond. Droplets flew from the floor to the walls and furnishing, shattering into a cascade of brilliant hues as it tried to find its grip on the glittering objects sown throughout the room.

Razor blades.

Mechanical pencils.

Broken, negelected CDs, labels scrawled with permanent marker.

Silently gliding across the graveyard of inanimate sentimentality, the black form took shape. Not harsh and enviously hoarding of darkness like the light from the distant star outside the window, light from a small candle glided across the wraith, revealing the soft young features of a young man.
Siting, head in his left hand and book in the right, the wraith scans the lines, page after page, searching for the words he read last night. His smooth features harden as he passes over a particularly familiar passage, then grow sharp and displeased as he moves from it, onto the next passage.

A distance away stands the door to his room. Framed in lines formed by light leaking from the hall it hides, it watches over the hunched wraith as the pages of the thick book flip, sometimes with such force they snap against the air and send a crack reverberating from the walls.

The lines wavered about the door, then broke and spread wide in a silent scream. Steping into the frame came a tall, hewn figure. Sprawling, the shadow it casts into the room engulfs the book and the young man gasping it.

Wraith draws it in to his lap, leaning over it. Protecting it. After a moment, he lifts his face to meet the eyes of the stone in the doorway.

The stone looks down, and notices that its feet fall beyond the threshold of the door frame. He moves back into the hall.

"Dinner."

Wraith looks back down to the closed face of his book.

Sarcasm pulls like a knife, bites just as fast.

"Amazing."

Stone sighs. The door closes, its scream ceases.

Wraith opens his book, and his face grows dark once again.


The shadows from the candle dance.


ARC - PART TWO

Although the brilliant light kept the room in some semblance of order, the darkness cast from the inert shadows of the long, dark blackout curtains threw a dirty essence on the hectic space. Although still, everything appeared to be in motion- although perhaps a form of motion that is more prone to being frozen, trapped. Like a bomb about to explode, like the rapid shiver sent through ones skin before being struck by lightning.

Death.

Lighting seems to have that effect.

So does darkness.

Wraith lay motionless on the carpet beside his bed. The world swam in his mind, colors mixing and shifting in their hue and intensity. Groaning, wraith turned onto his side, several volumes of ancient text falling from his chest to lie at rest beside him. Worn, the pages of the books sighed as they fluttered about, bound between the two thick covers of the fragile works. Most fell softly, however not all of them fell gracefully, their words folding back upon themselves as the chapters skewed against the stained, aging floor.

By no power of coincidence, the floor was very distinctly worn in the areas more often rendered in shades of gray and black than those lighted. An arc in the floor spread from the western wall to the eastern, as though bleached clean by the sunlight of many passing days. Stretching from one corner of the room to the other, the bleak bow carved into the carpet was completely devoid of all objects Wraith valued. Only an assortment of blades and compact discs, mostly broken, had managed to make their way to the place where sunlight breached the defenses of the window and laid silent siege to the floor.

At the most extreme point of the arc stood the bed on which wraith attempted to sleep on, inevitably in vain. The sheets were pulled clear of the arc's stolen space, crumpled and balled in a loose wad near the head of the bed.

Wraith arched his back in a sudden painful spasm. Retching, the curled form on the floor soiled some of the books he had been so carefully protecting, rendering the text unintelligible. It did not matter. Those books, which had been ruined, meant nothing, they were useless.

Drawing all of his being toward his center, Wraith once again assumed his fetal position. The darkness behind his eyes swirled with red, exploded suddenly into white, slowly muddying back into a deep black. Wraith could not see beyond the caustic visions, could not comprehend the distorted images and pleading, disdainful sounds that echoed through his mind's ear. Reflexively, his form bore arms from its impenetrable shape. Reaching to his ears and pressing his sweaty palms against them, his elbows bent at wild angles from his body. Crying out, another wave of pain coursed through him, the stench of the violent voiding consuming the room in its sour haze.

The bottle, which he had dropped earlier during a particularly mortifying seizure, sat on its base by some miracle of physics beside him. Half empty, though still containing enough of the pale, dry liquid, its shape was the only thing in the room close enough to Wraith's face for him to focus on. He studied the label intensely, searching for a break in the whirlpool of colors, colors which his mind had perverted, all potential beauty lost in the chaotic storm.

The bottle was a temporary substitution for the question. Not the answer, the question. The answer was merely the ends to a more valuable means; the journey to the answer. Wraith had searched through every page of every volume of every collection of texts he owned. Abstract cross-referenced facts and figures, hundreds of philosophies and theories tested and researched...

But the answer eluded him.

Or perhaps more accurate, it had escaped him.

The text that contained the answer, the one sentence that had shed light upon the end to his means, had gone missing. Days ago, maybe weeks ago, one of the smaller of his books made its way to the dining room table below his room. It had been a mistake, following the Stone down to that insanely bright room, that dining room. It burned his very essence to sit and choke down the sterile tasting food provided by his detached, health freak mother. Always wandering about in a peyote fog, her eccentric philosophies drove her towards revealing that other eighty five percent of her brain... through tofu.

He had left the book in that room.

He knew it.