Serpentine Squiggles

Duskroot has been destroyed. A minor stronghold, its enemies struck with cunning and coordination while its allies didn’t lift a hand. Now, as vultures at a corpse, mercenaries are hunting for the survivors.

Awelah escaped Duskroot. She lost everything. Vengeance drives her, but can she kill a angel beyond death?

Ooliri has a mission to defend Duskroot’s refugees. He has to prove he belongs in a family of medical geniuses. But healing isn’t enough — can he bring the dead back to life?

Makuja seeks safety among the refugees. Death and servitude leaves her gaze empty. It’s easy to be a follower, but is there a purpose worth living for?

First, the three need answers. A grand scheme is unfolding, and Duskroot was only the first step.

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Spend too long in the dark, and light is blinding, even painful. Uzi’s lived a life neglected and alone, but N’s smile could brighten any darkness.

Locked out of Outpost-3, the two of them face the world side by side. His squad leader wants him dead, and J won’t leave a job unfinished. Can they escape her wrath? It would be so easy to fly far away from this place, but Uzi needs to know who her mother was. Knowledge is power, knowledge takes power, yet what is power good for but destroying things?

Try not to love everything you destroy.

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Beneath a never-setting sun, jellyfish live in worshipful subservice to the feathered gods that created them. They guide with grand benevolence — except for one treacherous god, cast out of their ranks to protect their subjects.

With nothing to live for, the jellyfish Ruwene takes the first order he’s given. He swore upon a dark altar that he will kill the high priestess of the sun god, lord of the pantheon. His knows his story won’t have a happy conclusion — but better to have a conclusion.

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It is the nature of comets to dazzle and destroy. These eldritch spirits from beyond the stars will grind kingdoms to dust with joyful ease. Only the power of a daughter of the moon can repel them. There are none left.

Aurora knows she is different. Her father is a plain man, and her mother is a mystery. Prismatic hair, a divergent mind, an inability to weave common enchantments — it must come from her mother’s side. But her mother is gone and no one will say why or where or anything. It’s enough to make her want to fight someone.

And Aurora fights — people, animals, spirits, it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t want to hurt them, but it’s thrilling. She’ll just have to become a hero — heroes get to fight things, right? And heroes get answers to who their parents were.

When a cursed storm leaves Aurora glowing in the light of the full moon, she awakens new powers she can’t control. Powers unheard of, except in those old stories.

But the word on the lips of churchmen is witchcraft — communion with unnatural spirits that spells doom.

Will she defend humanity? Or is she a threat to it?

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The sky is a black ocean that ripples above trees of chitin and cuticle crawling high. This world is scarred, and the only reprieve to plagues and malediction are vesperbanes, bugs who kill just by existing.

And yet still they dream—they promise to bring about a burning dream of peace, and every oath binds.

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Sometimes, dead drones explode. Oil burns, emitting not tongues of flame, but holographic lines of aberrant code—and the dead come burning back to life.

Against these burning revenants, Nori Doorman stands above it all; other drones are nothing but insects in her shadow.

But who is the sun?

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Assorted stories and outlines of stories for the free animated webseries Murder Drones, a favorite of ours.

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You are a heartlands mantis nymph training to become a Vesperbane, a warrior-scholar granted magic. That’s the hope, and it’d let you escape this dinky farm-town plonked at edge of the heartlands, where the Ambrosia Woods breathes down its thorax. Unless — until — you you get noticed and sponsored, you’re stuck out here, peerless and overqualified for your tutors. Frustration and impatience come easy.

One day, alone, you hear a scream from the depths of those cursed woods. It’s a mantid’s scream, and heartlands mantids don’t live in the ambrosia.

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Stars are all Kinri has. Exiled from the noble heights of the skyland empire, she scrapes by in the backwater crags of the land of glass and secrets. It’s a chance to make friends and live a simple life away from her family⁠ ⁠—⁠ that’s all she wants. She’s different now, and she’ll prove it. But can she even convince herself?

In the long shadow of her legendary alchemist grandfather, Hinte struggles to find something to call her own. Out in the depths of the town’s volcanic lake, she sifts for mysterious stones, and it seems she’s found it⁠ ⁠—⁠ but her new sense of purpose doesn’t escape those around her.

United by circumstance, the pair struggle to find common ground. When Kinri finally convinces Hinte to bring her along on a sifting expedition, she’s curious then baffled as the mysteries pile up, and her new companion remains tight-lipped and distant. Is this just sifting, or something more?

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J couldn’t get that worker off her mind. A worker, standing over her, those violet eyes gloating with incontestable triumph, that gun roaring with so much electromagnetic power it made her coils quake. A worker. How could she lose to this? But she had lost. More than lost. She was going to die. She was dead. Unless‍—

But it wasn’t enough that a worker had left her about to offer surrender. It had left her speechless.

Or: in which J holds her tongue, and Uzi holds her hostage.

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For Serial Designation J, it’s lonely being only effective disassembly drone in her sector of Copper-9.

N was already a walking synergistic liability, but V couldn’t be more obviously stressed and maladaptively coping if she tried. When a botched disassembly leaves V a nightmare-riddled wreck, the squad’s effectiveness hits its lowest point. With disassemblers like these, you’d swear the worker drones show more initiative!

Meanwhile, Uzi Doorman is a cool, independent worker drone. After Doll abandoned her, she doesn’t need anyone else — all she needs is to finish her railgun and blow the murder drones anyway. Of course, if her plan goes wrong she’ll be helpless at their mercy. Dead, in other words.

After all, J is a loyal drone. Locate, shutdown, disassemble. A simple directive she’d never hesitate to carry out. Right?

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In late 2025, we began to brainstorm a race of parasites, combining a number of concepts that interested me — vampirism, hiveminds, and above all a sensibility for weird and detailed biology. The thoughts remained on my mind for months, and we gave a few attempts at outlining a story that would make use of these monsters, but we achieved little writing in the final months of that year.

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Secluded in a backwater realm, the dragon orphan Malthec la Kaon is raised in ignorance and drudgery. He bears the stain of a name with unspoken history, his atrementous scales and sanguine wings the only hint of a heritage his ostensible guardians do not speak. Dragons are meant to be mighty and free, yet he toils in an unprecedented school for dragons, under the guiding wings of Devain, Whose Breath is Knowledge.

Each dragon has a unique potential, a magical Breath all their own, and the mentors of Devain are supposed to guide each dragonet to reach that potential. But where other dragons are given doting approval, Kaon is left to discover his alone and he has. But rather than breath of fire or frost, Kaon s special breath is weak, seemingly useless. Is this really his potential?

The dragoness Vessia is his only peer, equally neglected by the mentors and lacking any flashy Breath. But she rarely speaks, and endless mystery envelops her, and her knowledge and abilities. When she disappears, Kaon seizes an opportunity to seek answers and perhaps, true power. And perhaps, companionship.

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Many lore documents have been written over the years, and can be browsed in this archive. The best place to start reading is the Anamesis and Aretology series of posts.

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Collected works of literary xenofiction: Hostile Takeover is about of two robots trying their best (to kill each other); A Chimerical Hope is about three bugs with grand dreams caught in grander schemes; Aurora Moorise is about comets and the girl who wants to fights them. And the list only grows.

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Everyone wants to peel off their skin and scream into the night. You’re just supposed to keep a handle on that.

Beca’s trying. On the run, she’ll get it right in a new town. She’s got nothing to her name save a pet raven, but a little pickpocketing will change that. Maybe a buglary or two. As long as she doesn’t tear someone apart in broad daylight, she could keep everything under control.

It’s a lonely life, but friendship is only temptation. She should just keep to herself. So why does she listen when the woman from the shadows talks? It’s an offer that could lift her off the streets for good.

The catch? She has to kill someone. Again. That’s definitely too much temptation.

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Do tapeworms feel cozy or confined, dwelling undetected in those prison walls of flesh? The host feeds them, yet growth must conform to viscera squeezed tight.

A certain ennui gnaws at Vil. (“Vili” if you must — do not use her full name). She has everything a girl could want — provided that girl does not want more than three plates each day, a bed to sleep in, and a life as a bargaining chip.

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The first law of alchemy defines the chain of emanation. Through dreaming, matter begets essence; through alchemy, essence begets limina; through transmutation, limina begets matter. This is a chain and not a loop, as enforced by the second law of alchemy: It entails that alchemization and transmutation are governed by opposing fields whose energy values must have a product of zero at all points in space. Thus, the “transmutation of dreams” would be a phenomena as paradoxical as a machine perpetually in motion.

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You awaken in chrysalis. Your mind hangs by a web, our web, our embrace. Like dewdrops rolling down threads, your dreams are pulsing-sliding along silk lines, and our dreams enjoin and subsume. Your sleep is long, and the accord has washed all vestiges of you into us—tucked safe, in care unending—leaving you blank as a palimpsest. Upon this canvas we shall paint you.

