Fen Orc
  • Home
  • Daily Ghost Archive
  • The Ghost Hack
    • Hell Hath No Fury
    • Upon a Midnight Dreary
    • Do Not Go Gentle
    • Ghost Hack FAQ
  • Blood Hack
    • House Rules >
      • House Varkolak
    • Nights of Fire
  • White Box
    • House Rules >
      • Death & Dismemberment
      • Trauma & Derangement
      • City Downtime
      • Combat Tactics
      • Feats
      • Psionics
    • Character Classes >
      • Assassins
      • Barbarians
      • Demonists
      • Detectives
      • Druid Spells
      • Elves
      • Familiars
      • Fighter-Thieves
      • Half-Orcs
      • Houris
      • Illusionists
      • Necromancers
      • Rangers
      • War Smiths
    • Campaign >
      • Merkabar, City of Paradises >
        • Clans of Danaan
        • The Millennium War
        • Medusian Culture
        • Swamp Elf Culture
      • Danaan Clerics
      • Ellyon
      • Half-Ghouls
      • Living Armour
      • Medusians
      • Street Mages
      • Swamp Elves
      • Magic Items
      • Monsters >
        • Faerie Monsters
        • Psionic Monsters
        • Stonehell Monsters
  • Forge Out of Chaos
    • Rules
    • House Rules
    • Monsters
    • Scenarios
    • Competition
  • Home
  • Daily Ghost Archive
  • The Ghost Hack
    • Hell Hath No Fury
    • Upon a Midnight Dreary
    • Do Not Go Gentle
    • Ghost Hack FAQ
  • Blood Hack
    • House Rules >
      • House Varkolak
    • Nights of Fire
  • White Box
    • House Rules >
      • Death & Dismemberment
      • Trauma & Derangement
      • City Downtime
      • Combat Tactics
      • Feats
      • Psionics
    • Character Classes >
      • Assassins
      • Barbarians
      • Demonists
      • Detectives
      • Druid Spells
      • Elves
      • Familiars
      • Fighter-Thieves
      • Half-Orcs
      • Houris
      • Illusionists
      • Necromancers
      • Rangers
      • War Smiths
    • Campaign >
      • Merkabar, City of Paradises >
        • Clans of Danaan
        • The Millennium War
        • Medusian Culture
        • Swamp Elf Culture
      • Danaan Clerics
      • Ellyon
      • Half-Ghouls
      • Living Armour
      • Medusians
      • Street Mages
      • Swamp Elves
      • Magic Items
      • Monsters >
        • Faerie Monsters
        • Psionic Monsters
        • Stonehell Monsters
  • Forge Out of Chaos
    • Rules
    • House Rules
    • Monsters
    • Scenarios
    • Competition

Walking the King's Road

5/7/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture

The grave stones are old now. Time has pitted them.  The weather has smoothed away their sharp angles. The names they  commemorate are obscure lines in the stone, shallow and smudged.

I look for my own name. I can still make it out.

They  brought flowers, once, and laid them around this monument. There were  weeping women and sorrowful children. It was a good burial. I look back  fondly on it. My memory is as crisp as my gravemarker is faded.

It was a long time ago.

No  one brings flowers to this gravestone any more. The little statues are  unpainted and made shapeless by the years. Were they once cats? Or owls?  I think they were cats.

There are visitors still. They pass the  stones and monuments with ignorant curiosity. The gravestones of  strangers are, after all, just symbols of mortality. The passersby sense  the vast ranks of the dead who have gone before them and then flinch  away from the insight. They hurry on. There is a gift shop to visit.
My coffin lies behind glass, bare to the world, like a strumpet’s modesty.  But it is better this way. Better here, under the alien lights, than  under the sands, in the oven of the earth, like my mother and daughters,  made nameless by cruel history.

I turn away. I pass the  turnstile and the girl who sells tickets. I look up at the images on the  walls, celebrating the grandeur of my tomb Even now, after all these  centuries, my works endure. Look upon them, ye mighty, and rejoice.

I  pass through the streets and the Living walk past me and beside me and  through me, with their sightless eyes and birdlike voices, always  singing. The vendors sell bright fabrics, robes worthy of princes and  queens. I like this place. They call it the King’s Road, a name familiar  to me from my living years. I trod the Royal Road once in sandals of  gold flanked by slaves and courtiers. I tread it now barefoot and alone,  yet the Royal Road stretches on, with years as its milestones, into the  vast desert of the future.

And I, once a king, must walk it forever.


This was the first story I wrote and it owes a lot to the requirements of the Ghost Hack Roleplaying Game it introduces. But I think it stands up as a ghost story for ordinary readers. The imagined setting is the Saatchi Gallery, which hosts the Tutankhamen 'Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh' Exhibition and is just round the corner from King's Road.

I also enjoyed spinning Shelley's famous line into 'look on my works ye mighty and rejoice' when the wealth and grandeur of Tutankhamun long outlives his troubled personal life and early death. Shelley didn't imagine archaeologists would spoil his lovely poem.

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    The Daily Ghost

    The Daily Ghost publishes an original ghost story every day on my Patreon page. Subscribe and support my chosen charity!!! These stories are from the archive.

    Picture
    Picture

    Archives

    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020

    Categories

    All
    All War Is One
    A Loophole
    A Miskatonic Seance
    A Toss Of The Coin
    Dearest Dorothy
    Deeping St Jude Welcomes Careful Drivers
    Fan Of The Gothic
    Far From The Tree
    Lucretius
    Miss Veronica Vervain
    Mother's Room
    She Calls To Me
    Show Your Face
    Sibling Rivalry
    Silence
    The Anger Of Ghosts
    The Colliery Wheel
    The Draugr
    The Green Door
    The House Of Three Sisters
    The Night Visitor
    The Traveler Returns
    Under The Bed
    Walk All Over You
    Walking The King's Road

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.