Musical Magic Practice
The lyricists sit cross-legged before bubbling plates of pale liquid and hum. Space stretches wide between them; any of them could stand and walk sixteen strides before reaching a neighbor. Their throats hum with all the volume of brash conversation and sixteen strides only dulls the sound to that of a whisper and the noise iritates, burning away at the singleminded focus a lyricist needs to master the essential wave shaping.
And the ash of this irritation presents itself: the ground beneath them is a vast field of stone warped under the weaving of amateur songs and fruiting with knobs and gnarls and almost fractal with bubbles and bulges of sphere on recursive sphere. Even now, against the din of practice, a dim lyricist loses control of his pitch: the pale liquid before him goes still, and the ground gently resonates. It gives him a jolt, and silences him before he tentatively rejoins, matching his pitch with those all around, none of whom have it quite right.
At the fringes are the lucky ones, who have all the class to one side. On three sides do the walls of the monastery cup the stone yard, and the last one, fenced instead of walled, looks out over the slope of the mountain. Walls reflect sound, so here is where the smartest connive to place themselves. And the lyricist sitting just off center, robes finer and brighter than the worned and faded median, will be the first of all to complete today's exercise.
The pale liquid — not water, not nearly as accomplished — is perfect for training the essential wave shaping. High surface tension, miniscule weight, silverlymph is a substance so slight that a strong summer breeze will steal up globules and float them bobbing away. Essential wave shaping is only a little different: when a lyricist like the bright-robed adept matches its inner frequency, with no interference at all save the overtones, his silverlymph will mold itself to a perfect sphere floating above the plate.
Or it would be perfect, if he weren't surrounded by his feckless fellow students still struggling with the pitch. As if they couldn't hear the liquid singing.
Redrafter's Drought (Alchemist Timeloop)
On the first day of spring, the alchemist in pink robes learns that she can save the world. She might fail.
Her name is Rhylla. She sits at her desk, and she thinks, and she makes her plans.
Her master has told her but once of the mightest of the five great works. Not the philosopher stone and its elixer of life (which doesn't work); not alkahest, the universal solvent (which certain coatings can resist); not azoth, the panacea (which is quite ineffective against truly fatal injuries); and not dragon's breath, the essence of life.
The legends speak of a potion unparalleled in potency, whose ingredients spans the whole range of the world, whose difficulty sufficient to challenge all the skill of a grandmaster transmuter to merely achieve a failure less than absolute.
Her master told her the legends are fact. She knows the potion has been brewed but once — a secret which keeps itself, as the very possibility that the mixture might ferment once more inspires tremors in those with any sense or imagination.
The possibility is secret, but hints of it have escaped into those reverent rumors which pass between the tight lips of alchemists.
This work they've given many names: the Redrafter's Draught, the Rewinding Wine, the Elixer of True Eternity...
It's dismissed as myth, of course. Even if it weren't, surely the expense, surely the peril, surely the absurdity alone, would dissaude any from the attempt. Nevermind that it supposedly bestows the imbider just short of absolute power — it could never be made, they say.
Some can weigh the odds. Some have the paranoia to pay attention, and put puzzle pieces together. Rhylla is one of them.
A seer slain dead in the fogless isles, eyes excised from the skull.
An order placed and delivered for a carcass of the windseeker, a bird faster than sight whose speed of thought is utterly uncanny.
A single scale missing from an elder drake of the soul-lizards who taught the desert savages the lost art of astral projection.
All isolated incidents, difficult to correlate into significance if one were even aware of all of them (unlikely, if one didn't already know their significance). But the last key for this manyfold lock lay hastily described on the pink-robed alchemist's desk, a letter translocated instantly from source to destination, the writing so rushed that the ink smeared. Truly, she expected this.
Only one person knows the chemical code of this desk to translocate to it, and the concise precision of the words is unmistakeable. Six words, and they practically cost a life. The author would never, could never, write another letter. The gravity nearly pulls her into the page.
Yggdrasil assulted. Fruit stolen. The Elixer.
Beside the letter, a scry-bowl ripples, the image inside already fading. The alchemist had checked, and confirmed. It still shocks her that anyone would dare assault Yggdrasil, the subcontinent spanning tree guarded by the world dragons.
She saw those who dared. A rogue nation, imperial defectors, assaulted the world tree. Black-clad, half-invisible insurgents who rapidly breeched the perimeter, slinging fell explosives and chemicals never sactioned. They sought the seed of the world.
And they must have found it.
Rhylla assumes they have skill enough, moxie enough, and luck enough to try and complete the potion. She must assume this. She can weigh the odds, and this possibility is far too heavy.
The alchemist in pink robes stands swiftly. Every moment now will be measured tight against an excruciating standard, and every bet would be that she will come up short.
As she walks out of her study, she begins to think harder.
Dragon Erotic
Minde liked poutyfruits, right? I slinked over the road emerging from the dense woods, carrying a basket loaded with poutyfruits in my wings. A quartet of songparrots trilled on a fence at the very edge. As I passed, a light green parrot hopped up and glided down to my shoulder.
“Not today, Rauchen. I’ve an evening planned.”
Rauchen warbled, but glode to the ground and chicken-walked away.
I was stopped by a trill from a red parrot in the quartet-cum-trio. Minde’s parrot, Rosque.
“She waits for ye pass the hill.” She cocked her head, eying me with her left eye. “Said it’s where no-one will hear you.”
Oh. My tail lifted, and it took an effort to let it fall. A thanks had barely left my lips before I leapt to the air, threshing my wings for the hill. Not far from the woods where I said I would be—how thoughtful of her!
Sweet anticipation drooled my lips. I wiped it away. I needed to look proper. Minde liked me fancy and posh. As I flew through the air, I wriggled under my cloak. It had been her idea, hiding something lewd under my impeccably correct and formal wear. But beneath it, tight leather dressed my scales, in a deep, lush red.