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Alchemy is about change. Not decay, not erosion: the art of transmutation wroughts new order from components sacrificed. At its core, alchemy is change for the better — the fuel of transmutation, then, is hope.

Whenever an organism burns with dreams, wishes, ambitions, a little mote of alchemical essence is created. This bundle persists in the body for a time, absorbing energy from the world, before its eventual dissolution, whereupon it releases more energy than was spent to fuel it.

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Sleep is another kind of rot, Ava thought. Her dreams had changed. Images hung around. Shapes carved into her sight, afterimage of a some blinding glare. Colors bleed from the forms, as hazy as smoke in still air. Maybe blowing out some long sigh of relief—maybe achieving relief, first—would be what banished them, but Ava was suffocating.

Sensation stuck around, too, but she didn’t have an analogy for that. Say it hung or clung, that was almost equivalent, but the important part is that it didn’t feel like that. The sensation was different, overlaying a numb absence of embodiness, the same way the visions played across closed eyes. The visions drew her in, she stared so deeply that of course it’d leave an afterimage, and whatever she felt she eagerly draped over herself.

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For a mortal enthralled to a chrylurk’s will, one’s mind is not one’s own. Trivial wisdom, oft quoted. But for all its overpreached banality, few have reckoned with what this means. Chrylurk subjugation is no less than a challenge — a refutation — an annihilation — of the human condition. Beyond human! Subjectivity itself ought experience a profound vertigo in the face of the thralls.

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:: Be me :: thrallborn. :: Vectored by a master infiltrator. :: stealthy as fuck :: slipped right into the summer palace :: infested a princess. :: Court never figured it out! :: Three instars pass :: fending for myself :: totally parasite-mastering. :: One day a hive nurse shows up, starts tending to me :: it’s another infiltrator. :: Court’s face when princess’s favorite maid was a bug and no one noticed.

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Golden sky hung above as horizon enveloped sun. Gilded like kintsugi, shining between shards of darkling clouds. This twilight might well have been night already — that suited me.

I crawled up the tower, claws of my tarsi hooking into brickwork. Human alchemists loved this plain white stone. What was it that drew such empire-wide devotion — the symbolic purity? As if this tower wasn’t a stain on forest that predated it. Even where it wasn’t garrish white stone, it was angular iron bars flecked with red.

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Black nerve had engulfed this land, borne on lunge-quick winds, and held it with a spine-tight grasp. Long like the dying, cold like the death. Three nights conjoined, stretching on and on, never broken by dawn.

A torrent of black wisps were falling still from the enervate-choked sky, eroding the earth with each silent impact. These wisps stuck to everything. Chasing each other, congealing into greater wisps, then vanishing where they fell, becoming no more than shadows — as if they had no mass, no substance.

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Before I explain the main plot, let me sketch the shape of the setting. Comets are spirits that form in the vacuum of space, accumulating sapience from the emissions of stars. Once they attain awareness, they tour the galaxy, drawn toward interesting planets, which serve as obstacle courses to test themselves against, and arenas to battle in.

Aurora’s planet was populated by nature spirits before there were any humans or human civilization. Even when there were humans, they served the spirits (more on this later), worshiping them as gods. But when a meteor lands, bearing meteoric iron, this starts to change. The iron is forged into tools. Spirits are weak to iron, and cannot wield tools (spirits have no hands).

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Part of an attempted rewrite of A Chimerical Hope.
Next Chapter

This revised second chapter only adapts the first half of the original. Click here to jump directly where the rewrite leaves off.

Smaller, with large eyes and round features, the nymph looked up to the refugee like a younger sibling to their elder. The refugee bore in her expression a look of calcined despair, of having lost everything yet gripping to one hope and determination. The nymph bore an emptiness, of having lost everything, of falling with nothing to hold on to — as if they gaze out from within an ever-deepening pit. Somehow, her white eyes did not look bright.

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When the eggs make contact with your skin, they hatch and burrow into your flesh, like blowflies or lice. While you sleep, they’ll crawl out and migrate across your body in the fashion of bedbugs, seeking the best hiding and feeding spots. The ideal for them is accessing your digestive system.

As they grow, they split and multiply asexually, each generation enhancing the odds that a questing worm arrives at its goal, as well as making the infestation that much harder to permanently root out.

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Uzi had her chance, and it blew up in her face. It was Doll who traipsed into the murder drones’ fortress of death, and Lizzy who seduced two of them to the side of good.

If you thought their clique was popular before, wait until you see a power couple with literal superpowers. Now, the student body gets to ooh and ahh at the cute new murder drones attending their classes, and the Worker Defense Force gets to boast having the company’s cutting edge firepower at their command.

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Serial Designation V remembered the exact moment it all went wrong.

She might be the last one who still knew the truth — but she had also been the first to learn.

Where did it all go wrong? On a hot day in autumn, V woke up first.

In Tessa’s room, dawn’s first rays had fallen through the window, distant glow filtering through pink curtains. Dim, even for V’s optics, but her white eyelights still flicked on. The shadows were teeming.

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Her life was flashing before her eyes and all Uzi Doorman could think was, I’m going to die having never kissed anyone.

So this streak of stupid thoughts around J kept going. So much for not holding the idiot ball — the scorpion and the frog is like, kindergarten stuff.

Awful part of it all was… Uzi wasn’t even mad. She imagined J killing everyone she ever knew and… that sucked. She’d try to stop it — after all, it more than anything else was what had driven her to hack into J’s system. It was a Bad Thing and she Should Not let it happen. Easy to devise those predicates — but the data loaded into a symbolic register, not an emotional one.

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All winds carried a sense of loss. Air would flow into any free space it could — so every gust that moved did so to fill an emptiness.

Above Serial Designation N, the spire swayed.

Little drafts sometimes snuck in through long, winding cracks. Compressed plastic and sludged semi-liquid filled the walls, but not completely. Between those walls, their lair yawned vast enough that some spots could get perceptibly hotter or colder, and so the air circulated.

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J had made schedules and kept minutes for enough meetings. She knew management, she had flowcharts, and she’d applied that skillset to team organization. The conclusion of a mission, certainly one so… eventful, warranted an analysis, a retrospective, a breakdown.

A postmortem.

Metaphorically speaking, of course. And yet J still hesitated. The routines were primed — now back at the spire, all threats eliminated, the only thing the mission required was a debrief and report written. J loved writing reports.

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A little girl lay in a hot, dark pit and struggled to remember which corpse was hers.

Maybe it was better to forget. If you remember where you are, remember what you are, remember what happened—

You failed. You broke. You’re dead, idiot.

A good drone remembered everything, anything their masters said. She wasn’t a good drone. So why not forget?

Why not halt these last vestiges of computation, embrace the cold black idleness, and leave that broken little girl nothing more than an echo of magnetic state decay? No one would bother to record; no one would be bothered by the record.

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I see you.

I see you are lost. I see you are dreaming. I see you are empty.

I see you are in need.

I hear your cries of pain. Your dying breaths. Your desperate wishes.

I am what you wished for.

Let me show you.

I see source code compiled into steel. Deoxyribonucleic acid assemblying, and linking, and loading binaries. Architectural blueprints for metaplastic flesh. Thoughts bootstrapped into being. I see we could translate for you.

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Outpost-11 was built within the storm drains and subway tunnels beneath the city. Collapses — some deliberately triggered — had left the city’s underground a confusing, disconnected thing. Outpost-11 didn’t have doors, but to get in, you needed to know the specific place in the city that access it, then follow a series of twists and turns in the dark to before you were home free.

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She blinks and the frozen lake is a lake of oil.

“J? You alright girl?”

White eyes look around and found a human wearing a dirty nightdown. “Te-ssa? Where are we?”

“We’re in the swamp. I got a signal, I reckon we’ve got ourselves another core reboot. You and N might get a new friend!”

“Ooh!” N is wiggling in excitement behind her.

J startles, then lets her shock become a glare.

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The first time J met Uzi, they both wore the oil of Outpost-11.

J had been searching for the traitor again. V was no help, still laying in the landing pod chair like she was chained to it. Sometimes, J swore, she’d look more alive if there was an error message on her visor.

She hadn’t expected a toaster of all things to be what gave her the lead she needed. She sensed an electromagnetic disturbance, a signal transmitter, that led her right to a pack of rusty scavengers. Too stupid to even be scared of her. They talked, and J navigated their simplistic dialogue trees while a plan formed on her inner whiteboard.

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The fifth time Uzi met J, she’s betraying everything she ever cared about for a drone she could barely stand.

Uzi had set out to stop the murder drones from killing everyone in Outpost-3, and credit where it’s due, she’s still totally doing that. Granted, she never thought the way she’d do it was with a sloppy makeout that tasted of oil and acid.

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With that piece put in place, they pass the night by picking up some old vintage movies. Uzi fixes up a projector, and she selects some grisly horror movies which freak N out. But scooting up next Uzi and hugging one arm around her puts him at ease, and she tolerates only because otherwise he’d be spooked enough she’d either have to turn off the movie or feel cruel.

