Wedge

We don't know who exactly Wedge is. We do know that he rummages through Wrack Line to see what he can find and places himself on the site at whim. We don't mind because he brings stories of what he has been, done and seen.

He reckons he's immortal because, though fictional, once someone has heard about him, he's in their head forever.

Anyhow, I'll let him explain himself a little, though mostly what he says is a little bizare.

Wedge – my brief description.

I was born of someone’s mind, full adulthood, with a sampling of backstories that are emerging slowly. The hat you see is not the hat I wore then. Like the humble yard brush, it has had ten tops, three rims and some fancy feathers that flew somewhere long ago. From time to time, I will offer a little insight into my existence.

Here goes an insight.

My first encounter:

‘I like your hat.’

   ‘I like yours,’ I answered, gawping an intensity of blue—eyes with the iris ringed in black. I was already sinking.

   ‘I’m not wearing one.’

   ‘You should do, they suit you.’

   ‘How do you know.’

   ‘Before I emerged from someone’s mind, I had a dream. I saw a woman like you on a catwalk modelling the latest slinky style for beginners, but it was the hat I noticed.’

   ‘Beginners?’

   ‘People like you and me, who have come from nowhere and so are beginners.

   ‘Do you have any tips for beginners, seeing as you arrived before me?’

   ‘Wear a hat.’

   ‘Wait there.’

   I did.  She sauntered into a side street that only materialised as she entered a millinery on its corner. A nice store where yellow candlelight flowed from the window to shine and morph the grass to cobles. She reappeared and strolled back. ‘Do you like it?’ I did; it suited her perfectly, and the dress, now Victorian, tight at the waist, flowed gently her grace. ‘Do you?’ she insisted, slipping an arm through mine as she turned me from the side street towards the sound of a weir.

   ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

   ‘The confluence, of course.’

   ‘The confluence?’

   ‘Well, you see, it seems I’ve distracted you. You should have begun to emerge from a mind upriver before the confluence, but you didn’t and are now in the wrong time zone, so I am taking you back.’

   ‘I don’t want to go back.’

   ‘Maybe? But I am a distraction,’

   ‘We are both distractions.’

   She stopped walking, turned to me, stared her mad blue eyes through mine and said softly, warmly, ‘You think we are figments of imagination; you are wrong. We are our own imagination, different, that’s all.’ She stepped on in silence until we came to the confluence, and she said, ‘I’ll explain more some other time when it is explained to me.’ She turned to the marshes and, fading into the dusk, left.

   Will I ever see you again? I murmured silently.

   You might. Keep looking. Choose another timeline. And listen for my footfalls. Her voice in my head was as if she still stood beside me.

   I listened through the silence for footsteps but nothing, though I saw a single flame glimmering the Ings.

   ‘What’s your name?’ I asked, wondering if she would hear me.

   I think I know, but I’m not sure. I’ll let you know if we meet again. Your name is Wedge.

That was the last time I saw her. Though I have heard her footfalls at night, through cobbled streets to saunter, in the alleys and ginnels of the old part of town, where the past lingers as a ghost to wander, link with, pester for a while.

Wedge, then. That’s how I got my name.

I will wind up for now. I have things to do, but I will be back and go a little deeper regarding my timeline and that ghost if the editor lets me. You might influence him on that if you wish.

Wedge.

I'm back.

When I sprang from that mind, I was a shadow, and a shadow found me, confided in me:

They did this

conjured lightning to strike bare

my veins to the root,

left me to rot, disintegrate

then came with axe and saw

to finish it.

    But I’m not finished

for they gave magic and when

they pass by and gawp I see

into their souls, wait to cast

everything I have crafted in mind

to revenge.

At night, under a three-quarter moon

when the sun has burnt all day

I leave this place and wander

the streets and byways as a shadow

to peer into secrets of others,

that is, those not exactly of this world,

of which I am one.

Those secrets I lock

with a key that is a promise

to a goddess whom

I have not yet met.

Our agreement

is a conversation

through minds.

To figure this out, I muddled along. I'll come to that later. I'll just say for now, I found my purpose.

