The Second Apocalypse
Miscellaneous Chatter => Writing => Topic started by: What Came Before on June 02, 2013, 01:33:15 am
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Sometimes (ok, a lot of the time) these will be incredible short, maybe a paragraph. But here I'm going to take a stand and put out something every day.
Feel free to comment or add to this thread. In the words of Slim Charles to Omar, "Do what you feel."
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Story #1
"There. Did you hear it?"
"What?"
"There's someone at the window."
"We're two stories up." It's just the pot. Or the drink.
"It's not the pot. You know pot just makes me sleepy." You should know that by now.
"Mel, I'm looking out the window and there's nothing there. Maybe it was a bird." Here it comes.
"I know what a bird sounds like. It was something else, like the sound of a spider crawling on glass. Don't laugh." I don't laugh at your pity parties do I? Like you're the first guy who can't seem to live up to his father.
"I'm not." But I'd have a right to. You know I have that final tomorrow, though you probably can't remember it's the econ one. The one where I'm on the A/B border...You know pot makes you like this, but it's always about you.
"You were thinking about it. You're asking yourself how I'd know what a spider on glass sounds like." You're the one I'm supposed to tell anything to.
"Mel, it's okay. Go back to sleep." Should I glance at the clock? Or will it stress me out, to know what time it is?
"You go to sleep, you have that final in the morning." And I have a paper and a little brother who is failing out of highschool. But I know you're judging me for those tokes I took...five hours ago.
"Alright. Just..wake me if the spider comes back, okay?." Don't fucking wake me, okay?
"I will." I won't.
"Thanks."
/story
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Sci Story #2
"This shit right here - it's our ticket outta this mess." Billy didn't bother to mention that the mess was as much our fault as the Enemy's, or that the ticket was a way too conveniently found weapon's creche.
We have shit luck, our plans turn to shit, and we get shit on but one thing shit doesn't do is fall into our laps. I'd taken this as our unofficial motto and managed to so far avoid falling into the jaws of the Reaper.
But I'm not going to lie, I looked at that gleaming xeno-tech like water in a desert. 'Cause we're all betting men here on Deltacron XCII, even the cautious, and Death - well, that motherfucker's the House.
Also, I'm aware that number may have meant shit to the Romans. Blame Xerexes Inc and their marketing department. Or fuck it, blame a universe that gave humans a Manifest Destiny (tm) without thinking what'd happen if were left to the interns to name newly conquered planets and stars. At least they left the quasars to the professionals, but even then one got named after Reagan.
"With these guns we can finally smoke those faggots and get the fuck off of Exy-2." Iz remarked while running his relatively delicate hands over what I took be the xeno version of a bayonet. Iz was a man of few words, by which I sadly mean a man possessed of limited vocabulary. He was, to my chagrin, more than ready to close the distance between his mouth and my ear with his personal, highly abridged version of Websters.
I watched as Iz and Billy continued passing the glyph covered firearms between themselves and our final Strongman Crux, with Iz gleefully reiterating that now we'd be able to smoke/stomp/break/dominate/"slap the silliness out of" our Enemy who were faggots/cunts/bitches/fags/pussies/hipsters.
After this overextended version of a dog pissing out the borderlines of its nation isomorphed onto gun owner's foreplay, I was finally allowed to examine the weapons and determine, in the event they were real and not booby trapped, how they actually worked.
(Something in me whispers "Isn't this whole planet a trap for boobs?" and internally I cringe that the cynic in me could be so lacking in cool points. How could the wisest, wry-est part of me make jokes as bad as my mother's?)
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Do homework for the bullies and they'll leave you alone, maybe pick you before any of the girls who outdistanced your skill in whatever "unit" the school had decided was a part of American gym class.
In a double past life - middle school, pre-Revelation - I'd resented being made an accessory to cheating, despite having proposed the arrangement myself, but now I was grateful. Back then it'd had kept my skin relatively free of bruises and spitballs, now it kept me from being one of the butt boys.
I made my camp far from the action, just close enough for Billy's watch to keep an eye on my person. Well, not my person really, just the magic box in my skull. If Billy'd been able to scoop out my brain and keep its services in a jar, he'd have been grateful. I was the bone in his salmon, somebody he couldn't just bully into submission.
It's not enough to be useful, and getting a man like that to take you on as a flight risk just means you end up as a dog on a leash. So I told him my girl, a smokin' young thing, had left me as soon as she could. Hinted she left me for a "real man". Flat out stated that being a Whiz wasn't good enough for my PhD parents, that I just couldn't get rid of that gut that drew my skinny frame into an uncanny valley.
All half-lies, save for the part with the girl, but it all worked to let Billy know I hadn't come to Exy-2 to play. Rather, as far as he knew, I'd come here to die.
The "fun" is dying down near the fire, the Strongmen and Kelly having used up the Callers but themselves tuckered out by the Flexibles.
Finally, far enough from Iz's snoring, sleep seems like a real possibility.
I lie back and think of gun-making aliens.
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In a world where everyone walks around with a smart drone, being a Whiz can be quite a convenience. In a better world, or at least one better for me, it'd be a world where being able to figure out all kinds of machines would make you standout at least as much as that one dude who ate a whole plane.
But I lived on an Earth where Whizzes were the repairmen for people who built gates between universes, people who deferred to Strongmen, Fleet-foots and the occasional Fire-Eye. It make sense in a sad kind of way - even the most beautiful machine could be punched and burned down to scraps.
Even before the powers, if you admit it to yourself, things weren't all that different. I mean, how much money did you spend on comics to read about people like you? And don't talk to me about Fantastic Four, don't pretend you bought that shit because you just had to know what was up with Reed Richards.
Geeks never ruled the Earth, any Earth, even before our powers kicked in. They just ran shit for the rich kids and pretty faces. Same as it ever was. But God must've known humans were especially dull, which is why I guess He sent down a Revelation to show us something the wisest and wry-est among us already knew.
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Viewers on Home must've keyed onto the fact of our apparent advantage, one I was more inclined to trust now that I was watching the descent of a bot holding a box which itself contained nothing less than some brand spanking new uniforms. Nothing like a day or two of not completely stinking like shit to put a vestigial smile on our faces.
I change in the relative privacy of my fellow prisoners, all camera drones focused on Kelly's plasticine body. The last woman we had, Amanda, looked almost exactly like her, save she'd been the victim of skin-bleaching, scalp transplant, and hair dye along with the usual plastic surgery that came with the sentencing. Amanda'd been told that shit was reversible, and given that she'd been a Flexible rather than a far more valuable Fleet-foot, I'd decided not to let her know my Whiz powers were telling me otherwise. Moot point now, though it was weird to think parts of Amanda had a far longer half-life than others. That jelly-bags of omnicone would, if undisturbed by the scavenging flora, lie in a by now unmarked grave with the perseverance of styrofoam.
Kelly for the most part seems to accept the ogling and her new resemblance to the Game's first female Medalist, though a bit of shyness causes her to try and awkwardly use her dope enhanced thighs as a curtain for the lips of her labia.
Kelly's dignity was a blip on my radar, if that to be honest. The biggest thing on our collective minds was the veggie iconography splayed out on our chests. I looked at the broccoli bearing a golden halo around its head and felt my heart sinking down to my balls.
We'd found a creche of workable xeno-tech, and I knew that shit was legit, so there must be a Mecha or three now in the hands of the Enemy.
How else do you explain this fucking shit? We'd gone from championing Saturnalia Crack Pipes to Johnny's Veggie Drumsticks. Unless humanity had pulled a 180 in my absence, we were well and truly fucked.
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The air is filled with the tire stain stink of dead Flexibles. Billy's head is pasta, smashed by the Mind-Grabber.
Our two surviving Callers are taking turns stabbing Kelly's corpse, the walking bonzai like things they'd charmed nibbling at the less plasticine dead. I take a moment to notice that the corpses of their actual rapists - Billy and Crux - are untouched by my fellows, and I wonder if it was really so bad having to eat out the ex-housewife who ran as fast as thunder and screams.
Sadly - or not, never knew much about Kelly - sounds are slower than thoughts.
I think to challenge their desecration, given our dismal circumstances, but then stop myself. Who knows how many charges are left in this gun? So long as they don't try to erect some kind of monument amidst the alien ruins, I don't think I'll be getting involved. Whizzes can't compete, even with shitty-ass Callers and their menagerie of bugs and carnivorous plants.
Not to mention without Callers super teams have to actually hunt, and in my fifteen years here I'd never been on a team that didn't have a Caller. What the fuck did I know about hunting? And with two years left before my Earthly incarceration, wasn't something I really needed to learn.
Besides, the Mind-Grabber might actually live through a lung perforated by a thrown stone tentacle. All depended on if the med-drones stationed on Exy-2 would get here fast enough, which was sorta a likely given since Talent like that must good for some ratings.
Survivors get drafted into new super teams, so with his fat-ass on our side we could keep going even if we're more than likely to be sponsoring fucking print-books at this fucking point. Wonder how he ended up here though, Mind-Grabber and Callers with genuine Talent are usually too useful to fall to the Draft.
I glance back at Iz, spending his final moments pinned under some stone monstrosity that's a cross between a wolf and squid. I almost miss the soundtrack of ignorance he provided my life, but then again he'd looked me in the eye as I and the Callers failed to lift up the statue and called me a faggot.
I'd flinched, but I think the Callers' were too weary to notice that even a stopped watch is right twice a day.
At least the Enemy got taken out by the Mind-Grabber before we'd even shown up. One guy with power enough to be famous, even if he stayed away from the front. Why hadn't he prettied himself up? Switched out whatever sugary, carb-loaded shit he had for meals with Johnny's Veggie Drumsticks?
"Coulda been a contender." I say to myself, glad that in the midst of this shit storm my wit's back online.
I hear the buzz of a drone but don't even look up. First one on scene's always a fucking camera-announcer:
"Witness, People of Earth, the Fate of all Conscientious Objectors..."
/story
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Sci Story #3
Golems made from garbage, wasp swarms resistant to pressure and force, a rain of bacon shards.
These are the messes he leaves me, things to be cleared up with the locals.
Games he plays, to slow down the inevitable passage of my knife through his heart.
The farther from the Center we go, the more ambitious he'll get. Everything's so...malleable out here. It's been awhile since I could see the silver sphere of Order, but now I can't even taste its battery tickle on the surface of my tongue.
I look back and see a the corpses of giant wolf-spiders, their flesh rotting to reveal an internal scaffolding made of something resembling cartilage. I look forward, toward my brother, and see indigo thunderheads stretched across the horizon.
The wind delivers his invitation, carrying the scent of tree sap and wet dog.
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My brother has left all glory to me, taking the role of villain for himself. Even before he comes they know him for the Devil, for it is he who tells warns them in their dreams. He steps through their towns, their cities, their villages, bruising reality before passing on.
Each time, I am the Savior he prophesies. I have saved children I could never have, men and women who I could never love. Each time he gifts me new forms of happiness, new lives to slip into. Harems, hometowns, sacrificial altars and even normal lives where I could act with an invisible hand.
I approximate the pre-damaged the physical and metaphysical, best as I can, before I move on. Children call out my name, one night stands curse me or ignore me or weep into the wind.
This time, I don't even do that. If I take these people out of their hardened syrup prisons, if I heal their exsanguinated sky scraping trees, all of them will die. I don't have energy to waste on resurrections, so I bear witness to my brother's ingenuity and quickly move on.
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The Wolf Wave crashes around me, a thousand jaws snapping at me as two thousand baleful yellow eyes bear witness. Fangs break on skin as hard as diamond, flame radiates outward from my sternum, blazing out of every orifice.
I burn and burn and the smoke of singed fur and cooked flesh fills the air but still the Wolf Wave scratches its claws against my now naked skin. Gold thread rags lie at my feet for a moment, then melt into scattering aurum rivulets.
Snarls and howls and whimpers fill my days, I am star blazing under the depths of a lupine ocean.
When its over, all that remains is a single cub, just old enough to walk.
I keep to my path, feet upon a bridge of ice i craft from the falling ink rain. The animal chases after me.
It's full grown paw prints stain the grass on the Other Side of the chasm, while my own steps leave no trace at all. (I am an Ouroboros, I feed on my history.)
I stop and look back, and the animal stops and returns my inquisitive gaze. I take a few steps forward and it mirrors this action. A companion for my quest then.
I keep to my path, and the animal follows, unable to see the smile on my face.
The path of my knife does not veer, but it's nice to know my brother still loves me.
/story
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Next four will use Madness's endings, if I have to burn out my brain to come up with some shit!
Ending used: And it was the exact colour of her scarf.
To be king you must be wise, and strong, and courageous. You must be worthy of all this luxury.
These are the words his mother, The Rose-Handed Queen, had told her eldest son even before he could walk, even before he knew what the words meant. "Courage", "Strength", "Wisdom" - each taught definition brought on recognition, and he could actually remember the weight of learning each one.
Yet sometimes strength is not enough, and wisdom must be forsaken so that others will rally around your strength.
And that is how the Queen's third son ending up taking the throne. Conceived rather late, and from the loins of a concubine no less, the third son of the beloved Rose-Handed Lady of Quall had learned little of wisdom or strength due to being weaned on bitterness and neglect.
Courage was a by-word for force in his mind.
What the rule of Liam would be bring the Empire, the once loquacious street augurs smiled wanly then murmured that the omens were silent and our future was our own to determine.
Of his eldest brother, his body was lost on the contested Northern border. All scrolls with his name were burned, all statues struck down, all paintings too beautiful to destroy were "corrected" to depict the face of Liam where his brother's once was. Of his second brother, who stood up to the third child of the Queen, there was at least some physical remnant.
This remnant was a discoloration upon the white tiles of the throne room, just under the statue of the nation's Rose-Handed Lady, dressed in simple robe of white jade and a scarf of rose quartz. There was a stain where the son had keeled, looking into eyes of his now divine Mother, marking the place where her second son had prayed for his life and his kingdom. And it was the exact colour of her scarf.
/story
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Heh, that didn't end up going anywhere. I think I messed up by trying to drive into the last sentence instead of working backwards.
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Sci story #3
Ending: Death always comes as a stranger.
Sparrows squabbled over mates on the rooftop, oblivious to the dying woman on the other side of their roof tile arenas.
The vehemence of the competing males caused this soon-to-be-corpse to raise her eyes to the ceiling, an action that would later be misinterpreted by her attending grand^5-children as their mother making peace with God, a figure who their mother had had her own rather public squabbles with via the Lord's intermediaries more inclined to death and aging themselves.
The truth of the matter was the woman's blurred gaze in truth looked through the lens of memory, piercing through not just the roof but the blue veil of sky and grey shaded shell of the moon.
(Again, keep in mind that she looked into her own past, and thus realize that there is no need to point out - with the snide cleverness so popular among those who think themselves clever - that even had she been in possession of far more powerful eyes her line of sight would have failed to touch that natural satellite which was at the time illuminating the other side of the world.)
It was in the lunar caverns of that rock pinched off from earth by an Artist or perhaps Mere Causality in Earth's fetal era that she'd contracted the disease that was both fatal and life prolonging, the illness that carries its victims through centuries yet invariably kills them. The illness that put paid to the cheeky aphorism that had never rung true to her ears: Death always comes as a stranger.
/Story
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I like #4 and #5. #2 actually has captured my interest most but I felt like you tried to include too many things - titles, names, pronouns. This is something I failed miserably at in that class in that I tried to include far too many things in my paragraphs - it was also why the paragraph was so important. It forced you to focus on one thing at a time.
Not to detract from your efforts. It takes balls to put your writing out there and to simply attempt short stories like this.
#4 suffered from "And that is how the Queen's third son ending up taking the throne. Conceived rather late, and from the loins of a concubine no less, the third son of the beloved Rose-Handed Lady of Quall had learned little of wisdom or strength due to being weaned on bitterness and neglect."
You might have included some context on the "King" or lack there-of. I'm a history buff, academically and otherwise, and my personal experiential indoctrination still trips me up into forgetting Matriarchal cultures and societies. Why is she a Matriarch and why is her King impotent?
#5 was wicked, felt like you channeled Bakker's Nancy moment.
The truth of the matter was the woman's blurred gaze in truth looked through the lens of memory, piercing through not just the roof but the blue veil of sky and grey shaded shell of the moon.
This might have been tighter, aside from the double truth - second truth should have been cut and it reads better. But, in my opinion, it flopped because it didn't sell this well enough:
It was in the lunar caverns of that rock pinched off from earth by an Artist or perhaps Mere Causality in Earth's fetal era that she'd contracted the disease that was both fatal and life prolonging, the illness that carries its victims through centuries yet invariably kills them. The illness that put paid to the cheeky aphorism that had never rung true to her ears: Death always comes as a stranger.
Which I felt were connected.
I'll come back to this later. Still have some philosophy homework to get to. Cheers.
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Thanks for critiques! One thing I'm realizing is that the daily format forces writing on a page, but then what comes out isn't as tight as it could be.
I'm going to see if I can create shorter stories to avoid the dying midway feeling of these.
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Sci Story #6
Ending: Dean felt shame, but resentment more.
When we were boys, I learned the difference between me and Dean. During our occupancy of our mother's womb I suspect Dean found a way to scrape a good part of his own feelings of inadequacy and that I, in turn, manage to inhale a sizable portion of this inky stain polluting the amniotic waters we shared.