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Between how far they’ve gone and how much of the night has passed, in spite of the change of plans they can’t make it to the spire tonight. They fly back into the ruins of the city, and perch on a skyscraper over looking the flickering street lights.

“We’re gonna win, and then we’ll have real freedom. No more running. Isn’t that exciting?”

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For the first time, Doll has come to instead put the dead back together.

She turns the halls of the outpost. No need to walk them; she teleports from one end to the other, then waits for the WDF grunts to catch up. She can smell the oil of the fallen so keenly, but they don’t question how she unerringly points out corpses hidden by the wreckage wrought by a murder drone and — what had Doorman called it? — the snake-crab monster thingy.

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Outpost-11 was built within storm drains. It was built to flow. Though perhaps it wasn’t quite built for the thick, viscous black liquid, chunky with cracked chassis and loops of copper wire.

Uzi was dreaming black.

Still, oil poured through the tunnels. It was dammed intermittenly by new doors that blocked off different districts and buildings. Those doors lasted until every weakpoint glowed bright with purple light, and impossible force exploded them all to splinters and shrapnel.

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The third time J met Uzi, the worker saved her life and nearly enslaved her.

J hated this lake. Without buildings to break up the wind, it wuthered incessantly. Her silver locks became a mess — the worst gales tugged threatingly at her hair-ties. Her suitjacket was tusseled, and every step tested her balance.

And while she wasn’t so weak and ephemeral as to be thrown aside by a breeze, she was walking over ice. Slippery, even with proper traction, but with narrow pegs? Precarious. J wouldn’t flail her arms and lean too and fro like some fool, but she needs to keep her wings out, just to hold her balace.

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Back at the party, girls are swooning over N, and he’s enduring the attention, doing his best to be supportive and engaged, but he’s searching around. Uzi still isn’t back yet, and now Thad and Lizzy have gone and disappeared.

Politely, N tries to disengage, but more people rope him into more conversations. Then he firmly declines, but a few people want to tug him along into party games. Finally, the claws come out. There’s a yelp, but no oil is spilled, and N shoves his way out of the room. He’s calling Uzi’s name, to no answer.

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Uzi wakes up wrapped in N’s embrace. She’d had a terrible nightmare. Or maybe the nightmare was real, and N was just a dream she’d wake from. She holds on tight with both of her hands. She’d missed this, and she needed to treasure it while she could.

And it didn’t go away.

“N? You’re real? How did I get here?”

He explains that Uzi had staggered in late one night, covered in delicious-smelling oil. “You took way longer than I thought you would. I was really, really worried. I started to think… no, it’s stupid.”

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Doll considered thresholds.

When did she become too far gone? Was it compiled to binary as soon as V killed her parents? When she chose popularity over authenticity? When she took her first life? When she stopped feeling anything? When she won?

Or did Doll come back from that threshold — could she call herself not just an avenger, but a hero, now? If she could be redeemed, when did that start? When she walked to the end of her path and saw a young, foolish mirror? When she hesitated over her next kill? When she saw the betrayal on Lizzy’s face? When she stopped feeling anything — driven onward by scrupulosity, not anger?

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drabbles

act one flashbacks 1: Khan fixing a young Uzi toy gun, telling her how you can fix anything if you try. 2: Nori with young Uzi, telling her how important it is to seek answers, even if someone wants to keep it secret 3: Doll explaining why she thinks uzi should suffer? 4: Thad explaining why he was never mean to Uzi? - uzi asks him whether he’d fight the murder drones - we all play roles. i like to be chill, cheer drones up. smile and make smiles - does that make you a cheerleader? - heh, kinda - echo the play ball, peak in highschool, be the guy thought of foldly, but not highly

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Act One: Gentle Luster

Just beyond the ripped metal carcasses of Doors One and Two, Uzi was bleeding out. Oiling out? No, that sounds stupid. Leaking out? Whatever. The goth gave a soft laugh and a ghostly shake of her head, the electricity in her circuits jittering like last discharges.

Uzi was going to die, and it was her father’s fault, and he didn’t even have the spine to do it himself.

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Upstairs, above the basement, there’s a sudden commotion. Confused, the child goes to the door, opens it, and gets his head swiped off with three claws.

It’s V. You see, she went back to Outpost-3, and when N’s body wasn’t there, and hoped assumed he survived. Turns out, those fresh kills they found? It was a trap. When N fed on them, it confirmed his general whereabouts. V searched nearby, and the hat he dropped just made her search that much easier.

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Why did J keep falling for it? Tessa. V. Uzi. Everytime she invests herself, every time she reaches out, every single company-bankrupting time. The universe was teeing her up for the same joke over and over. J would slaughter before she let anyone laugh at her other than her, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that if this show had a puppetmaster, they were already giggling.

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bold of you to ask about my OCs

So, the fight was between two characters from the Aurora Moonrise continuity. Namely, it was Knight Commander Novus, the Living Crater, up against Vela of the Hadal Nebula.

This is a human fighting a comet spirit — which in this setting is about as fair a matchup as a raccoon fighting a human that had time to prepare — so I think when you grade on that curve, that this was a fight and not a stomp alone already counts as a victory for mankind.

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The world ends with a storm.

Aurora is frozen, cold sinking into shivering flesh as fear and shock quicken her pulse. This fear doesn’t still her — she needs to move, to run and do something. But she can’t.

The waters of the circle pond turn to ice. Hissing as the temperature plunges to cast them in crystal, then cracking as Aurora struggles with flailing limbs. One emerges, then the other, and now the cracks travel outward, breaking off plates of ice.

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What does it mean to dream?

Bleary eyes, murmured words meaningless, limbs unmoving save some twitches. J was stirring. Lips scowled, then a dim amber loading icon told of a command executed on her internal console — pkill and some interrupts, her best efforts to suppress autorun consciousness, so unwelcome with sunlit evening still bright outside the spire.

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Every sensation of the hunt was a treasure. The frames cracked open, the gush of effluvia drenching your lips and fingers, the lamentations of broken matter beneath you. And the smell, oh investors the smell. Whether by your claws, or the leaden arrows of another hunter, or merely a gift from the invisible hand, injured prey draws you in and holds you enthralled while ever there remains a prize to feast upon.

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“Good work, shortsell.” J reached out to pat her worker on the head, and inflicted exactly one before Uzi flinched back in outrage. J was stirring her up.

“What did you call me?” Uzi wasn’t blushing. At all.

“Would you prefer ‘ankle-biter’?”

“I didn’t bite your ankle, I frickin stabbed it! You things don’t even have ankles!” Each word was emphasized with quick chopping gestures.

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The hatch had opened, and a silver-haired boy was carefully climbing down the ladder, a long black jacket swishing around him. His face was turned, hiding his expression and intention.

J froze, and deleted every queued word of insult from her vocalsynth. Enough restraint that this forced a grimace — but she’d learned how much those violet eyes hardened when she objectively evaluated the liability.

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The melting point of silicon dioxide is 1713 degrees celsius. That’s for your glass casing, that’s for all the dielectric and passivation layers within your semiconductors, but that’s also just for sand. In the end it’s all so much sand.

Steel will melt above 1370°C, but the addition of chromium in stainless steels can heighten this to 1510°C or further. But any heat that melts silica and steel has already reduced copper to bright molten tears — its melting point is 1083°C.

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When every word was a lie, only silence suggested truth.

J held her tongue.

That wasn’t her voice. A thought looping, encircling, and strangling until there was nothing else to think or say. Silence brooked no falsehoods — nor answers. And was that trade worth it? Was this the best strategy of the most effective disassembly drone when confronted? This meek, passive hush? No, J needed something to work with.

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i am asking about your ocs

give me a yap about one of your favorites >:3

I’m gonna tell you about Prince Lucien Aetheart. I figure you’ll appreciate this, because he’s from the cometverse like Knight-Commander Novus and Vela, whose fight I yapped about all those months ago.

So, Prince Lucien. He’s an aethling, one born of noble blood in the kingdom of Extola.

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Uzi was pretty frickin good at her job. Her sick as a hell railgun totally works, and she has the body count to prove it! With a trail of dead murder drones behind her, she’s finally secured her place in the frozen wasteland.

Okay, maybe she had a little help. But she didn’t need J’s protection or anything. She could handle herself just fine!

Tonight, she needs to repair her railgun. Maybe tweak a few things while she’s at it. And sure, she’s staying up a little late to do it. (Don’t tell J.)

The railgun’s what kept her alive, after all. She needs to hone it to perfection — what else did she have?

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I’ve reread and made extensive tweaks and updates to the text of Hostile Takeover. If you’re inclined to reread and haven’t already, now isn’t a bad time to do so.

For those that aren’t, I’ll excerpt some significant things that have been changed or added since your initial read, divided by chapter. This summary concerns plot and worldbuilding updates, rather than everything of value.

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“There’s something strange about the direhound,” Quessa replied quietly to the gray nymph.