I held my urge to yank off the straps of my cloak, reveal the scaletight suit the onlookers below. Minde would smile that wicked smile of hers. Something so brazen would wrench a kiss from her lips. Or two.
It was worth it. But I cared too much about the consequences to bring myself to do it. Behind the hill lay a clearing almost perfectly out of sight of the watchtowers; you couldn’t even see a building from here.
The woods marched up to the edge of the clearing, which left a rug of leaves hanging over the area. So I dove into the ground, sliding through the crunching leaves. It wasn’t water, but it broke my falls nicely enough, and Minde would hear me coming.
Had she hid in this rug? My tail curled into a ball. It was just like her to play a game like this after getting me started. No one will hear you. A deliberately loud crunch came from somewhere else in the clearing.
Oh, so it would be one of those kinds of games. I’d look for her, she’d look for me. Whoever found the other first got exactly what they wanted.
It wasn’t fair. She had time to set up, to plan this out. I hadn’t even landed strategically.
“Gah,” I groaned. Then groaned again. I shouldn’t have made a sound.
I wriggled way through the leaves. We’d never played this exact game before, but the rules seemed easy enough to guess. Slither through the leaves. Flying or walking was cheating.
Why did it have to be so loud? I could move slower, but now she knew where I was, and so I had to leave there, but then if I moved fast it just exerbated the problem.
Crunches. Right beside me.
I rolled sideways through the leaves. Minde’s giggle bubbled up behind me. When I had put some strides between us, I rolled overhead. Probably cheating, but I was losing.
When I rolled to a stop, spread my wings as if to paddle through the leaves. But I felt a a foot wrap around the tip of my tail.
I could squirm away, try to get the upperhand. But I didn’t want to. I liked losing. Minde always made me regret it, always made me crave more.
Another foot wrapped just ahead of the first. The first moved, repeating the action. Another. Another. My tail wriggled. I let my legs splay, sliding me into the leaves on my belly. Another. Another. I licked tang from my fangs. My eyes clouded. My tail wrapped around the feets.
A toe brushed against the soft scales a handspan from my vent. A hindfoot pulled my tail from its coil around the gripping feet. Then the hindfoot gripped the tip of the tail and the other hindfoot joined it. Held in every foot, my tail was pinned. It wriggled, but didn’t move.
The forefeet rubbed the leathery frabric into my tender scales. I squeaked. The forefeet released me, and the hindfeet inched forward in their absence. The forefeet gripped my flanks, then ran along me. My lower belly. My belly. Rubbing circles on my belly. The pits of my wings. My chest. The pits of my forelegs. Sliding under them.
Meanwhile, the hindlegs released me to run themselves through my hindlegs and gripped my tail once again. We lay like that for several beats, entwined. Minde’s breath fell on my neck, and I was smiling like a hatchling. We’d knit ourselves into tighter knots before, but this just felt nice.
My wings spread fully, and wrapped themselves around Minde. She twined around me tighter. I wrapped her tighter. She squeezed my tail.
“Ah.”
A wet giggle in my frills. Minde pressed down on top of me, emphasizing her own weight.
“Whatever shall we do about this little suit of yours?” Her voice rose and fell in a cadence. “It's in the way.” Her grip on my tail twisted and any response I might was lost in the resulting squeak. “Oh, but this may do just as well, frilly me.” Her toes drummed up and down my tail. “I could play you like an instrument.”
“Please,” was what I could manage.
Another giggle. A foreleg wrapped around my breast, and another snaked up the my chin, pressing my head up. I followed it, cloudy-eyed, and my lips met Minde’s.
When we kissed, the leaves froze in their flight, and all the songparrots were at rest. My tongue slipped from my mouth, but Minde wouldn’t let me in. I licked her lips. Her foreleg pulled me in closer.
Her lips parted, and my tongue slips right in. Her mouth tasted tangy and sweet, and it mixes with mine. I could feel dew pouring from her apertures.
I broke the kiss.
“Minde,” I breathed.
She opened her mouth, but I stuck an alula in it.
“I brought you some poutyfruits.”
“They aren’t called poutyfruits you wingless—” I sticked the round yellow ball in her mouth. She bit and a foreleg tried to take the fruit from me.
“No no,” I murmur, and I feed her the rest of the fruit. She let me. I shifted my grip as I did, and it ended with us lying side by side in the leaves.
I pounced on her, wresting her onto her back. Now I was on top.
“Cheater,” she said.
“As if this whole game wasn’t one big cheat on your part.”
“You just drag.” But her words fell as I pushed my snout toward hers. Her hindlegs still gripped my tail. “I am going to unstrap you. Last longer than a minute, okay?”
Even the Moon Goes Black
[A lazy gryphon takes the chance to erase every mistake, and faces the empty page that remains. A time loop story.]
A hard red cloud swept in from the distance. Going back east. If I rolled down onto it, I could make it to back to port without even flexing my wings.
But I had just found the perfect soft spot on the yellow cloud beneath me. The sort of position it makes hours of small ajustments before everything's perfect, and the world had to end to make you want to get up. You know how it is?
When did I have to be back in port anyway? By sundown, right? I didn't have any outstanding appointments or nothing — I'd remember that, right?
A squeaze, and a floatmouse was poking his fat little head, cheeks bulging with yellow cloudstuff.
The very second those beedy black eyes caught sight of me, you saw a fiery, consuming sort of a fear erupt on his expressive little rat face.
He thought he would die.
He must think awfully highly of himself.
I deigned to lift a single talon, sweep it over and flick hard that rat's head.
An awful discordant shriek, and I smelt — something new, no points for guessing what.