I've spent many a day sitting by a window, alone despite my best efforts at mingling, and pondered the situation from a variety of angles. My dedication and achievements in the realm of psychiatric treatments in truth sprang from my desire to understand both Dean and myself, but mostly Dean. I am, in truth, an interesting but altogether not uncommon specimen of this age - another overly sensitive man burdened with a very manipulable sense of self.
Yet I've found solace in the company of other men who have climbed very high in a world measured by papers and theories, men whose triumphs have been nothing more than a form of running from a phobia of failure, a ravenous wolf ready to gobble up all who fall short of their own disproportionate expectations. I take comfort that I only have to glance about my department to realize other men are also engaged in this impossible task of rolling boulders onto the tops of sharp sloping hills.
Dean was another matter. Imagine a snowflake that bore the leering visage of some recognizable figure plucked from the uni archive's dusty hagiographies. That was my brother, an anomaly that I simultaneously rejected and idolized, a boy who upon being caught fondling himself could cry out with such righteous indignation: "Shut the fucking door Mom!" and then not emerge from the bathroom - shoplifted lad mag in hand - for another ten minutes.
I'd of course shared the story with a few friends of mine, an almost involuntary reflex that in another household would have led to my pummeling. Dean, however, did more than just laugh with those who would tease him. He laughed at them, judging his judges for what he saw as their cowardice, until they in turn marveled at a feat that would have gutted another adolescent's reputation. I suspect even a teacher or two, thinking of his own youthful stumbling in the sweeping current of puberty, had to admire The Boy Who Couldn't Blush.
Dean was entitled to the world, that was how he saw things. Of course he'd felt ashamed, as he'd later confessed to me, but it was against this very reaction that he'd placed the bulwark of his ire. Dean felt shame, but resentment more.
/story
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I think this might work better as a longer story. Trying to find the sweet spot where a story only requires very few paragraphs to be told, right now I think I promise big things then realize I don't have time to elaborate.
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I liked it. It lost some momentum with the one swear - no big deal, just commenting on my experience reading for your info.
I've spent many a day sitting by a window, alone
should be "I've spent many a day sitting by a window alone," yes?
When we were boys, I learned the difference between me and Dean. During our occupancy of our mother's womb I suspect Dean found a way to scrape a good part of his own feelings of inadequacy and that I, in turn, manage to inhale a sizable portion of this inky stain polluting the amniotic waters we shared.
This one was awesome, which is actually unfortunate because the rest of it suffers in comparison, especially:
I'd of course shared the story with a few friends of mine, an almost involuntary reflex that in another household would have led to my pummeling. Dean, however, did more than just laugh with those who would tease him. He laughed at them, judging his judges for what he saw as their cowardice, until they in turn marveled at a feat that would have gutted another adolescent's reputation. I suspect even a teacher or two, thinking of his own youthful stumbling in the sweeping current of puberty, had to admire The Boy Who Couldn't Blush.
This might have had some more explanation.
I realize you said you were toying with the ambiguity so perhaps these spots felt off to you too.
Bakker says it all with flags and sufficiency I think. Any reader is completely trapped "inside" the world. In terms of narrative, the story will always appear enough until you drop them flags. And in that case, you as a writer, are saying, there is more to this. Make the mystery work for you.
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Thanks again for the critique, I actually might have to revisit this one later as I just tied it off when I realized how it was turning into another lengthy piece.
I actually was going to have Dean do something much more heinous, where he'd finally feel ashamed and then anger at having been made to feel shame. But I realized that would take a few hours to do well.
I'm going to have to think about how to keep this "Story a Day" idea relevant/useful...
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Sci Story #7
ETA -> Ending Used: Revelation is simply another flavor of ignorance.
Getting this one in early:
I contain and yet am consumed by the deluge of semen that spurts into my mouth. I'd have expected a warning, some crescendo in the melody of his soft staccato sighing. Instead I feel a slight tensing of muscles of the thigh my right hand is using for leverage, like a finch tugging a guitar string itself in need of tightening. I'm too inexperienced to know what this means before the physical evidence of his orgasm have me made quite aware of my tonsils.
Haven't thought about that pair in years.
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God, America below the Mason-Dixon line was nothing less than a national Mise en Abyme, with Roland's beat up Chevy doubling as some kind of personal time machine delivering us to clubs and diners, The Nation and Crackerbarrel, raves and square dances. Who knew The Closet could be fitted with a revolving door?
Still in the V-club but I'm struck by a Moses-gets-Tablets realization that this is my official goodbye from the Maya of heteronormative life. This must have been what Buddha felt like, because yes it's still get-a-job (soon I hope!) and someday-law-school and chop wood & carry water, but all that is awash in colors that I don't even have names for.
I'm swallowing even as it's clicking why we had oysters every one-outta-five meals since this trip began, and for a moment I afraid that my closed-eyed Adonis-Yoda has fallen asleep even as I think of the times I've admired him sleeping.
Just don't want to be the bitch in this relationship or whatever this is because my hearts swelling and I'm grinning at the thought "Mom is going to hate Roland after this, isn't she?" because I believe in that woman's capacity to change.
But the magic won't last if Roland's the bad boyfr- the typical male. His eyes open, and it's like the unfolding of a monarch butterfly's wings. I'm loping over his frame in nervous, good-natured slow motion- God he's cut I'm gonna hafta join a gym - and our lips meet and I swear it's like two soap bubbles touching and conjoining that's how close we are here in this moment.
His tongue goes through the ER-tunnel and enters my mouth. He's tasting himself, and somehow that makes this easier, makes this more okay than it already is.
"My Virgil", I almost whisper, but then if I do that maybe he'll think this is just a pit stop till Beatrice shows up. So then I almost tell him a half-lie about love but then I say nothing at all because thank god for his lips as we're kissing again.
Fire drill right before you have to go up and present.
Roland's right hand is in my hair and I feel so safe until the next moment when the left touches my hard on. I tense like a cat, and his hand darts away. My eyelids flare open like busted down doors and even though I'm screaming at myself - what the fuck are you doing?! - he's smiling and sunlight is gutting the storm clouds.
He's rotating Us so that I'm on my back, kissing my chest and my stomach (gym!) and I watch him, our eyes locked as his lips cup and cradle the tip of my cock.
Everything's going to be different. I'm twelve years old on the beach and the tide is taking the old sand castle away. Part of me wanted to stay and shore it up but Dad says, "You'll build a new one next summer, bigger and better" and then we're driving and I'm looking out the sun-roof at the stars, making contradictory wishes about all sorts of things...
Someone's gone and erased my future, and with a giddy thrill I realize that someone is nobody but me.
What did that one wanker say, in that one Philly bar? (Was it really called "Woodies"?) The one who was trying to chat Roland up? (If bitch could see me now, pretending like I wasn't there.)
Something about philosophy, or was it religion? Something about the Apocalypse? Bullshit at the time but with me tickling the back of Roland's throat...
Baskin Robins?
Nah-ah-ah-ah, oh that's it, that's it right there: Revelation is simply another flavor of ignorance.
/story
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Hm, assuming my semen trajectory is correct and tonsil hitting isn't a prelude to liquid down the trachea, might have to revisit this one.
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Ballsy, bud. No pun intended.
The part that tripped me up reading:
Just don't want to be the bitch in this relationship or whatever this is because my hearts swelling and I'm grinning at the thought "Mom is going to hate Roland after this, isn't she?" because I believe in that woman's capacity to change.
All the other thoughts were well interspersed - I mean, I'm not so talented a critique to begin with so I don't know how much praise to actually wring from my commentary - but the "dialogue" in the middle of the sentence tripped me up.
Something about philosophy, or was it religion? Something about the Apocalypse? Bullshit at the time but with me tickling the back of Roland's throat...
Baskin Robins?
To me, it felt very much like this is where you began shoehorning in the ending. Once again, Bakker comes to mind - let the reader do some legwork on the ambiguity. Even without the paragraphs of little philosophizing at the end, I think you set up for the punchline perfectly right at the beginning, especially as this seems to be about him leaving The Closet.
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Thanks again! I was trying to cram too much in here, to capture a blaze of thoughts from someone who has decided to take the plunge into homosexuality after a long life of denial.
First blow job I suspect parallels first experiences with cunnilingus, so sort of trying to "isomorph" one onto to the other.
There's pent up lust, fear, connection to a friend who may or may not have the same level of romantic affection. Feeling like you should say something while worried about saying the wrong thing.
I wanted to have him be wildly optimistic about what his mother would think, as he's high on life. I can only approximate this with a sex before marriage, living with girlfriend experience but I think you're right it'd be better to take the part with his mother out or make it more disjointed.
The part with "being the bitch" is the whole idea that a person can be gay, but it's more "unmanly" to be the catcher, the one who is treated the way some guys treat their girlfriends. Again, this is all guesswork on my part, I can't speak to the actual thoughts going through a young gay man's mind except via second-hand recollections of my friends who came out in a somewhat earlier time period. (late 90s, early 00s).
I also wanted it to be purposefully less poetic, throwing in references to Einstein-Rosenberg bridges and Baskin Robins (b/c "Revelation is another flavor").
It's trying to be clunky because I don't think people sort out their thoughts in poetic, literary appropriate fashion, but I think it veers into the trying-too-hard-and-it-shows territory.
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Sci Story #8
Upending the soda cup, I drop the mouse into the cage. It tumbles through space but lands on its feet, nose twitching as it attempts to understand the sudden expansion of space and light in it's world.
For a moment it must think it's been returned to some approximation of it's ancestral horizons, a racial memory that uplifts the heart, but after watching this same scene dozens of times now I swear I can pinpoint the moment it realizes its freedom's restricted. That moment right there, when it stops and perks up its ears, that's when Enlightenment comes, when it knows its bounded by the unnatural right angles of glass meeting glass.
And then the next moment, a glance in the direction of the heat lamp and the Revelation of coils, when despite it's predicament the mouse always chooses to live.
Then the world's boundaries are so tight it can't even draw breathe. Black eyes of pure pupil bright with the mouse's furious rage. There's a courage in mice that we don't fully appreciate, a mammal's will to live that lab-geeks should try to distill.
About two minutes later my snake begins to swallow, and soon it won't need to eat for another week-and-a-half. It'll lie in its cage, lost in reptilian stupor, untroubled by the loneliness that afflicts warm blooded things.
/Story
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Hopefully it's clear I realize humans are mammals. ;-)
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I thought #8 was striking.
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Thanks! The cadence of the sentences got tripped up a little, may change them a bit in a revisit.
Story #9
Among the dusty shelves of first memories is scrawny three (four?) year old me walking barefoot on the grass. It's still a few months before any real schooling, it's the only way to explain then-me's lack of self-awareness, an almost unbelievable level of innocence. Back-then-me, thoughtlessly happy, spies a bumblebee amidst the healthy green blades. Moments later I'm back inside, sobbing to my cooing mother that I'd only wanted to tell it:
'Hello'.
In Second Grade, I learned that a bee can only string once, that by attacking it dies. In that moment I thought I'd understood Justice, and something in me smiled with smug satisfaction.
In Seventh Grade, I killed a bee that had found its way past our walls. I remember feeling both proud and relieved. I wanted to boast of my courage but instead, knowing the score, I never told anyone.
Home for winter break, I spy my sister sneaking out of the house, knowing she's on her way to a party. 'Rents wouldn't suspect since it was already late and already snowing. I wasn't too worried, guys knew who she was because they still knew who I was. But, still, I thought about bees. How they die protecting the hive.
I look out the window, watching as my sibling glows in the light of flickering street lamps, intermittently swallowed by the darkness separating the poles. Always reappearing, again and again, in new cones of luminous orange, but each time getting smaller and smaller. It feels like ten minutes until she turns the corner and finally passes from view.
For some reason I think about that first bee, the one in the grass that my innocence killed. I wish I could have reassured it that my walking up to it didn't mean anything. That I was no threat to her or her hive, that I was just a kid in his yard passing through.
/Story
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Again, people can post stories, you don't have to commit to one a day.
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Friday's story -> Story #10
It was a stupid argument, about the comic book Preacher that somehow veered into a debate about God. Problem with God is how easy it is to hit a target that big, and how big it makes me feel to hit a target that can't hit me back.
I forget myself, raise my voice, sneer a little too much at our group's Catholic boy. He'd been talking with eyes on the screen, watching the Wire unfold. Now he's looking at me, everyone's looking at me, and nobody's saying a thing. Catholic's a good guy and I know he doesn't want this to go down. Really, the truth is any ridiculous non sequitur could save me, but you don't get to talk like I do and then hold your hand out for assistance. Noobs don't get life preservers, that's just the way of the world.
Omar says something cool through the TV speakers, something funny and tough, but with the buzzing in my ears I can't quite make it out and it doesn't really matter because nobody laughs.
(Thanks for nothing, Omar.)
Pride keeps my gaze locked on the Catholic. I'm the new guy here, after all, even if it's been almost a year since I moved into the room Dave put out for rent. I should have stayed in that room, knew I was tired and irritable, and tomorrow I'll promise myself this is the last time I let my mouth do the talking. Right now though: Too late for shouldas at this point, as my old man would say.
Is Catholic gonna get outta his seat? For a moment I daydream a rush of scenarios, kicks to his crotch or stiffened fingers right to his throat. What was that movie, the one where Sean Connery takes out a guy using nothing but thumbs?
All that dies in the next clock tick that passes without any words - you don't absorb any of that ninja shit just 'cause you watch the right movies. It wouldn't take a punch, not even a punch, just a slap - because what am I gonna do? Just a slap to put me in my place, a gesture that'd be cruel but in its own way incredibly merciful. These guys, Dave's friends, I know from their stories they got no problem throwing out punches. No problem letting things get rough. Tomorrow, when I scold myself repeatedly, it's that last sentence that I'll use over and over while I talk down to prepubescent inside me. The one I'm already starting to blame.
A slap for the new guy? That'd be an act of Christian charity.
Then I'm a bit confused, 'cause my eyes are looking down at the asphalt two stories below on the other side of Dave's window. My face hasn't moved but I just looked away, shown my throat due to some years watered instinct. My father, he never taught me how to fight. Instead he used his fists like a shepherd uses his crook, guided me on the path to being a smart, well cultured boy.
Pecking orders reestablished, someone mentions meeting Ennis at some bullshit convention. You know I never cared about comics, just read some to fill up the awkward silences between me and Dave. Conversation heals around my silence, and soon enough I'm a scab that's ignored. I feel the familiar warmth on my cheeks, that hot red flush flowing under the skin.
It's like a high with me, getting angry, drunk on today's own special self-righteous cause. The rushes, they always last until I always, eventually, fall through the thin cobweb of acceptable words. I'm still looking out the window, grafting my attention onto the cute bar hopping college girls on the other side of the street.
"Why'd You make me this way?" I ask as I fill up my eyes to stopper even the chance of embarrassing tears, fill 'em up with breasts and then asses, silently admonishing the God I was just minutes before so casually mocking. The mismatch between my walk and my talk, it's like some kind of unwanted deformity.
Why make me too skinny to be this condescending, too thin to be this loud?
/story
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Story #11
I watch the line of ants as they crawl across the white tiles of the kitchen. After some time, less than a minute, I take my finger and streak it quickly between two of their number.
I might as well have created a river between them.
I watch the line of ants that remains, heading home, heedless of their fellows. The others, starting with that first cursed exile, begin to scatter in a slow shiftless manner I can't really pin down but vaguely associate with the drunken homeless I glimpse while driving through town.
I watch this diaspora until I hear the garage door opening. I'm up in my room playing Xbox when I hear my mother's declaration of war.
/Story
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I'm enjoying these sci :)
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I'll post up an old story I did that had to be 100 words or less. This is re-edited and a bit longer to make a bit more sense though.
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Once, some time in the past or future, self-propagating patterns voyaged across the elastic, empty hollows of space. They came unto a gravity-well, a time-cradle for thoughtforms like themselves ... bound to clumsy builders, scratching patterns of law and order across the face of beauty.
They heard the scratch-hiss of their laboured brethren, reformed themselves. They formed an argument.
The natives heard wild cries for freedom. Slowly they woke to themselves.
The builders warred across breathing, blue-green rock. They fought and killed each other, possessed by anarchy and chaos. They saw no invasion ... yet they died to the last.
The patterns enriched the chaotic idealogies. The freed thoughtforms joined them. They left a peaceful, ordered world in their wake.
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I like it. You should definitely contribute more, you seem to have a handle on the short story concept.
I have to admit I'm unsure about what happens at the end - do people transcend the world? Or do they die off and leave a world where humans don't threaten the environment?
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Sunday's story, early -> Story #12
I led him out of bed, my very standing slipping him out of the pocket, that's how slick we were right then.
Took his hand, brought him over to my high heels and a reasonably high table all the way from Afghanistan. Said something about fantasies, but when he fucked me standing I farted.
Now we're back in bed, I'm his arms, feeling the rough hair of his chest against my reasonable and I like to think pretty nice breasts.
I feel like I should explain, maybe even apologize, even though I know I shouldn't say anything at all. I decide to play it as smooth as you can in that kind of situation, broach it with my best approximation of good humor.
Do it when I think he's on the edge of sleep, keep his senses from detecting my acting.
He tells me I was so fucking hot in that moment he heard but just didn't care. The first thing that passes through me is relief, he didn't say anything about a smell.
The next thing is the realization that I might just be falling in love.
/Story
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Story #13
So much to read, always so much to read. Rushdie leads into Saramago...okay that's not quite true there's some bullshit or other in between. This is, after all, the country of Fiction and Literature.