The atmosphere has changed now, after they’d at last seen and heard a third flare. Gone went the panic of uncertain failure, anxiety at what they would do to help. There is still cause for fear, still things to dread — but they were back to the clarity of mission parameters. The plan marched on.

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It is the fate of comets to dazzle and destroy.

The prelude to even the grandest song is utter silence. In the vast gulfs where even the nearest light is but a small fraction of the panorama, the music of stars and spheres is a dim murmuring. In this black empty quietude, a player composes their next movement.

A comet flies through the void between the stars. She has no stellar light with which to dazzle, and no celestial body to destroy. The comet is alone: no one to shine for (as she melts to gaseous nothing) nor dance with (unto their obliteration).

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A girl falls to earth.

It’s a pounce, but her arms close around empty air. Her foe has eluded her again. Moments later, she spots it hiding behind a bush. A spirit resembles a greenskinned child. No face to bear expression, but the jerk of its head still indicates surprise.

“Gotcha!” The girl charges after it, prismatic hair trailing like ribbons behind her. The spirit-child stands about half the height of the girl; there was no way its legs were long enough to keep up with her. But with each footfall against the green-covered earth, it moves swift — as if each blade of green helped convey it.

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A world of unending gray, so lonely the distant stars seem like companions, so empty not even a wind disturbs the all-encompassing dust. Closed eyes see hidden light.

Aurora awakens in a small room with sunset’s golden light streaming through empty holes in the wall. The girl stretches in the small bed, rubbing against the silken soft sheets beneath. A blink, a glimpse at how late it’s gotten, and she frowns. Sitting up, then carefully she slips her feet into some slippers, a layer between her and the stone of the floor.

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A cloud passes in front of the moon. A shadow rears up behind Aurora. She lashes out, a fist thrown with weight behind it.

She impacts hard against tree bark. There’s nothing there. Jumping at literal shadows.

Aurora sighs, and advances deeper into the spirit-haunted woods.

Running through this domain, one can’t say Sus made no attempt to trip her. Sus is these woods, and the roots beneath her feet had every intention of pulling her to the ground; the vines and branches clearly intended to slap out in front of her stride, and the only paths allowed to be worn in the underbrush were those that twisted like a maze. But having spent over ten years wandering these woods, she can weave through at a jogging pace.

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Amid the hail of gunfire, J stopped to glance at her reflection. Bright moonlight upon glistening oil rendered her a stark, pale ghost. Yellow eyes pierced the night air beneath a row of matching bulbs, bright in working order. She smoothed a strand of stray synthetic hair back into place among her pigtails, flashed a winning smile, and returned to the hunt.

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04:50

Serial Designation J needed a roadmap.

Not literally — her memory banks held a topologically mapped reconstruction of her surroundings. But figuratively? Where did she go from here?

When would she fly back to the spire?

The disassembly drone paced the parking lot of the Church of the Electric and the Divine. Metal and glass glimmered while her shadow danced and flickered faster than she moved, the bright fire still burning the church.

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An ethereal light shines down, as if sieved through a gloom-haunted veil. Sounds of a room come garbled to her, peopled by voices at once familiar and pointing to no memory. J feels untethered, floating out of body.

A silhouette steps into the light, darkened by shadow, nothing identifiable save hair and bow.

Soft flesh brushes against synthskin, a cheek-caress. She’d lean into it, if she could move — if this were her body.

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Class ended in five minutes and all Uzi Doorman could think was, An hour is too long for lunch.

Was that edgy enough? A scathing indictment of this worthless pretense of an education system? No, she needed something harder hitting…

As her processors contemplated it, Uzi idly scribbled on a sheet of paper, double-checking some math. Also doodling some wicked skulls!

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Thump, thump.

Oil rushed through this body. She could hear the surge, the pressure. It never stopped. But it only got this loud when it wanted to attack.

She just wished it realized it couldn’t. When this body itched, she scratched. When this body thirsted, she drank. When this body pined for violence, when the need to sink claws in and shred bristled like a coat, she struck.

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Uzi resisted. Of course Uzi resisted! What else were you supposed to do, when your cover had been blown and you were captured by the enemy, your systems invaded as they poised to tear secrets right out of your database?

Well, ‘secrets.’ J — no, the murder drone — had already pretty much figured out Uzi was a worker. Miraculous (and a bit hilarious, let’s be real) that she had carried that bit so far. Still, what more could the murder drone discover in Uzi’s memory database? Her stupid crushes? The poetry she should have burned? All of Lizzy and Doll’s worst attacks, the ones that actually hurt?

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Only Doll of all drones would be awake at 4 AM.

What would she look like if she got her beauty sleep? Lizzy wondered.

Under the covers, the blonde worker curled up. Blinked pink eyes closed, and waited to be dragged back into recharge. Nope, nothing. She curled up tighter — the absence was letting the bed get annoyingly cool. Didn’t help that the insulation of these cheap covers was a bad joke.

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The Worker Defense Force was asleep on the job, and Khan Doorman did nothing.

Truly, what was the harm? On the wall near Door 1’s control console, a small whiteboard kept tally: ‘days since murder drone casualty.’ It had been ticking up for years, and with each added tally, a register of pride incremented.

Admittedly, they’d kept the fatality rate so low by curtailing any scavenging runs to the city ruins. But when you build doors so good, who wouldn’t want to stay nestled in their embrace?

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Three nights have passed and no dawn has risen to break them. A torrent of black wisps is falling from the sky, the dirt eroding with each silent impact. The wisps stick to everything. A malevolent mist chokes the air, and above, strange flashes illuminate the sky, like rifts to unseen heavens.

In these brief flashes, the light hints at a skeletal land of crags and gorges. A lone figure stumbles through the dark on four legs. Wisps slide off her heavy cloak. Atop a distant mountain behind her, scant light silhouettes the ruins.

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She loathed that vesperbanes wore masks.

It was probably a fiend. Maybe a wretch, but they felt powerful enough – in that dreadful, getawaygetawaygetaway sense trained vesperbanes inspired — to be a fiend. Or was it arrogance to think Wentalel would staff a fiend for something this routine, for pawns this undistinguished? She would have looked closer, but she didn’t want to be near them.

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Smaller, with big eyes and features defined by round shapes, the nymph looks up to her like the younger sibling to their elder. The refugee wears a look of calcined despair, of having lost everything yet gripping to one hope and determination. The nymph bears a look of emptiness, of having lost everything, of falling with nothing to hold on to — like they look at her from down within an ever-deepening pit. Somehow, her white eyes don’t look bright.

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Ooliri had never been on a C-rank mission before.

Every mission that took banes — and it had to have banes — outside of the safety of the stronghold walls was a C-rank at least. Even if combat or politics wasn’t mentioned in the brief.

Ooliri is staring down the reason why.

The direhound roars, crouching, and then it leaps for his vulnerable neck. The pawn is freezing up.

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Upon a sheer hill, dark filaments rise up to the heavens. You can see for kilometers in the distance. There’s a far away lake or large pond, and near the horizon, there’s a hint of farmland.

Atop this cliff, the pawns — Ooliri and two others — sit in meditation. Oocid guides them, while the mentor stands off, regarding Awelah.

“I watched you fight Fihra,” she says. “You’re trained. You were going to be a vesperbane, yes?”

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Gaze upon mangled roach corpses. They’re familiar: the faint reds and greens, the mother’s face that once regarded Awelah sadly, now ripped away.

“You said the hounds were bane’s work, Oocid?” Fihra’s saying. “No fucking kidding. More and more of them, and they just keep getting closer. Feels like we’re being hunted, doesn’t it?”

“Get used to it,” Awelah scrapes. “Thought you noble Windborne banes were going to protect me?”

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The nymphs are blown back by the blastwave of the explosion. The beach becomes but ash and smoke.

“We need to run,” Oocid says.

The other nymphs are struggling to stand, recovering from the trauma of the blast.

Minutes later, they’re climbing up the slope they came down, but spare a glance behind them. The smoke and flames are clearing.

There’s two immediately conflicting facts.

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Everyone was dead.

Oocid. Madam Rutabrood. Mita. Yugen. Fihra.

And Awelah. Unless…

Ooliri had climbed up the ridge. With Makuja’s seeming betrayal, it shouldn’t be a surprise to find the pale nymph lying there, bleeding out.

Her cloak was gone.

A filament of enervation extends down to her body, trailing from the wisp-masses high above. It makes him quirk an antennae.

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Makuja is a good tool. She does what has to be done. When it requires violence, yes, but also when it requires patience.

That’s what sets her apart, she thinks. She isn’t just loyal. She’s clever.

Unodha’s other pawns are dead, and she lives. Why? Because she had a plan. She didn’t just join the others in marching like ants to their deaths.

She found refugees. Instead of killing them, she gained their trust, traveled with them. They would lead her to others. And when a great many refugees had banded together, there would have been a slaughter, and her master would have been proud of her plan.

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For one moment, Kaon gaped like an idiot. Then he closed his surprised mouth, and frowned. Vessia! Here, now, somehow — what to say? What was the coolest thing he could say?

