A HiE I Will Never Write · 3:31pm Dec 16th, 2017
As I left my mother's front step one sultry May morning, in an unseasonable heat-wave that had broken the rainy season, I resolved to strike out into the country and see more of the world than I'd ever seen before. My rucksack over my shoulder, and my feet tucked into a sturdy and well-broken pair of boots, I swung out into a long and mile-devouring stride. The rolling hills disappeared beneath my heels, and the world unfolded swale by swale as I made my way northward. Each night I found a hayrick or a barn to sleep in, and each morning I found a lovely farm-wife to feed my wand'ring hunger, for I was generally accounted charming and was favored by the fairer sex. But also, I found as I spiraled out and away from the lands my childhood had known, that each barn smelled less and less like home, and more and more... horsey. And sometimes, it occurred to me that each farmwife's face was longer than the last, and the hair of their affronted husbands hung longer, and more wild, and the thunder of their furious feet rang more and more often with a strange cadence upon the farmlanes and byways by which I fled their wrath.
One morning, arising in a distinctly equine-patterned shack, I emerged into the farm-yard to note that this most recent patroness had a distinct tail, and ears quite notably high up on her head. The usual drama led me once again cross-country, bread in hand, a remembered kiss upon my handsome face, and I fled happily but in something of a confusion, losing my latest pursuer in the chaos. Emerging from a hedgerow a township or two over from the site of my latest venture, I beheld a vista which I must confess evoked great wonder and perplexity, for before me was a bustling town full of activity and prosperity. But rather than the horsey folk whose bourne I had been rambling through these past weeks, I found no people whatsoever, but rather proper livestock, upon all fours, wearing hats and saddle-bags, but no reins, and conversing volubly as if I had wandered from the waking world into some equine-themed fae land entirely divorced from the world into which my mother had birthed me.
And perhaps I had done exactly that, for I never again found the land of those who walked on two feet. My ramblings carried me from that day onwards through the land of the four-hooved. And I was as fine with this as I had been with the hooved, for lo! The farmwife is as sweet, and the hay-rick is as restful, whether she dances on two or four legs.
Someone on the fimfiction #writing-help channel had said that every possible variant on HiE delivery of protagonists had been done. I said that I have yet to see a Zelazny-style Nine Princes in Amber world-walk, and so I tossed off the above. Irritating bugger, isn't he? Yeah, I don't care to spend enough time in his company to record his life-story, sorry, folks. But I figured I ought to actually kick out a blog now and again...
(This bloody thing ate up enough of this morning's witching hour that I didn't really get much done on the next Twilight In Plain Sight chapter, damnit. Will have to work on it during a less inspired time of day. For some reason, I find that the dead of morning is when the words come most easily to me.)
I love it. I think Steven King had a piece like this in one of his fics, where a character wandering across America starts noticing the faces on the money and other little details gradually changing until he is in a different dimension.
Like the show, most fics do not reconcile the fantastic elements of the universe with the mundane. I'm all for a plegmatic protagonist that walks one step at a time.
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Do you remember what story that was? All that's coming up is the Long Walk, which was awesome, but not what you're talking about.