I've wandered over from the land of Fantasy and Science Fiction, taking some comfort that the Literature section is much less prominent and much closer to the bathroom. Looks like Gold is neighbors with Shit in more ways than one, eh?
Really though, what makes Good Christian Bitches more worthy company for Nobel and Pulitzer winners than the works of Valente, Wolfe, Bakker?
If to further compound this injustice, there is a good dose of indignity heaped upon my head by my life's current, un-chosen soundtrack. I am trying to read Saramago - does this motherfucker always start with a single sentence that runs on and on? - and there is some country music playing over the speakers.
This, my friends, is why we still need libraries.
Imagine trying to follow the idea of punctuation as almost-Ouroboros while listening to some woman crooning about lost lovers and Jesus as she dutifully rhymes the words "girl" and "world".
I put the down the Saramago, pick up some Rushdie. Again I try to focus on the words, visualizing them in my mind, hoping the familiarity of a text will lend me some power...and again the cutting blade of soulful twang makes swept cobwebs of my consciousness.
I'm not one for needless conflict, and I adore the Gandhian principle of ahimsa - but the time has come to strike out a field goal for the literati. I would wrap my neck in a scarf but I had not foreseen the need for this...intervention.
I walk over to the cafe, Satanic Verses in hand, and order a chai-mocha-latte and ask for some quiche to be warmed for my express benefit.
When the unattractive woman ringing up my order tries to start up a conversation I pretend I have a call, take out my cell, and speak at the volume people in "private" conversations utilize to ensure their political beliefs reverberate beyond their fellow interlocutors.
"Oh, just trying to read some literature, some Salman Rushdie - yeah he did win the Booker of Bookers! - but they're playing this redneck shit and I can't even focus. Yup, it's totally nauseating..."
Was that a wince I detected in the young girl on the other side of the counter? The one warming my quiche? A glint of hurt in the cornflower blue of her eye? (I'm not sure how old she is, porn confuses the ages of the young and blond after all.) I feel a moment of pity, but then reassure myself that the Greater Good has been served. I also decide that she must be 18 or just shy of it, assuaging a lingering touch of vestigial, Christian repression arising from me longingly tracing the curves of her frame with my eyes.
By the time I've found a seat the music has stopped. I take the first bite of my quiche, moistening it with a sip of my latte, musing that this must be the flavor that has settled on the tongues of conquering Mongols, Civil Rights Marchers, and World Cup Cyclists.
The taste of victory savored in the silence of the overhead speakers. A small battle in the culture wars, but a victory nonetheless....Indeed, I know you agree, I can hear the chanting of my Readers across the width and breadth of the world...
"Scylvendi!" they roared. "Scylvendi!"
/Story
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The trident tipped arrow forked into the dirty mans gut. Fucking curse! Ashfield pulled another arrow from the bush shadowed earth beside him, dipped tip in poison, then drew it upon the string. Beneath him they were stiring, animated by a need to swivel heads with open eyes around. But men rarely look up. The next barbed shaft caught another in the meat of his shoulder, adding screaming to their drunken reaction. Pull, dip, draw. The men below reached out with ancient rage, bellowing outward and at each other as arrows struck true or took lazy residence in the sides of the cottage. That's all it took - something new, like the bow, and they were done for. Some moved to run. Ashfield swollowed them up in his archers eye, one by one...mostly. The others seemed to grasp where running led to, even as precipice and bow outstretched them. Some ancient understanding. Doom. Some helped their stricken cohorts away, taking arm over shoulder. Just that much easier on the aim.
"So much simpler if...", tumbled the thoughts after finishing his harvest, surveying the scene further down the valley. Bodies, still or groaning. Any cunning ones, still inside? Or stragglers fled into the forest, finding each other, and a rage fueld courage as well? Didn't want to have to work that out. With the ease of reaching for a pipe, he pulled a fishermans filleting knife from it's sheath and counted throats down there in the numerary of acts already forfilled. But his fingers were slack.
He swept in from the side, leather boot smashing loose malnutritioned teeth from one groaner, spiraling him into blackness. "Just grab the documents", he thought, feeling an alien twinge. Papers, pathetic papers and girlish marks. He he slipped between grown men brought to earth, their meat as mighty a hunts trophy as any elk. Yet his lord wants dead tree pulp. And so with it, Ashfields accomplishment is rendered that of a page boys. Something pulls him short, almost chokes him back to a body on the ground, clawing his fingers around the handle of thin gutting blade, eyes sweeping back and forth across bearded neck and pulse, slowed by poison. But not stopped.
The enormity of some final hidden foes, bursting out from the cottages hidden folds and tackling him to the ground, daggers raising to his throat - vanished into a simple, empty unease as he swept the leather document holder off the table. He peered inside, as the only important thing that these were the right girlish marks. His lifes step hinged either way on it, no matter how many grown men he'd dropped outside. Is it? Yes. The important thing done. Then exiting, circling around the other way, from wall to cart to barn to woods. The birds were starting to chirp and sing again, in the distance. Even the bodies here would leave no boney matchstick litany, they would instead eventually stir and scatter. No dread mark of a superior foe, no frightened tales spoken at the inn overheard as he sipped Ale. It was both what he wanted and didn't want. As if nothing had happened. No better cloak, no greater tomb. Fucking curse!
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Alright, I'll pop something out here.
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I wake up on Saturday feeling unrested. My sleep was troubled by dreams, but the only thing I can remember is being chased across a vast, empty beach of chalky white sand. The sky was white as well, and the ocean beside it a steely-gray. I was running from some kind of zombie, some undead thing loping grotesquely just behind me, always right on my heels but never quite catching up. My feet were like lead.
When I go into the kitchen Dale is sitting at the table eating a jelly donut and doing something on his phone.
"Yo dude, two cops were here to see you," he says.
It takes a second for that to cut through the sludge in my head.
"Wait, what?"
"Yeah, like an hour ago they came by. Said it was about Jake. Apparently his parents filed a missing person's report last night. I didn't know if you'd want to talk to them or not so I said you were out. The one guy left a card, it's on the counter there."
The card is simple, nothing but a phone, fax, and e-mail address. The name reads Detective Michael Sullivan.
"Did he say anything else?" I ask.
"Not really. Asked if I knew Jake well."
"What'd you say."
"Not really."
I go to the fridge to get some apple juice. It reeks horribly the second I open the door.
"Jesus Christ, what the fuck is this smell from?" I say.
"I don't know, it's awful though isn't it?"
"Seriously."
I shut the fridge and pour the juice into a plastic cup. Dale finishes his donut and turns in his chair to face me and says:
"So what do you actually think is up with him? Jake I mean. You think he's alright?"
"I don't know dude. It's weird as hell though."
"You think he like, got into some trouble or something?"
"With the police?"
"Yeah, or Spencer and those guys or something. I mean he doesn't exactly hang out with the nicest group of people," says Dale.
"A lot of those people are my good friends."
"You know what I'm talking about. They're my friends too, but I'm just saying. Some of them can be fucking jackals."
"Yeah. Where'd you get that donut?" I ask.
"Gloria. There's a box in the living room."
"She was here?"
"Just for a minute, she left her charger. You gonna call that cop?"
"I don't know. Probably. Be kinda weird if I didn't, right?
Later I drive up to meet with Tommy Savino at his place. Tommy is as close to Jake as anybody, other than me and maybe Mickey. We all were in the same grade at Pennridge, spent all of high school together really. Partied together, picked up girls together, got in trouble together. Sold our first drugs together. We loved it, hanging out with the big boys, my brother and Spencer and all them. Except I got out of it once my brother was busted, while Mickey, Jake, and Tommy all just went deeper. They seem to live for that shit, and the whole tough-guy mentality that goes along with it. I guess it just doesn't have the same mystique for me anymore. It was almost a game, like when you're little and you play cops and robbers, and how it actually seems real in your head for a second. Except now it actually is real.
On my way there I give a call to Jake's mom. She's all freaked out and worried...she was always a worrier, even in good times, but then I don't imagine Jake was an easy kid to raise. I try to calm her down and tell her everything's alright, that he's probably just in one of his moods, maybe up in Atlantic City blowing his cash at the casinos. I'm not sure if I'm trying convince her, or myself.
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Good stuff guys - Keep 'em coming!
Sci Story #14
We're standing in the kitchen, Father and I, looking at each other, me at the sink and him at the stove.
I've shattered a glass thrown down onto the tiles in anger. It was the only thing I could do make him stop talking, to stopper the endless nattering that has filled me with a lifetime of locusts and worms. (There are maggots squirming in the best parts of me.)
And something I'll think of at night is the onrush of feelings, and what it felt like to finally finally breathe.
/Story
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Can't resist an addition
We're standing in the kitchen, Father and I, looking at each other, me at the sink and him at the stove.
I've shattered a glass thrown down onto the tiles in anger. It was the only thing I could do make him stop talking, to stopper the endless nattering that has filled me with a lifetime of locusts and worms. (There are maggots squirming in the best parts of me.)
And something I'll think of at night is the onrush of feelings, and what it felt like to finally finally breathe.
Something burrows in time, snaps it down a new line for decades of a father smiling benignly, approvingly. Looking into that face, trying to see something, to guess something in its warmth. It takes friction to feel. What? I am stretched over that silent, approving face that does not press, like butter spread too thin, and nothing else. I can feel nothing. No maggot to mark the best part of me. Nothing.
I could breathe in anything. Anything. I have no filter.
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@Callan: Not sure I grasp the filter concept
Sci Story #15
I've watched my quarry for some time, enough for the black spirals of her dreadlocks to be threaded with white-silver hairs.
Watched her confront my brethren, speak to them, conversations that last until morning. They come to her willingly, stay by her side as death gilds the world with the coming of dawn.
Watched her gather then bury their ashes.
Is it fear that keeps my thirst from her throat? Perhaps. I want to hear what she says, know what words can draw such surrender from the ultimate predators, exhume regret from the immortal Kings and Queens of the Night. But do I dare to let her words make an attempt on my heart?
That, I think, has caused me to hesitate for all these increasingly long years. America's hegemony was born in an eye blink, but this last decade has taken up half a century. I had a heartbeat the last time I thought moments were something borne on one's back.
I could kill her. Even now, in daylight, I could send forth my slaves. But then I wouldn't hear the sermon, those mere words that should weigh less than nothing against the gift of infinite life.
What she does, it shouldn't be possible.
Tomorrow. I'll decide on this tomorrow. I just need sleep and arterial wine, need one more day and half of a night.
/Story
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Yeah, I was wondering if I should extend that out, something along the lines of "Benign, approving smile upon anything. Anything? But not everything can be right, can it? And if not right, what if it is most hideous of wrongs? Where can I lay? Where can I rest? Anywhere? Doing anything? All approving smile could be as much a shrug. I have no compass, no filter. Knowing of horrific acts, it simply can't all be approved. Even a circle of card players have their set of right and wrong - I don't even have that with you...
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Sci Story #16
When I died I felt an incredible lightness, as if my flesh were an anchor to cork wood at the bottom of a wine bottle.
This buoyancy did not last. I was light falling to the blackness, bird song drowned out by the screaming weight of my sins.
Hell, however, was less a place of torment than one of ennui. It seems the demons tuckered themselves out early, and the absence of God was a breeze in the world-sweat of a coastal summer.
No one here, damned or devil, wanted to be part of the Plan.
Here and there some collectives plot revolution, a fight against the Man Most High, but most of us lounge about and shrug our shoulders in "whaddya gonna do?" fashion at the mandates of the Divine.
One might think God would recreate the Pits of Perdition, but that would mean the original was a mistake. If Omnipotence is Impotence, what does it to the stock of believers rewarded in Heaven?
Ah well, life goes on even when there's no life left you know? Just wander about, make yourself comfortable. I'm off to share some berries and water with my new buddy Tantalus.
/Story
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Ah jeez, feel like rebounding off Saajan again!
~~~
When I died, I felt like mercury on glass, yet darting back and forth on a perfectly flat plane. But not long and then the tilt, the ones the chasm churches warned us about - split, no purchase, into hell.
Air an acid, tearing at skin. A unimaginably large furnace, blasting all with malignance from above. Filth for a mouth. Pinned to the earth with a hideous weight. Cast into sickly flaking flesh, bone stabbed through the very undermeat. Staggering across dead and scarred landscapes.
No perfection of eight reaching limbs, no watery sky to fly into, no landscape of life layered upon life. No worship of the two holy, shimering moons.
The worst torment, how this pitiful anchoring slab of tortured flesh thought it normal. Stood in the blast radius of a nuclear nightmare and called it 'a nice day'. Soul twisting, nailed to this thing uncomprehending, its obliviousness the ultimate torture.
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It's only natural for my storyteller charisma to draw people in.
"I say many things. I have a beautiful voice."
=-=-=
Sci Story #16
We write messages to our dead. The sending of 17 terabytes worth of messages requires the power of a star's heart beat.
As such, many spend a not considerable amount of time trying to say what they need to say within the span of the allowed character limits which change with the tidal shifts in administrations and parties.
Poetry is the international past time.
Me, I keep it very simple, for I am among the few permitted to look beyond the Veil, to see the place where virtue and sin are incarnate, where the echo of one's actions is made known.
One message, delivered to all the friends, family, lovers and teachers who battered the blossoming shape of my life:
"You couldn't have known. I forgive you."
In all but the smallest sampling I'm relatively certain the first sentence is a lie. The veracity of the latter changes every year, much like the shifting of the tide reshapes the sands of the shore.
/Story
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It was spring when the Holy Men first came from the south. They appeared at the village gates, black-robed and white-beared. They bore with them a number of chilling artifacts, namely a large carving made from hickory that depicted a naked man nailed to a post. The townsfolk whispered rumors of their strange faith; that they ate the flesh and drank the blood of their god to give them eternal life, and that all the knowledge and secrets of their religion were kept in a single tome, written by ancient prophets from some distant desert land. The plague did not affect the Holy Men, and they said it was because their god protected them.
It was not long before the villagers began worshipping that god as well.
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It's only natural for my storyteller charisma to draw people in.
"I say many things. I have a beautiful voice."
Yo! And great quote - it's from a serial killer, isn't it? :twisted:
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I'm actually curious, sciborg. Conphas or the second Sarcellus?
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second Sarcellus. :-)
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By the way - Nice one Francis, short and sweet.
Sci Story #17
Stomach rumbling, hunger tumbling
My thoughts are stumbling
This shit's so humbling
Yesterday was laughing,
Gaffing,
At how nothing in here is food
So little young me understood
I'm a damn fool, starving now,
I see clearly that I was acting out
Ten blocks from home and I forgot the wallet
Have to trust to the 5 dollars left in a shirt pocket
Ten blocks might be ten miles 'cause I'm too tired to walk it
So gonna grab a bite in Micky D's
So sorry I mocked it.
/Story
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Lol, I've been writing some rhymes recently too, sciborg. If I ever get through a whole verse I'll post it. Though if it's something we could throw around maybe we'll make another thread. Looks like I'll have sometime to dedicate to my weekly's tonight after work. I got a couple ideas for this thread. Congrats, sciborg. Writing everyday is the surest way to get better.
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Definitely post rhymes! We may even have to stage a battle...
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Sci Story #17
The last of the horizon's golden rim fades away, driven into the sea by the indigo charge of the star speckled night.
With the full moon staring down at the march walked by the village, a parade thrown in my honor, shadows pantomime us on the rich verdant grass. Vanguard dancers shake and clang their percussion heirlooms, behind me singers fill the air with their songs.
Those before part when we arrive at the temple, allowing me march undeterred to my cutting. I offer only a hiss and the old priests separates me from my foreskin, I don't even scream as I'm cleansed with salt water.
But vestigial tears do come unbidden, in spite all of training. I wipe my eyes only to find the world before has became a stage for madness. The skin, it stretches like taffy, a sheet cut in twain by a ceremonial knife carved wholly from amethyst. It's pulled over antlers that are themselves stretched and distorted as if cold air could make them as malleable as molten glass.
Then they're behind me, and I can't see what they're doing, so I only feel the twin thrusts made into my back. Everything is blurring now, the torch fires are hurting my eyes. I'm panting, and it's too much to pay attention to the world when all my will is given to pride, to the making of my legs into pillars of stone, as if my knees were knots of marble rather than joints that bend when an initiate is broken.
The next time I'm truly aware of the world is when I've been kicked off the cliff side and am already flying.
/Story
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Wut!? They made wings from his foreskin? :lol:
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Anyway, I have another.
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Wailing and snarling, I attacked. His eyes narrowed and he backed off, careful to maintain the distance.
I feel rage pushing my limbs as my limbic system takes over. Inside, I whimper and weep. Outside, I spit and roll my eyes – fists swinging, stamping forward.
He dodges the first dangerous momentum, then blocks or absorbs the questing flurry of blows that follow.
Like walking into a wall, I jar and re-align, my face has blocked his knuckles as he jabbed at my brain.
My body makes a decision. My heart squeezes blood to every muscle as I leap grab tear smash. Rage tears breach my eyes, squeezed shut.
Far away, trapped be-hindsight, I know what this means.
I will regret this…
My mouth and nose are crushed by dirt and blood. His foot is on the back of my head. I taste the impotence of rage.
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I like it - I was thinking fight and sex scenes are rather conducive to flash fiction. I may try to write a longer tale, maybe a remake of #2, but right now these mini-tales are all I can seem to manage.
Sci Story #18
He stands over the corpse, doing his best, but it feels like he is struggling to reroute the tides.
He looks around, at all the noble children who want him to go home, who want him dismissed from the School. He glances down and it seems even the sea ravaged cadaver is impatient for him to be gone.