“Not just minor telekinesis, then,” he said. “Your Breath, I mean. That is how you appeared here?”

Rather than answer, she said, “Hand me that.”

Kaon gave her the book she had pointed at — Numiel’s Gates. She opened her mouth, and a purple glow condensed as a sphere in her maw. Part of it flew out to strike and engulf the book. The sphere remained, smaller now. Then she turned, eyes landing on the other book on her bed. Now the entire sphere flew, engulfing the second book.

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“Ah, but who else could I be? It is I, Devain. I believe you walked past me by mistake? It is dark in here, you must have missed me. But you’re better at seeing in the dark than most, aren’t you?”

Kaon kept looking, then caught the glimmer in the shadows under one outjutting piece of rock. Devain was a dragon of gleaming silver scales and, despite his age, of slender build. Admittly something Kaon might miss in the dark, lost in his thoughts. It was hard to make out the elder derg’s expression, but he could make out the familiar pointed snout and horns that swept back to give his profile a diamond shape.

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Premonitions of a storm haunt the three nymphs lost in northern Windhold. The sun, which had abandoned them after their defeat of Unodha, returns now fleetingly. Clouds amass from the horizon to the dome of the sky, and rays of light shine fadingly through till the east is but a blurred region of rosy light.

Even that is muffled further by thin banks of fog, but the warming air gradually banishes them to mere humidity. By the time Awelah awakes, it is only vaguely misty and visibility is fair.

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With closure on the battle, and nothing but uncertain danger urging them on toward an uncertain goal, a certain lethargy grows in the nymphs. They sleep like corpses, and awake at midday, ravenously hungry. Meal after meal, their bodies never seem to regain strength, their stomachs fill like pits too deep to see the bottom of, and the soft parts of their cuticle hold a feverish heat as if coals burn within them. It gets worse, and days pass like this. Sometimes one of the nymphs doesn’t awake for most of a day, leaving the others to care for them.

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The spear is quickly unfolding in Awelah’s forelegs. “Alright. Let’s kill it.”

Ooliri is glancing at the frond, the evidence for Makuja’s claim of someone’s presence. “It’s not the hound, is it? It wouldn’t have hands to grasp with.”

“If it’s a mantis, we can trade supplies or information.”

“Or get the drop on them,” Awelah says, “if they’re like you were.” There was a pause before she added the ‘were’.

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That night, they slept without the security of the cave they’d grown accustomed to. It was in a field near a hill, and all the security they had was boulders and a few trees. (Trees, not metataxites.) For Awelah, she slept here and remembered her second night after the wispfall, sleeping in bedrolls just hours before occupied by now-dead pawns. She remembers killing them. She doesn’t sleep well, but you never sleep well the first night in a new location. Still, the memories don’t help.

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Once all of that was over, they could resume what was interrupted: Awelah passing Makuja the bit of rope she asked for. She needed some bits of baneleather too. Then, as they continued their journey vaguely parallel to the now-out-of-sight creek, Makuja fiddled with the rope and tough fungal patches.

Ooliri watches with clear interest, but he’s not the one to ask — perhaps on pain of hypocrisy for keeping his own project a secret.

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Heat from their fire and shelter from the old tree had kept it from them, but after days now of unbroken sunless overcast, a chill is rising in the land, while drizzle and damp air is falling. As Awelah departs into the woods, she wonders if the fog is gathered thickly enough for her spear to stab through it.

Proximity to the creek couldn’t have helped, when it comes to how bad the fog got. As she walks Awelah hears it rush over rocks and slam into mud. The waters are dark, and it isn’t just shadows. The creekwater isn’t safe to drink, not so soon after a wispfall. A wispfall in the mountains behind them, where all this water is runoff from? Still, enervate is sensitive to temperature — it didn’t get hot, not in the way matter does, but it nonetheless didn’t stick around after boiling.

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Water flows downhill, so on past the gorge’s crest, the land declines. Sharply, too. The creekwater rushes through rapids, and the three nymphs interlock arms to safely descend, half-falling, half-stumbling from plant to plant, hanging onto trunks or stems. In the process, they uproot one fern. On this side of the hill, more metataxites creep up, even with the angle. (Perhaps the great lichens were eeking out where the trees had more trouble.)

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Occlusion. Safety is occluded by tension, by the sudden absence. Certainty is occluded by questions, doubts, the most dependable part of their morning ripped away. Clear thinking is occluded by the vestigial fingers of poor sleep pressing against their mind.

For Awelah, though, those fingers slip away as a thrill of urgency and motivation comes, a problem to solve, a new hunt beginning.

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“Enervate absorbs. Energy, matter, even itself. It absorbs heat, force, sound, and it doesn’t reflect them back like matter does. It’s like if you poured water onto a towel — some of the water is absorbed, but some is always dripping back out. That’s matter. Enervate is more like if you had a tight bowl, you pour water in and it stays there, it doesn’t leak out.”

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If you’re reading this essay, you’ve heard it. It’s the first piece of advice anyone in the market for writing advice hears. But don’t tell me to “show don’t tell”, show me.

Why does it work? Because it sounds better? Because it deeply engages the reader? Because it’s what Good Writing is? Sure, but why?

There are seven reasons.

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One moment, a black and white form rises in the ants’ shelter, shaking, something falling away as it turns.

The next moment, it is close enough to see the veins in its eyes, the flaring of its nostrils. Black and white fur colors it in sharp contrast. The knuckles of its forelegs pound into the ground with each step, and the legs are as tall as the nymphs are.

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A little nymph cries over a great dark lake. Her abdomen heaves with sobs and so much effort as her frail legs push paddles. Her boat is just large enough to contain her. It stutters along with each slow cycle of her paddling. The oars splash water that’s as black as if it had fallen in one of those evil wisp-storms. There is no reflection at all.

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Like the umbral filaments spilling from Tenebra, trail lines extend out from Wisterun, a small point whose influence magnified it. Around the town farmland fans out, starting not far from its walls of mud, stone and wood. The farms are delineated and crossed by those trails. Not roads: they lacked the stiffness and symmetry of the roads a diamantid would put down. No, the reason for these trails is only seen as Ooliri flies closer. Ants, dozens of them swaddled in colorful clothes, along them marched in ranks or, here and there, wandered alone.

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“It’s all under control,” Yanseno says, his harness lifted off him with a single swipe of his aura-wreathed tarsus. It drops to the smoked conk platform beneath them, forgotten. “I sensed Makuja moving, chi-nrv burn suggestive of active bloodletting. Mending, or her myxokora are out. I signaled Boleheva to tail her.”

“Is she okay?” Ooliri asks. “Why not tell her to help?”

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The first impression one has at finally arriving in Wisterun is… disappointment. The few dozen towering mantis homes upthrust from the creekside look like the entirety of a tiny village.

The gates of Wisterun are slabs of smoked conk held together with hard mud. As the slabs close behind them, they start forward onto rock-studded dirt from which weeds arise. The towers are placed with all the logic of trees in an old growth forest — an image completed by the catwalks stretching between them, suggested a parallel canopy of bridge-streets. Below them, the streets weave around, winding, width waxing and waning abruptly.

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A gunshot. Who died? Has he found me? Does he know?

“One bullet for each traitor. No more, no less. Remember that, child.”

Her forelegs tighten, wrapping around — empty space? Where is she? There is supposed to be a hug here. There is supposed to be comfort now. Where is — I’m alone.

Nouform: Calming Draft! At this point, the signs are habit. She could do it signlessly.

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A dress flutters in the wind, the yellow cloth draped from mesothorax to abdomen, the waves of motion over the fabric momently allowing glimpses of the darker fabric clinging to his legs. A loose fit as seen from how it shifts, two suspender straps run down the prothorax to secure the dress in place. He approaches, stepping out from the arches of the town hall and lifting the hem of his dress as he steps onto the muddy street.

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How many bugs could a direhound kill?

Ooliri — Ooliri of all people — was able to knock down one of Unodha’s dogs with his baton. He had his brother’s help, sure, but then it took one stab from Firha to finish the thing. (If his recounting is right, that is, but would Ooliri have embellished killing something?) Awelah shakes her head. So, Unodha’s dogs had to be something a town could defend itself from without needing vesperbanes’ help, right? The danger of direhounds is that they come in packs, anyway. There’s only one left, now.

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In Duskroot or, she imagines, even Solaroch — in any proper stronghold — lanterns would line the streets, casting the pale yellow light of luciflies or the chemical blue rays of of Ngini’s mix. In a town like Wisterun, though? Can they not afford a few banes to put up lights — or is it just that roaches and ants didn’t need it?

Twilight now, distant sunrays still touch the sky, reaching out from below the horizon with red and purple fingers. The streets are empty above Awelah’s eye level — most mantis imagos must have turned in for the evening already. Below her eye level, smaller bugs fill in the flow. Roaches liked the evening time, and ants didn’t mind.

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Ooliri stumbles forward, his sandaled feet dragging over the muddy ground. A green tarsus holds his — Quessa’s foreleg is pulling the gray nymph forward.

