The Harpies of Nangong
This story was inspired by a friend's trips, a passage in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and this amazing drawing by José Daniel Cabrera, a Spanish concept illustrator.
Illustration by José Daniel Cabrera Peña
The Harpies of Nangong
— by @CryptoSharonAaaaaaah!! A thousand screams. A life unseen by worlds unseen. A truth away from me.
Near a lake he stood, in his latest trip to China to sell his ideas.
"I am here", he said, wanting to engrave the landscape into his weary brain.
He was exhausted, but the lake was too beautiful to let go just like that. It was surrounded by howling willows and ritual stones. Who knows what religion these people had, but one thing was certain: they had great taste in their choice of landscape. The greens and blues and grays and the occasional yellow created such a contrast that his brain was overloaded.
He kept looking left and right, but he knew he would forget its beauty as soon as he left. His phone's little camera would not record it properly. Yet, he tried, and he took more than thirty pictures. He ran around the lake looking for perspectives to capture, but he was never satisfied.
Suddenly, a scream came from his left as he had just passed a willow. He jumped in fright and looked around. He noticed that there were no willows; that they were all harpies fooling his senses. The branches and leaves, their wings, and the howls, their eternal plights, their unending suffering. Punished tormentors. He remembered the stone he had seen. It had a drawing on top of a willow-like lady, but the legend was in Chinese.
To change his mind in such a little moment, like waking up from a dream, was strange and uncomfortable for him, but he knew it all now. He was their servant. He had always been. And in seconds he forgot... what? What had he forgotten? It didn't matter. He had things to do, ways to please. He could not let his mind dwell in such meaningless matters.
Thank you for bringing us great stories everyday! May I ask how or which part of your friend's trip inspired this piece?
Well he's travelled through many Asian countries and always tells me stories about his trips. Sometimes I feel he may fall into an unknown situation due to his lack of knowledge about the local culture, but he always comes back safely.
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nice!! i like
Thank you :) I'm glad you do.
Those harpies seem to have a siren song!
Maybe they do :O Or a siren landscape.
Nice story! I enjoyed that. You have a nice way of using descriptive words while it still sounds natural. I struggle with that, I feel like, when I read over my own writing.
Good writing :) Looking forward to seeing more
The key, in my case, lies in the metrics; the poetic sound that words make when pronounced and the poetic air that ideas create when they tumble from your language perception and into your subconscious, where the imagery is created. It's like a conversational trance that needs to sound natural to work, and the rest is just the music that comes with it, filled with concrete idas to give a sensation of fullness.
This is all together with a subconscious algorithm obtained from practice to create texts that, if understood perfectly (through sounding natural) will progressively call the reader forward to keep reading the rest. And I wrote my first paragraph with this. Hope you noticed it. The parentheses kinda broke the momentum. I practice a lot.
His Dark Materials is one other best trilogies ever written. Your writing is very engaging and this short piece is fantastic.
Thank you :)