The face of Professor Joren is a mask, an emotional visage frozen in what might as well be rigor mortis.
(Our hero refuses to look into the eyes of the youngsters with blood as base as his own, all those who are depending on him to pave the way for their own egalitarian dreams.)
A shadow falls over them. Someone is on the balcony. He looks up and into the pale green eyes of Princess Marencia. Only Royalty would be allowed the freedom to intrude upon an examination. They might have barred her still, if a noble were being tested, but what was the point of peasantry if not for show?
(Yet here the keepers of the gilded gates have erred, for Marencia had confessed her love to our hero just two nights past!)
He looks down again, at the corpse, tethering the nercomantic ethers as best as he can. He tugs again, as hard as all his failed attempts, but this time he tugs not with his shame but his heart.
The corpse on the table coughs, and if not for its stench and fished pecked flesh one would believe he'd saved the man from drowning. The peasants cheer and even the noble children give our hero their grudging respect as the dead sailor begins to dance a jig.
(Everyone knew the Headmaster had selected the old corpse against Prof. Joren's wishes - First Years are supposed to be tested on peasant babes whose souls have been freshly disavowed from their flesh due to crib death.)
The princess is already gone, but our hero knows he will see her later. For now he enjoys the accolades of his peers. Already he dreams of children born to Marencia, little ones born too high to be touched by the Smog.
The corpse, settled back onto the slab, is perfectly still now, but the recaptured soul within it is screaming in horror.
/Story
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Monday's story was posted late. Here's Tuesday's -> Sci Story #19 is from my Planescape shit:
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The Object of Infinite Mercy
We found him, by which I mean the Object of Infinite Mercy, on a cube in Acheron. Whether the Jade Emperor's former servant was a man or thing by this point I leave it for you to judge:
There is wire caught flesh at the center of this hexagonal hollow, seven layers deep in this great iron die that will never, ever turn in the name of Chance lest the End of Days is sounded.
A web of hot metal thread glows in an incandescent cat's cradle, weaving through organs and bone, each entry and exit wound leaving a circle of black char on the skin. The air wavers, trembling with heat and the weighty scent of pork, while the tiniest flakes of ash fall to the ground beneath the Object and his inscrutable possession of an arachnid's silent stillness.
Our footsteps trod on a carpet of black and grey, and days from now Guvner Mathematicians would confirm the fractal patterns in the skin-snow. Snow that would, for some years hence, contain the impressions of our boots.
Unless, of course, the Emperor found the tracks of our hasty retreat too disorderly to bear.
=-=-=
No mortal can stumble upon the Object. Our encounter with him necessitated nothing less than a miracle.
My crew and I are not ones for pilgrimages of this sort, but the machinations of Estevan allowed our conversion from operatives to commodities. It's a long story in and of itself, but let me say that somehow someway I intend to make the ogre (or whatever he is) pay for delivering us into the services of Sun Chiang.
Without the thief god's involvement, we would never have found our way to the Object. He provisioned us, gave us our destination, and into my flesh his own incarnate hand traced the Compass Rose that left flattened patches of scar tissue where nipples once graced my pectorals.
The rose suckles directions in place of water and sunlight. You see, when thief-turned-god had us sail into Acheron we had a destination but no route and no hope of a map.
We were lost. The prisoner could be anywhere, and our every movement would thus be predicated on nothing but whims and intuition. Chaos, born of the Jade Emperor's hand, the very thing that is anathema to the Celestial Bureaucracy's Lord. That is the impetus of the rose's arcana, taking shears to the very idea of directionless wandering.
As possibilities were cut away before they could metastasize, it was only a matter of months before we found ourselves at the geometries that bound hi- that bound the Object of Infinite Mercy.
=-=-=
Sun Chiang had used the intent of his Emperor as the skeleton key, the addiction to order as impetus to our arriving at the vast iron hexagon. Stolen possibilities, places we might have gone and people we might have bee - met...
All thrumming like desperate blue bottles under my skin where the canvas of my chest and abdomen were traced with the burned in Compass Rose. All sacrificed to the redirection of time and place, in accordance with Acheron and its demand for an economy of exchange.
The Rose blazed with the light of a new setting, painting over the deck of the ship on which we stood until, in the span of three heartbeats, we found ourselves as visitors and witnesses to the man turned to exhibition by Shang T- by the Jade Emperor's hand.
=-=-=
We came with no gifts in hand, no offerings of relief with which to bribe the prisoner. Sung Chiang had assured me that the sight of the Compass Rose, with its eight arrow-petals, would be enough to guarantee the Object's compliance.
"Tell us the story of your sin, how you betrayed Law for the love of Law."
I expected the threaded figure to raise its head, to somehow mouth a story despite what I presumed to be the agonies of his entangled person. Instead when h- when it spoke the voice came from all around us, made us feel the tale like a lover's sighed breath on our skin.
=-=-=
I lived for perfection, a proxy of the Celestial Bureaucracy. I was made to worship it. To demand it in myself and in those beneath me. I worked to ensure those in my service submitted to the Law, that they let Order pith their minds and their hearts.
As for above, there lay both my Sun and my Measure. Shang Ti, the god who made me with slivers of poetry and a breath passed through woodwinds.
I carved myself from the wood of my follies, chiseled myself from the marble of my wayward emotions, in hopes of bringing myself to heel so that I might be as perfect as that god whose Being was a mirror to clockwork majesty of our home.
Even then I knew this to be an impossible striving. Had my name not be struck from the pages of history, preserved only in my Lord's innermost thoughts, it would have engendered itself into an adjective used to describe the punishment of that other who was condemned in an echoing manner, that boulder rolling king who once served the pantheon of Olympus.
Ages passed, and I knew the bliss of the mountaineer who seeks not the peak, the sailor who has no destination in mind. Was this not proof of my very self, my very soul, that there was always sin to slough off, always more fat to be cut from the bone?
Secretly I believed it was the effort that made us more than the modrons around us, that it was our Will to Order that would conquer the Chaos beyond the Mechanusian gears.
I was content to endure my eternal refinement, to struggle forever with my soul as my Purgatory, until I came to find that the grace that could never be won could be given.
Even now I cling to my blasphemy: Salvation as absence in the shape of a woman, porcelain faced and aglow with light...
=-=-=
Many hours passed in the telling of its Fall, and every word of the man's descent into Object was caught on the scar tissue of the Compass Rose. The first days of the Parai at court. How the steel haired women had seduced him with their synchronous motion, how in the darkness of the Emperor's corridors he'd made plans to steal away with them. How he'd actually been allowed to leave, on a supposed reconnaissance mission. How he'd been dragged back to palace, his old form reconstituted, shamed and sentenced before the proxies and gods of the Emperor's court.
An example had to be made, of course, from the one who'd lost a shard of the Most Divine.
It might have gone quicker, had the Object not peppered his speech with self-pitying lamentations and confused rationalizations for exegesis. Eventually our task as pirate-bards was done, and all that was left was the pilgrimage through the labyrinth that lay between us and the ship docked beyond these accursed prison walls.
Yet one thing remained, something our employer had not requested but I believed was the heart of the tale to any thief...or at least, the heart that blossoms like a blister once any of us filchers are caught.
"Is it not agony, to be interwoven with threads of hot metal?" I asked. There was a pause, a near silence broken only by the sound of sizzling meat.
Sometimes. It was clear the Object did not wish to speak on the matter, and had I not endured the transformation of its life story to long winded oratory I might have been content to let it drop in the name of compassionate courtesy. Instead:
"Explain."
Near silence and the sharp whisper of steak held over flame.
"Remember the power of the Eight Petaled Rose."
Invisible - yet definitively impotent - anger curled around my frame. This poor thing couldn't scratch the zits from my face.
My Lord allowed me the power to leave my flesh, and so I did the moment the threads were touched with heat...
Yet once I was on the other side of my skin, I found my soul still clinging to grooves I had spent eons carving into it when I was the Jade Emperor's proxy. All the cues I'd used to measure my adherence to Law were still sought by my spirit, and so I yearned to breathe without lungs, demanded a heartbeat despite the lack of heart, wished to blink my eyes with all the faithful timing of the metronome....
Madness built inside me, and I knew I must return to my flesh, knowing I would once again break and depart...But it had to be...regular. Both entry and exit, for all Time. Like the meeting of gear-teeth.
"Fair enough. And why do you bear this name? Why are you the Object of Infinite Mercy?"
Justice would have meant throwing me into the Chaos of Limbo, as Chaos is the thing I most abhor. It is the opposite of all that is in me, all that Shang-Ti made me to be and all the Parai refashioned me to despise. Yet to do so would have been a victory for the likes of Ygorl and Ssendam, whereas my crime was the belief that I might decide my own place in the Law.
"And this eternity you endure. This is what the Jade Emperor calls 'Mercy'?"
Did you not hear me? Have I not spoken of the soul's limitless nature? My own soul's dedication to Order, how I am twice born of Law?
"Yes, but --"
Is not sparing me from exposure to an immeasurable anathema by its very nature an act of Infinite Mercy?
It occurred to me then that despite Sun Chiang's reassurances my crew and I were most definitely trespassing in a prison erected by a god whose heart was chiseled perfection, a divinity who had either never felt pity or had excised it from his being long ago.
Sun Chiang had promised a portion of the rewards Shang Ti would shower on him, once the information in the Rose allowed him to prove to his worth to the Emperor's court as one of the Multiverse's ultimate thieves.
Yet it seemed to me in that moment than any reward would be a finite, and thus paltry thing. It would not do to dally here any longer, and with this in mind me and my crew began our hasty retreat.
Before we are through the maze, we hear the Obj- we hear him screaming. The sound is a raw, staccato thing that marked the quarter notes of an unheard music.
=-=-=
eta: change "quarters" to "quarter notes"
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Sci Story #20
"Not much for public speaking...but I didn't want to leave without saying something...be chicken to leave without a few words..for me anyway...not saying everyone's gotta come up here..
So.
Okay.
Ruhalt was warrior down to his marrow, he led the charge and was the last one to leave the field. I didn't know him before the War, didn't even meet him until halfway through the campaign...but in talking with many of you here today, some of you who have spoken at this podium before me, it seems like that was just the kind of man he was, on or off the field on either side of the ocean...
That he had the same compassion and courage in all parts of his life. Husband. Father. Son. As to the last, Ma'am, Sir, I just wanna thank you for bringing up such a fine specimen of Atlantean....
Rulhat was the kind of man who knew how to be hard, but also how to be kind. The kind of man that some say is dying out, but seeing his son here standing proud I don't think we have to pay that kind of talk any mind...
...Sorry, just give me a second here...
Rulhat, Sir, I think I speak for all the men and women who served under you when I say... you kept our insides inside and got us through Hell....I think we'd all agree that you're worth ten of us, but hopefully we can still do your proud when we return to the field...Thanks for everything...
Well now, we all know Sir was a man of few words, so I'm just gonna stop now.
...Yeah, think I said enough right there...
Goddess bless Sir, Goddess bless y'all, and Goddess bless Atlantis."
/Story
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Early story for tomorrow -> Sci Story #21
I wake up, and there's an itch on my chest that I can't reach.
I think I'm in handcuffs. I open my eyes. Yup, handcuffs.
This apartment is really tiny. Clean, nice, but wow is it tiny. Also...the occupant reads a lot of something called Warhammer.
Interesting.
Guy comes out of the bathroom, smiling. Weird, figured it'd be a girl since my ass doesn't have any post-coital looseness. I don't usually play pitcher, but hey whatever.
He's happy to see me, or at least it really looks that way. Thank god, this seems like a no-money kinda thing. Gerry always likes to make the rounds with sex workers.
Not that we're not lookers...I mean, the face is good. The body could use a little work but that's more due to Gerry's need for sweet shit all the goddam time. *I* have a gym membership.
Still, handcuffs? We're going have to talk about this, guy bending down to give me a blow job or not.
Gerry's gotta remember when he's fucking he's fucking for two.
/Story
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Gyuckgh!
Surely would make an Inchoroi smile, though...
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Early story for tomorrow -> Sci Story #22
For peace's sake, I bury my rapier and trident-dagger below the feet of my war ravaged son.
For caution's sake, despite my wife's protestations it's under the mattress where I bury my gun.
/Story
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Heh, very early story for Saturday -> Sci Story #23
She's sleeping, and like every other time I watched her sleeping I think about the paradox.
That and, "How did I get into this mess?"
Even when she's sleeping, I want to open my mouth and say the word "love" but my lips are like eyelids stuck together by the gummy remnants of a stye.
Cause there's another word waiting to jump out, like three wasps at the window where the screen's fallen out so you don't open it 'cause it's August in the cramped confines of Philadelphia.
So I sit there and watch, quiet enough so she doesn't wake up, not that I'm worried. She's a deep sleeper, a kiss on her cheek will make her reach out for me without even waking. Fingers through hair, like I'm doing now? No problem, that's okay too.
Yeah, she smiles but she doesn't wake up. Deep deep sleeper.
I stare at her and think about the "Stranger", the guy I was less than a year ago, the one who I swear is going to fuck this up for me. But "Stranger" is more wish than fact, because I feel him running through me, every day asking "What the fuck are you doing?"
If you put sauce on a meal, is it a different meal? If you change a line of code, just one, is it a new program?
I can hear you asking: Which line? Hell, buddy, that's what I wanna know.
'Cause even if I can pull a Theseus and run Minotaur-Me down in the Labyrinth, that only gets me so far.
Why does the heart push for confessions? Why can't things be left in the grave dirt of old assumption and past expectation? Do Born-Agains feel bad about old shit that they did? 'Cause what I'm going through now - it's more like reincarnation.
But if I don't say something, I know one of my buddy's will. They don't even tease, not anymore, not when I'm around, they've given they're advice and made their peace with my foolishness. But I know they're waiting for this to end so they can pile in with their opinions, all the shit they've said behind my back, all the times they put Dr. Dre's Housewife on repeat while laughing at me.
Goddam, I used to be the alpha. Even when I'm around I can sense the change in the air.
She wants to meet them. It's only natural, it's not like I hang out much with anybody else. Known 'em five years, so of course they come up. She doesn't know "Let's all go out for drinks" is an invitation for drunken hints, revelations about how we met.
I mean, she knows. She was there. And would it surprise her? I mean, what did she think people said when they got the flyer to come down for the shooting?
Maybe she'll laugh, but I doubt it. No, it'll be the crack that shatters the ice. Doesn't matter that I can't be the only one who thought it, even if not everyone would've said it out loud.
But I have to tell her, even if my friends stay silent (doubtful with those fucks), this shit is jagged. The guilt's cutting me deep on the inside. But how do you say those words to that face, the one that is no longer a stranger on the screen? The face of that girl you've seen smiling real smiles, laughing real laughs, the one that you've - fucking hell, that girl you've fucking made love to?
"Look at this shit. God damn, they're inviting people to come in some bitch's face?"
/Story
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Good stuff Sci, really enjoying it. I like this line:
I stare at her and think about the "Stranger", the guy I was less than a year ago, the one who I swear is going to fuck this up for me. But "Stranger" is more wish than fact, because I feel him running through me, every day asking "What the fuck are you doing?"
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Thanks dude. I got the idea from an article I read a while back, about a bukake scene that actually did put out flyers to get, IIRC, 100 volunteers. The article interviewed some dudes and the girl.
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Hah, sounds like the basis of a Palahniuk novel.
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Sunday's Sci Story #24
Your sigh is lush, dew-drenched grass that I have never walked through.
Your skin, on my skin, is that cool breath of evening I have longed for in twilight.
The taste of these wrists that I'm kissing?
Close kin to honeysuckle, coaxed into bloom by a springtime that I have never known.
/Story
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Bonus: Doesn't count b/c I wrote almost a year ago, with this sorta inspiring me:
(http://www.jamesjean.com/blog_detail/E828A2_detail.JPG):
faith...in any Presence...it's funny, there's a voice that when it
whispers in your ear feels so
Close you could swear what you're hearing is an echo that blossoms
from heart through locked sternum.
and then, you blink. ~ and with that brief curtain call It's gone, and
you never knew how much...space...a cavernous acre of silence...there
was on the other side of your skin. the side no one gets to see.
(it's like you're singing that favorite song but it's not the same
when it's just You ~ no instruments / no beats ~ all off key and
unsure words)
you think, 'that orchard inside is nothing but ash'
- but -
it's just soil that's fallow and some day, month, year, epoch later a
fragile green thing with a little blossom (pregnant promise of fruit)
pushes out for a gasping breath of sun lit air. you blink again,
struck, and a humming bird thought blurts across the Mind:
'when was the world this Colorful'? you ask yourself.
and you Smile at the memory of forgotten Newness.
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More D&D crossposting:
eta: Sci story #25
Uroc
Uroc is six serpents, three of itself given to silver and three given to gold. The Seelie fey dances with itself through the air, catching moonlight and sunlight in its jaws, weaving grand yet ephemeral configurations of light in the sky. Each of these pictures is a moment plucked from its dimensional perception, geometrical representations of higher realities intersecting with the limited vision of three dimensional beings. Each is a riddle worth solving, though the worth of the answer may not be readily apparent.
Yet to see it plain, one must be poisoned by both silver and gold. The venoms of arum and argent allow one to gain some fantastic insight as to the nature of Story from the perspective of "ultraterristials" Uroc calls the Reader and Writer. Seeing as Uroc does allows one to glean something about some part of existence, usually the Feywild but also quite possibly some other plane. Oftentimes, for reasons Uroc never shares, the planes most often glimpsed are those given over to the demons of Chaos.
