RE: Trailer Trash 7 pt ??? (Patreon)

   “Silence your shackles, Mage,” Censeit warned, carefully lifting a withered hand from his cloak festooned with bones. “We have arrived—this is the silk road.”

   The goblin sage, the captive magician, and a young girl with no name stood together on the final plateau rise of the Ostskala, taking in the sight of where the barren rocky wastes abruptly gave way to the drop of a sheer precipice. It was like nothing the girl had ever seen—here where they stood was the mountainous ground, and in front of them there was nothing. Nothing, save for a curious twisting white vine of some sort that adhered to the cliff edge before them in a mess of fibrous strings and then was pulled tight by something high up and far, far in the distance. Much further than she could see.

   “You fools,” Beon rasped out in a harsh whisper as he stared in horror. “You two damn fools! Do you have any idea what this is?!”

   “A single strand of the Great Weaver’s net that spans the sky,” Censeit answered in a grave voice. “It is our path, and we must tread it lightly.”

   “Tread it lightly? ‘Great Weaver?!’ So, even gobs know of such things,” Beon let out a bitter laugh and began his frantic struggle with his chains anew. “What a fool’s errand. This looks to be one of the mooring lines of a Chimeric Dreadweaver’s web. Quite an old Chimeric Dreadweaver, at that. Several centuries, at the very least—see the thickness of the silk! They’re calamities. Calamities. World-enders. It’s been said they can live forever, that the greater ones weave nests between planets and moons and ensnare wyverns and dragons and lesser deities and who-knows-what-else as though they were insects!”

   “Does the silk road lead to the moon?” the nameless girl with them asked, following the taut band of white with her green eyes as it ascended from the cliff face towards the sky.

   The strand was a pale line that stretched out into the air until it became impossible to discern along the distant horizon. It was not quite the width of a narrow footpath, and it seemed as though traversing across it would be no different than stepping carefully across the branch of a tree limb. Although unlike the gnarled swamp trees the girl had climbed in the past, this silk road appeared to hang tens and then hundreds and then thousands of feet into the air, and she could only pale at imagining crossing such an unfathomable distance at such incredible height.

   “No, child,” Censeit assured her. “Only as high as the northern mountain peaks. Our Great Weaver, he is not yet so old as to reach beyond the clouds.”

   “She,” Beon corrected with a bitter laugh. “Your ‘Great Weaver,’ she’s female. Obviously.”

   “The Great Weaver… is female?” Censeit’s wizened old face took pause at the notion, unsure as to whether or not this was a blasphemy.

   “That’s right,” Beon said. “The males, they don’t spin webs. Or grow quite so terrible in size. Dreadweaver males wouldn’t live beyond two or three meters tall, they’d be nothing at all against a company of Mages. It’s said the males mostly become food for the female Chimeric Dreadweaver, though—”

   “An entire company of mages?” The nameless girl’s face fell. “You—you can’t mean that.”

   “To kill a male, yes. A female? Hah! Hah! We can’t walk this ‘road,’” Beon swore. “Gods, a Chimeric Dreadspider. Here. One this blighted close to the border. This horrible web must stretch for entire leagues... must stretch across the entire sky over Ostsea like some terrible unseen…! Gods help us. You have to let me free, you must let me return. To warn the capital at least, I beg you.”

   “Warn the enemy? We’ll do no such thing,” Censeit scoffed. “We walk the Silk Road.”

   “We won’t get caught in it?” Sierra asked, giving the enormous line of webbing an experimental prod with the toe of her boot.

   “No, you imbecile—this is a radial,” Beon explained in vexation. “Part of the frame, it won’t be sticky. Trapping lines are then built upon this in a capture spiral starting from—no, you know what? It doesn’t matter. We can’t take this path. We’ll die. There’s no chance. No chance.”

   “You’ve much wisdom, wizard,” Censeit gave their captive an appraising look. “But so little courage.”

   “I’m a mage, not a wizard,” Beon corrected the goblin elder with a sneer. “I suppose you mean to cross from this anchoring line to a bridging thread along the outer edge of the web. Head back down to the ground somewhere on the other side of Ostersjon, bypass all those outposts and checkpoints of the Northern Magi. Well, I’m telling you; it won’t work. It’s madness and suicide and the only destination this ‘path’ of yours will lead to is right into the maw of a Chimeric Dreadweaver.”

