Deleted Scene from my WIP: The Crown of Infamy

I know I promised a post with book recommendations, but that's on hold while I manage other things. Soon, though. 

In the meantime, I just had to revise the plot of the novel I'm currently working on, The Crown of Infamy, which meant that I cut a few scenes, and I thought I'd share one of them here. 

Keep in mind that this is absolutely first draft material, so there's likely to be misspellings, dropped words, word echoes, and clumsy sentences. If you read, please read generously. 

By way of setup for this scene, Liam Both, who is racing to seize the titular crown from a secret vault infused with god-magic before a sadistic crew of mercenaries can grab it, has failed. The magic of the vault has deposited him in an upper chamber, fully conscious but so weakened that he can't move. Beside him is a non-human immortal who is the only other person to try (and fail) to grab the crown. 

This isn't really spoilery, since it is no longer part of the novel. Hope you enjoy it. 

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Liam lay in the darkness, waiting for his strength to return. It didn’t. He waited for Sophie or Nicolas to come fetch him, since the two he’d met inside the Vault had obviously been illusions. That didn’t happen, either. There was only the faint glow of his equally helpless companion. 

“Wildergreen, tell me about your childhood.”

Wildergreen didn’t answer at first. “I am not one of the Eldest, one of those created whole at the dawn of the Fourth Age, but I was born in the first millennia after. In that time we lived in the far north because the summers never ended and the world was dry and hot. Horizon Lake was a basin of bare rocks and choking weeds. I grew up in the grasslands, running through the stalks, hunting the great feathered razor toes and the dawn chargers with our slender spears. By night, we sat beneath the stars, singing songs that no hand had ever written. It just flowed from us like water from a spring. My own father napped the first flint edge, and my own mother made the first picture, an image of a dawn charger made from red clay on a flat rock.

“Eventually the weather cooled, which brought rain, then trees, then an exodus to the south, away from the unfamiliar bite of winter. The basin of bare rocks and weeds became a swampland. The grasses did not burn so often, and rivers began to thread through the terrain. 

“And still we ran, slender spears in hand, to hunt, and to weave, and to sing. After thousands of years, when the land was covered with snow, and mountains of ice crept toward us out of the north—”

A light suddenly appeared above them, followed by a woman’s yelp of surprise and a splash. 

Liam recognized that yelp. He didn’t want to, but he did. 

“Fuck, that was different,” Palina Breakwater said, as she climbed from the pool. 

“Pride is the—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Liam interrupted. “Don’t help her. Don’t help any them.” 

“Well well, Liam, what a surprise to find you stretched out here like a roast pig. And helpless, too, or you have would have already drawn your knives.”

“I’m faking it,” Liam said. He didn’t sound as convincing as he would have liked. “To draw you in.” 

Palina laughed—a snorting sound that was one of the few things Liam had found endearing about her—then moved toward them. 

“I don’t understand,” Wildegreen said. “Are you enemies? Because you are also lovers.”

Palina had already reached them. “Lovers, huh? What have you boys been talking about? Bragging about your conquests?”

“He’s sky folk,” Liam said. “They have an odd way of seeing the world.”

“Is that why you’re glowing? You’re sky folk? I’ve never seen one up close. Huh. I have to say that I’m not impressed. Now, what were you saying about pride?”

“Don’t help her. If her people get their hands on the crown, they’ll use it to kill thousands of people.”

“That,” Wildergreen said, “was my plan, too.”

Liam wanted to grab him and shake him, but he could barely lift his head. “She’ll kill all of your people and mine.”

There was a sound of a blade being drawn. “Liam, you’ve become such a bore.”

“But I don’t understand,” Wildergreen said, “you two are lovers and enemies?”

“Gods pass us by,” Palina said, placing her hand on the back of Liam’s neck. “No wonder the sky folk sing. Imagine how boring their theater must be” 

Then she slipped her blade through Liam’s ribs and into his heart. 

He’d imagined himself dying in any number of ways, but never like this. He never thought the moment would come when he was unbound but helpless, without even the strength to raise a weapon of his own. 

He fell into darkness. 

Then he fell out of it again. 

“Finally,” Wildergreen said, when Liam gasped and opened his eyes. 

“How long was I out?”

“You were not out. You were dead. But the magic of this place does not allow for escape of any kind, not even death.”

“Okay. How long was I dead?”

“It’s impossible to say. Time means nothing to me now, and I don’t know how long I was dead. She stabbed me, too.”

“Thank you,” Liam said. “Thank you for not telling her anything.”

“Oh, I told her what she needed to know,” Wildegreen said. “I did whatever I could to help. If she takes the crown away, the Twisted Vault might finally allow me to die.”

Shit. Liam wanted to curse him, but he found that he didn’t have the heart. Wildergreen had lain here in the dark for a century or more. Long enough to go mad and then go sane again. Liam couldn’t judge him. 

“Tell me more about your childhood.” 

“Why are you so curious?”

“Because the Fourth Age is ending, and the gods are dying. Maybe the same will happen with your people, and who will remember them? If you tell your story to me, and I survive this place, I might be able to get your history into a book in a library. Then, even if you’re gone, you will not be forgotten.”

“The world is full of forgotten things,” Wildergreen said after a moment’s thought. “A tree that stands at the edge of a brook, burned in a forest fire. A robin’s nest ravaged by a rat. A stag felled by a hunter’s arrow. A stone that lies untouched and unseen at the bottom of a muddy river. All the world is temporary and forgotten. Isn’t it?”

“I guess it is. I’ve never heard of a dawn charger, after all, unless my people have a different name for them.”

“They are gone, driven to extinction when the ice melted thousands of years ago. And what tale could I tell you of them that would capture their speed, majesty, and ferocity? They would still be forgotten. What you would preserve would be nothing more than a phantom. An image made with red clay on a flat rock.”

“I’m no historian,” Liam said, “because I suspect a real scholar would have ready answers for you. All I know is that the people of the Fourth Age have been hobbled by our inability to remember. Look at that woman who just left us. She grew up in a time when our elders still tell stories of the Bloody Hooks—the children they murdered and the cruelties they committed. The Hooks are stock villains in every play. They’re hated in every corner of IntSial. And yet, she joined up. Their ranks are swelling, and they’re being paid out of the coffers of kings who, just a few decades ago, would have trembled to see them marching toward the city gate.”

“They want to be evil?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they want to be strong. Maybe… I just wish they’d pick some new way to be evil.”

“Ah. You are a man who hates tradition.”

Liam was tactful enough to say Go fuck yourself with his inside voice only, and after a long pause, Wildergreen began to fill the silence with more of his story.