New Eden Excerpt

The tension rose like that of a pianist playing before an audience of a thousand. Climbing ever so quickly, the tone rose until it reached the climax, and in that crucial moment a wrong key was hit. Call it a slip of the finger, call it a careless mistake, but in that error spanning from seconds into the perpetual never ending eternity, that mis-sung note hung in the air. In those initial seconds of shock everyone sat in silence, trying to register the mistake made before them.

Surely this was planned? A gambit to throw off the audience?

But it took them equally long to recognize that the pianist had also frozen up, his brain attempting to register the mistake he made and his mind flickering over a thousand possibilities as it vainly attempted a graceful recovery.

The spell was broken; the audience mesmerized not by the climbing tension and skill of the pianist but by the error made before them. This is not what they'd come to see, what they'd come to gossip about later on in their social circles as they attempted to feed their egos and raise their gluttonous status.

This careless error however would serve all the same as a piece of gossip.

Quietly, like a sweeping wind, the audience spoke in hushed tones, their words shadows as they attempted to piece together this horror of a mistake so uncharacteristically unlike the pianist before them. What had happened? Surely this was not the mark of decline of this man?

In these seconds of gossip the pianist seized the piano and let out a flurry of aggression so loud as to excite the audience into a stunned silence.

The piano had spoken, none would dare contradict it; dare raise a pitiful voice in opposition.

Fingers stabbed at each key, no longer dancing like they once were only moments ago, as the pianist was seized by a self-induced rage with his carelessness. How many hours had he practiced such a simple piece? To make such an error here? Such a thing was despicable. He was better a man than that, he knew it all too well.

To hell with this planned piece! Like an angry sculpture hacking away piece of marble in a mad vision of greatness the pianist spun a new tale with his piano. So strong would it be woven that though his idle mishap would be spoken of poorly, they would sing odes to his great recovery.

Yes, that was the vision now in the pianist mind. That was the reality that he would weave with this piano and his soul; the piano being the physical manifestation of the prior.

Such a description of a mad pianist attempting such a swift recovery was the only analogy suitable to depict the mindset of everyone in the room as the IlLontano attempted his recovery and eventual exit.

Such a slip-up was beneath him, but some scars never healed; even with the nightmares of time.

The horrors of war, so casually depicted in modern media, were memories of things he could never leave behind no matter how hard he struggled. Burned into his memory, into his soul, were the brothers and sisters he could not save no matter how hard he struggled. And of the ones he did: their shaking fear and quavering hearts with eyes staring into distances none could fathom.

He. Never. Forgot.

He exited right and left his stage; much to a stunned audience who was unable to determine what it was that would be gossiped about.