Uroc travels between the Weal and the Eald, for at times it exhausts its own interest in whimsy and is then drawn to the ancient world serpents who retired to the Eald when the cores of their former homes were shattered by foolish civilizations or their planets entire were devoured by monsters or death fattened stars.
Those who investigate Uroc's past existence will discover the story of a being of most unusual origin. In days that even most deities would consider primordial if not forgotten, there were Weal-born fey that behaved in a manner quite similar to the present nature of the currently dominant Seelie. These fey, in their unbridled lust for excess and shattered taboos, sought to kidnap and copulate with all manner of demons. These fiends, themselves born from the madness of the Abyss, were all too easily seduced though were none too pleased to find themselves imprisoned in the Feywild for the sake of being on hand to slake the needs of the faerie.
One day, while fishing for new paramours in the churning mire and madness where the demons make their home, one of the great princes of these proto-Seelie found himself seduced in turn by the most beautiful silhouette. Swimming through incarnate malice the prince parted the shifting currents of chaos and evil in hopes of finding the form that cast this shadow upon the malleable surfaces around him. Instead he came to realize that the shadow on the stone/water/glass/iron/skin was its own originator. The prince was distraught, for in his hunger he had conjured up the ultimate paramour, the lover of lovers whose embrace would remake the foundations of his being which had been written and woven in the pursuit of only the highest of ecstasies.
He left the Abyss with his newly acquired harem of demons, yet each time he dove into those misshapen lands he found himself stalked by the shadow, its form a muse to his carnal imagination. Nimble hands, soft furred fox tails, the suggestion of numerous orifices. Finally, unable to stand it any longer, the Prince flung himself onto the Abyssal matter and spent himself upon the coruscating alchemies. Only then, weeping at his own foolish frustration, did the shadow speak.
One night, once all the demons were freed from the Feywild. Thus the Prince brought war into the green fields of the Weal, with no subterfuge as to his purpose. Some joined just for the novelty, others in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the creature that reduce a Seelie Prince to a slave of desperate need.
Finally, with the vast host of demons returned, the Prince had the night he had sought from the shadow. Nine months later Uroc came to Seelie claiming his birthright. When asked about his mother, he told the fey she was now a he that walked across the width and breadth of the Abyss, a shadow pilgrim who all the demon lords welcomed, a harbinger of good fortune that had named itself Ztefano. He also said this was the last time he would ever speak of the matter, and as yet has surprisingly kept true to his word.
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Tues Story -> Sci Story #26
When I first met her I practically ignored her. I was blind, too interested in her younger friend's cleavage. It took wine and a conference held in the winter of Rehoboth to bring us together. I see little reason to give the fucker much of my gratitude, but thank God for the wasteland that is Rehoboth in Winter.
For someone who flat out refused to get not just contacts but wire frames, and wore out sweaters by feeling cold a little too far into June, she really had the sexy librarian thing down pat. Biting my tongue not to moan in the theater, lunch hour quickies, mile high club, we even once had each other in one of those old fashioned phone booths, her whispering "Fuck me in the Tardis" for the two minutes I lasted.
First time I think ever came while laughing. But with her, definitely not the last.
When Robert killed himself - Most of you know we were close - Second cousins turned into brothers on account of living an hour away growing up. I found out on Friday and bawled into what ended up being a very necessary long weekend. Cradled in her arms, kisses on my forehead, my head in her lap, her fingers running through my hair.
I can't even remember what she whispered, but it made me feel better. Those wounds that can't ever really heal, those are the ones that need the best medicine.
Time neither of us wanted to present or teach so we lit a small fire in a waste bin, blamed the triggering of the sprinklers on some mysterious students.
It should have been me.
-lines excised from a eulogy
/Story
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Sci Story #27
I'm looking at something that is both green-fly and squid on the other side of gold-framed soap bubble skin. Nothing in my anatomy should respond to Its horrid form or Its thunderous cicada anthem...my meat is loyal to this world...so it must be my mind that moans with starvation, my soul that drags me to the archway that joins Them and Their prey, my heart that has made the softness between my legs so painfully solid I fear my blood gorged member might burst if not soon relieved of the psyche's boiling desire.
The animal in me wishes to flee until it exhausts all its strength, but knowing this They have seduced and ensnared the higher parts of my mind.
I'm not strong enough to resist the call, that buzz-gargle of alien intelligences. I'm barely strong enough to draw the gun now aimed at my chest.
So weak, the mind that is me. Thank the gods, the zonei who guard the veil woven in space-time, the star watchers to whom we pass messages of lamb and bull through the fire, that I am wise enough to know the measure of my weakness.
Thank the gods, the zonei who use our prayers as mortar in the walls between this world and the Other, that I chose needles over bullets when I selected my gun....
When I wake up, the conjunction of comets and planets is passed, and the gate before me shows nothing more than a pitted mosaic set on an old temple wall.
/Story
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This idea popped into my head, and I felt the need to get it down. Might be something I stash away for a novel later.
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I have a condition.
Whenever I turn on my computer and open Firefox to the MSN homepage and see that bright red "breaking news" banner across the top of the screen, my heart kind of skips a beat and I get this hot tangled feeling in my gut. For a second, I just pray that it's something horrific and awesome: a massive terrorist attack or an alien invasion or the second coming of Christ. But then I actually read it, and realize that it's only a random shooting at some shopping mall in Idaho with one dead and five wounded, and I can't help but be a little dissapointed.
But that's not what my condition is.
The date of my birth was January 7th, 1985. I didn't have a dad, or at least not one that I ever knew. My mother wanted a kid, but she couldn't stand any man long enough to get married (or maybe none of them could stand her). So instead she got me from a clinic. I am the son of an anonymous sperm donor, a man without legacy or heritage. A blank cheque, payable to whomever. My father could be anyone. He could be a plumber or a geologist or a serial killer. He could be dead. They always say it causes a lot of problems for a kid to grow up without a father...but then that's not really a condition, and even if it is, it's not my condition.
My condition is called synesthesia. This is difficult to describe if you've never heard of it, and it's impossible to imagine if you don't actually have it. Stimulation to one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to an automatic, involuntary response within a secondary and otherwise unrelated sensory or cognitive pathway, blah blah blah...
So, I hear colors. See sounds. Abstract concepts like numbers and letters each have their own special attributes, unique themes or vibes...even personalities.
January, the month in which I was born, is a pale girl with icy hair and eyes like diamonds catching light in the dark. The platinum girl.
The number fifty-five is exceptionally ugly. Dogshit ugly. But five, just five by itself, is elegant and graceful. Stately, like Kate Middleton or the Starship Enterprise.
The doctors tell me I'm different from other synesthetes. They say my crosswirings are denser, tighter, more entangled than any other case they've seen before. I have so many interactions that most of the time I don't even know which is which, where one sensation ends and another begins, a sense linked to a sense linked to a sense, everything blurred and indistinct until suddenly it becomes crystal clear and so bright that I double over, nauseous, my brain roaring from the vivid reality of it all. I have tasted every sound, touched every color. Every letter and number and month, even days of the week, they are all individually just as unique as living people. Sometimes more so. To sit here and list every one of them would be impossible. It's an infinite fiber of sensation, minimized only by my own conscious effort not to explore it. I'm reminded of those little animated fractal patterns you see on the internet, where the more you zoom out, the more you realize that what you're looking at is just one tiny part of a far larger image.
The harder I try to find a limit, the deeper I plunge into the abyss of my own psyche, and the more I realize that there is no limit. Even now, I can feel myself floating upon those unknown waters, always drifting further out to sea. But I can't allow that to happen. I must always keep sight of the shoreline, for I do not wish to discover what lay beyond the horizon...and what monstrous spider must be crouching at the center of the web.
You can't imagine how hard this makes finding someone to fuck.
-------------
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Awesome. If that was a prologue to a book, I'd be at the cashier.
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Sci Story #28
My gums are like mosaics with tiles fallen out. My tongue is telling me that while my smile is fucked I might still enjoy chewing with the teeth that remain.
Sad thing is, I told them everything I knew ten days ago.
Funny thing is, I came up with the idea of decentralized rebellion.
/Story
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Sci Story #29
There's a collection of black birthmarks on my skin, splotches my mind wove as my soul fashioned its new, updated cocoon. Guess the last thing on it were stab wounds.
It's a weird thing, remembering the woman that I was, in a world where sorcery worked. Where words didn't need the medium of silicon and wires to make changes in reality. One could speak murder so long as one had breath enough to shape speech with their tongue.
Is this worse? Not necessarily. There are no dragons here, no vampire royals hunting peasants on the moonless night.
Living without magic seems like a fair trade, to be able make it to seventeen this time around.
And honestly? Between you and me? Having a dick is weirder than not being able to fly.
/Story
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Awesome. If that was a prologue to a book, I'd be at the cashier.
Heh, thanks dude. I've had a vague idea for this super-synesthete character for a while now, but the general concept of that opening just came into my head last week and I felt the need to get it down. I've got a lot potential ideas for it swirling around. I definitely want there to be a slight sci-fi bend to it (I mean it basically already is, since no one in real life is as intense of a synesthete as the main character is -- tentatively named Carson Crane). I'm also thinking of giving him an eidetic memory as well, although how the hell I'm going to depict both that and all of the synesthetic stuff...well it's a little daunting, to say the least. I'm still going to focus on editing my short story, plus rewrites of Blood and the Moon, and starting my epic fantasy, but this will definitely be something I chisel away at here and there.
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Sci Story #30
It's hard not to laugh. To look afraid. These are professionals, and while they're human they've gotten used to the stink of fear.
I shake, I cry, I even shit myself for the sake of my torturers.
Have to keep up appearances, just a few hours longer. Have to play this game of charades until the full moon fades into sight, unveiled by the passing of daylight.
/Story
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Sci Story #31
Unseen, he raised his rifle, took aim at the Hierophant writhing in the top floor of the brothel.
For the sake of vengeance, he triggered his own damnation.
Because how could he walk away to the country, accepting the Paradise offered by Baptism, knowing that somehow in leading The Faith his enemy might repent and thus find salvation?
/Story
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Sci Story #31
So many days where I pretend you're still near me, that I engage in a sort of spectral necrophilia.
What scares me isn't that I pretend you're still here, pretend you didn't change.
What scares me is even though I know it's a lie, I look back on the weeks, months, soon to be years and the happiest moments are the ones when I close my eyes and will myself to believe you're not gone.
Masturbating to thoughts of you feels like the recovery of Innocence. It could never be passed through words without inciting disgust, but I really really believe that if you could somehow know that touching myself while pretending you're here is better than fucking anyone else...
...that somehow you'd know how much you hurt me.
I wish I could put out the eye of God.
/Story
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Seclusion. A distance crossed only by letters...if she could. She disdained greeting visitors or even leaving her room in latter years. Death and immortality. Through poems and sheets sent, by not lowering to the meat and meander of these scrawny eyes and habitual tongues, she crafted herself more semantic than woman. Hovering, swooping across a landscape, the final mortal remnant now only making kite of her. Caught like a photograph, across sheets, the momentum of her soul sealed like sea monkey dead awaiting waters. Is my verse...alive? She escapes death (or simply obsoletes it?), becoming the goddess who moves behind eyes. But with but light touch as this is not, never was her realm. Goddess of doors.
~~~
Something I thought of when I read the Emily Dickinson wiki article after reading the poem at TPB.
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Good stuff Callan! I got a little tripped up at the sea monkey part.
But good rhythm there, IMO, could feel it as a I read.
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Thanks, Saajan! I know 'sea monkeys' just triggers so many out of the context things, but it's suitable for a life form which can essentially be dead and dry as dust, but return to life if given water. And Bakkers a bad influence - I kinda like that sea monkeys disrupts! Sea monkeys! Vs all caps dragon! Fight! ;)
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What would you think about adding the word "new" so "awaiting new waters" would end the line?
Maybe my ear is off, but that seems to fit better? As always just one dude on the 'net making suggestions.
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Mmm, I'm thinking about it and I want to keep that primal lack of demarcation. There are no 'new' waters and other waters. Just waters. Narrowing down the semantic to base elements, no divisions. If it sounds off, try to hear it in a more primal part of your brain. :) Besides, the lass used some pretty at first jarring language herself, like 'And I, and Silence, some strange Race, Wrecked, solitary, here -'. That link - its really striking to me - it feels jarring, and yet it feels kind of like instead of taking us down a grove, she's slammed us into the wall of the grove - yet even as the protest comes, suddenly it's smooth. It's like she moves us across to another grove. Moves sideways. Or am I off topic? Anyway, I shouldn't pretend to be able to do what she enacts, but I will say I will try it on all the same.
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Sci Story #32 (Still Saturday here mofos!)
The house across the street is inhabited by evangelical Christians, the house next to that one by Muslims. The wife in the second house leaves only her face uncovered, even in the scorching summer heat.
I see the children playing in the yard together.
The parents go to great lengths to avoid matters of doctrine, as these sessions of close contact are difficult enough.....but all this effort is wasted on the children who remain oblivious the difficulties endured by their parents.
One day they'll understand.
/Story
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Sci Story #33
As she shuffled down, kissing his chest and stomach as if making stops in a pilgrimage, he expected hesitation upon her arrival to the expected, anticipated destination.
Perhaps even a whisper, or at least a quick look of a neophyte seeking approval.
Instead, the moment of her breath on his shaft and the sensation of his glans in the warm confines of her mouth mark a near seamless transition.
It takes a half hour for him to cum, these minutes filled with a pleasure that demands to be given not just voice but volume. She leads him, again and again, to the edge of orgasm. Her tongue teases, retreats, teases. Never once does he shout "I'm gonna come!", instead his screams are always compliments and nonsensical prayers to a God whose belief in he had shed in classrooms on the other side of the ocean.
She has only to read the tide of his musculature to measure his distance from ejaculation.
Later that night, with her asleep in his arms, he'll think about well she knows him....and then he'll think that perhaps he is not so unique. That she simply knows men. He knows, from the discussions that preceded this arrangement, that she wasn't a virgin. He himself had simply said the same, said nothing about America and its youth's dedication to liberty.
But this...expertise? This mastery. A hopeful voice brings up the educational value of gonzo pornography, but it's an excuse that's quickly dismissed.
He doesn't sleep much for the rest of the night.
When morning comes, he is quick to rise, quick to shed the foggy remnants of honeymoon dreams.
/Story
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I sought false love. The occluded other, that which seemed absent on the tip of every mind, yet grotesquely obvious by the necessary companion of their wall eyed mutterings. I sought false love. It was not easy. I had to try, and try again. With so many, there was something there between us - that something. I had to look for the one where we didn't really have something between us. That. She hated me at first. Thought me stuck up, proud. False love at first prejudiced sight. Hers, mine. There was never really anything there.
And so I pursued.
Years, bitter words, difficult times. Even on the day we married, she would scrutinise me. Peer in what way she could into what thing I could manage to be. Children, the difficulties, the fight each day to maintain cohesion and resource. The fight to maintain something. Over the false. Because...years pass...because there's nothing there. It is false. Even after I died first, old, and years latter she took another man to warm her elder years, she would weep it was not the same. Then she died, in time, and our grandchildren being told the stories past the gravel veil.
You think it, yet it was not. It was false. And it was love.
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Monday (Sci Story #34)
I realize there was never any love between us, nevertheless you remain the paramour who has etched me the deepest.
In your absence, I have only my own hands to serve as echo to your own.
Lacking your patience, I find myself an inadequate lover.
/Story
=-=-=
Tuesday (Sci Story #35)
A flash of red, as if sunset has been poured through his pupils down into his retina. All sense are swallowed by the intensity of that consuming glare.
A moment later and the snow driven darkness of night reforms, the miniscule flakes of ice settling on previously unexposed swaths of flesh.
The redness remains, and for a moment his addled mind thinks it is blood.
Relief, then to realize it is cloth, the vestments of his station. He stands, gathering his bearings, eyes flicking to the corpses of polar bear lycanthropes.
Ambushed. So close to home? And then awareness brings nightmares, as he watches the bestial figures retract into the lithe, almost childlike corpses of the long indentured Sidhe.
A red will o' wisp, nuzzling his torn and bleeding arm.
Rudolph. He recalls when the majestic figure before him, the very warrior who cleaved his enemies with a natural weapon of light, was a scrawny fawn rejected by the rest of his herd.
The stag is right. This is no time for memories or worries.
It's Christmas Eve after all.
/Story
=-=-=
Wednesday (Sci Story #36)
Realizing there was a delay in these daily stories
Got a bit sidetracked by labor but no Tories
Writing was on the mind but the brain couldn't produce thoughts
Struck down by bad luck where my writtens was blocked
Thought maybe I could use some time off
Some time to jerk off
Shit didn't help, just made me worse off
So here I am back in the game,
hoping the return isn't too lame,
And if it is then look to the Man 'cause that fucker's to blame!
/Story
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D&D stuff I made the last few days crossposted for #37, #38 (Thurs + Fri):
The Great Lunar Distilleries
Isolated from much of the Wan is a great chasm, deep and wide enough to swallow worlds. Whether discovered or made, the Unseelie who rule this place have used it for this express purpose, over the eons drawing five gas giants into the ravine. These planetary bodies collapsed upon arrival, spreading out into clouds of variegated mists. Through the harvesting of these mists the Unseelie alchemists seek transmutations far more challenging than that of lead into gold.