I was able to ball up my talon and give the guy a big nuggie before he found the sense to scurry away away in mindless terror.
So mindless he went clean off the edge of my yellow cloud.
And like that, the floatmouse floated off into the sky.
I leen back, watching the cirrus clouds drift by miles above me.
The sun stood there at some halfway degree of the sky. Daring me whether he'd fall down to set.
He would, but till then let me rest.
Into the Desert of Leaves
There's something about wandering the desert of leaves, I don't know.
The trees — what were trees — are mostly horizontal things, crumbling cylinders. The animals — what were animals — existed as dust and fragments. You'd walk and you'd see a great white rotting mound of death, and you'd wonder whether it were one animal or a whole list.
A scientist could put the pieces in place, probably. What were scientists.
But the trees and animals were details. It was called the desert of leaves.
You were glad there was no wind, because the top layer of the ground crunched into brittle pieces when you stepped. You wore goggles anyway, your bags weren't sealed tight.
The sun was a mercenary, and as if his contract with the kingdoms of life had ended with the death of all these trees, it glared vaguely from the dark pall of the sky. Whoever its new client was, they must intend you dead from all this heat. Your clothes were sweating.
Miles. You'd walked miles under this sun. Breathing this still aridness.
You hadn't seen a person in—
Calendars were dust.
As bad as the sun was, the desert itself was its own kind of radiation. Every moldering tree, every pile of death, it wore on you, it withered.
You wandered on.
You found something.
What were trees no longer quite looked like trees. What were animals no longer quite looked like animals.
This no longer quite looked like a person.
She still wore her wedding dress. The cheekbones were still in place, like the last hint of a smile.
She still wore that ring.
You bent down, looked close at the broken skeleton.
It felt like a disturbance, but the desert of leaves was no place for something like this.
I took the ring and wandered on.
There's something about the desert of leaves. Something lonely. That's not quite it. It wasn't something you felt, but realized. You felt the desperate touch of air, the urging, the pleas.
No, the right word is welcoming.
A Preposteriat's Failure (Only Aporia)
There’s something mathematical about a preposteriat’s failure, something geological in the way it piles up. Something literary in the interpretive paroxysm of it all.
I lay on the sandy beach at the end of time, watching the sun set backward. Idly, my feeler tentacles fingered the obsidian key. Cut themselves on the handle where it'd shattered. Where I'd shattered.
It took a meditative exercise of will to restrain myself, and keep from throwing the thing out to some final obscurity at sea.
Over past the sea, at the horizon, the warm rays of golden hour sunshine enchanted the surf. I wondered if cunning fate, as one more gambit, could contrive to steal back the key if it was thrown. Perhaps a rushing undertow would guide it to another shore, or a covetous seabird would pluck it from the sky. Maybe I'd change my mind immediately after, and spend my last hours melting in salt water, tentacles groping for that long-sought treasure.
I still wanted to throw it. Bury the mystery forever. Let this sunset mark an ending, instead of a beginning for another night spent chasing answers.
Cut my losses. It's what you'd do, isn't it?
But then again, perhaps you wouldn’t. Why else would you still be here?
You want answers, just the same as me.
When I think about who I am, what I'm all about, I think of the first time I met a preposteriat. I wasn't an acolyte then, and knew only tales and felt only third degree effects of fate. Out in the sticks where time flows linearly and your genelogy is a tree, not a graph, we called those robed mystery figures "seers". Seers!
I got my name the same day I got my genitalia, feeling puberty tug me in either direction. It happened during school hours and I got the rest of the day off because of it.
So I was following after my mother like a little duckling. My head was buried in a cheap fantasy book (we could only buy the cheap ones) and I would walk stright into poles or walls and mother would spray her anger and I'd flinch and keep my tentacles off the scented paper for just long enough she'd stop watching. And the cycle would begin anew.
We lived out where the roads were dirt and and the houses were piles of stones and the schoolhouse was a pile of pretty stones. Once a moon, I think, was how often my foot ever touched cobbled streets. Inside the shell of the city's wall, though, the streets were slick. It felt good to slither over the hot black stuff. I asked my mother and she had called it asphalt.
I don't remember the buildings we passed, and I don't remember the smells (my tentacles were occupied). But I remember stopping in front of the church like a giantic spire to unkown heights, and how it smelled like something always burning.
My mother pulled me into the spire and dragged me up ramps until I was plopped squishingly down in front of the purple-eyed seer. I was still shell-less, it hurt.
The seer didn't even wince. He looked.
My mother didn't have to say anything. The seer, who had seemingly just been waiting here for us, simply signed, "And you shall be called Aporia." The movements were grave, as befitted a declaration of Fate itself.
That was it? But the seer didn't walk briskly away to other tasks, the way they tended to do at the conclusion of any task.
He regarded me with twitchy, excited tentacles on other side of his face. He went on to sign, gaze drifting to my mother, "You should be proud."
By now I knew enough language to wave, "Why?" (much to the chagrin of my mother).
A tentacle indicated the book I still held in an apendage. "You read those silly fantasy books, yes? Imagine a child named Mana. There is something Significant about that. The aporia is ineffable, inseperable, and the very backbone of preposterity."
The seer inclined his head, and before he turned, he indicated, "May the name serve you will." It had the stiffness of a ritual declaration.
There was the brisk walk you expected.
My mother turned to me then, face enraptured in one of her proud parent moods.
But that doesn't matter for this story. What does is what happened because of that name. Aporia. The very backbone of preposterity itself. The name made me into who I am writing this story, crafted me into its perfect wielder.
I pored over books about time and causality and physics and — when I had the permission, from a seer (acting, assuredly, on behalf of Fate itself) — books about preposterity.