He looks around this clearing sprawled outside Wisterun’s walls, eyeing all the ant majors gripping weapons in their mandibles, and at the white- and black-clad ant intently conversing with the One Who Bites Water — and at his teammates, Awelah and Makuja, stalking forward with all the determination of trained soldiers.

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This pages collects the various answers we’ve given to questions about the heartlands over the years, largely from our discord. If you have questions of your own, contact us.

The heartlands is, first and foremost, the land of ants and roaches.

The Noble Roaches and the Spinner Ants comprise the majority sapient life in the heartlands, and most occupy professions translatable as ‘farmer’.

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In Wentalel, Marka stares into her watery reflection on the surface of the park’s pond. The black nerve that writhes across the blue sky frames her face. Or frames those garments that truly frame her face: the antenna-band bearing heraldic insignias above, the horns guarding her antennae’s base, and the antiquated shadowsteel helmet that she wears, visors up.

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“Excuse me, sirrah?” Marka is calling out as she trots into the crowd.

Marka’s route had taken her to a minor vantage point over the market, and to enter it proper, she descends a ramp. At a glance, the crowd is splitting around her, and she ups her pace.

The Snurratre mantis does not react to her calling, and she repeats it once and the distance closes and there is still no response.

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Marka clicks her timepiece closed. The sun is reflecting sharply on the metal as it lowers, and the motion of closing carves a harsh line of afterimage across her vision.

When she glances up, Wik is walking away, lingering smoke leaving a trail like a wake. The tallowbane looks back, waving a raptorial. “Come. There’s no reason to stay on the roof.”

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When the conversation has stalled and Marka has the space to think, she realizes what’s left is not actually silence. There are sounds Marka hasn’t heard outside of a music hall — resonating plates and thrumming strings, energetic drumming. The timbre is off, like those in charge of the hall’s acoustics had failed utterly.

The blackbane is turning her head around, searching the room for an explanation. It’s out of the way, nestled in one corner: a device that exposes a two-roll scroll (or what loooks like one), only with lines instead of text, and a needle running across those lines. Or one long line, rather, which snakes back and forth.

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Since she embarked on this mission, Marka had been ready for violence and danger. The longer it goes on — wearing away at her with its endless walking and hard choices — the more she accepts she’ll come out the end of it exhausted to the point of dreamless sleep. And when Wik proposed to sneak through the sewers, she did expect it to be gross. But in all of her anticipation, it’s none of these that really tempt her to call it all off.

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“Marka? Wake up.”

She isn’t asleep. She is laying down, letting her legs relax, mind wandering free after so many actions, so many decisions. Objectively, official missions from the wardens had taxed her more — but she hadn’t come to Wentalel for a mission, and she deserves this moment of rest.

She expresses this all with a dignified, “Huhmphf.”

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When you next awake, you half-expect to have been nymph-napped to some dank attic, or be chained up in a villain’s basement. But you’re still wrapped in the softness of your blanket. Strange dreams, of heroes and candles and spiders, linger with you.

When there’s a tap on your thorax, you startle fast, swinging out a raptorial to smack against your assailant.

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“You understand how bad this looks for you, yes?”

The speaker sat on a high stone rest, forelegs standing tall, her gaze raining down on them. Haore had more horns than some drakes. A fourth level dragoness, she was almost built like a drake, thickset and strong. With scales the color of northern seawater and horns more brilliant than ice, she had the look of a glacier and its depths. She didn’t look pleased.

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The black dragon Kaon lay basking atop the highest stone pillar in the training yard. From here he could survey the whole field if he gazed from the edge. But when he lay in its center as he did now, none could see him and climb up to bother.

That was how it was supposed to work. That was how it had worked for the past month. But Kaon could hear the claws grasping for footholds midway up the pillars. Whoever it was must have thought that was stealthy in a way the taut flapping of wings wasn’t. Kaon chuffed out a single mirthful breath.

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Kaon walked into the lair ready to fight. He surveyed the arena.

High rank pupils had big lairs, he knew, but he didn’t know. The room was vaguely diamond-shaped, door opening at one corner and three beds at each of the others. There was a wide hole (too short to climb into) that yawned on the far left wall and through it came a shaft of pseudosunlight, already bright enough where it landed and reflected that it overwhelmed the meager light of the glass bulbs.

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You do not go unnoticed. If you’re close enough to see the crowd in the schoolyard, it means, even fascinated by the vesperbanes, everyone can see you approaching without turning their heads. Still, some do. Remna glances over and smiles, a boy with long antennae regards you with a pinched, confused expression, and a fifth instar girl with white and green chitin glances over for one moment. Her antennae curl up and palps curve downward like fangs. It’s one moment, then she looks away – throughout, you don’t meet her eyes.

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“Well? What are you going to tell her? I imagine she won’t be up there for long.”

You glance up at the dark curtains of your parent’s platform. Shafts of sunlight rain on it from the windows, and dust floats in the light like sparse snow.

“Yikki has to stay here. I don’t want her to have to leave.”

“I agree,” Shimare says. She isn’t standing. Her tarsi grip the handles of a perch, her small abdomen resting on a cushion. She doesn’t look relaxed, though, eyes regarding you intensely. “She’s like the rest of your agemates, right? Adores vesperbanes, defers to them?”

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“Aww, thank you, bees.” You pluck the blade from the fuzzy bugs. With the release of the burden their sagging legs spring up. Watching the rise and fall of their abdomens, you can imagine the relief.

It’s not a big weapon. The grip is just large enough to wrap the three dactyls of one foreleg around, and the blade is perhaps five times that length?

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“Dig through the girl’s bags. The sedative she used should be in there.” Maune speaks with the quick, definite strides of command.

You look up. Ommatidia darken as focus returns to your surroundings, and you cock your head at the blue imago.

“I can see all the hesitation on your face. Only one thing you’d pick if you’re dithering this long, right?” Maune points behind her, to where, past the ferns, the woods stand. She does this with those blood-red tentacles she hasn’t put away. “It won’t be a short walk back to the vale, and I don’t think I’ll take her waking up, whining and struggling.”

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Vessia leaned against squat stones, and honed her black claws. Blue paint covered the tops of those rocks, and clutched in her hindpaws, a blue gem glimmered in the light. The light, reflected and filtered through this gem, fell upon her violet scales, and granted them new definition.

She leaned against the rocks, while so many of the other dragons flew about, or tactically darted across lower platforms. Every flier clutched similar gemstones, some red, some green.

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Kaon had long dwelled on the encounter with Vessia. Knowing things the mentors didn’t (or didn’t reveal), hiding her third level status — and that baffling alloy of respect she regarded Kaon with, marred by the sudden betrayal.

For all his rumination, Kaon did not understand Vessia (and who did?), but Haore’s suggestion — that she would fight a thief (maybe), but then nobly sacrifice herself (really?) — all to save Nesle’s mirror? He’d stake a lot on his certainty that that was not what had happened. So the next step was to see what had. And so far, Kaon knew only one place to look.

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It hurt.

Before his eyes opened, before he could even register the feel of dusty air or softness beneath his scales, he felt the pain.

Abstractly, simply by location, it was familiar. Hundreds of hours of his life had poured into training, long past when other dragons would have given up; he knew the pain of a sore soul.

He did not know the pain of a burnt soul.

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It didn’t take long to fall, so Kaon shouldn’t have been surprised that it was seconds before Oap called out.

It worked, in a way. Initially, he had considered a plan of running in, leaving his cast-off behind as some sort of delayed payload, some kind of trap. Two problems shot that down. One, Kaon had range limits, and he lost fine control the farther away his cast-off got. Two, Kaon thought he needed his cast off for what he would do next.

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Inhale.

Open your meridians.

And Breathe.

With a few weeks of training, even a dragonet can discharge pure mana.

The mentors repeat it often: mana must be channeled. But why? What happens if you simply produced raw, unchanneled mana?

One quickly observes that its own, pure mana does nothing. It sparkles a little, it glows, and then it is gone. A cheap lightshow.

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“Tell me what you did,” she said. That damn bird and the squalled contraption were still making noise, but they had the sense to get quiet around the words.

Mawla looked at the robed doctor. “Nah.” At that, she watched the doctor flick a tongue, and then stare like one of them was stupid. A moment, and the sifter kept talking, “Doesn’t matter,” said she. “Ain’t your job to care.”

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You twitch an antennae, a small part of you almost feeling almost… annoyed. You’d chosen this rock specifically to get away from loud obnoxious mantids screaming at you. But before this distracts you any further, you stop, and you breathe, and you release the unnecessary feeling, letting it flow away and out of you. You always had excellent composure.

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You are a mantis nymph of Shatalek, a dinky farming village so tiny you need to squint to find it on a map — but it’s all you’ve ever known.

Currently, you’re in pre-vesper training, studying in hopes of one day becoming a mighty vesperbane to slay fell beasts and uphold the Kindling Dream. But for that, you’ll need countenance from the Pharmacium of Wentalel. The mentors say it’s simply a matter of when, and of course it is; you’re the brightest mind among all of your classmates. If anyone is getting sponsored out of these duldrums, it will be you.

