Ch 1 Scene 1 revised

Ludens is free. He rips himself into consciousness and lives. He abandons what must have been...him. He floats clumsily, topsy turvey, unpractised limbs awry. Ideas torrent into his head as if borne on dreams.

Then there is nothing until...

On a gust of frost a snowflake twists and turns, in it a happenstance of thresholds. Strange algebra shreds and tatters at the razor’s edge of chance.

Figures of men resolve slowly into confrontation with each other. Heady vapours of aether puff within their sinuses. Nascent energy crackles in their ears. One, pink faced, perspiring casts down his hiking stick.

‘Is it only me who had to walk all the way up?’

Another raises a cane in his hand. His eyes burn cold. He shouts,
‘Conjuring dolt, buffoon, it is impossible that you are here at all!’

A third says nothing and watches. His lips, as well as they can be discerned through his unkempt beard, curl a sardonic smile. He is tall and wears a ragged woollen cloak. His beard makes you want to scratch at imaginary lice. His eyes are a predator’s, wary and cruel and hungry.

Now there is a fourth who tripping from a precipice above falls into the triangle of the three. Rising, he raises his hand as if to silence them. He seems younger than they and savagely beautiful. He glows radiant, his eyes golden. He waves his arms in clumsy circles as if to draw everything into his ambit.

‘This in my time!’ he shouts, his voice hoarse and broken as if unused for days or weeks.

‘A fool has no time,’ says the man with the cane. ‘For such as you it is merely a clicking by of Lumiere frames, a fanciful dream. You sleep.’

‘You lack the will’, says the pink face turning florid in the shifting light. ‘You do! The will is not in you to create. Ludens, for I do know you, I know who you are, from what unknown hell have you been released?

The predator face entangled in knotted hair only smirks and turns away.
‘No belief,’ he mutters. ‘One day we shall meet and I shall defeat you. Belief is mine.’

‘My time! Mine.’ says the clown. ‘My century! A time come. My time.’ Now, hoarse as he is, he is almost screaming out. He shakes his fist. He raises his face to where stars would have, had stars been possible in this place. He gulps air into his body and stops. Clasping his arms around himself he lets the anger and lust escape from within him. In a voice cold and now controlled on wavered breath, he says –

‘My time, yes, not yours, my time to make, yes, mine’

‘There will be light!’

‘It brings reality!’

‘Reality, light will damn you all!’


The snowflake settles at last wearily onto the ageless still of a glacier. It rests for a second trembling fitfully. The glacier splits. Avalanche is unloosed.

It begins.

‘My time!’