I learned that the seer had lied to me. Wearing named Aporia wasn't like being named Mana in a world of magic. It has like being named... Darkness. Black magic. Aporia was that maddening impossiblity which reality itself flinched from. It was less like the backbone of preposterity than it was the explosion forcing air to flow away.
Fate had decided me an explosion. But what would I blow up?
Words are stupid.
I'm sitting here and swarmed by sounds like I'm a slab of meat and they're the flies and I'm marking down all the names of the sounds. The slam of the doors of the people just now getting home. The buzz of the insects infesting in the people's and in the garbage (like those are different things). The puff of clouds hitting facades.
There's the thump of my heart and the scratch of the pen and the grind of my teeth, and I force out a sigh and the sum of my willpower is I don't turn the paper to shreds in my claws.
I'm sitting here and hearing all of these sounds and mark
A Spider With Purpose
I wandered, and I wouldn’t let it be said that I moved without purpose. Even then, my hair was sweetened, my eyes saw two full octaves, and I still had all eight legs. It was a sheltered look, the sort that had your bags gently lightened and your asked-for directions leading somewhere ulterior. More to the point, it was an unfamiliar, uninured look that spoke obviously of some reason behind your being in these parts—but that reason, the betting lady would note, was so often tourism.
No, I wandered purposefully. I did not tour, I did not dawdle. I was careful, I was sensible.
I was missing half my rations, and the smirks I couldn’t see knew why, and laughed. The blankly sympathetic frowns I could see gave non-apologies and useless advice.
“You should keep better watch of your shit. You know what happens to tourists in these parts.”
I detoured, and wouldn’t let it be said that I gave up easily. Yet, with the high-blue moon setting, I found myself brooding atop a boulder, instead of searching for stolen rations. Brooding, with no brood. I’d been old enough for a while, but males aren’t cheap, and children aren’t worth it. Yet.
There were brave ribbon-flies—the bright, poisonous kind—flowing around me, and I stopped to stare at the dazzle of colors. Would my vision grey out over sleep? Two octaves fade fast.
Aegri Somnia Vani
Location: somewhere cinematic with dramatic cliffs overlooking a sunset on the ocean.
I heard the click of the gun pressed to my temple. How had he sneaked up on me like that? I needed to know that trick.
A moment passed.
"Why not shoot?" I said.
"Is that really what you want to be asking, in your position?"
I grunted noncommittally, and re-considered.
He said nothing for while, so I suppose it fell to me to break this super-awkward silence.
"I'll admit," I spoke, "I really didn't expect to have this confrontation this early in the arc. I suppose you're going to take me back to the Kingdom, now?" He would probably parade me back in the capital as a demonstration of power. Good, I had contingencies in that case.
He ignored my question, and just addressed my comment: "You should recall the bounty still on your head. You aren't as secretive as you think and the locals aren't as trustworthy as you wish."
To be fair, he probably only knew my location because I don't care enough to hide it. I wouldn't tell him that, though.
"I did notice you avoided my question," I observed.
"I took it as an insult. I'm fully aware my government is compromised in your favor, I'd never expect you to get back within custody," a pause, then:
"I expected better," he tut-tutted. He literally tut-tutted. I've never heard someone actually do it.
"Hmm. I planned for a break just a bit longer, but that's how the saying goes, isn't it?"
He remained silent. Seriously, had this guy not heard of small talk?
"Isn't this a part where you monologue?"
"You seem to be expecting this to flow like a story. It won't. I have this gun press to your temple, and I fully intend to use it," I wanted to laugh, but I wouldn't insult the poor soul.
I settled for:
"No fun."
"Correct," I knew he had to be smirking, at this point.
More silence was smuggled in in the ensuing lull.
"Not much of a conversationalist, are you?" No response. "I guess I'll have to pay that monologue deficit, eh?" No laughs, tough crowd.
I cleared my, throat, had to make this good.
"You say this won't flow like a story. But you're wrong. It will. It already has, and I know it will continue to do so. You might have told yourself the world isn't narrative, that Heros don't always win, good guys don't always get noble deaths, et cetera. You'd have to, since you are a Villain. But I digress.
"The world makes sense. Hell, it's legible. Narrative trumps causality, narrative trumps reality. Heros always win, even if it's a Pyrrhic victory. You s-" interrupted by a laugh.
"Not even I expected this level of delusion, even from a Hero. So your parents fed you on fairy tales as child. The least you could do is outgrow them. Herohood will do you no favors; the last people who could be called Hero were killed. By me. You're the last, luckiest one. That's all. This alone won't save you."
Despite my earlier misgivings, I knew it was my turn to laugh. I did.
"Again, wrong. It kept me going in the pits of despair. When everything I've known was taken from me. When I reached for victory in the jaws of defeat and came back missing a hand. Herohood keeps me going"
"When you should just cut your losses," he continued for me.
"Heros win! I keep telling you as much! It's . . . I can't really explain, but I've, I've seen things. Impossible odds, brushes with Death itself. I never should have survived, but I did."
"Where I'm from, we call that 'luck'."
"It's more than mere luck! None of of this came out of nowhere! When I'm saved from the brink, it's not by random strangers or one-off coincidences. When I find a puzzle, the pieces are all there. When I reach a locked door, the key was picked up by a friend just a few hours past.
"It's not luck. I's like . . . it's providence."
He seemed to take that in. Maybe I convinced him? Maybe he was finally seeing thi-
"I tire of this."
"No! Don't," I was shouting at this point, "I don't know how, but I promise you, if you pull that trigger you will fail. I will win. I've seen it before. Innocent men, good men. All dead before they crossed me or were on the wrong side of my conflicts. When I say providence, I don't mean a gift from the gods. Whatever hand guides my fate is not benevolent, it doesn't have our interests at heart. It's very human, and very vicious. It does this for enjoyment, for entertainment.
