Justin's throwing a feast?

The HOOK, LINE and SINKER BLOGFEST is a feast of worlds and characters built with words and ideas. Pop over and see how deeply you get towed in.

The tests your story and character must past in the first 1,000 words or less.

• Who is the character I am relating to?
• Does he/she have a personality that I crave to read?
• Is the world around them set up to compliment the character as they are introduced?
• Are there secondary characters to assist the hook along, with conflict or pace?
• Lastly: do I love the character? Do I want to read more about him/her?

USURY: DOUBLE DESIRED

CHAPTER 1

KINGDOM OF THE STRANGE

Only the grind of bone-on-bone grated through the cavern, until a thump disturbed the stillness. The intermittent double beat played out an uneven rhythm. Pain made Will strain against the laws that governed nature. Cold granite ripped the skin from his heels. His legs rigid, arms locked, as he convulsed. His jaw jarred open, oxygen flooded his lungs. Heat lashed through him. Every cell in his body screamed. He clawed upwards, curved his fingers around the upper edge of the stone sarcophagus. When he was sure there was no movement but his own, Will gripped the stone wall and pulled. Scrambled. He grazed his shin against the side of the chiselled coffin in his haste. Crashing to the floor, the cinder-sharp surface bit.

He ached. Heavy and awkward, swamped in sensations, Will gasped for breath. He opened fists to fingers, traced tips over tight skin, angular cheek bones and the hollows of his cheeks, short silky hairs over boned chest, thin legs, and long feet. He catalogued what he knew, gained a sense of self. In the cacophony of knowledge that didn't belong to him, Will clung to the practical and the physical: he was cold, naked and male. New to life. 
Into his panic and self reflection, the stone box billowed a frigid air so dense it was visible in the blackness. It swirled over his skin, as it rose. An unnatural cold? Darker knowledge oiled through Will's understanding, dead sleep was cast in chill waves. Terror became the impetus to move. When his legs could not bear his weight, Will crawled. The crumbling door held by bronze-work bands gave, when he beat at the copper latch. 
The dewy ground beyond ignited a terrible thirst, Will lowered his head to long blades of grass, and licked. But surging power drew moist, warm heat from the ground into the sky. Will staggered to his feet too. He squinted into the violet-blue sky, shrouded in grey clouds that billowed, tumbled over, and into, themselves. Undirected fury, the silver-lined clouds were lit by shards of brilliance edged with gilt. Will recognised ancient anger. He felt it, when the slivers of ice sliced through the air, heavy and hard. He cried out, arching his back. 
The crypt offered the closest shelter from the storm, but Will staggered towards the crumbling, grey stone tower revealed in each flash. Before it, dim in the shadows, grew a split stemmed tree, low and wide. He stumbled. Stopped.  In the silence that preceded the whip and lash of lightning, Will’s hair began to rise. Power licked it higher. Moonlight broke through smothering cloud, illuminating the small, white flowers and the delicate leaves. Dark then pale, the leaves writhed in the gusting breeze.

What shelter could there be under a tree?

Lightning struck close by him, singeing the fungus there. The acrid, charcoal stench clogged his throat. The brilliance blinded him. Water streamed down his cheeks, as he stumbled not towards the stone walls but to shelter of the tree. As the air heated before the next flash, Will crashed to his knees and crawled under low branches. Gasping for air, he grazed his face against the knotty bark. He waited. Beneath the candle-shaped canopy of leaves, the shredding power of the wind, heavy with debris, the potent mix of menace and power, could not reach him. 
With fierce thunderclaps, the lightning struck the taller trees nearby, in turn.

Dawn broke as a golden rim of light and rays: the clouds dissipated; the wind faded to a thin whistle through the trees. Will rested his head in the dust and the crisp fragments of leaves. 

Then the whispering began.

He flung himself from the edge of sleep, back against the tree. Using physical and deeper senses, Will amplified the sounds around him: the scrabbling of insects' tiny feet from the bark, the crash of stealthy footfalls in the woods beyond the boundary walls and the rush of wind through the leaves of trees. Awake he could not hear the voice. 
Will fought the need to sleep, until he was too tired to care enough about the consequences.

Now I'm off to read everyone else's hooks and see where I get reeled in ;)