After failing so miserably at Hodderscape’s (@hodderscape) Scifi Opening Lines Quiz, I decided to come with my own fantasy homage. Not as fancy I’m afraid or as simple, no multiple choice, but you do get a hint.
I’ll start you off with a few easy ones.
1. The storm had broken. Pug danced along the edge of the rocks, his feet finding scant purchase as he made his way among the tide pools. His dark eyes darted about as he peered into each pool under the cliff face, seeking the spiny creatures driven into the shallows by the recently passed storm.
Hint: Shazam
2. The great horn sounded. Arlen paused in his work, looking up at the lavender wash of the dawn sky. Mist still clung to the air, bringing with it a damp, acrid taste that was all too familiar.
Hint: Body Design
3. The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like eternity in all directions.
Hint: Bang Thrower
4. I wake up on a pile of smouldering garbage and leaves in the old Hollywood Forever cemetery behind the Paramount studio lot on Melrose, though these last details don’t come to me until later.
Hint: Granular Adult Waif
5. I heard the mailman approach my office door, half an hour earlier than usual. He didn’t sound right. His footsteps fell more heavily, jauntily, and he whistled. A new guy.
Hint: Violent Facing
6. There are many perks to living for twenty-one centuries, and foremost among them is bearing witness to the rare birth of genius. It invariably goes like this: someone shrugs off the weigh of his cultural traditions, ignores the baleful stares of authority, and does something his country men think to be completely batshit insane.
Hint: Woofed
7. Private eyes come in all shapes and sizes, and none of them look like television stars. Some do insurance work, some hang around cheap hotels with camcorders hoping to get evidence for divorce cases, and damn few ever get to investigate complicated murder mysteries.
Hint: Unknown from the Daytime
8. On this day of days there was an unfamiliar stirring deep inside the dozing heart of Hayholt, in the castle’s bewildering warren of quiet passages and overgrown, ivy-choked courtyards, in the monk’s holes and damp, showed chambers.
Hint: Reptile Throne
9. The women struggled through the knee-deep snow, the bundle of dead wood she tied to her back almost as great a burden as the weigh of the the child she carried in her belly.
Hint: Armed chopper
10. It was night again. the Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.
Hint: Address the breeze
Hope that wasnt too bad, and you enjoyed it. Answers here.