"I don't know why this thing latches onto the Heros, but when it does no force on heaven or more can stand against them. Please, before you pull the trigger, just consider what I'm saying. Reform, don't stay a Villain, because this force will target you if you continue.
"A Hero," he said, some weird emotion in his voice.
"Yes,"
More laughter. What. This is fucking serious! Why isn't he taking this seriously?
"And yet you try to save me," that emotion was amusement, "don't heros save Innocents or whatever it was?"
"You are innocent! Please, you have to believe it. You aren't evil, you were just forced into a mold. You didn't choose this!
"But I did."
He pulled the trigger.
ii.
I didn't survive.
And My Breath is the Wind
The sun was shining, and the stars were out.
Laying on the last rung in the crown of a massive, earth-splitting oak, shrouded in shade, peering at the sky through the black purple, magic-imbued glass of a stolen telescope, letting the wind ance in his hair, and breathing in long, well-considered draughts, Evan was awake, but it was easy to miss that.
His arms and legs still ached from last night and the sharp chill of the air chided his skin, a sensation he’d long grown inured to. The birds chiped their annoying songs, but today they had some restraint. Even the whisper of the wind his some comfort.
In one word, the forest was waiting. It was early morning, not evening, and one cannot be relaxed with a day yet to unfold; and with mates, prey and food to be striven for, with dread curling in the wind, and the fear burned in Evan’s gut, the morning could not be peaceful.
Evan did not know what the forest was waiting for. If he were being honest, he didn’t know what he was waiting for. He always hid in the forest after nights like last night—it was tense, but it was familiar. No, the telescope was the piece out of place. Evan clutched it like it were soldered to his palm, like he should be able to stuff the device deep in his pockets at a heartbeat’s notice.
He’d never gotten anything like the telescope; it had been a spur of the moment, last night. So what did Evan wait for? Some signal that it was okay, this time won’t be any different than the others? But they’d be searching in the city…
All it took was a second.
The winds spun in a moment, and the breeze became a wuther. The oak’s leaves clutched tight to their boughs; the birds stuttered for a moment.
And Evan? His hands clutched the telescope; his legs slept on the bough. He would have stayed put, but he startled, his legs jolting awake, his hands flinging the telescope away. He still might have stayed put, but he yelped at his dropping the telescope and reached for it, not fighting his losing his balance.
He had risked everything when he grabbed it last night—he couldn’t lose it.
And that’s exactly what he did. When he planted down on the ground, landing awfully on his leg, twisting his arm beneath him and knocking all the breath out of him, it was all he could do to look up in the direction he’d been reaching.
And that was when he saw an overgrown squirrel scurrying away with the telescope, and that was when all the birds around flew away, escaping a storm of cursing.
He bolted after the thieving little rodant—what else was he to do? But what really happened was he tried to bolt after the thing. His groggy, aching, twisted leg folded right under him, and he fall again. He needed to do something about it.
Even more dirt spilled onto his rags with his falling. He didnt mind; these were his forest rags. He especially didn’t mind when the dirt clinging to his skin gave him the grip to get up.
Standing still this time, Evan groaned. Even this much weight crumpled the leg. He might as well have been standing on one leg.
The branch he’d slept on hung high above him. He likes this tree because its lowest branches can’t be reached from the ground, but that meant the fall hurt. He narrowed his eyes, sliding them over the length until he found where his bag hung.
He couldn’t climb like this. So he happed over to a rock on the ground, wrenched at it, failed because of his aching, half-twisted arm, wrenched again, budges it, wrenched again, and knocked himself over with the effort.
But now he had a rock and after four tries hit his bag by throwing it and, after eight more tries, hit it and flipped it over. Grunning, laughing, he stood among his belonging raining down and caught a certain roll of red bandages out of the air.
Flame bandages, they were. Of all of Evan’s belongings, these were one of the two no one would believe were rightly obtained. There may have been a bit of goading, a bit of negotiation that wasn’t backmail involved in obtaining them, but Ozzy had given them to Evan freely.
That was what Even thought about as the bandages were wrapped around his leg. Ozzy’s long-suffering glare, his head turned so that the way-too-tall collar of his silk robes hid the smirk creeping onto his face, and his parting words of, “Fine, fine. Take the damned things and get out. You aren’t even supposed to be here.”
He said something similar when he gave Evan the lighter he now fingered, having combed through the mess below the branch to find it. It was the other thing no one would believe he hadn’t stole. But they were both gifts, and even had even returned the favor. Once, with a spirit he found trapped ina spider web, twice with a little glowing flower.
Evan knew the return gifts were the only reason Ozzy’s family would tolerate his giving Evan these things, if they even knew.
Family. It might be nice to have, but the fire clan would never be his pick—how did Ozzy deal with them? And besides, the old woman was close enough…
Evan’s thoughts had wandered away, and he brought them back to focus by setting the bandages on fire with the lighter.
The flames kissed the enchanted fabric, and rolled along the red wrapped his leg. The flames bled through in hertbeats and raked blazing claws against his leg.
It should have hurt, but it didn’t.
Flame bandages were magical; they healed wounds, but temporarily. In a few hours, the apin and imjury would be back, and five times as bad.
But for now? He could chase.
If Evan hadn’t been lucky, the trail would have been cold. The squirrel had scurried away minutes ago, and he wasted so much time tending to his leg. But Ozzy’s lighter wasn’t just a lighter; it held, from the runes engraved into its side, enchanted flame that lit the ambient magic on fire—and all creatures bled an aura that stained and lingered in the air.
You needed to be a mage to use it, and Evan wasn’t, not yet. He couldn’t afford it.
He brought the lighter and its stark, engraved runes to his mouth. While Evan wasn’t a mage, he’d been working around that all his life. He took a deep, deep breath, and held it for a second, then two, five, ten.