   “The silk road can be traveled by those with proper reverence,” Censeit sniffed. “We are very small. If our footsteps are light, the road will not tremble enough to displease the Great One.”

   “Oh? Really? Really?” Beon laughed. “So, you’ve walked this path before, then?”

   “I have,” Censeit answered with a grave nod. “Long ago, with my Master and three other Goblin apprentices.”

   “Impossible,” Beon shook his head. “No way, there’s no way some ignorant gobs blundered across entire leagues of a web like this and somehow survived.”

   “There were other apprentices underneath your Master?” Sierra perked up with interest. “Does that mean—are there other Goblin Sages? Allies we could call upon?”

   “Once, there were many apprentices to the great Goblin Sage,” the many wrinkles upon Censeit’s goblin face folded into a bitter smile. “Now, there is only me. The Silk Road can be walked, but it is not without danger. The three other apprentices on that journey—each of them fell from the web.”

   “They fell from the web?” The girl with no name repeated in shock. “But...”

   “Yes. Fell, one after another,” Censeit admitted. “One must step lightly and with utmost care, while standing tall and prepared to die. If you doubt yourself, if your heart wavers for even an instant—if balance is lost and you begin to fall, you must fall. You cannot catch the line and hang from the thread, for the slightest tug will summon the Great Weaver, and thus doom your companions to become its food.”

   “Oh Gods, oh Gods,” Beon paled. “You really mean for us to…? Impossible, just—impossible. I can’t do this. We can’t do this.”

   “The other apprentices, their hearts were not steady enough to complete the journey,” Censeit hung his head. “However each of them fell bravely, allowing Master and I to finish the journey. The

   “—Whatcha reading?” Aiden interrupted.

   “Oh, good heavens!” Mrs. Moore jumped, almost knocking her daughter’s Goblin Princess binder off her lap and onto the bare patch of dirt worn into the playground mulch by the feet of those who sat at this bench. “Young man! You were ‘bout liable to give me a heart attack!”

   “Aiden!” Tabitha called over from where she was watching the boys at the top of a playground riser. “Please don’t bother your Auntie Shannon when she’s reading. Say you’re sorry and come back over here with your brothers.”

   “Sorry,” Aiden complied, giving Mrs. Moore on the park bench another strange glance before trotting back over.

   “Okay, does weaver just mean a spider?” Mrs. Moore demanded, taking a moment while she collected her wits about her and adjusted the notebook back into her lap to address her daughter. “Because, it keeps sounding like a spider!”

   “Oh, um,” Tabitha blinked, carefully rising from the playground platform she’d been sitting on and crossing over towards her mother. “I do think I have that in my notes—maybe it’s just a page later on than it should be. What does a weaver seem like to you, just from reading?”

   “Well, like a spider,” Mrs. Moore admitted. “They’ve got lots of legs, or at least the little one early on in the book did, they apparently have webs—it sounds like a spider. They crushed that one that tried to come in and steal the l’il young goblins back in the beginning of the story, and from the way you wrote it it seemed like a spider. But, you never called them spiders.”

   “It is, and it isn’t,” Tabitha frowned. “You can imagine it as a giant spider, but I also wanted a way of clearly separating our conception of spiders from these fantasy spiders with the terminology I use. To the reader, a spider is an arachnid, a little thing that, at most, grows as large as filling someone’s palm. To them in the story, even a newly hatched weaver is this frightful abomination as big as a large dog. The older ones—the Dreadweavers, they might have a body roughly equivalent to the size of a large house, but with a legspan reaching much much farther out.”

   “Good heavens,” Mrs. Moore muttered, shaking her head. “And now this one’s a... Chimeric Dreadweaver?”

   “Kīˈmirə, pronounced like the ‘chimera’ from mythology,” Tabitha explained with an embarrassed look. “A ‘keh’ rather than a ‘chuh’ sound, kind of. In this context, it means an organism grafted together from different creatures. I thought, instead of having a traditional predator lair aesthetic with animal skeletons strewn around, it’d be more interesting if the great big Dreadweaver fuses all the bones it can’t digest directly out into the chitin of its—well, um, yeah all that’s in the notes, once you get to that section.”