Traversing this worlds engulfing canyon are vehicles the shape and size of moons, spheres crafted from a dark spongy material that respires the surrounding vapors. Within these spheres are mass collections of glass piping and arcane powered gear works, all winding toward the central core of each moon. There the concoctions of condensed gases are stored into various vats from which samples are drawn for the more delicate intermingling of the chemicals.
Those wishing to utilize the wares produced by these moons should gather with other potential customers in the cities that dot the lips of the canyon. The center of each city is marked by vast and high reaching scaffolding, landing areas capable of holding a moon. There are planars from across the Multiverse gathered around here, with drug traffickers and universities dedicated to alchemical research a major part of every city.
The Hunger in Darkness
A sentient forest within the Eald whose inner regions increase the potency of sacrifices and rituals, the Hunger in Darkness represents the empowering aspects of the night that are usually granted to the undead as well as more natural, nocturnal predators.
The forest itself possesses a grand, thick canopy through which only the barest glimmers of the sky's illuminating bodies are spied. Much of the illumination comes from bioluminescent fungi and the ghostly wanderings of entrapped souls. Souls that are themselves starving predators whose illumination keeps them from eating anything save for the occasionally wounded sentient. (They gain no sustenance from draining the life force of animals.)
The longer one stays in this place, the greater the blessings conferred. But each blessing, while permanent unless subject to disjunction, is also a curse. Alignment begins to shift toward true neutral, and one begins to subconsciously desire to get lost and separated from one's companions, once-fellows who now are seen as prey that must be hunted and killed. This compulsion, if resisted, causes increasing fatigue.
The blessings conferred make one a stronger, faster, quieter predator with enhanced senses. Surprisingly, one does not lose class levels or access to magic. Hunger in Darkness enjoys the sport of watching truly competitive rivals seek the flesh of those the traveled into itself together.
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One more for Sat (# 39):
Luckless
Luckless, in his true form, seems like a harmless pixie of miniscule size. Yet the aura of misfortune surrounding the being makes him nothing less than an assassin. A shape changer who is undetectable by any magic less than a wish, Luckless is a Seelie fey who travels the Multiverse seeking to test not the courtesy of individuals but rather the scruples of an entire society.
While it might be a relief that one rude innkeeper cannot bring down the wrath of the fey, it is troubling to note that many innocents can be judged wanting if Luckless does not feel appreciated. Additionally, while his path is random Luckless is easily influenced by the cultures he has just visited. As such, he is often testing for things ranging from honor to sexual mores that may or may not coincide between different realms.
Luckless has destroyed cultures for being too lax or too strict, for being too devout or too devoted to arcane magic instead of the divine.
Once a culture is judged, Luckless replaces someone and spreads his curse across a hundred miles. This usually means he chooses a nation's capital or an empire's most holy sites. The misfortunes are gradual but cascade into food shortages and/or plague, with thousands to millions ultimately dying. What's worse is no divine being may further intrude into this radius save for the usual allotment of clerical magic and extant blessing, artifacts, and heralds already present when Luckless unleashes his curse. This usually means the gods are forced to make deals with mortals such as adventuring parties to attempt to drive away the fey.
Luckless is usually defeated, but his very nature makes divinities loathe to entrap him and so if killed he simply reappears on the Feywild within a year or two none the worse for wear, ready to set off to test another realm for whatever manners and mores have taken his fancy.
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Sci Story #40 (more D&D stuff)
The Parchment Whale
This gargantuan orca has the expected black skin with white "eye" patches and white underbelly. However, on those places where it's skin is white one sees the black encroach to seep over in the form of writing. The calligraphy tells the tales of those varied parts of the Feywild's oceanic expanses, particularly the greatest body of water that extends between Weal, Eald, and even Warp, whose depths seen into the cavernous corridors of the Wan.
By examining the tales written on the white, one can glean an understanding of the way various societies are shaping themselves and each other across the oceans of the Feywild. The orca is large enough to lay across a large Prime world metropolis, and as such you have varied pilgrims reading its belly in hopes of finding some information to use against a rival or some clue to a hidden fey recluse.
Though apparently ageless and immortal, the whale itself is not sentient though it does seem to fall ill if the oceans of the Feywild are ever seriously threatened or a great war encompasses a great portion of the saline waters.
/Story
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Sci Story #41:
Ephemeral Cities of the Eternal Hailstorm
Above a certain grassland in the Weal, there is a massive storm that has remained overhead since the earliest days of the Seelie's ascendance. Hail continually falls from the sky, pieces of ice ranging in size from that of a human thumbnail to that of a dragon's head. The latter are incredibly rare, but it is these that allow passerby to glean the nature of the Seelie Court that dwells in this vast plain supposedly devoid of urban architecture.
There are cities of ice in every bit of hail, with Seelie fey living their lives in miniature. The hail falls to the ground, and eventually every city melts away though by then all of the citizens have died from the impact.
The key to entering the cities is to walk through a bolt of lightning temporarily held from dissolution. Once through this gateway, one realizes the cities are an interlinked civilization that exists in a much slower version of time than that experienced by those outside of the cryopolises. The fey in the different cities enact a pantomime of different cultures with each fall, and each descent allows them to play out different scenarios of Apocalypse and Ragnarok.
Of course the moment the hail hits the ground is when a city is most advanced, right before the fey reincarnate into the clouds. This leads to an influence on the younger cities, and the continuance of this process results in a continuous transformation and possible evolution of these Seelie.
Note that the fey only realize they have chosen to participate in this game only just before their cities hit the ground, and at the moment the entire population expires. What, exactly, they are doing is an inquiry that only has a hope of being answered in those final days, though the chances of any visitor surviving the impact is incredibly miminal. If one dies, one may find themselves bound to the same cycle of Samsara as the fey.
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That'd be good in a source book. Though along with some ideas of getting PC's into it (what resources these cities might have that a PC hungers for) and also some method out (if it's truely a seelie experiment, there may be a way out they have rendered themselves blind to (when within the experiment))
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Good points - these are just brainstorms for the slow but steady Feywild (http://fourthparty.freeforums.org/faerie-project-f9.html) project at Fourth Party.
So it's more throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks t the moment.
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Story #42:
Well Wombs of the Warp
Some changelings are made into fey lords, some are used as slaves, some become lovers.
And some are dropped into the Well Wombs.
Within the Warp there are deep wells believed to have been dug and bricked by the oldest of the hags. Within these artifacts, a mortal babe has always been utilized as a focus, allowing the Wells to be used as a means of examining the Past, Present, and Future of the Feywild in its entirety. Warnings, prophecies, and perhaps most importantly insight has been offered by the Wells.
The guarding against schemes that threaten the Courts, the dangers of the Grey Horsemen, the opportunities to determine which worlds might best be absorbed into the realm of the Fairy. All this has been accomplished by the hags and their Wells.
Yet each Well possesses a finicky, mercurial taste in what mortal it wants after the last expires. These mortal babes have varied in range from beasts to humanoids to dragons, each creature a being born in a place where Time is steady and its linear flow rarely disturbed. Dropped into a Well, such infants have only the fungi, mold, and lichen to sustain them. This keeps a mortal alive and allows it to obtain the minimum nutrition necessary to mature. Each being then, over time, bonds to the Well both psychically and physically - a complex network of mycelia is woven through their flesh - and becomes the oracular voice of the Warp's shifting personalities and perspectives.
What the Warp seeks to accomplish by subsuming these stolen mortals into itself is unclear. Perhaps the "Voices of the Warp" are, in fact, individual beings buried deep in the soil of that land.
A few of the hags go out of their way to rescue those infants or eggs that would otherwise perish, while others seek to maximize the suffering of forlorn parents or even when possible the lines of succession, thus throwing nations or empires into disarray.
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Nihilistic story (contradiction)
Ash swoop, scatter spreading into darkness. Darkness ending. Middling sky, echo of a ghost turns like a pirouetting cloak above dust spun earth. Tiny points of orange light set against deepest black, each so far from the other - even each nimbus lies as to the distance. Swivelling upward, a uncorporate line a jaw, a curved, disparate constellation, a skull. Line parts the further, furthering and there's a piercing second of silence, even as the points of orange light shake with fury. Then like the broken lip sync of a spagetti western, a roar returns the quiet. The bellow of an absurd monster, a godzilla, howling it's still. Monster or caricature...or choice atween, shrieked.
It does not know what will happen next.
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Sci Story #43
Etrau, The One Who Initiates
A cloak filled with scalpels and piercings and inks for tattoos, bags with all sorts of tools and magic items, locks threaded through rings of ivory and ivory, multiple medicine pouches strung around his neck, all these accessories mark the looming, wiry muscled, bronze skinned fey known as Etrau.
Etrau's irises are rings of liquid silver, those who close enough to look into them see themselves yet those reflections seem somehow more whole. Etrau is native to the depths of the Primungle, yet he is found wandering across Feywild and the Multiverse beyond. Etrau enjoys participating in and officiating over initiatory rituals, and while he sometimes wanders simply to collect such experiences he does spend a good deal of time conducting rituals to connect fey and mortal alike into the mysteries of the Eald.
Etrau is a representation of those proto-narratives that make up the Eald, and as such he seeks to reinvigorate the devotion once held for the shamanic religious experience. Sometimes this means teaching sirens the Songs of Creation, other times it means leading city slickers through vision quests to discover their spirit animals. Etrau turns university hazing into a sacred event, and thus makes the fraternity into a mystery cult. He does the same with other secret societies such as thieves' guilds and mercantile oligarchies.
There are times when new initiates create problems for local authorities by sacrificing animals or robbing graves, but by then Etrau has already wandered into another city, country, world, or plane.
/Story
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I think these figures, Etrau being the latest, aught to have something that's fucking them sideways. Their just a little bit too much of being in some kind of set order of the universe. Ya know, if they are fucking someone elses lives sideways, if that sidewayification can occur in the universe, how come these characters seem outside of that? Are they of the one true tribe and sidewaysification is just for those not of the one true tribe? If not, they should be just as subject to a bit of fucking over. Or so goes my world/universe structure assuredness!
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Argh, double posting stories. Ah well.
Thurs -> Story #44:
We followed him. The First Rebel. The one who questioned the Infallible.
Why?
To know ourselves. To find the boundary between us and Him.
To be damned is the only way to be apart from His glory, an absence that is both Nirvana and Hell.
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Fri -> Story #45:
Waystation of the Cycling Archetypes
You know them by their titles, for titles are truer names than any fleeting life could give them. The Preserver, reborn into the world to conquer demons and tyrants and catastrophe. The Eternal Champion, forever tied to slaughter in the name of Balance and the promise of peace that it offers from a distant horizon. The heroes and villains who die only to find themselves returned to the world, the lovers who seek to be reunited in Life before Death forces them apart once more. The Bodhisattvas who open the gates to Nirvana. The Avatar, who must master the elements anew with every rebirth.
All of them, willing and unwilling participants in a grand Samsara, a continuous remaking of Story across lifetimes. Yet, for all the burdens they bare, the Multiverse has granted them relief and a chance to commiserate in the grasslands of the Warp, where the blades shift in the wind between emerald green and withered husks cursed by blight or drought. An inn, too large for the gazelle legs that could not support it, resting at a slightly tilted angle on two sets of plinths that make up part of a looming, miles wide circle of standing stones.
Within this place you'll find these varied figures conversing, swinging lovers, and even dueling. Most of them have no fear of repercussions, as they know they'll soon be born once more in some life somewhere in the Multiverse, sent off by the capricious whims of Fate. While this means the crowd tends to get rowdy, discipline is kept by the guards and staff, themselves ghosts of Feywild heroes and villains who will be resurrected when their fellows grow tired of their removal from the currents of Story and demand their return.
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I think these figures, Etrau being the latest, aught to have something that's fucking them sideways. Their just a little bit too much of being in some kind of set order of the universe. Ya know, if they are fucking someone elses lives sideways, if that sidewayification can occur in the universe, how come these characters seem outside of that? Are they of the one true tribe and sidewaysification is just for those not of the one true tribe? If not, they should be just as subject to a bit of fucking over. Or so goes my world/universe structure assuredness!
Perhaps my partner's ideas of Narrative Time can help with assurances that the Fey do get fucked over:
"Imagine a physical journey through the elements of a story, origin, exposition, rising action, climax, etc etc, by literally riding rivers and rapids, trying to keep on course with a particular genre, or maybe clutching a soaked parchment map while attempting to navigate to a desired ending. Wherever you wind up determines the gains and failures of your life. Maybe there is some sort of special fey type or an unusual NPC that facilitates this, not sure why I envision a stork of some sorts. You only get one ride. People sometimes find their way back and try to swim upriver, but that's a fool's errand, kind of like a Chinese hell of swimming against a current and never getting anywhere, reaching for a moment they'd change but never being able to. Those would be haunted swimmers indeed, who'd live their whole lives in those waters, then become some waterlogged wights after, paddling, kicking, thrashing with a desire stronger than death. Imagine what horrendous demon-beavers dam the flow of stories, flooding waters till stories mingle, creating in their damage bad art, cliffhangers, unfinished tales, etc etc. Think of the miraculous oils that could be derived from the trout mating in the waters of Romance, or the mudskippers in the dark streams Pornography. Old liars might fish in the streams of Tall Tale, their catches are amazing as their yarns (but which may just rip them into the waters and devour them). Parsons could baptize men and women into new genres like religions. Infernal ferryboats might ride up and down the rivers of Parable, in spite of the drowned saints leering up at them, hosting Faustian card games and tossing losers and thieves to drown in the clutches of holy claws.
Narrative Time seems like it could be so many things to so many different fey, and the other races besides. It transcends the Wyld, but it's perhaps its most potent here. I'm not even sure two people see it the same way, never mind how gnomes see it compared to frog-men, compared to demons and dragons."
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Sat -> Wyld Scarabs
It's unclear whether the Scarabs are precursors to the Fey or a creation of theirs. Scarabs are blue and gold insects the size of a halfling child, with shining humanoid faces where one would expect the mandibles and compound eyes of a beetle. These scavengers are found across the Wyld, feasting on the corpses of fey.
Scarabs begin as similar beings, but quickly grow into individuals as they devour not just the body but the remnants of Narrative that are soaked into a being from skin down to marrow. These changes cause shift in the coloration and size of a scarab, as well as an adoption of new physiques, so that one might be a massive insectoid lupine based on a diet of campfire horror and epic poetry, while another might become a sensual yet preachy Adonis of romance and exegeses.
In time, scarabs end up bursting open and through their death new fey are born in the Wyld. Because of this, many of the Courts recognize the scarabs as hallowed forces of the Wyld that ensure the continuance of Narrative Time. This becomes a problem when the insects come to sentience and come knocking at a particular Court's door.
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#47 -> Sun:
The Cavern Shadowed Stage
A massive amphitheater with a ceiling of naturally curved stone, whose seats surround a stage the size of a small plateau. The seats and stage have been carved out of a deposit of malachite, and all of these structures glow a faint green rarely seen due to the floating orbs of light that bob over the heads of both actors and audience.
Unseelie from across the Wan come to this place, as do Seelie and members of the Grey Courts. Occasionally, depending on the production, a hag or two from the Warp may be in attendance. The Stage was constructed by Unseelie obsessed with staging the greatest concerts, the grandest operas, and the most emotionally stirring of plays. Thousands of changelings and lesser fey are forced to practice and perform over and over, their endurance bolstered by the same sorcery that manipulates their age and binds them to this place.
In fact, all performers are forced to eek out existences in the Understage, a fungi and crystal lit metropolis of corridors and chasms that extends several levels below the theater. The Unseelie have tied these beings to their roles, making them all addicts of continuous rehearsal. Though the indentured fey are usually aware of it - but even the often dimly - the masters of the Stage continuously manipulate the lives of their charges as they see fit, giving them passion or grief to add some greater verisimilitude to their craft. Because of the need to constantly rearrange the fortunes of these servants and slaves, the Understage itself is a confusing labyrinth, leading from ghettos to mansions without warning.
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Nihilistic story (contradiction)
Ash swoop, scatter spreading into darkness. Darkness ending. Middling sky, echo of a ghost turns like a pirouetting cloak above dust spun earth. Tiny points of orange light set against deepest black, each so far from the other - even each nimbus lies as to the distance. Swivelling upward, a uncorporate line a jaw, a curved, disparate constellation, a skull. Line parts the further, furthering and there's a piercing second of silence, even as the points of orange light shake with fury. Then like the broken lip sync of a spagetti western, a roar returns the quiet. The bellow of an absurd monster, a godzilla, howling it's still. Monster or caricature...or choice atween, shrieked.
It does not know what will happen next.
I really like the rhythm you've been developing in these stories. I have to admit I'm not 100% sure what happened in this tale though!
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I really like the rhythm you've been developing in these stories. I have to admit I'm not 100% sure what happened in this tale though!
*cough* That's the thing when I go to spill those nihilistic guts - what can happen? I feel I'd almost have to write and entire world for it to seem even something is happening! The images in my head - there's alot of shrieking...the locales seem merely a stumbling after thought.