Evan breathed out on the lighter and watched his breath light up the runes. They glowed and hummed and pulled more breath from his lips. He had to fight to brethe in again.
Evan had wanted to be a mage for a long, long time. When he’d gotten a chanced to plead to a priest for anything to help him to become one, she left him with the one piece of knowledge he’d cradled ever since.
Counterconceptual Training
The symbols crawled across the candle-lit page, schizophrenic, a patternless amalgam of patterns. The swirling, interstitial lines of ink and empty space crawled deep into the space beyiond the eyes. It unnerved, repulsed. But it was deeply intoxicating to the curious mind.
Eyes roving over passages even as their literacy atrophied, faces pressed to the skin of the page even as flesh sloughed from their skulls — I couldn't count the lives this thing has taken if I took the time.
But…
There was something about the dark brown ink that bargained for my attention. I shut, slammed, the book closed, my mind already tripping over the alphabet, the fibonacci numbers, the sequence of primes, anything to put mental distance form whatever—
Why am I doing this?
As the black, strangely-textured tome slipped into my satchel, I didn't kill the small grim working onto my face. I was always the best at controlling attention.
I pulled my head up as I zipped the satchel. The tome I was sent here to crib was taken care of —
But there were so many other books, spines contorted, almost begging me to pull them aside, give them a reading they haven't had in years—
I grabbed a handful of dirt from my left pocket, giving measured tossing over all the candles on the wall, extinguishing them. The only light remaining spilled from the exit.
But the shelves were still there, in my mindeye, packed like prisons with so many faces, such sad, poor little faces, downtrodden — so many sequences of letters, numbers, names, faces. I summoned images of my life, cute girls, things done last summer —
I'm outside now, out of breath. My mind had been virtually disconnected, detached, from my body. And yet, it, my body, still ran me out of there.
There were things to be said about Counterconceptual's training — mostly that it helped you not die painfully, rather than survive — but sometimes things worked out good enough.
Just a Drill
I sat in my second period class. The fire alarm went. There wasn’t suppose to be a drill today.
A familiar voice, clear against the other sounds, spoke:
“Run.”
It was timestamped to just a few minutes from now.
I got up and ran out, bursting through the door, into the hallway. I barely remembered to check my watch. This had happened hundred, thousands, millions of times. Each time it had been a false alarm. It didn’t remember any of that, however.
I fished my notepad out of my pocket.
’[10:47] Run,‘ I wrote.
I was panicking. “Left of right?” I breathed.
The response:
“Right.”
‘[10:48] Right,’ I wrote.
And I kept running.
There was the door to the downward stairwell. The staircase was U-shaped and the exit was right under the entrance. The best path was clear. I jumped the railing, spinning in mid-air to land in front of the exit (which was, like most non-class interior doors, already propped open).
At this point, I was in a familiar part of school, and getting to the exist would be easy. That was a bit frightening, as it meant this might have also been a false alarm. It couldn’t be a false alarm.
I wouldn’t exist otherwise.
I continued making a way toward the exit. I was still running, and harder, faster than I did on a regular basis. I kept pushing myself to go just a bit farther. I wouldn’t exist if this was a false alarm.
I burst through the door.
“Where do I go now?”
“You’ve done all you can.”
’[10:52] You’ve done all you can,‘ I wrote.
But I didn’t exist.
Abyssal Fog
When you gaze deep into the abyss, a part of you never leaves.
There were guards keeping watch on the eastern wall. Some walked along its length, other didn’t, whether to socialize of cultivate solitude. Some slept or relaxed in the quarter inside the wall, and some disappeared.
There was a sense of anxiety hanging on the place, and everyone felt it.
Sargent James channeled that anxiety into keeping a continuous and thorough eye on everyone. At least half a dozen people had disappeared, including the highest ranking officer, leaving the position of authority to James.
He made rounds around the length of the east wall. Every time he’d run into Alex. Sitting in a chair facing the ‘out’ edge of the wall, he looked to be reading a book. More often than not, however, he’d be staring out in the distance.
He felt sad for him, he really did.
“There’s nothing out there, Alex.”
He was talking about the thick fog that had clung to the ground just away from the wall.
It had hung there for days. No wind was ever felt, no animals went in or out, no sounds, no light.
They sent some guards into the fog to understand what was happening. They sent four guards, precisely.
A day later, two corpses appeared a ways away from where the guards entered. No one dared identify them, they just tried to ignore it.
Later that day one of the original guards appeared on the opposite side form the corpses. He seemed alive, but scared to death and back. He entered the quarters and went immediately to sleep.
He never spoke about his time in the fog and eventually no-one else did, either.
There was nothing beyond the fog. They just accepted it.
“I’m sorry man, but there’s nothing anyone can do.”
Alex had come from out of town. He was a family man with a wife and two sons.
“This is horrifying to us,” James had said to Tyreke, “but it must be ten times worse for him.”
“It’s nothing,” his voice was quiet, James struggled to hear it. “I’m just fine.”
“Nothing? Its your family, Alex. You’re dying inside, you ahve to be. No-one here is just fine.”
Alex was silent awhile. He started to stand up, but James pressed a hand on his shoulder.
After another while, he said, “I miss them. I didn’t—” his voice caught. He sounded about to cry, “I didn’t even want this post.”
“There had to be a way out of here.”
James wanted to agree. He wanted to be as optimistic.
Cold Hell
Cold pressed in from all sides.
Darkness hung like a curtain.
Anxiety slowly digested every thought.
Hunger eroded whatever was left.
I guess I’m in hell, Francis thought.
He just wanted to walk down the street and grab a drink.
He walked ten blocks. The scenery never changed. The same ugly houses. The same crumbling sidewalks. The same suggestive alleyways.
Did the world always look this fucked when you’re sober?