   “That sounds... awful,” Mrs. Moore looked from the notebook back to Tabitha again with a shake of her head. “This is all—well, it’s incredible, honey.”

   “Keep on reading—if you want to, that is,” Tabitha gave her a nervous smile. “I’ll try to keep the boys occupied.”

   Each page of the story manuscript itself was in white notebook paper, and then was followed by Tabitha’s meta commentary on the next in yellow legal paper—sometimes there were as many as three or four yellows for every white page. Mrs. Moore first read a story page, then she delved into the yellow legal pages wherein Tabitha explained how the ideas were connected and outlined what purpose they served in the larger narrative, and then finally she tried to reread the story page with new appreciation for the depth of thought involved before moving on.

   Tabby just has so many ideas she puts into these! Though she had of course read screenplays before, Shannon Moore didn’t regularly read for fun and found herself very honestly intimidated by her daughter’s writing prowess.

   Some details were easily gleaned from her first casual read-through—the book was intended for an audience of teen readers, after all—but reading the note pages always surprised Mrs. Moore. Censeit was the only elder among the protagonist girl’s close cadre of goblin characters, archetyped as both the wise mentor and the character who would eventually betray the heroine. His name was intended to sound like both sensei and conceit, there was always story planning about how to deliver each of his lines with a certain amount of gravity, and often entire sections of Tabitha’s outline were devoted to seeding hints of both his upcoming betrayal and his redemption.

   A good deal of the note pages were Tabitha creating methodology for herself as she wrote—the clinking of slave irons worn about Beon’s wrists had been written in vivid detail in a previous chapter, and then Censeit’s first line of dialogue here in this chapter reminded readers of this. Tabitha was attempting to use a regular rotation of sensory exposition—visuals, sounds, smells, tactile sensations, temperature and et cetera—while also utilizing an ‘economy of words’ strategem, using increasingly brief references to past descriptors to omit more lengthy and repetitive description. Tabitha worked to set a scene upon reader’s memory, and then as the story progressed she would ease back and only allude to that imagery or slightly build upon it, using less words to greater effect each time because the ‘set pieces’ and ‘production value’ now already existed in reader’s imagination.

   Mrs. Moore found many of the notes to verbose to follow, and discovered the ones she adored the most were the meandering train-of-thought ones that Tabitha hadn’t completely organized yet.

Giant spiders. Such a fantasy cliche! Though I’m loath to follow the common tropes (and yes oh yes I do personally hate spiders. Don’t most people? (Arachnophobia to some extent seems very common but then I can fuse that into the fear of heights here, too!)), but I’ve always been fascinated by their webs. Spiderwebs are just so beautiful and interesting and I never feel like a fiction I’ve read before has really done them proper justice. The web aspect itself, not just spiders. How they’re constructed, how they work, the function and the why. But not even just that, either. There’s something a little magical about them to me.

When I was very very young (4th? 3rd grade?) I remember we went on this fun random trip to a flea market and there was this one stand where the artist was selling those airbrushed ‘van art’ style paintings. There were fairies with butterfly wings and spiderwebs on flowers and tigers sitting on mushrooms and colored smoke that (in hindsight) probably represented marijuana clouds or something. Obv don’t want to go all in on THAT sort of thing but borrowing from aesthetics that leave a strong impression on people can be vital!

ANYWAYS wanted to focus on the scary tightrope-walk trial sort of thing, and have the spider itself be more of an unseen threat/tension that hangs over them. When a big spider is just a giant eight-legged monster in a story, it seems like it’s lost the essence of what makes a spider scary, to me. Spiders should be written more like ambush predators! Just -ominiou- ominous tension. Hidden and unseen. If the characters can see it, then it’s already too late!

   Mrs. Moore rocked back in her seat at the memory of taking a very young little Tabitha to the flea market. It had been a fair drive away, and she only remembered the whole place being crowded and unpleasant. The rows of stalls had been beneath the roof of a long covered pavilion but it was still too sweaty and humid, little Tabby had gotten hungry and started whining for one of the disgusting overpriced hot dogs some filthy vendor was selling, and personally Mrs. Moore been resolved to never allow their family another trip to the flea market. So, they’d never visited the place again after that.

