Very good story, Dandello. I liked how the strange magic in this fic was like the Hindu conception of
karma - do good, and you will be rewarded; do evil, and suffer the consequences.
Everything you do comes back at you, kind of like Newton's laws. If you do good, good comes back. If you do evil, that also comes back. Intent is everything.
And there is defintely something unnatural and strange about people's deaths here:
“How long ago did he die?”
“He collapsed maybe thirty minutes ago,” Lois told him.
“He looks like he's been dead a lot longer than that…” Lundren pulled the sheet back further. Ziggy's face had shriveled to a parchment covered skull with only a few strands of dark hair.
Scary. Ugh. It reminds me of one of my cousins' comic books which I read way back when: The Phantom, my cousins' favorite comic book hero, met a beautiful and mysterious woman who was really a witch. The Phantom defeated her, and she died; and then she turned to ashes, just like that. *shudders* The witch, though, was several hundred years old, and when she died, putrefaction and decomposition just came roaring out at her and engulfed her like a flame. How old was Ziggy? He wasn't abnormally old, was he?
I didn't comment on part two of your story, but I thought that you captured Jimmy's innocence extremely well when you made the idea of accidentally going naked to school the worst horror he could imagine. It was interesting to see the man who was afraid of dogs in this chapter, and poor Ziggy, of course, who was literally frightened to death by Baron Sunday himself. It's really interesting, and depressing, that fear itself is such an awful, terrible thing.
The fear you chose for Clark was a very apt one. We are talking about a primal, wordless fear, when the small baby knows his own helplessness and the inevitability of death:
lonely - lost - Mommy gone. I'm very glad that Clark confronted his own fears and managed to come back to Lois. And I'm just as glad that Lois turned out to be pregnant with Clark's child here. I always love that!
Ann
