The White Between the Black

I thought there was something better, in the white between the black, yet the beast was within me before I ever saw the stones. I was thirteen when I arrived, and half-dead when I left.

The Scribes, that's what we called ourselves, scratching our fortune with the quill, a thin piece of sharp metal, the edges tearing through veins of white rock and skin alike. No man left without at least one stone, for one stone was enough to feed his family for life.

The mine was deep in the interior of the country, a place where the smoke of the city clung to the barren earth and the stench of blood and bone worked its way into black rocks that shone like oil against the thin strips of the white between the black, the stones dwelling in the pale seams, waiting for the beast to devour them.

Black swallowed all as we scratched and scratched, no one speaking save the kric kric kric of the quills, the Scribes lost in dreams of satin silk and banquet feasts.

On my thirteenth birthday, I left my home, taking my father's favourite pen with the knowledge that in the mine I would be a man, that I would find my fortune and write to my father to tell him of my decision, hiding in the folds of the letter a single stone that would feed my brothers and sisters, buying then a thousand pens to replace the one I stole.

The letter would never be written, the pen slipping from my pocket somewhere on the road, the blue chrome and gold tip joining white bones licked clean and left to yellow among the trees.

A wooden sign stood at the mine's entrance, the letters carved with a quill, metal splinters hanging from the root of each vowel.

Take from here a quill, and become inside a Scribe

One stone is all you need, should you ever survive

Below, a small pile of quills lay waiting, pieces of shrivelled pink clinging to the edges of those forming the pile's base. I took mine from the top, and ducked into the darkness.

Black consumed black as I stumbled into the arteries of the earth, the quill held between my teeth, the metal bitter, my tongue bleeding from jagged edges that hungered for white lines in the wet and waiting rock.

That night, I slept with my quill in the white between the black, the presence of others known only through the scrape of their quills. As I drifted toward sleep, I thought of the trees in the tale of The Winter Writer.

The writer had been freezing, his rented cabin set deep in the forest where no one could distract him from finishing his masterpiece. Once he had been famous, yet inspiration had deserted him, his words decaying into the skeletal forms of twenty-six letters. Sat at an uneven desk, blue hands held pages that could not be burnt, they being the stone he sought to right the wrongs of his life.

Beyond frost cracked glass and over fields forlorn with snow, the trees beckoned with the promise of fuel for a fire.

"You may rent my hut," the old man had warned the writer five days prior. "But do not cut wood from the forest. For what the trees sow, they reap."

The writer forgot the old man's warning in the smoke of a final fire, the dying heat taunting the pile of waiting white pages.

Taking an axe from the shadows, he entered the forest, walking for an hour until in the moonlight he saw a sapling.

Raising the axe, his first blow had been his last.

The sapling had fallen, its demise shadowed by the crack of a vast oak branch above, the writer pinned beneath it while damp wood embraced him amid the howls of waiting wolves.

The beast had claimed the writer, the same beast that hid amid the smoke of the mines, waiting till a scribe saw the stone in the white between the black, the point of the quill uncovering first his fortune, then his demise.

After all, no one leaves the mines, for a single stone is never enough to sate the beast that lurks within.