[Gormenghast] fics20in20 Round 3 Entry: Author's Choice: 5
"Fire"
Word Count: 120
It might have served as the means by which Steerpike had assumed his rank, but after that very same incident left him scarred and disfigured, he found that the very sight of fire terrified him. Because of this, when he heard of this new-fangled thing called electricity, he arranged to have a steam-turbine built in one disused wing of the castle, the water heated by the hell-mouth ovens in the vast kitchens where he once served as a drudge. That kept him from needing to light his office with candles, or warm it with a fire on the hearth. At least this removed one reminder of the price he had to pay for his rise to power.
"Water"
Word Count: 123
It is said that we are born of water, and Titus believed this, at least as a metaphor. Water had become his conduit to freedom: the flood waters had forced the threat to Gormenghast into smaller and tighter quarters, easing his discovery and offering Titus a chance to prove his worth as the earl. A boat on a stream had offered him passage beyond the bounds of Gormenghast, and he had hidden himself from the inexorable agents of the faceless government of the world beyond his world, by hiding in the tunnels beneath a river.
Now water offered him freedom again, as he boarded a boat en route across the sea to an island, following a man who had become his guiding star...
"Earth"
Word Count: 137
Within the walls of the castle, Titus could not smell the earth. He could smell the dryness of the stones and the torpor of the dust but not the fertile damp of the earth, the way that he could in the forest. Only there could the scent of life fill his head and his lungs with the promise of movement and novelty.
And it was here in the forest, that he first saw her, the Wild Thing, dancing through the tree branches, like a leaf on the wind, suspended between sky and earth, as if she belonged to neither and to both at the same time. And he, bound to the Stones, could only look on her in awe and admire and envy her for her freedom and her closeness to earth and sky and forest between.
"Metal"
Word Count: 110
Everything about the portly poet and his court seemed made of metal, from the gleaming black limousine that bore him about the countryside, to the clink and clash of silverware that bashed at the plates in the dining room as his coterie of dilletantes and poetasters ate and chattered while barely tasting the bounty, their tongues seeming mad of lead.
Most metallic of all was the voice of the king of the would-be aesthetes. He declaimed his mechanical verses as if his lungs were a bellows and his voice box was made of tin, his voice as brassy as the strokes of a gong struck by a desultory automaton.