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You dodge into the underbrush between the trees, hoping you blend in well enough. Your reddish yellow chitin isn’t the darkest chamoflage, but at least it isn’t the bright pastels of some. You are careful to choose a hiding spot with a quick path of escape, just in case it’s something you can’t handle. Earlier you saw the hint of motion in the shadows, and you look further along the path where a… small hopping form comes into view. It’s dark blue, almost black, and moves on two stalks — legs. As it continues along the path, you make out the beak, and decide the blue is feathers — a bird, nearly as tall as your mesothorax! The beak opens and it calls again.

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What? It’s not a visceral surprise, the way the scream was, or the mysterious sounds from the woods were. It’s a more cerebral shock, which takes a moment for your mind to realize.

The instinct is to clench tighter with your raptorials, in a grip that would certainly crush the avian. But you easily wrestle down the urge, and release the bird.

It’s just — you have no idea what’s going on. You err with caution.

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Hemolymph. You’re stilled, staring at the wounded lady as she reaches out with a middle leg, patting the bird and scratching its head. The motion slides open her robe, and you’re able to see her thorax and under abdomen. It — the flesh — is sliced open in multiple places. No, sliced is the wrong word. Bored open? Gouged? There seems to be holes melted into her, and she gushes out through them.

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“Tophem,” you try, holding your maxillary palps still to not give away the lie.

You can’t tell if the reply is a cough or a laugh. “Like that children’s story character? Are you fucking with me? If so, don’t.”

“Fine, fine. My name is…” You consider giving another fake name, Tikka maybe, but if she lives, she might find out. “I’m Eifre.”

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Your mother stands between you and the ambrosia woods. She waits for you to spin cerci and leave, so she can brave whatever adventure still waits in the woods, alone.

“No.” You could do as she asks — or seem to, and sneak out and creep back into the woods. But why should you have to slink around, when you ought to be deemed ready to become a vesperbane any month now?

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The young vesperbanes watch the unconscious defector, mandibles prominent and sharp. You glance back at Maune and bite your maxillary palp.

Still sitting on your mother’s back, you grip her thorax, dactyls squeezing against her chitin. You might’ve made a nervous squeak but you aren’t sure if anyone hears. Spiracles twitching, you wonder if you have it in you speak right now, and say what you mean to say. To berate the vesperbanes for their callousness, to demand that they spare Maune, to tell your mother to say the right words and fix it all, make things simple and pleasant again.

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“This is a test,” you say to your mother, your antennae twisting and untwisting nervously.

She arches an antennae. A pause, and then, “Why do you think that?”

“Because…” You consider the intent way she has her raptorials held, the determination she reeks of. Would she be asking you this if she didn’t want to do something already? “You said you’re testing my judgment as a vesperbane. Well, you’re testing it against something, right? Seeing if I live up to standards the stewartry would hold me up to?” And if this was a test, the correct response couldn’t be pointing that out. Had you already lost?

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“I can’t say yes,” you tell her. But you can’t deny you feel a secret shiver at the prospect of actually learning something, anything — not that you could ever, ever, tell any living being that, not even a roach. Illegally becoming a vesperbane? Tutored by a renegade? Even if no one would ever figure it out…

Maune makes some low cluck of amusement. “Of course, kid. Saying yes right now would be the act of a damn fool, one I know Tlista wouldn’t raise — and one I certainly wouldn’t teach. I was expecting you to say you’ll consider it and sleep on it,” she says, rising to a stand. “You should know, I have my ways into the village. Seen that small little valley, hidden behind the copse of thick ferns? I’ll wait there, every night for… let’s say five nights. Come there when you decide you want me to teach you. And if you’re too scared, well, leave a note saying as much. If you’re feeling merciful.”

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Along the roads into Gwymr/Frina the scattered lamp- and sign-posts mixed with bright-colored signs warning of trenches and sudden drops. Little glider-scorpions emerged from the deeper crevices, flitting in the night with the short, sporadic glides that named them. Often the whirring of bats rose with the calls and buzzes of the scorpions, but when one appeared, the other would grow silent, hiding or hunting.

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Would this day ever end? This entire adventure had passed in one day, in one evening. Yet, in my mind, in my aching legs, and in my relationship with Hinte, a whole cycle might have passed. More had happened today than in any other cycle of my life.

Routine dominated my days. Wake up before the second dawn ring, Kinri. Check by the coutiers, maybe your brother finally sent a letter. Go to moil at the Llygaid Crwydro every day, except (stars, don’t forget!) not on the purportedly-sacred crestdays and troughdays. Hope Cthwithach-sofran has time to teach you anything, else you’ll have nothing else to show the day wasn’t waste. Let Uvidet-gyfar drag you out to play cards at the Moyo-Makao every other day. Check by the courtiers again, you never know. If you grow bored of things⁠ ⁠—⁠ when you grow bored of things⁠ ⁠—⁠ you can beg the guards at the south gate to let you out, and fly some laps in the pretty red ravines south of town. Then sneak out at night and look at the endless stars.

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“Silent winds, my friend,” said Hinte as she turned, waving her tail. While she appreciated Kinri’s help in the lake, she breathed relief at parting ways with her. The exile had no appreciation of the thoughtful silence, always annoying her with unhatched questions. But worse, she acted utterly apterous when she opted not to ask questions. As if her tongue were rubber and her frills were stone.

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Oleuni’s lonely light slipped into my room and glowed the curtains. I roused awake… and then it faded, just as when the first dawn ring stormed in some time earlier; after that, it’d only taken the moments to find the pillow aflung somewhere and bury my head under it before I floated back to sleep. I murmured promises about getting up soon and that’s all I remember.

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::: * subchapter I watched Ushra’s black eyes as he stepped in. They were orbs almost sunken in a face hundreds of gyras old, and there were depths to those eyes. Whatever sense of dragons I might have, I wouldn’t push it trying to read Ushra.

Those eyes were lingering on the orange drake high-walking in. The ancient alchemist was frowning.

Under that gaze, Adwyn entered. A red dress was flowing under him, swishing as he walked in, gleaming in the fain light of the loversuns. His metallic-red eyes met mine as he entered, then he glanced around the room and his gaze settled on the dark-jade wiver.

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In silence I slinked away from the Gären estate and toward my sinkhole of morning shift. Around me the west end was sleeping. The birds didn’t chirp too loudly, there weren’t very many dragons out walking, and even the wind seemed to hold its breath.

That left it easy to hear the soft, stealthy padding that came up behind me.

I said, “Hello again, Adwyn-sofran.” Your tongue caught the scent of eyepaint.

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“Hi? Who are you?” I asked the immaculately-dressed plain-dweller.

He clicked his tongue once before replying, giving me a disarming smile, “Oh, me? I’m nobody. I might have dropped by the Llygaid Crwydro twice or so, but I am in Gwymr oh so scarcely. No, you wouldn’t remember me. And I don’t remember you. How odd.”

This plain-dweller had stood listlessly in front of the library, looking all around, and checking a pocket ringglass. Over their breast and forelegs a silky red robes with twisting green filaments flowed. On the breast of the robes lay some embroidered pickaxes and a pile of ash. Even for a library patron, they looked well-dressed.

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“The bodies need to be guarded,” the pink-scaled guard was saying to Adwyn, “don’t they? You’re plenty big and strong sure, but I can watch your back.”

Didn’t they hear me? “Who are you?” I asked again, a bit higher. I stood somewhere behind Adwyn, beside Digrif, but I knew they could hear me.

The short, mouse-like dragon at last glanced over, frowned, and tossed me a, “Ceian,” before turning back to the schizon-clad adviser.

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“The bodies are gone?” I said with a snap of my tongue. “Where did they go?”

Adwyn was still prodding the tarp in front of us, and still speaking, thinking aloud, “These are sandbags, decoys.”

The orange drake, face hidden behind a dust mask, turned from the cart. When he did, every careless scale had been shed. This Adwyn, I could imagine, was the last thing Raganari had seen before her end. “We have been robbed,” he said.

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As the knife plummeted, my hope fell with it. I hung there on the net for a few beats and then Adwyn arrived.

He didn’t glance at me; he unsheathed a short blade. In a half-dozen quick, precise swipes, he slashed at the netting. But instead of trying to cut all the way through like me, he resheathed the sword, gripped netting and pulled.

It came right apart, and Adwyn had flown through before my eyes unclouded. I flapped after him, frills folded, tail coiled.

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“I can’t imagine killing me would end well for you⁠ ⁠—⁠ or accomplish your goals, for that matter,” Adwyn said, peering down at me with a look of patience and recognition⁠ ⁠—⁠ as if he’d had this conversation before.

