The Temple of Lore, Works of the Schola Options

[Black Hand]

This thread is for the stories of the members of Order of the Schola, for any questions you may have please click on the following link.

http://chorrol.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=3495

ANYTHING that is not a story or poem or whatever should be posted on the link that was just provided. Thank you, not trying to be mean, just trying to keep our sacred temple clean. Now then, an explanation.

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The Temple of Lore is a sacred sanctum of tomes, dreams, thoughts, abstracts, histories, stories, poems, and the written word.

It exists in the twilight, between reality and fantasy, it embraces all forms and images that attempt to define it. It is perception, and the perciever.

There exists an order of men, commonly known to the masses as the Writers Guild, more accurately called the Order of the Schola who have mastered this twilight abstract in the form of storytelling, they alone have the power to transcend to the Temple of Lore, and contibute and take from its threads of knowledge.

They exist amongst us as Journalists, Bards, Old Men sitting on a porch with a glass of lemonade recanting old experiences. If you ask nicely, and your lucky to find the chosen few, a Schola can breathe life into any illusion, any thought.

[canis216]

Here's a piece of non-fiction I put out last fall that echoes some of my inspiration for the Alik'r desert stuff that I've got in the works.
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Clouds have been building all morning, first wispy white and then steel gray. Now they are nearly black and the rain begins to fall. These are not the small, delicate drops of a brief shower—the first drops are large, deathly cold, and strike with stinging force. The skeletal remains of the forest, coal-black, recede into the building mist and we can hear a helicopter-based fire crew calling over the radio, waiting to see if the storm will squelch the fire season. They are mad to be up there; the rain falls like one of the Great Lakes being emptied into the sky. Erich and I keep working the crosscut saw because the sooner we finish the sooner we take refuge under the tarp. Our rain gear is at our sides—we are too consumed in the work to put them on and the aerial bombardment somehow seems attractive, as if to take the assault were to prove something to the Mogollon spirits, or our Apache boss.

The dull thud of rain on my hardhat is sharper now—rain had turned to hail. My shirt is plastered to my back and now I am repeatedly stung. But still it is bearable, so we continue, Erich and I, to work the saw. We don’t like to leave any log unfinished, and pulling the crosscut out only to reinsert it later strikes us as inefficient. We are anything but inefficient. I pull and rest, Erich pulls and rests while I pull again. Do not push a crosscut saw.

Five more pulls and we are through. Erich takes the saw—to avoid binding and warping the steel—while I get to work on the log, rolling our section off the trail. Finally I slip on and zip up my rain jacket, pull on my rain pants, and make for the tarp. I am soaked but not cold, in spite of the icy rain and hail—instead I’ve been working up a sweat.

The tarp is already occupied by three colleagues. Karl is having a smoke and Amber is laughing while Echo spins a tale from a campaign to legalize cannabis in Montana, a hilarious story about getting high and driving backwards through Yellowstone National Park while her car lost all gears but reverse. With lightning in the air there is not much to do but to tell stories and keep warm; it is unsafe to work and storytelling out in the woods is our highest ambition anyway.

The mist grows, and the forest is quiet but for our happiness, the creaks of dead ponderosa, the drumming of hail on a blue plastic tarp, and the deafening boom of thunder at 9,000 feet.

This post has been edited by canis216: Sep 26 2008, 09:05 PM