/lit/ - Literature

She ran. She ran. She ran.
Alexandra sprinted through the dense foliage. She ran so fast that she felt she could run off the world at any moment and soar skyward into the immaculate blue. The forest around her was a blur – a ceiling and a floor both made of brown, crimson, and gold, with wooden pillars to separate them. Dry organic matter crunched and crinkled. Her heavy breaths and footfalls drowned out the background noise of the woods; still, her ears strained to listen over her heartbeat thumping in her head.
She’d heard people scream.
She reached the boundary between the woods and her village, vapor pouring from her mouth into the cool autumn air. The two setting suns showered the landscape in amber light. She slowed to a jog. From the top of the hill she could see the whole village – a central cul-de-sac, now packed with people, branching out into a small web of neighborhoods with rolling hills of farmland beyond. A cacophony of voices talking over each other enveloped the congregation like a swarm of obnoxious bees.
She paused, suddenly uncertain of what to do. Maybe the best thing to do was go home and stay inside until everything got quiet again. Stirring up trouble was never a good idea – even her innocuous curiosity was a gray area – and she didn’t want to get blamed for anything she didn’t do. She was not a troublemaker.

>>2272888
>Star Wars, Halo, and 1984

Out of the corner of her eye Alexandra saw doors opening cautiously. A handful of people in this neighborhood emerged from their cookie cutter one-story houses. They seemed just as hesitant. Lots of people had already assembled to shout and holler and cause problems. They couldn’t arrest an entire village, could they? There was no harm in investigating from a distance.
She blended into the group of stragglers trickling into the heart of the village. It took them only a few minutes to get there, and the sound of the ruckus grew louder with each step they took. Alexandra glanced at people out of the corner of her eye as they walked. She could see the worry painted all over their faces. Then, at her eye level, one of the stragglers caught her eye – a boy with ebony hair and electric blue eyes. Their gazes met, lingered, and then hastily went their separate ways.
“What’s happening?” Alexandra asked no one in particular, but by then they had already reached the source of the uproar. Eight people stood on a makeshift wooden platform, shouting through cones at the onlookers who spat back disapproval.
“That’s my brother!” said the black-haired boy. Alexandra turned, but his eyes were fixed on the troublemakers.
“We have been oppressed too long!” a woman shouted through her cone. “The Harmony makes us farm until our backs break to feed other colonies – and what do we have left for ourselves? How many of us die every year because we don’t have enough food or medicine?” A few people hurled replies like “How could you say that?” and “You’re insane!”

“The Harmony does not have the best interest of humanity in mind, and humanity does not have our best interest in mind!” cried a young man. He had dark hair and light eyes just like the boy in the crowd.
“The Harmony has been nothing but good to us!” an elderly spectator corrected him. “How dare you badmouth them! You’re a criminal!” Her words fell like dominos, igniting jeers and hisses throughout the rest of the assembly.
“Our kind has been oppressed before and we rose above it!” continued the fiery young man. “Hundreds of years ago – when every human in the galaxy lived on Earth – we oppressed each other. We rose above it. We realized that if we were going to colonize other planets-“ Suddenly one of the onlookers seized his cone and threw it over his shoulder to a smattering of cheers and claps. The protester continued through his cupped hands. “…we knew that we couldn’t poison other planets with our tyranny and our greed! And now look what’s happened to us!”
“What is he talking about?” Alexandra asked the boy to her left. He shrugged without looking at her.
“He used to say stuff like that at home,” he answered absently.
“Benjamin!” said a voice, piercing the confusion. A man pushed his way through the lake of people. He crouched slightly next to the blue-eyed boy and grabbed his shoulders. “Ben! Son, where is your brother?” He pointed to the platform and his father’s face twisted in horror.
The throng loosened to make room for other figures plowing a path to the core. Several men wearing uniforms and very serious glares penetrated the audience and marched toward the protesters. Alexandra gasped.

>>2272892
That's fair. I expected people not to be huge fans of that bit. That's all I have so far.

This reads like erotic fanfiction

Do you have prior experience writing those?

>>2272915
I neither write nor read anything erotic or anything fanfictitional but thank you for the input. Also that's pretty unsettling and I had no idea.

if harmony met melody it would be like this...

Publish short pieces online before you finish the whole = will never finish. This rule has never been broken in the history of writing.

>Star Wars, Halo, and 1984
Ha ha. Pic related.