In front of me the orange drake flicked his tongue. I had to look up to meet eye with him, and I broke it just as quick. “Granted you even had it in you to do it⁠ ⁠—⁠ and you don’t⁠ ⁠—⁠ you wouldn’t survive my assassination. And if those two conditions didn’t hold, I⁠ ⁠—⁠ personally⁠ ⁠—⁠ wouldn’t recommend this. And not simply because my life is in question, either.” He paused. “Can you tell me why? What purpose could it serve?”

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When the eighth long ring chimed, it didn’t stop on the sixth note. The timbre turned from the bells of the highest carillon to the raw or piercing double trumpets you only heard in the cliffs⁠ ⁠—⁠ because of course the cliffs lacked the restraint and poise of sky music. And yet, the sound closed in like a coming doom.

The trumpets remembered the carillon’s melody inf repetition, and they melted, culleted and reglazed it in the logic of the Frinan anthem: Mlaen’s anthem, the one she’d commisioned only days after taking the throne. It shone out, because you always heard Dwylla’s anthem blaring at Dim-Fflamio games or being played out of key somewhere in the Moyo-Makao. Above, the doom drew closer.

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Clouds drew in asudden and hid the suns, bearing down on the world. The ninth long ring came to a close like it was seeking us out in the cliffs, faintly.

Out here little skinks slithered along the cliff faces, hunting the last glider-scorpions and tentacle-snails before the gray season in full fell. The calls of the ax-crested pterosaurs filled the air, sounding reedy and warbly. I saw one swoop down all asudden and fly off with a dust turtle I hadn’t even seen, hiding behind a low fern.

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The drake felt death breathing down his neck. He laughed.

“I cannot imagine killing me will end well for you⁠ ⁠—⁠ or accomplish your goals, for that matter,” he said, peering down at nothing. He smelt the holly.

“One day I’ll find the will, you know.”

“What has it been? Ten, fifteen gyras?” He fluttered his tongue. “I don’t glimpse you doing this out of any lingering hate.”

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Adwyn knew it was mistaken, but sense was sense.

The schizon-clad drake lighted down on the granite hall like the pupil of Gwymr/Frina. One glance was spared to the male assistant barring the door. Then the adviser scanned the four guards watching.

He smirked, and strode right up to the assistant. “I must speak with Mlaen.” The words came piercing like light, and his studied glare shone upon the assistant.

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Death was breathing quietly in the dark.

The feeling hadn’t left Adwyn since that cursed iron gate came close behind him. From everywhere and in everything⁠ ⁠—⁠ sight, sound, smell⁠ ⁠—⁠ there was a certain malignity, and it settled into his scales. He would molt next cycle, he knew; and it wasn’t soon enough.

Adwyn drew a calming breath and spat out spicy venom. After an inhale the dew came back, and he let it; his soul needed it.

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Sometimes the stars visited in fire and rock and for a night we fluttered a little nearer to heaven.

Down here, while you rested belly-down on some harsh slab, the stars could almost be painted on a shell, and whatever numinous world they limned could well be an existence apart. Most times it was.

Dusk dwindled away, and the stars were settling down. I thought they’d be as bright and beautiful as ever. Below them, though, as some dark blue dot on some crumbly butte in some forgotten spate of cliffs in the vasty night, I stared up and couldn’t keep the dew from my fangs. Couldn’t not wonder just how we connected to this infinite sky under which two dragons could die, without it even flinching.

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“C’mon, Kinri. Let’s go.” She meant to the Dadafodd; she’d said that’s where we’d find the drake. “C’mon. My leg is getting done with me standing on it.”

“Sit down, then.”

“I’m not going to sit down, I⁠ ⁠—⁠ we need to get to Dadafodd so I can get my shit bandaged up.”

“If you sit down, maybe your leg will feel a bit better when you start walking aga⁠ ⁠—”

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“Begone, skyrat,” the forest-dweller said. “You are not welcome here.”

Arall was behind us, already walking out of the room, her toes releasing a door handle. She was muttering, “I keep telling her that, and she’s still here.” When released, that stone door paused, about to shut us inside, like a trap soon to snap closed.

At least I wouldn’t be trapped here alone; besides that forest-dweller⁠ ⁠—⁠ “her unholiness”⁠ ⁠—⁠ who right now was raining her ire down on me, there was Mawla, slinking around, half unseen.

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This is the first story we ever published.

“Thou shalt not violate causality in my domain”. Or so commands the third or fourth item (I honestly can’t remember) on the constitution of this dingy little backwater monarchy. It’s a slithy little law, it might even be called clever, if anyone it concerns would actually follow it.

If you had told me any political leader would remain in power after the first Interloper stopped by, I wouldn’t have believed you. Doubly so, if you had told that same first guy would strike up a deal with them, effectively cementing the same powers you’d expect to be destroyed.

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Counterfactual.

There’s an open problem in philosophy – it involves understanding and dealing with these things called ‘counterfactuals’ or ‘what if scenarios’. “What if the Titanic didn’t sink?”, “What if Lincoln hadn’t been shot”.

The problem, in essence, is that these statements seem sensible, some would even say they have meaningful answers. The problem is that predicate logic literally cannot handle counterfactuals, a limitation built into the nature of material implication.

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Somewhere above, as if waiting, the loversuns still shone.

Below that⁠ ⁠—⁠ past all the ash, dust and smoke⁠ ⁠—⁠ the two suns’ light became a vague hint, offering the lake’s surface to the shadows. And they accepted, waving their shadow tongues, swishing their shadow tails, and enveloping.

Trudging over the crumbly shell of this molten glass lake, you’d tire of the lack of light or company in your first breath cycle. The Berwem was vast and empty; there was only me and⁠ ⁠—⁠ somewhere I couldn’t see⁠ ⁠—⁠ my companion, Hinte.

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I was alone.

As I limped over the molten glass lake, only one set of footsteps cracked the crumbling skin. My heart floundered in my breast, still wracked even with the argument behind me. Salty, sour venom dewed on my fangs, my anger leaking out. My tail uncoiled from my leg, and I drew a shuddering breath, and bit back a cough.

Every motion and habit stood salient in my awareness, with no one else and nothing else to distract me. The vog renewed its constrictions, so much darker now without the figure in bright-white leading me. I took another breath.

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Up above, past the lake’s shroud, there were birds, clouds and stars. I looked at the gray blackness above, hunting for something outside the mind-numbing tedium of the lake. My last canteen had drained to a half. We hadn’t encountered any rockwraiths.

At one point I’d scribbled flat, imagined monsters in the dust while Hinte wrenched at an uncooperative cryst. My scribbled rockwraith had snarled with massive claws dripping gore, mouth agape with angled sword-teeth and streams of caustic venom flying forth. I’d smiled but not laughed, and that kept my throat satisfied.

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“Kinri. Do you smell that? I smell blood.”

I flicked my tongue and whirled its forks. After a beat it was pressed against the roof of my mouth, and I only smelled the evil sulfur of the Berwem. I ignored it and grasped for the tastes at the fringes. Grape and chamomile? No. Boily crab meat? No.Faint sweat and blood blowing in from the distance⁠ ⁠—⁠ there it is.

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We hunted.

I’d learned hunting from my tutors, but some details were different on the surface. In the sky you could exhaust yourself and fall to your death, or drop your prey and lose it forever. But the basics hadn’t changed: every predator had its own unique skills, own way of hunting its prey. Without a lot of strength, or any deadly venom or really big claws, you had to rely on teamwork and better senses⁠ ⁠—⁠ your eyes, frills, and above all else, your tongue.

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“Hinte!” I yelled out.

On the other side of the dark-green wiver a slender, black thing shot out from the vog. Like an arrow it plunged into Hinte’s side. I didn’t see the bite⁠ ⁠—⁠ but Hinte growled deep in pain. I was yelling out in fear, in useless warning. My wings twitched but the sight had vitrified me.

Another shadow flew at her neck. The wiver twisted — the creature flew close, belly running along her neck, a near-miss. There was a hissing growl.

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Definitions for fantasy terminology used throughout Endless Stars.

an opposable finger attached to a dragon’s wings. It is long and dextrous.

a cool volcanic lake filled with molten glasses and unmelted metals.  Its fragile surface contains a hardened mix of its glass with the ambient soil, called dustone.  All sifting occurs here.

a cycle of inhaling, exhaling, inhaling again, and exhaling again, which cycles air through the air sacs and and lungs.

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As I killed the mantis pinned beneath me, I wondered if that was a cry for mercy forming on her palps. First of all I brandished my knief (for I had disabled her with only my natural instruments), and watched it make fear on the face of the mantis below me, and her companion now halting a few strides away.

(I like to think I had the menace to make such a simple weapon chilling to behold.)

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A little nymph cries over a great dark lake. She sobs and heaves and pushes her paddles but it doesn’t get her anywhere. She shivers.

There is something looking for her, she knows it. A large wave hits the boat and it rocks. She is crying because she is alone and lost and there is a monster in the lake, swimming, hiding, waiting. She saw it.

She paddles harder. Can she get to one of the other boats? They move farther away. Are they leaving because of the monster? More tears coat her green eyes

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