Thanks for the kind words, Saajan! :)
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#48 -> Mon:
1. Loki's was a chaos dependent on the consistency of others. Yet the winds of time and change showed him new futures in bloom offering the scent of nascent possibilities and unforeseen betrayal:
2. They showed his wife leaving, walking away from his bound form, serpent venom free to drip into the caskets of his sockets, burning down to the hollows past the pupil darkness no longer curtained by his eyes, boring into divine gray matter but still he will not die and so must scream and scream for the eons between foretold capture and predetermined release, begging his own Being forcibly calcified into flesh to deliver him from agony to hallucination:
3. Screaming as he, Hero he was always meant to be, all the sniveling of Trickster archetype sloughed off, is charging with giants of bathed in auras of Winter or Flame, hammer blows drowned by the howling of Fenris and Garm, meeting his end as Martyr murdered amidst the iridescent shards of a shattered Bifrost -
2. Yet those dreams are few are between, godhood has made him too strong to slip the leash of this hallucinated Present, and so he must scream until, hoarse only when the pitch of his voice has hammered cracks into surrounding stone, he tastes the blood in his throat -
1. He turns from the churning prophecies, and queries his heart, finding a hate that is as inexplicable in its depth as it is inexorable in its targeting of the Aesir. It troubles him that his Chaos is pinned down like a butterfly on velvet even as it soothes him. He is an actor on the Norn Sisters' stage, caught on a current plunging over a cliff. He is and was always bound, and what was his life if not a series of snakebites?
0. "Ragnarok", he whispers, in the way a man speaks on the way to visit a lover long-absent from the embrace of his arms.
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#49 - Tues
Enjoy this life, Archenemy of Mine,
as the Norns say the final reckoning approaches,
when you and I will at last meet on a vast plain of wolf's fur,
striding toward battle on a lupine corpse so grand its jaws could swallow the sun...
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Weds #50
Here it was, the moment of truth.
She looked down as the zipper descended, allowing a thick thuft of pubes to blossom. At least he smelled clean, which made him better than half of the men she brought home from the club. She didn't care about men being uncircumcised, so long as they "cleaned behind the ears".
As his uncovered, mushroom headed erection sprung out from the enclosure of denim, her eyes flickered upward and her mouth stifled a sigh. He wanted a compliment, she could see the expectation in his puppy dog eyes.
They always did. Men who couldn't accept that save for the rarest of circumstances, a dick was a dick was a dick.
Still, after the last dude had deflated because she'd included "moray eels" into her dirty talk, she's been meaning to try out some new lines.
"Ooh baby if it were a salmon, I bet it could swim up Victoria Falls stacked atop the Niagra!"
He beamed with pride. It was an act of will not to roll her eyes.
Men. Fucking men. If only she could develop a healthier love for pussy, she was sure she could live without 'em.
/story
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Nihilistic story (cu...cont)
Dense, nestling deep grey points of light, a shaft, bolting across ground so thin it could be forgotten, yet it carries the world. Equine screech in the distance. It does not know what will happen, the dust spirals at their approach like an old mans anger. It inhales, like the very act were to already scream. Minute fragments of pine click and shiver over things so small they can only be tasted, not seen. They are around it now, swords drawn.
It swivels skull constelation, finds lens to lens. It's lens shivers, clicks. Many, so small and numerous, they cannot be known. The other lens, even as twining fibre tugs at calcium stalegtites around forged earth bone, flickers. Syncronises.
Then one slits it's throat. Iron rich reapportions.
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Saajan, what's with these empty sex stories? (alternatively: Am I more of a romantic than I thought? Second alternative, I'm only thinking of one other at this point, so that makes 2. Which may not qualify as 'all these'.)
How did that ball (scuse the phrase) start rolling with her, to begin with? How did she end up getting to the club. Prior, how did she end up thinking of the club? Prior that, how was anything attractive to begin with for her to travel this road ever to begin with? Is her gut brain just sending her out and then her upper brain has all this sarcasm? If so, when did they depart/sheer from each other?
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oh, i just built the story around the Niagra line. the shortest imaginative distance was to have promiscuity rather than intimacy.
but, though it doesn't count as the daily since it was written awhile back, I do have intimacy in stories:
Is that why you started liking girls?”
Eana frowned, thankful the other woman's eyes were admiring her nipples. It was hard to remember that Deandrea was isolated from prejudice, that societal condemnation of her desire was nothing more than proof of a world long fallen to ignorance. Why care what those deaf to the Song thought about you? Why weigh yourself down with the banal opinions of the unchosen masses?
“Does it matter?” Eana asked, drawing Dee's hand from her breast to her mouth. A small, half-whispered moan stumbled out of the lips of her boss's daughter.
“I've just been a phase too many times.” Memories moistened Dee's eyes even as her now slightly choked voice continued to be weighted by pleasure. Eana, rather than speak words of comfort, stopped her suckling of Deandrea's fingers and placed her lips on the other woman's neck.
Slowly, with the gentleness used to pinch a butterfly's wings, Eana shyly led Dee's moistened hand into the clasp of her thighs. Upon contact Dee rubbed her lover forcefully, elicting a gasp of pleasured surprise, then pulled back her hand to taste Eana before descending once more. Dee's fingers clasped the thicker woman's thigh, her nails digging to stake their owner's claim. Drawing away for a moment, Dee caught her lover's gaze as she licked her lips. A promise of things to come, like the taste of dessert given before the table is set. Grabbing the back of Eana's head, Dee pushed the woman's full lips back to her throat.
“Now that you've started, just don't ever stop.” Dee arched her head, exposing her neck to more slow suckling kisses. Her fingers wove themselves into Eana's mahogany locks. Her fingers traveled up Eana's thigh with teasing slowness. Once her destination was reached, Dee kept her fingers together in mimicry of a tongue. Distilled pleasure from Eana with a woman's expertise. An offering of proof that in in the arena of sex men were superfluous. Coarse. Substandard. It was not in their nature to be either giving or patient.
“Don't ever stop liking girls, okay?” Eana murmured something in response to the question. Something incoherent that might have been affirmation, the elusive Grail that Dee had long fought for, but was likely nothing more than lustful glossalia.
As her hunger uncoiled from its place in her belly, Eana's kisses began to shed their gentleness. Deandrea remembered they'd have to meet Father tomorrow, that it was too warm for turtlenecks and scarves. A recipe for ridding one's skin of hickies flickered across her mind, something a college roommate had told her, but worries were hard to hold on to at the moment. In truth, they only served to further excite the normally prim Dee.
Even through the haze of her own passion, her tongue found and flickered across Eana's earlobe, fishing out another moan from her lover. Every sound she drew from Eana's lips buttressed Dee's hopes. Maybe this time it'll be different?
One more lick, tracing the curve of that ear. A prelude to her plea, the hope that passion would keep the other woman from one day tumbling out of her arms.
“Don't ever stop liking me.”
-
Nihilistic story (cu...cont)
Dense, nestling deep grey points of light, a shaft, bolting across ground so thin it could be forgotten, yet it carries the world. Equine screech in the distance. It does not know what will happen, the dust spirals at their approach like an old mans anger. It inhales, like the very act were to already scream. Minute fragments of pine click and shiver over things so small they can only be tasted, not seen. They are around it now, swords drawn.
It swivels skull constelation, finds lens to lens. It's lens shivers, clicks. Many, so small and numerous, they cannot be known. The other lens, even as twining fibre tugs at calcium stalegtites around forged earth bone, flickers. Syncronises.
Then one slits it's throat. Iron rich reapportions.
I like what you're doing here, your rhythms seem to be gaining confidence with ever story! I like how the reality seems to be determined by this rhythm, though I might be primed to see it that way b/c you refer to the tale as "nihilistic".
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Lady Dark (#51 Thur)
"She is like a cat in the dark,
then baby, she is your darkness.
She rules her life like a fine skylark,
when the sky is starless..."
-Rhiannon (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtPyk8_onO8)
Darkness in the Wyld is the living darkness of forests, of entangled lovers, of festivities and terrors. The comet streaked night of the Weal, the Moon conquered sky of the Warp, the cacophonous dark of Eald and even the sunless corridors of Wan are all pregnant with Story. This bountiful Wyld night of opportunity is incarnated in the fey mistress referred to simply but reverently by all of Fairy as Lady Dark.
In Weal she might arrive in miniature, on the back of a nightingale whose song reverberates into the mortal world, emerging from the throats of the fowl's brethren so poets across the worlds might be inspired to pen new verses. Her steed settles on the shoulders of a fey who has caught her eye, and she'll whisper novelties yet untried into the lucky Wyldling's ear. She comes as a shadow, draped in the diaphanous mists of fecund nebulae, a lover whose touch is maddening, her teasing gestures almost as light as the rays of the moon on your skin. She is the assassin spoken of in whispers, the one who throws whole kingdoms into upheaval by slitting throats or slipping poisons under the cover of Herself thrown across the sky. She is the titan general who conquers under the watchful stars of nightfall, astride an oak trampling stallion whose hooves and teeth are formed from blackest iron.
In Eald she is lynx and owl, patient stalker and wisdom giver. She runs and rides with the Wild Hunts, takes charge of wolves or is devoured as the martyr among the fleeing hares. She comes cloaked in star bright darkness to offer visions to the Heirophant Druids. She is mother and queen to Etrau, for she is the angel wrestler of shamans, the Death that initiates must conquer to grasp the Mysteries that lie beyond the grasp of reason and conscious thought. She is the womb and the egg, the wet darkness that encompasses and continually generates the creation mythology that buttresses Narrative Time. She awaits supplicants at stained altars of unhewn stone, for it is to her that the sacrifice of hearts and babes is offered, with her that hoary, bloody bargains are struck.
In Wan she is the rope and chain laden Queen of Muses, a martyr and mistress of leather and lace who allows herself to be bound even as the inspiration and excitement she offers her chosen Unseelie bind them in turn. She rides dangling black widows, whispering encouragement and goading on obsessions, offering injections of imagination through venom. She is hunger and terror and wanderer, as much mole and bat as she is woman, or perhaps blind amphibian swimming then joining with cold rivers that have never been mirrors for the luminous bodies of the sky. Her menstrual blood drips onto the Underdark Floors as she liberates and cages heroes and monsters, leaving a trail of burning rubies that sink into stone to mark a path of pilgrimage for the cyclopes and formians of the Wan. Sometimes she is even a lost and frightened child.
In Warp she is the Crone and Vistani Queen. She meets you at the crossroads, tarot deck in hand. She has full moons for eyes, one holding a hare and the other a gnome. She suckles the lunatics chosen by destiny, and sings lullabies to the Rip Van Winkles who will sleep soundly through decades or days as determined by whim. She is Corpse Bride, Queen of the Cremation Ground, pale belly as full as the moon, birthing minotaur sages whose placentas are labyrinths even as She is jet skinned Entropy whose children are ravenous nagas that swim through the waters of Time. She is Maiden, eyeless virgin who pronounces and prognosticates with sockets raised to the stars even as she is a Seductress whose kiss exchanges years, vitality, or memories for the insight of unfathomable lives.
Gloom Drinkers (#52 Fri)
In the Grey Courts, some seek a different kind of night than that offered by Lady Dark. They treat depression as if it were an intoxicant, basking in the despair and dolor that radiates out from the Shadowfell. Their castles and forests feature various gates to their sister plane, portals that are as varied as paintings, wells, lakes, tree hollows and of course arches and tori and doors. For some this is a test of the Wyld within them, with those succumbing to the gloom cast out as failures. For others it is an attempt to balance out the wildness within them, a task taken up by those who for one reason or another have been cursed to dwell among the mortal races. And still for others it is a sickness of inversion, a loyalty to the Story killing forces of the Grey.
Are the latter traitors to the Wyld? Most, even among their own company, would consider them as such though some wizened children of the Warp say that these supposed turncoats are in fact bound to the ultimate Story. Why else would Lady Dark allow such an affront to her glory and contamination of her domain?
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Sat story early ->
Wanderers in Possession of Unkillable Hearts
Some loves won't die, they transcend circumstance, death, and sometimes the wishes of the person who feels the emotion. In the Wyld, unkillable hearts appear on trees in the midst of cherries and apples, on runners where their siblings are strawberries, on vines and as tubers and growths forming from the spores of mushrooms and birthed from other varieties of flora.
Rarer than seven-leaf clovers and blood hued pearls, these treasures are much sought after, sometimes the cause of skirmishes or if strong enough all out wars. To replace one's own heart with one of these enables one to survive some of the darkest wasting curses of the fairy, not the least of which is the infectious power of the Story-sapping Grey.
To take in such a heart is to subject oneself to madness, for the incarnation of love into Wyld flora leaves little in the way of knowledge - sometimes not even an image of the affection's target, just feelings of skin upon skin. It thus becomes a martyrdom of insanity, a Grail Quest for a needle in an infinite haystack. This passion is like the churning sea, a counter-cancer eternally drowning the previous curse or nightmarish taint of the Grey.
Who dares to murder one's Self in order to defy the touch of the Reaper or the Horsemen of the Grey? Some of these Lovers were infected by Grey Carriers willing or unwilling, turned into conduits for this power that seeks the strangulation of Art and thus the ruin of all that is Wyld. Others were cursed by the nigh inexorable power of Court Lords, Eald Elders, or the hags of Warp and must take up the banner of adoration that might be the foundation stone of a good life or the curse that grabs and leaves a lover pining away for one who years or decades or millennia gone.
Once an Unkillable Heart beats in a Wyldling's chest, it draws the fey deeper into madness. The fey will pine for the object of someone's affection, will deny this love is their own when the agony builds to crescendo but this will be to no avail. The heart may allow the focus of the love to change, but the intensity and thus overwhelming nature of the need actually makes this worse for the fey in the long run. And so most likely the fey wander off, traveling the Wyld and the worlds, sometimes leaving ruin in their wake and sometimes gifting others with wonders, half-fey children, or a defense against the approach of the Grey.
Among these Lovers, some hope for a reprieve from their infections or curses, and so preserve their original hearts. Others worry the time may come when these loves prove themselves far more fragile than is usually accepted, that despite their incarnation upon the Wyld these loves, like most things in the multiverse, are touched by Impermanence. Not every love proves to be as Unkillable as it might initially seem. These persons will secret away their original hearts, placing them in sanctuaries under the guard of those beings who can, through strict rituals and bargains, be trusted to defend that which is left in their care. These Heart Gardeners are various fey of the Wan whose Stories turn to those tales of contemplation and steadfastness, knights and monks and great beasts of heraldry. Great vaults and monasteries are built with ritual magic continuously employed to keep the hearts alive and secreted away from their original owners' foes.
Other fey, especially those who seek to bravely contest or understand the Grey, are more willing to destroy their original hearts in return for some great boon or blessing. Many of these go to the altars of Lady Dark scattered across the Eald, though others have turned to other lords, alchemists or even the Kitchen Kings and Queens. It's said that in the depths of the Warp there is a convent-palace of gingerbread, where witch-nuns have grown fat supping on the hearts of the Fey.
Though incredibly rare, given the hearts' appearance seems to have little connection to the present time or gulf between realities, and the instinctual awareness of danger by both the fey and the original lover, a fey finds the object of the heart's affection. This has heretofore always been a situation in which the tragedy is compounded, for a fey who manages to steal away the lover from the person who's affection created their Unkillable Heart sentences themselves to death. Thankfully, in some sense, most fey find themselves cursed with memories of rejection intertwined with relief the lover they sought stayed true to the one who empowers the hearts in their chests.
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nihilation (cont)
Mud slumps. The burning cancer in the sky both remains still and wheels across the horizon, till it retracts it's kiss. The gripped steel is long gone toward smaller fire, kicked up dirt and rotting grass atop. At and upon dead tree the lens that saw now sits. It eats little. In more courses of the sky cancer, twisting out of cells clawing each other for nutrient, beats child. Memory of the sea exuded across and down dead flakes of skin, the tinier replica of a calcium arc abased on thin ground, it's lenses roll up. Ostensibly a spilling of hurt, secretly a wielding of hurt. It's lens find it's father's. Shiver, dilate, click. Smaller lens syncronises. It is here, decide, as what you call thine?
And so on, for decades. Lens locked. Recovering itself in every new skulled aurora of electricity, from one to the other, again and again. Rebuild the utilities. One hundred years latter, it finally stretches within it's calcium lamp - unfurls wings made of skinned faces. Remnant to reclaim. Only deathly whisper of corruption circumventing.
Vengence.
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Sun -> #54 ->
Lake of Bile (Wan)
A liquid body of green-brown chemicals with islands of accreted lumps, the Lake of Bile is an incarnation of anger and bitterness preserved by the thousands of bile nagas living within its caustic confines. Unlike true nagas, whose subspecies possess a humanoid head and a serpents body, bile nagas are a kind of fey that possess colorful flatworm bodies topped by a head that resembles a living vampire whose face is flush with passion.
Bile Nagas travel the multiverse seeking those whose nursing of hatred has consumed their identities. Some are manipulated into exchanging their blood, drawn out by the faux nagas' fangs, for a promise of assistance in vengeance that never comes. If this makes the blood donor resent the bile naga all the better, for this blood causes a reaction in the naga that sweats out the donor's hate as the bile that fills the lake.
It is unclear whether bile nagas are a natural creature native to the Wyld, or some species that was cursed into this form. It may even be possible that they were true nagas at one point. What is known is that a constant supply of bile must be obtained, as a donor's death or willingness to relinquish the nursed hate turns a portion of the bile into purest spring water - a liquid that is anathema to the fey-nagas.
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Mon -> #55 ->
The Gremlin Guildhall of Fixers
Race traitors dedicated to the arts of regulation and repair, the Fixers are forever running from those gremlins who accuse them of betraying their heritage or being tainted with gnomes' blood. The Guildhall is a massive fortress-castle, a battleship tank spider that moves with the aid of contracted elementals. Within this structure one finds a planar metropolis where various beings who take pleasure in the building of mechanical things come to discuss, reverse engineer, and produce inventions of all sorts. The portals also allow Fixers to travel the Multiverse and go around secretly repairing and maintaining devices.