Francis had tried all variations of walking down side-streets and even a few alleyways.
He always ended up somewhere slightly different each time. If he walked up, and back down a side-street, the scenery always seems familiar… but something would be off. The proportions of a house change slightly, or an oak tree becomes an elm, or the door knobs end up on the left side.
Once, Francis found and tried to open the door to his house. His key didn’t fit. Several attempts later, he was upset and more than a little terrified.
He tried to break down the door, and instantly regretted it. He took one step into his house.
There was an unnatural cold. The feeling was something no amount of warmth could destroy. It settled inside you and it never went away.
Francis immediately wanted, no, needed to get out of there. He knew there was worse to come, that the coldness was the symptom, not the disease.
And the disease was incurable.
Lucidity
The day is exceptionally clear. I hold up my head, washing away the drowsiness with sunshine. I pass by a telephone pole, and I habitually flick my left wrist out. But I'm not thinking about that, I'm enjoying the beautiful blue sky above. All I feel is the just-noticeable breeze rolling past my hand.
My awareness goes to the faint fragrances on the air while my head lolls, my eyes catching some image I'm not focused on.
I intentionally don't notice the arm going through the telephone pole.
At least, not until I'm sure it's gone fully into my working memory. Like a spotlight, my awareness spins over to see that image. Looking beyond the veil, seeing what minds aren't to see.
I have proof. It was all I could think, that flourishing realization painted with equal parts joy and terror.
What now?
My mind was picking through those implications my whole awareness slowed to a crawl. I slipped, and careened into some corner of the street where no one happened to be looking. I'm engulfed, and I barely have the faculties to notice the ground really shouldn't be that far away.
But I can feel the speed of my thoughts slow until I'm reduced to only awareness. No response, no reflection.
I'm falling. Everything else falls away, leaving only this.
As my mind fades into nothing, my thoughts settle into a final pattern, remembering that damned David Hilbert quote.
“We must know, we will know.”
All this just because I wanted to test a stupid theory.
Ha.
I was expecting oblivion. This was weirder.
Everything here feels so… abstract? It takes seconds for my senses to settle, resolving to a grandiose castle foyer or something, but I can feel that it was just an interpretation.
Where could I be that I actually had to interpret what my sense told me?
I feel… bigger. More solid, almost, but it's so strange. Nothing here feels real, nothing feels material.
If this was the afterlife, I was not impressed.
The sense of unreality was amplified by the absence of any kind of human element. The foyer was vacant, the decorations look so stilted, artificial without feeling man-made. The paintings were technically proficient swirls of color and form, but with nothing visceral within them to latch onto. And the statues. They might be what happened when you asked an alien to make art for other aliens. It was… objective. Mathematical, platonic. There were centers, variations on theme. But nothing connected in a human way. They could be intense, without being meaningful. Sound and fury, signifying nothing.
I looked around, trying for some detail to interrogate. Sickly light poured in from vaulted windows, pooling, congealing on the ground.
Light shouldn't do that, I supposed.
I could see multicolor dust specks illuminated by that light. They sparkled, really. Like someone was making a tech demo, and really wanted to wow the audience. All particle effects, beautiful in a way that could only be engineered.
If all this was an interpretation, what did this place, if it even was a place, really look like?
“You ask a wrong question.”
I probably jumped. If the surreality of this place had me on edge, disembodied voices responding to my private thoughts certainly helped.
“Perhaps this will alleviate.”
I'm running out of adjectives to use, here. The congealing light aggregated into some humanoid figure, and it was all weird. The figure itself was obviously some subtle uncanny valley creepiness, and (of course) was also all weird.
Now pretend I said all that with more flowery prose and subtle poetics. Good, now I'll get back to the object level.
If I hadn't had good self-awareness and self-control, I probably would have stammered out a non-sentence and embarrassed myself. I'm so totally beyond that. As it stood, I stayed really silent for a spell with I got myself under control. It probably didn't help, since I didn't have much control of my face. Mostly likely it could read my entire internal response right from my body language.
“Why should you worry about your mind bleeding into your body, when you've already witnessed my responding directly to your thoughts?”
My mind bleeding into my body? Was this thing trying to creep me out?
“No.”
Then why was it using such morbid metaphors for mundane things?
“I found it colorful.”
So it's completely inoculated to its own creepiness. Explains a lot, really.
I found my voice, and also that my words flowed a lot smoother than they should, given what I was feeling.
“Creep factor aside, what did you even mean by ‘asking a wrong question’?”
“What color would you say the word ‘flourish’ is? How does it taste?”
What.
“Yes. I myself would answer ‘pink and green’ and ‘like bubblegum’ to those questions, but to you wouldn't answer at all. To you, the question is an aporia, an internal contradiction.”
Okay. “But my question…” I trailed off.
“Was ‘what does my demnes really look like?’ Consider that question for me. You start by asking about the true nature, but in the very literal next breath, you ask for a metaphor. “What is it really?” and “What is it like?” are two very different questions, whose answers stand in stark contradiction to each other.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“‘Sorry?’”—it made a non-verbal inflection that might have been a laugh, I guessed—“if this had been one of my siblings, they would have lied to you, or eaten you. You have made a this mistake once, keep that a constant.”
Eaten me‽ “What? Why?”
“Principle of explosion,” it said simply. “My kind must always behave logically or figuratively reasonably. But from a contradiction, any and everything follows. Ask a contradictory question, and you allow any answer; you give a license to do anything. And a person not bound by some strictures isn't really a person at all.”
Bizarre. Crazy. And yet, not incomprehensible.
“That both does and doesn't—oh, I mean it does make sense, but it is a bit hard to understand.”
“You're learning,” there was a pause, possibly for thought, “I have answers, but there is need for discretion.”
Suspicious, but I wanted those answers.