   But, she wrote here that she remembered it was fun, Mrs. Moore seemed flabbergasted.

   Never even considered what it might have been like to her little eyes. To her it wasn’t awful, it was just this exciting new experience. All these years, and we never ever even talked about the flea market. About going ANYWHERE. These notes of hers, they’re not a diary, but then somehow... they also are. She gets herself so intent on getting down her thoughts on something and not leaving something out that may be important, that things like this really just… jump out at me!

At the time of my original first draft, ‘silk road’ was pretty much already a buzzword because of the darkweb marketplace honeypot thing that got made into a big movie, but I always appreciated the name recognition of its more historical origins as a trade route. Maybe if my books take off this time my own silk road will earn a place in the etymology of the term on a wiki page somewhere?

   Darkweb marketplace honeypot... thing? Shannon repeated to herself, rereading over the phrase again for any context clue she’d missed but still unable to make much sense of it. I’ve never heard of any big movie that goes by ‘silk road.’ And what in the heck is a wiki page? Wiki?

   Her imagination leapt all the way from bamboo tiki torches to the city of Wichita in Kansas, with no concrete way of connecting different possible meanings into something she could make any heads or tails of. While Tabitha’s story itself was written in fairly simple parlance as it was intended for an audience of a certain age range, her unorganized scribbles were often downright strange. Seemingly made-up words or shorthand methods of expression for who-knows-what were common, and Tabitha also often fell into a strange habit of mixing her tenses so incomprehensibly that it was difficult to tell whether she was referencing an occurrence that had already happened in the past or would perhaps happen in the future.

   “Tabby—” Mrs. Moore called over. “I still don’t think I like that the main character’s name is always just ‘nameless girl,’”

   “That’s intentional!” Tabitha beamed. “It’s supposed to grate on you and feel dehumanizing. But, at the same time, when her Magi parents left her for dead in the goblin swamp as a baby, they just called her—”

   “Girl, they just called her girl, I get it,” Mrs. Moore sighed. “But that’s not a name, I don’t know if you can go through a whole story just calling her girl.”

   “The goblins overheard the parents call her girl, so they felt they had to honor that as her name,” Tabitha shrugged. “To earn a new one, she has to—well, you’ll see. You’ll see.”

   “Yes, I get that, but at the same time, you can’t just call the main character ‘girl’ throughout a whole book!” Mrs. Moore argued. “It’s not right!”

   “I maybe can?” Tabitha held up her hands. “You’re supposed to keep feeling more and more strongly about it, so that seems to be working so far. And, it fits in-story—the two orphan goblins were just named ‘goblin.’”

   “Well, alright,” Mrs. Moore gave her daughter an indulgent smile before she returned to reading. “Might be a little too experimental for me, but we’ll see if it works or not.”

   The following encounter with the Chimeric Dreadweaver was so fraught with tension that Mrs. Moore completely forgot she was seated outside at a playground in the dreary November weather. She actually found herself skipping over several pages of notes just to find out what happened next in the story! There was a crisis and then a sudden and totally unexpected death, there were moments of clarity and then new twists that made her see things that had happened in a new light.

   The Goblin Princess story seemed intent on drawing Mrs. Moore deep inside and then turning her expectations around in novel ways from moment to moment until she was so invested that she was completely unable to stop reading! There was a brave little girl who struggled to discover who she was, then her honest but somewhat naive goblin cadre who always accepted her at face value, and then the terrible and treacherous Magi who insisted on defining what everything was based on seemingly arbitrary reasons of their own!

   She’s been on such a rough journey already, but then at each stage things get so much more complicated sometimes it seems like this girl would be happier never ever knowing the truth! Mrs. Moore thought in vexation as she turned a page. I don’t want her to find out she has magic and take on a Mage name, that would just completely break her heart! I want her to stop, but I have to see what happens next!

    ( 34, The music just right for Elena. | RE: Trailer Trash | Next, To be Continued... )

/// I want to attempt at least one section where her mother reads her story and draws insights/ parallels to Tabitha's life from it, but actually writing sections of Tabitha's story myself is just the dumbest idea. I even told myself I wouldn't try doing that, because it's such a bad idea. Fuck, I don't know how this happened. Gonna try for an AH post tomorrow, this was fun but maybe not what RE:TT needs right now.