I can’t tell you how many times I have listened to “The Cave” by Mumford & Sons. I have never watched a live performance of the song, but I have heard it enough times that a story always seemed on the edges of the lyrics’ periphery with what it was supposed to be—and mean.
The Cave. Most people might think of just any place they might see in a walk through, say, a national park on a vacation in a land far away. But I have always imagined something different.
I’ve imagined Plato’s Cave.
While some people may look at the philosophical bent of Plato’s Cave as something pertaining to the necessity for education (is that the common read? that’s what I’ve surmised), I instead always looked at Plato’s Cave as something different.
We see the shadows on the wall of the cave, and really they are other forms of ourselves—those selves that we seek to hide from the world.
In some respect, those shadow selves could be akin to what we put out into the world when—for instance—we take to social media in all its guises.
If I were to write a story according to the lyrics of “The Cave” by Mumford & Sons, this is something I would come up with:
Eighteen-year-old Landry has always thought he was alone in the world. He is the last survivor of a settlement at the end of the world, and he takes his time throughout each day as he moves through a wilderness of varying dangers, his only companion a wolf that he has tamed through time and patience. His home is a cave that he has lived in since the last survivor other than him—his father—died.
He has learned how to be a hunter. He has learned how to be a survivor. He has learned how to adapt to a world that hated humans so much that it snuffed them out the first chance it had.
But then something happens. Landry sees a white glow on the horizon one evening. Intrigued in spite of himself, he knows better than to chase after hopes—but he goes out of the cave, his wolf by his side, as he stalks into the night with a torch in his fist.
Then he meets Them.
They call themselves the Existentials—a word he has no meaning for because he never learned how to read and write, those things gone to another era bygone to him. Among them is a young woman with pale blue skin, white hair, and eyes the color of a summer sky. Landry finds himself intrigued by her and the two people she calls her brothers.
Landry eventually learns the Existentials have arrived on this planet to save it before other invaders come to conquer it—but Landry insists he is the only one left on the planet. The ones with the blue skin look at him with pity in their eyes.
“You’ve been lied to, all this time,” the young woman says. “You are not the last human.”
What Landry learns is that humanity has been fighting wars all over the place—and his settlement was just one off-shoot where people went off on their own in hope of finding a better life for themselves outside of the systems that be. His settlement just happened to succumb to a sickness that ravaged them from the inside out. This sickness is known as The Blood Rush that makes people go crazy, lost in delusions before they succumb to their bodies’ internal systems fighting against them until they succumb. Landry only survived thanks to a glitch in his genetic code—or so the Existentials surmise from what they have observed from afar about him in their surveillance.
Landry has a choice to make: either join forces with the Existentials—aliens that they may be—or go off on his own into the world and find out what has been hidden from him all this time. What will he choose?
Find out in Existential Bloodlines.
What do you think? Yay or nay for the story idea? I have a weakness for dystopian stories, so this one is interesting to me. I have to wonder how it would go: if it would be like an odd mixture of Scott O’Dell’s The Island of the Blue Dolphins meets Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking trilogy? Who can say?
But I rather hope dystopian stories come back into fashion. I still have so many ideas I’d like to write in that vein.
Someday!
For more Songs into Stories, check out my publication on Medium!
Nice idea - I think that would make a good story.