The tree, a scream

I'll describe a little tale, it may be an asside but it does reveal a little insight

The Lineage

A lone highwayman sits astride his blue-eyed black gelding, easy in the stirrups, alert to the raucous silence that is midnight. Raucous under a natural score of nightlife over which the beating of hooves and the rumble of iron-shod wheels loudens as a coach bursts this forest corner and pulls to a halt. He finds a solitary woman inside carrying wealth about her neck, breasts and wrists: jewellery. He’s unaware of the gold strapped to her thigh in a soft kid-leather pouch. He knows of her. This well-heeled beauty, wild in the eyes of many, with enough land and opulence through her husband to live comfortably against the current.

Gently, and with considerable patience, he strips her of the wealth about her, still unaware of the gold warm secret about her thigh. Though the smile that lingers in her eyes he takes as a warning, folds it into his mind. She stares as if he is the captive, which he will be, she’s sure of that. The fascination, she understands, runs deep between them. She asks quietly, ‘I cannot read you properly; most of the detail is masked. Remove it, would you? You now have wealth enough not to run like this through innocent lives. It’s easy; you just slip the knot behind your head and the fabric of denial will fall away.’

He steps into the void that is her gaze but cannot find that innocence. ‘You hide your innocence well?’

She pauses before she answers. ‘There’s no innocence to hide, you know that.

‘Not much, maybe, but enough to steel.’

‘Don’t you think you’ve taken enough?’

‘Trinkets. I’d prefer that of which you would not give up so easily.’

‘And that is?’

‘Secrets.’

‘I’m good at secrets, not my own but unearthing others’. Yours, for instance.’

‘I am what you see, ‘A highwayman?’

‘Yes, but no one knows me; I have no name.’

‘And you think I’d prefer a more notorious thief?’.

‘Don’t you?’

But before she answers, she senses the highwayman’s horse stiffen on something it hears. A man on horseback breaks cover, slides to a halt, raises a pistol and asks the woman if he should fire. The highwayman does not move, sits a little higher in the saddle.

‘Let him flee. I’ll enjoy the unmasking when he’s chased down.’

‘So be it, my darling. How much of my wealth will he be fleeing with?’

‘Nothing of your wealth; you gave it to me, and I gave it to him.’

‘True, my love.’ With that, he fires at the highwayman’s heart, misses, and the bullet just grazes the side of the robber’s eye—blue eyes, similar to the colour of his gelding’s.

The highwayman now has two pistols, raised and cocked, one aimed at the driver, one at the husband. He orders the driver to tie spread-eagled the husband to a coach wheel and spook the horses to the edge of bolting. He then casually but efficiently ties the driver astride the lead horse, hands behind his back. Then, with a certain charm takes the woman from the carriage and sits her side saddle on her husband’s horse. She lifts her skirt and throws her leg across the horse, fit now for speed, and in doing so, reveals the pouch along with a small silver pistol, holsted. ‘Loaded, I presume?’ he says.

‘Always. The bullets are small but big enough when close enough to kill,’ she answers, a slight slant to her vowels that he kind of likes, almost northern, almost not, somewhere mixed, loose, as if she neither knows or cares.

‘Firing the gun would spook the horses. Then your husband would not last very long.’

‘No great loss,’ I love him sometimes, mainly when the rivers are in flood. I’ve never worked that one out.’

‘Have you just exposed a secret? Shall we go?’

She nudges the horse forward, the reigns in one hand, the other perilously close to the gun. She pulls up her mount beside the highwayman. ‘I think it might be wise to take away my pistol. I may use it, but I don’t want to kill you yet. I’m curious.’ She pulls to the side her, revealing the gun,

He leans over and unties the small pistol from her thigh, empties the silver bullets into the pouch, measures the weight of gold and pain in one hand, and then reties the pouch to her thigh. ‘It’s safer there than with me,’ he says. ‘Much safer.’

‘Your hands?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are not hard enough for the land or soft enough for gentry. They are though dexterous. You have a way with knots. You are a sailor.’

He does not answer as they travel apart together, both aware of the distance, the way it will surely narrow.

I’ll finish there. That highwayman was the mind I came out of, in another portal of existence. I believe a little of my wildness comes through this lineage. When more of the story opens into my mind, I will relay it to you all. I recite it here to give you an insight into where I wander. Besides, though I am from his mind, I was not omniscient; he revealed what he thought was enough. She the same.

