Greetings, dearest readers. Even more greetings to new readers. I love that you decided to be here. Thank you!
A little while ago, I made a post about character and point of view, all in the context of a novel I have been writing, called Precipice. I’ve linked that post below, using the new larger embed feature of Substack. Oh how I like the graphic novel-style cover image with this one. It pops from the page.
That post mentioned some aspects of the worldbuilding of Precipice, stuff such as:
/ a world marred by its own ruin /
/ the city of Siridan, straddled by the city of Vi /
/ the protagonist Jisa, off doing … things /
OK, so those precise words probably weren’t used. I didn’t check. I just wanted to use that nice centre-aligned quote box and italics.
The things for Jisa: Those will only become apparent once the novel surfaces from the depths. It’s not a hook. It’s a terrible, flimsy one if it is. Can you imagine if that was written on the back of the book as the blurb? Me neither. No. This all probably makes it sound far less serious than it is. (Yes, this is spiralling.)
What I mean is, she’s the protagonist whether she likes it or not. I suspect she won’t like it. Sorry, Jisa! It’s not going to be easy for her you.
I came to realise that when I was writing that-post-not-this-one that I was, in part, trying to explain a lot of things to myself, to see how and whether it made sense. And so when it came to it, I was hesitant to post about those thoughts (I’m hesitant to post anything) because maybe none of it did make sense. I’m rambling. In the end, I’m glad I made that post.
So, umm, I want to return to that world today and flesh it out a little further with a short tale. An adjacent tale, if you will. I like that term. The piece below wouldn’t ever make the main novel, but it can be the start of a series of interconnected, overlapping and fragmentary stories told across Siridan and Vi, to give little pieces of background on characters and places that form, in some way or another, a part of Jisa’s life. Her world.
This story is about one such character: Warv. He is a father figure to Jisa, but their relationship has been … difficult. In the main story, Jisa asks something important of Warv, a task that he eventually, begrudgingly, worryingly (urgh, adverbs) agrees to. What transpires below comes some time after that moment.
I’ve added some of my own thoughts at the very end. You don’t have to read those, but I’ve put them there anyway. And as always, my dear reader, if you enjoy or have thoughts, please do say hi and let me know. Every comment stops one droplet of rain from leaking through into Jisa’s world.
I hope you do enjoy.
Boil the kettle. Pour the wine. Fill the glass with that whiskey and settle in by the fireplace. It’s time to be serious now.
///
Warv’s eyes peered through circular, lensless frames. His fingers held the piece of circuitry, cracked skin pinching wafer-thin board, aligning etched ridges within the cylinder. There was a soft, satisfying click. It was done.
He allowed himself a smile, pushing the frames up the ridge of his nose. They were useless things, no more visual aid than accessory, the arms attached to a wire as old as he was, twisted twice as much. Yet he was endeared to them, despite their lack of function. Feeling the metal behind his ears, the cold of the wire on the nape of his neck, seeing the blur of the rims—it focussed his mind. They were ritual. With them, he could work steady, fingers retaining the poise and purpose they had always sought.
They were a gift. A reminder of a time and a place and a person—their mangled existence held memory of another.
Warv cleared the clutter of parts and screws, wires and electronics, setting the device down on his workbench. Then he stood, taking a final glance at the smooth metal cylinder—the only task left to seal the open end, to forever keep its insides dry—before stepping away, moving around boxes of whatever had been discarded to him in previous days, contents yet to be sifted.
“Manipulative child,” he muttered, shuffling down the length of his shop. “Always wanting.”
His hands trailed across shelving touched a thousand times, absently feeling at what each held, fingers looping through cables, palms gliding across polished metal. Solder still hung in the air, acrid. Overhead, striplights blinked endless phosphorescence, their low, gentle hum lost to the rain that pelted against the shopfront window. To Warv, there had never been days without rain. Rain and darkness, clouds thick with portent—nothing else. The same for all in the lowerscape.
He made for the area that served as his living space, offset from the shop’s main rectangle by a flimsy screen with a sign hung above it proclaiming, in a child’s scribble, J+W oNlY. The W was almost illegible, more like a V with a scraggly tail. He lingered under the sign, removing the frames from his eyes, letting them dangle and rest against his chest as the memory of that day passed through him. Seeing her try, the frustration and concentration, the three sheets of metal it had taken for her to even get the letters to fit and be something resembling straight. And the promise he’d made. To never take it down.
“You think she remembers that?” he asked, sighing. The sign said nothing in return, the tremble of a nearby transport juddering the ceiling, causing the metal to vibrate. He made to move beneath it, but stopped when he heard scratching. Soft at first, then it grew louder. Faster. A scraping sound. The squeal of many small somethings against glass.
It was a noise he knew well.
Warmth crept across Warv’s face as he turned toward the window.
“Nib?” he cried, moving as fast as his legs would allow. “Oh little Nib!”
He reached the door, setting his palm to the plate. It slid open, cold air blowing in, bringing with it the street’s fumes and a fresh spray of rain. On the ground, still pawing at the glass of the window and with matted and damp brown fur, was a small cat.
“Hurry, little one. In. In!” Warv kept the door open, shielding his face from the downpour as a rumble of thunder hit somewhere in the blackness above. The cat threaded into his shop, nudging against Warv’s legs. Head turned upwards, it let out a whimper, water dripping from its body and onto the floor.