“What do you need me to do?”
Where the lanky, overweight, faceless form of my interlocutor might raise eyebrows (and blood pressures) while still being arguably 'humanoid', this thing was nothing close. I might have said this thing stepped out of a nightmare and decided to stop holding back, but that would dilute the sheer terrifying presence of this thing with humor.
It wore darkness like clothes. That was the very first thing I consciously noticed. It was formless shadows like the absence of substance, wrapped around its torso like a toga. It masked the true size of the thing, making me guess from what wasn't under the shadows.
Sitting down, it was half-again as tall as me. Its head peered down at me from a position that had me wondering if it had a neck or was just pretending.
The face was the worst part. Eyes and mouths. Eyes and mouths. It was covered in them, a collage. None of the eyes were pairs. Blue, green, cat-like, giant, tiny, they were slotted in-between each other and the mouths as a puzzle. At least the mouths were all human's, and not constantly /watching/ me.
It had limbs, but they were just as wrong as the ‘face’. Most were sparsely dotted with more eyes and were just as diverse. Muscular, atrophied, anthropomorphic, questionably possible. They didn't come in functional or rational order. The just sprouted from arbitrary places on the torso.
It was probably aware of my thoughts too, fuck.
This had to be an intimidation. No way he couldn't find anything better than this.
I said as much.
When it spoke, there was a deep and arid rumbling, textured like harsh noise resounding from a mountaintop. “It talks? It is aware?”
What I said was the understatement of eternity. “I know I asked for answers, but this is starting to look just the slightest bit sketchy.”
Winter Rain
The winter rain smashed wet, icy sheets into the dark concrete of the lot. Raindrops died with small plinks lost in the noise of the downpour. Slinking footsteps slashed and stepped. A dog was wandering through the night under the winter rain.
With blades like angling teeth, the dog’s rubs curled, skin sucking tightly against them and rain running through the crevices. As she prowled, the dog nosed the ground and gnawed on the scattered, empty wrappers littering the lot. Under a concrete overhang blocking the downpour, by a empty plastic chair, the aroma of a raw steak wafted, smelling strong enough to withstand the rain. The dog bounded after the scent with a lolled tongue and legs that didn’t seem to touch the ground.
A blue and pink umbrella spun, reviving raindrops to plink once more. Below that, a flashlight roamed the lot, dying, but it was enough to turn the dry column beneath the umbrella into a lonely lighthouse. Calls of “Marionne? rang across the lot, sounding quiet and defeated. The girl didn’t cry; but in the rain, you couldn’t tell.
From the concrete overhang where she would watch the steak and wait, a skitter of plastic came. With an “Oh!” of tempered surprise, the girl ran to her plastic chair. In its haste, the dog had barreled into the chair. In return, the girl barreled into her dog and held Marionne like that as the dog ripped into the meat. They sat like this, and the girl didn’t cry; but if she did, she wouldn’t be alone with her tears.
MLP/Worm Crossover
Celestia strode into the meeting hall. Her typical regal posture tainted with worry and anxiety.
Her eyes took in the scene, a room with both of the other princesses, the archmage, and her apprentice, every current high status member of the Equestrian Magical Society. There were a sporadic few politically inclined characters, notable a lichpony from some foreign land present only for his idle interest in trade with Equestria. Precious few dukes or barons (or any Equestrian political position) were here.
But it was the odd zebra shaman or griffon witch which finally solidified the connection she drew.
/Everyone here has a non-trivial understanding of advanced magic./
Celestia’s stride continued completely unimpeded by her idle thought.
Her gaze whipped around the room and again before settling on her sister, Luna. She allowed a small smile to touch her features as she took her place at the head of the table.
She waited just a moment for an introduction or a greeting. She picked up on the grave atmosphere in the room, and she forgot her expect ions of pleasantries.
She cut to the chase.
“How dangerous?” she asked simply.
It was a royal astronomer who answered. Star Bloom, Celestia recalled assigning her to the grand observatory in the ancient mountain range in the north.
“Something hundreds of thousands of miles in the sky. Something massive. Completely invisible, and it mucks up most magical sensing methods. It shrugs off scrying, for instance.”
Another mage spoke up. A council member.
“All practical divination rituals are virtually useless as well.”
Celestia spoke up. “Virtually?”
“We can carry out the rituals, and we do get answers, but they are gibberish. Either we accept results that completely contradict logic, or we are dealing with anti-divination measures unheard of since before the society. More advanced, even.”
Another council member, male this time.
But that isn’t the only problem. From what basic robes we were able to carry out, everything points to a creature with little or no innate magic.”
“Moreover, every causal analysis and retroclairvoyant analysis suggests this thing pops up seemingly at random and leaves just as well.”
Celestia’s brow furrowed. “Star Bloom, you said this thing is massive?”
“Energy flow analysis suggests something bigger than what we see,” she stated, then added: “An illusion, perhaps?
“I don’t see it,” Celestia replied. “If that were the case, we wouldn’t see anything at all.”
“Taken together, it looks like we’re dealing with something that interacts strangely with most of our magic. It would seem that we’re dealing with something that is not native to Equis at all.”
Several ponies (and non-ponies) scowled at that.
“Well,” Star Bloom started, “that is consistent with it’s behavior.”
Someone jumped into the conversation. “But that doesn’t explain the sudden appearance and disappearance.”
It was Luna who spoke up this time. “I have a theory, but I personally find it quite disturbing.”
“That and this entire ordeal,” some blurted out. “Go ahead and tell us. We gain [nothing?] for your silence.
“From what I understand, we are seeing strange objects which appear to be part of a greater whole,” she paused. “Does this not seem analogous to that of a sea serpent undulating though the water? I would not be surprised to learn it resembles a cross-section of such a creature as it intersects the surface of the water.