I am back but I haven't quite got a grasp of how I want to describe the events next.

Soon will have, cheers for now.

I am back now and will continue

The cavern where the highwayman and the woman he wronged in the eyes of her husband, friends and the law glowed to the pulse of a fire built from debris in the rain forest they'd sought and found.

'With the aid of the spirits,' Evlyn said, quietly, as she ate a chicken thigh, a wild chicken that she had thanked for its blood. 'Remember, I can pry into minds; you can manipulate minds, but I can see what you have done.' 

'But not why?’

‘true, they did whisper and I find myself slipping towards their persuasion more and more, but this is our place. The question is, why are we here? And, anyway, my mind at the moment is not on other minds.'

'Apart from mine?'

'Of course.'

'I just follow you, Fin. Promises. You seduced me.'

'No one seduces you. You are here partly for me, but I know there are other reasons. It's just that I am comfortable not knowing, as long as we are at one with where we are.'

'And that means with ourselves together, not just the place?'

'Correct, Evlyn. I'm still mesmerised in your circumference.'

I am back. The story continues:

enough for you to abandon the idea of springing another mind from your mind?'

'I'm not doing that. I am just freeing someone.'

'Not just anyone.'

'That depends on what the gods wish.'

'And are you yet one of them.'

'I doubt if I ever will be, partly because I not immortal, like you.'

'Like me?'

'You can bear children; I’m just the catalyst.’

‘And shall I carry a child?’

‘I don’t know. Sometimes I see such possibilities, sometimes the opposite.’

‘Isn’t there a manifestation within you already, someone that will be that isn’t now?’ she asked, tossing the bare chicken bone into the fire, producing blue sharp flames that alter slightly the mood in the cavern. Fin stands, steps a couple of paces and slips his fingers through  Evlyn’s hair and walks to the entrance. ‘Where you going?’ she asks.

‘To thank the Myan for the chicken, the Yucatan for its hospitality.’

‘You mean the spirit of the Yucatan, the spirit of the Myan?’

‘If you wish.’

‘Pass on my appreciation.’

‘Of course.’ The shadow he cast as he passed the fire slipped her mind as smoothly as his fingers had passed through her hair, shivered her. He was she thought slipping towards the spirits, the shadow of shamen about him.

I'll be back. 

The highway man was a while, but when he came back, he was a shaman, and she became a goddess. They were always in each other’s minds. And now I was with them, though I had little idea of why.

I was tempted to never leave the Yucatan, or even the cavern, lodged as I was in other meanders. But I was afraid of jumping ship, so I stayed and was pleased with the choice. Later, much later, jumping time and space as they did, therefore as I did. I was in awe of what they did. Still, I had no idea why I in was in  the place I was.. I guessed, quite wisely, that I was being  groomed to fledge, out of someone’s  mind.

And that did indeed happen. Now I am exploring a website, priveledged, I suppose. Thing is, if I am not encouraged to stay I will slip this net and find some other story to influence. So, it is up to you. get in touch with the editor and state that you want Wedge to carry on. If not, I will be extinguished. Though I am imortal so will pop up somewhere else. Though I do enjoy the radience of the limestone belt of Elmet, so may not be too difficult to find, that is if you know Elmet at all.

I've slipped the net, just for a while. I did enjoy a swim upstream from the confluence of my birth. But I cheated, I went back three thousand years to a time I knew I would be alone. But I wasn't alone; a goddess attempted my abduction. Three gods with eyes so deep river creatures shied and fled. I like to think of myself as a river creature and so I am. I think I will tell you a little about that, later; that is, if you let the editor that is what you want.

In the meantime, I'm going to look for girl that moves around this site. I have never seen her, just the iamges on the pages. She was created here so has total freedom to do what she wishes, like a child treats its home.

I almost met her once, in the library, a dozen books off the shelf, one open, a clue, but she was gone. The books allowed me her mind to some extent, in the way of knowing her interests, which, I think, she has many. I call her Strider. The book left open was: The Confluence of Elmet. What does that mean? Is Elmet a confluence; if so, of what?

I'm off to the library.