Warv closed the door. “Oh, little Nib. Where have you been?” He crouched as much as his legs would allow, holding out a hand and waiting for Nib to nestle against it. He could feel her tiny, cold body shivering beneath his hand. “Let’s get you dry, hmm. Come on.” He stood again, grimacing, began making his way back and under the sign and through the screen into his private space. A space that once held two.
Nib followed, scurrying between his legs, releasing a series of plaintive cries.
“I know, I know. Come, come.” Warv pulled two towels from the rack on the wall. He threw one to the floor and Nib moved onto it, circling, undecided of where to be. Warv smiled, placing the other towel over Nib’s sodden body, pulling a chair close so he could sit and bend down. He rubbed at Nib’s fur, keeping her still, moving the towel along her body, the bony spine all too apparent against his hands. “Poor little one,” he said, continuing to rub. “Where have you been, hmm? All this time. Off making trouble?”
Warv had found little Nib a year ago, frail and young and cowering behind the railing of one of the colossal struts that supported the city of Vi high above. Nib’s cries had been high-pitched enough to reach his ears and he had searched until he found her. Cradling her tiny form, he took her home, tended to her. And named her Nib, for reasons he could no longer recall.
She became the second daughter he’d never had.
Head poking from under the towel, Nib started licking herself. Warv stopped his rubbing. “There. Better, hmm? Dry now and warmer?” He inclined his head towards his companion. There was the faintest of purring. “I thought so. Now, how about some food?” Her left ear pricked at that. She looked at him. The cat’s deep, dark orbs swallowed the room’s light, reflecting nothing back.
Food. The issue that had worried Warv ever since that first day. There was nothing she wanted to eat. Cats were not commonplace animals, whatever street vermin they once sought having diminished or found places that were too hidden even for such cunning creatures as Nib. She would sniff at Warv’s supply of synthetic meat, then walk away. His non-meat, too. Everything he tried. You don’t have the luxury to be fussy, he had told her, watching her slender body fade with each day. But a chance conversation and a lucky trade led to the procurement of a batch of frozen pickerel; something else no longer commonplace. Warv had wondered at this luck, and the how, the why, the from where—questions he didn’t voice. Nib ate the pickerel greedily. Too greedily. He had to ration, despite her desires. She would scratch at the freezer when hungry, knowing what was inside, her many little claws scraping, growing in strength. Then one day he had left the shop’s door open a moment too long and she had fled, out into the daytime dark. Gone. He stood at the window for two weeks, straining his eyes through the blur of the glass and rain, hoping to catch glimpse of her, to see her return. He walked the alleys and roads, even going back to where he had found her. At night, sometimes he awoke convinced he heard her paws, scratching for that cache of food. But when he strained in the dark, eyes half open, he could see there was nothing there. No little cat with imploring eyes.
Opening his freezer, digging through his supplies, Warv found the packet. Ten left. Only ten. He glanced sidelong at Nib, her ears still pricked and with that asking look across her face. He winced, sliding a pickerel from the packet, ice encrusted along its scales, and set about thawing it in a pan.
She meowed.
“Not long, Nib. Not long. You know this.”
She meowed again, perhaps understanding.
“You survived this long, hmm? Eating what, I wonder. Or did you find someone else all this time?”
He stirred the pickerel, letting it thaw and warm, the oily aroma filling the room. Then he scraped the fish onto a plate and set it down by his feet, Nib clambering over his hands until she settled to bite and chew and lick. It was gone as quickly as it had thawed. She pawed at her mouth, licking, then nudged against Warv’s leg.
“I thought so, too,” he said, smiling and moving to the other side of the room, Nib following his every step until he settled into the corner chair next to his bed. She jumped up onto his lap, curling into her swirl of fur and flesh, purring, eyes already closing as his hands rubbed her ears.
As he sat there, fingers idling along Nib’s soft warmth, his mind returned to Jisa and the device on his workbench. To measure the density of the clouds, was all she had said. He’d called her a foolish girl, knowing but not knowing the purpose of her request. He had agreed, just like always. She would come, she would take, she would leave. And after, what then? Would he see her again? Or would she simply go on, able to exist without him once more?
Then his mind turned back to the cat curled between his legs and he wondered at the same. As his eyes began to follow those of Nib’s, closing and sinking towards sleep, his thoughts lingered on that packet within the freezer. When the pickerel run out …
My own thoughts1: Even though Warv is very much a side character in Precipice, I wanted to write something to establish him as an actual person, a hint of his own life. I also wanted to explore writing more in the third person, as I tend to default to first-person prose. And I wanted to do this in a slimline fashion, conveying Warv and some of who he is and who he was and still is to Jisa, without being overt about it (I hope). Most of all, though. I wanted to elicit some emotion, be it tenderness, sadness, melancholy. Ideally, I’d want to make you cry over the plight of a fictional cat. I hope you took something from this, whatever that may be.
Huh, not bad. Only six em-dashes in that entire post. But who’s counting—…;-Amanda?
I am impressed with how much life you could bring to Nib and Warv in so little time. You have a warmth to your writing - I can really tell you care about these characters. So good Nathan!
It's cool that you write background stories for side characters. I tend to scribble down notes in my lore section in Scrivener, otherwise, I will forget, e.g. one character has a bonsai collection, meticulously trimming them, a metaphor for something else going on in his life. So, keep them coming, those background stories. I like your names in the story, too. It gives it that little otherworldly touch.