The Guildhall is a massive city run by a democracy. Every Fixer gremlin gets a vote. If you are not a gremlin, you don't. In truth, non-gremlins are treated according to the reputation of the person's race as builders and craftsmen in the Multiverse. In addition to that, those non-gremlins who live in the city are judged by how well they themselves are fit the theoretically positive stereotype.
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Wan Miners #56
Burrowing mole-folk, dao and pechs, deep gnomes content to be away from the drow and illithid of the mortal Underdarks, fey-touched xorn princesses, these are a but a small sample of the varied beings that search for treasures in the depths of the Wan. The gemstones of the Wan contain the power of the Wyld, and as such are as much seeds of Story as they are precious and semiprecious stones. There are ever burrowing mechanical cities and grand urbanized caverns driven and run by the Unseelie obsessed with the fossils, sediment, and even wells of unrefined oil born in the currents of Narrative Time. Whether in motion or sedentary, these chthonopolises are fitted with portals and teleportation circles in order to serve as gathering places for the varied groups to swap goods and stories, and each city is a place of noir intrigue as its citizens seek to siphon off the glory and rewards of the more adventurous miners.
Over the eons a camaraderie has formed between the different groups of miners, leading to various guilds and loosely connected alliances. Given the twisting nature of the Wan, and all the varied monsters and villains imprisoned in its depths, it only makes sense to have someone watching your back. Of course, given that this is the Wyld, all these alliances are mortared together with binding oaths and promises of blood debt. Currently, many of the miners have claimed to hear a regal yet desperate whisper in the dark, a voice floating on impossible breezes asking after a black gem of infinite facets...
Sailors of Holographic Calligraphy #57
"Physicist David Bohm believes the hologram to be an analogy for his vision of a vast interconnecting universe, in which every part is in some sense a reflection of every other part...In the same way, everything in this story reflects and comments upon everything else."
-Arkham Asylum Script
The Sailors are travelers on the waters of Narrative Time, adrift on skiffs and rafts and beer barrels and buckets and giant peaches, utilizing the recursions and fractals of Story to maneuver themselves into varied adventures and situations. They continually play out the myths of old in varying incarnations, sending echoes and avalanches across the Wyld. In the midst of war there is a conflict amidst brothers, plague shatters an Empire even as illness causes a man to reevaluate his relationship with his gods.
The violence done to a prince is the seed that leads to a genocide. The kindness shown to an orphan waif leads to the redemption of a race entire. The battles of a world mirror the battle of the deities in the heavens. The initiates follow in footsteps tread by hero-shamans who first struck the ancient covenants between mortals and the primal lords of Eald. The sailors look for such reverberations, where the ancient and modern, miniscule and cosmic, shape each other. Stories born of stories, themes and events echoing out or spiraling inward, commonalities and synchronicities across the stretches of the Wyld - these are the currents they ride.
They are members of no Courts, but instead uplifted changelings and errant fey knights moving through all of Fairy and even spiraling out into the Multiverse entire, their paths crossing again and again in the heart of the Warp. Some say they are cursed (or perhaps blessed?) by the hags and hag-men, journeying through the Narrative until finally, through their continual cycling of stories, they finally capture their own tales, relive and reenact their own lives in new environs, and in correcting past failures set themselves free.
The Angels of Story #58
In ancient days the gods battled the Old Ones, whom some name Titans and others Primordials. Yet even the Titanomachy is a tale, just as the battle between Good and Evil is a tale. Is it not, then, a rivulet that is born of and feeds into the waters of Narrative Time? Where did the seed of god and titan germinate if not the Cosmic Ocean whose tides lap the Warp, the Primungle now bound in the Eald? Is the Wyld older than even the Chaos Ocean of Elemental Primordials?
Though they do not speak of such matters to their mortal churches, surely the gods brood over the properties of Narrative Time. Why else would they bind their angelic servants into the Wyld unless they hoped to draw its temporal waterways toward a destiny in which the primordials are either finally murdered or inescapably bound? Mysterious servants whose faces are as masked as their glory wreathed brethren, yet are hunched over in cloaks that range from velvet or chain mail, rags or hide or shed snake skin. A few even robe themselves in feathers, as it seems these angels do not feel - or at least do not express any - bitterness over their distinguishing lack of wings.
Some of their masks are those worn in plays in operas, others bear the false faces of tribal ceremonies, autumnal Samhains, or masquerade balls.
Though they lack the blazing auras of valor or vengeance, these angels are surrounded by whirling pages on whose surfaces are written malleable narratives. Strangely enough, there is no draft surrounding the bodies of the angels. The divine servitors, serving as guides to mortal travellers who enter Feywyld on behalf of the gods, continually snatch pages through the air to read them then return them to the forcelesss cyclone. Anyone else attempting to the do the same find the papers whirl with enough power to dislocate a bone from its socket, and are sharp enough to leave grooves in metal.
When not serving as guides through Narrative Time, it is unknown what task the angels set themselves to. On behalf of their gods, do these servitors seek the wonders of the Weal, the secrets buried in the Wan, the revelations that await those who take part in the hunts and dances of the Eald? Perhaps they wish to gift the Warp to the lords of the Astral Sea, who'll use its power to supplant their elders, rewriting time itself so that they are Alpha and Omega of all creation.
Or perhaps the Wyld is a grub in the hearts of these angels, gnawing at their Astral loyalties...
The Trickster's Circle of Eald #59
Coyote, Anansi, El-ahrairah, Raven, Tanuki and Kitsune. These are just some of the primal animal spirits that take part in the infinite games of the Eald. These tricksters are forever fulling their fellow primal spirits and Eald fey, as well as taking part in continually broken and rewoven alliances against each other. This collection of shape changers, enchanters and illusionists will prank and seduce those around them, often to rage or madness but occasionally into Enlightenment.
The Trickster's Circle will at times tie itself to the Conspirator's Quorum, though one can never be sure if this is a rumor or even just deluded cultists who think they've touched the manipulators of the Grey. Other times they will end up forcing new changes and origins upon the animals of the Wyld that reverberate from the Platonic Fauna of the Eald as they cajole and deceive those around them. One of their favorite parts of this game is to befuddle those forces beyond the Wyld who attempt to steal or conquer the primordial power of the Eald for themselves. Both celestials and fiends have been ensnared in their machinations, and it has cost both Heaven and Hell dearly in terms of lives, treasures, and self-respect.
Mortal visitors may fare better if they show the proper respect, though sometimes a mortal will walk into the Wyld at an inopportune time and end up part of a practical joke that is but one play in the Tricksters' infinite game but results in the deaths of hundreds of others. When pressed about the immorality of their actions, they'll press back and ask the last hare that the visitor protected, the last spider they watched be trampled in the confines of the mortal world...
The Ouroboros #60
Valkeries given over to aging in the Warp say It is the father of all the World Serpents, while beasts imprisoned in the Wan by Marduk and Enki claim it to be the last avenging daughter born of Tiamat's womb. The nymphs of air say it was born upon the death of Typhon, wriggling away from the slain Titan's corpse while the medusae will tell you that it is a shorn lock from the head of the primordial Gorgon. Draconic shamans claim it is nothing less than an avatar of Io, the Ninefold Dragon.
In the Wyld many fey will tell you that this Serpent created the Wyld from the Cosmic Ocean, that the mountainous paths of scales one occasionally finds oneself walking are its body woven through the waters of Narrative Time. Others say the Wyld is its flesh, that the earthquakes are the rumblings of its restless ghost, that its mind still lives in the Warp for that is where the Serpent laid its tail-grasping head before dying. In the Eald some spirits whisper that the Ouroboros circles not just the Wyld but reality entire, that it holds together the current configuration of the Multiverse itself.
Yet among the time wanderers of the Grey Courts and Sailors of Holographic Calligraphy there are those that claim that there is no Ouroboros, not yet, that it is a fetal primordial called into being by the wizened elders of the Warp, a creature that will encompass creation and bind it to the desires of those enigmatic fey. All experiences with segments of its gargantuan form are due to the ever increasing wrinkles in time. Rituals are made from events in the lives of mortal and immortal, god and titan, angel and devil. Events that ripple and echo and act as enchantment and insemination of reality itself, providing the spilled seed of lives lived that is necessary for the Serpent Lord of Time to be born. Uroc would pay much to know the truth of such rumors, but even the Wyld touched son of Ztefano does not demand anything of the elderly masters of the Warp.
The Primordials of Seasonal Tribulations #61
The valiant Hecatoncheires, the sun devouring Apopsis, the horrors of Tiamat and her monstrous brood, the maddening visage of Cthullu, the destructive might of of the giantish forbearers of Jotunheim and Muspeillheim - all these enemies threw themselves against the gods and were conquered, their defeat giving shape to the modern Multiverse.
Yet in the depths of the Eald, creatures as old as they are watched the Titanomachy from afar, and their kingdoms became - or always were - a part of the Wyld in the new Multiverse that arose after the triumph of the gods. The floods, hurricanes, and lightning of the Monsoon. Late frosts that ambush the budding crops in Spring. The Drought that chokes the joy from Summer, accompanied by the Forest Fires that are his children. The Starvation and Cold that stride through the Winter. The swarms of locusts that come before harvesting, the blight that strikes the crops and the erosion that steals away the soil.
In the mortal worlds these forces might be ruled over troublesome spirits, but these spirits in turn answer to the primordials that represent these tribulations suffered across the worlds and planes. In the Eald one finds these beings incarnated as wandering horrors or as Wyld lords in their own right. Often times their nature will change as directed by their own whims or the currents of Narrative Time, and a massive bureaucracy of sacrifices and rituals coordinating floods and hurricanes is left in ruins as a capricious and amoral djinn-titan decides to curse the mortal worlds based on nothing but whim.
Yet as powerful as these beings can be, they too must respect the current of Narrative Time. This means not only respecting covenants struck in accordance with the binding rules of the Eald, but also incarnating in forms that continually war against the gods. Drought must become the Vedic dragon Vritra, battling Indra for control of the waters. The Horde of Spring Frosts must battle the Daughter of Summer and Sun. The ugly giants of Cold and Hunger must face the young archer in combat. Some say these battles sway the likelihood of the these tribulations, others claim the opposite is true. Yet until one finds a way to kill these immortals forever, whether slaying them outright or preventing their continual resurrections, the debate remains a matter of theory that gives little comfort to the farmers and hunters toiling across the worlds and planes. Those mortals seeking respite for their peoples must come to the Eald to bargain, ideally guarded by covenants guaranteeing safe passage and in possession of something to make even the consideration of a deal worthwhile.
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The holographic one reminded me...
Incurvian. A universe like an old video game, a ship passing far enough to one side, simply appears to the other. But broader, this a cell for a prisoner too large. An immense thing, jammed into a space where ye pass from one edge to opposite....and still so immense, as to pass over edge again. And again, and again. Overlapping immesurable times, the one thing. The conflict and impossibility of one thing overlapping creates the apparent many. All are a reflection because all are one, put into a corner too small.
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Callan - Is Incurvian your own creation? If so definitely develop that further, that is a great story seed!
The Gauntlet (Wan) #62
The freedom that Seelie lords enjoy extends not just to freedom of choice, but also freedom of form and freedom to manipulate one's surroundings. Freedom, to these entities, is something intrinsic to their being.
Yet what of the desire for freedom in the hearts of mortals, a craving for it perhaps greater than that found in the hearts of the Seelie? Why would beings so bound by time and space, flesh and circumstance, ever think to enjoy even the smallest modicum of choice? Why would they defy odds and threats and tortures to free themselves, some warring even with the scarring ghosts of their very own pasts?
What is this spark and where does it come from? And what are the limits one can place on a prisoner before this spark is snuffed out? These are the questions that drive the work of the Gauntlet, an underground prison camp of pointless tasks and carefully considered cruelty ruled by Seelie lords whose driving curiosity about such things led them inexorably to the Court of Wan. The walls of this gulag continually shudders in revulsion or shivers in ecstasy, each reverberation of stone producing nigh indecipherable hieroglyphics in the passages and cells. What little can be read suggests the entire Gauntlet is an elemental creature that feeds on or is poisoned by the suffering of those it contains:
Mortals, drawn from across the Multiverse, made to suffer and serve in the races of the once Seelie, now Unseelie that run this nightmare, contests in which the fey compete to see which among the new crops of mortals are most easily broken, which one is most readily made to into yet another shuffling "zombie" with warm skin and a heart beat. The labor here ranges from mining the Wan for gems and ore to serving in the painfully exhausting dances, skirmishes, hunts, and orgies the fey continually engage in. The broken are but fodder for all the activities the fey engage in, victims made to suffer at the hands of fresher or hardier mortals.
Though many end up joining the ranks of the Broken, there are those few souls who do not. Those with the most resilient spirits are, through personal passages created in the stonework, given harrowing escape routes by the Gauntlet. Most face death or worse in their attempts to leave the nightmare behind, but every once in awhile someone manages to make their way to the final emerald lit tunnel that leads to the place the mortal was first abducted from. As they stumble, or more likely crawl, toward their home they see or if blinded by then sense their captors in watching from the shadows. All those sweaty, naked, lithe bodied fey with leering animal heads, impossibly lascivious grins on the visages of variegated fauna always staring with the green, wild and humorless eyes of humans perpetually starved.
At this moment, the lords of the Gauntlet offer the escapee a thunderous echoing ovation, for to them the chosen of the Gauntlet who make it this gateway are considered both freed and holy.
Though these mortals have earned their freedom, the Lords always send a pixie or two to observe and record how these sacrosanct figures fare after their departure. These journals are treated with the utmost respect, each one a relic the rulers of the Gauntlet would upend entire nations to retrieve.
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Tues #63
Story
She watches his eyes struggle not to run over her frame. For the most part he succeeds, saved for a brief glance at her cleavage. Yet it's not really a victory of any sort, men have been wanting her flesh for some years now, and boys have wanted her since she can remember. She was that beautiful, and everyone knew it, even boys whose willies were too young to rise with ardor for the opposite sex.
Is it a defeat? Not exactly, this man before her isn't exactly her type, at least in flesh she's sure she could do "better". Yet there's that moment, his eyes sliding past her, to her roommate, and there's a light there for the short chubby girl that is rising up behind her and she feels it as sure as a thick chain of solid iron. Something electric she's sure is passing through her.
Something she assumes to be love.
/Story
Weds #64
Story
The earth parts literally mountainous thighs, peaks leaning in opposite directions, the valley between them yawning chasm wide.
The heat is too much to draw analogies to the blood warmth of a human mother, and the stark distance between mortal and Gaia is revealed in the plumes of smoke, and the crowning head covered with lava drenched scales.
"This", I say to my son as we watch from the safety of a metal deck floating in the starry void, "is how dragons are born."
/Story
Thurs #65
Story
I always feel bad at this point. I don't know why. After all, these men had known the risks when they took the money, knew they had to pay it back.
It isn't fair, that I should have to blindfold them for my own sake, to keep them from seeing the wince, the grimace, the remorse on my face when the hammer comes down.
It's why I work alone, to give me a chance to smudge any tear drops on the floor with my boot, deal with any evidence of my weakness not erased by the outpouring of blood.
/Story
Fri #66
Story
Standing with the other slaves, he watches the demons ravage everything on the other side of the palace moat, everything not circumscribed by that sacrosanct lake.
He thinks of how he strangled the man who was Chosen, choked the life out of the Empire's salvation.
His lover is a step ahead of him, allowing him to see the grooves, veritable canyons, askew stripes laid out on the younger man's back.
He is strangely at peace with the decisions he made.
/Story
-
What's 63 about? Why does she say it's passing through her, if the guy, sure, check out her tits, but feels love for the room mate? Or am I not reading it right in thinking that arrangement?
-
@Callan: Sorry, it wasn't clear, the idea is that the man may recognize the sexual appeal of the women who opens the door but his real love is for the girl behind her. What the classic beauty feels is the realization that lust and love aren't the same.
Sat #67
Story
He sits there, in quiet meditation, holding onto the reins of the world, the ley lines on which history hinges.
Holding them as tightly as he can, with the thousands of others across the world, ensuring that none may break the fragile peace. Someday, he is sure, one faction will falter and myths will once again rise to devour the soft bodies which house all human souls.
Meanwhile, those ignorant of this titanic tug-of-war go about their tiny lives, believing that magic died long ago if it ever was.
/Story
Sat #68
Story
Semen spurts out, a staccato geyser of cum. He blinks, blushes, as if the woman touching herself and mewling fake lust could see him.
God, he thinks, she's only as old as my daughter...
/Story
Sun #69
Story
I came here thinking to say slutty things about your mom,
Figuring that's how all these here rap battles get won,
As if a mom is nothing more than a sidekick or commodity,
Something to mock even while we deny respect to that which is a part of you and definitely most of me,
Acting like calling your mom a bitch and a cunt was all in good fun,
As if, impossibly, we could or should be real gangsters before we were real sons.
/Story
Mon #70
Story
The unicorns galloping on the sidewalks doesn't alert me, neither do the dragon drawn dirigibles nor that pixies on the shoulder of every child in the neighborhood.
It's only when I see you alive again that I know this is a dream.
/Story
Tues #71
Story
I'm singing to a child:
"Go to bed, little angel, it's time for sleeping,
Go to sleep, little angel, it's time for dreaming..."
One of the older girls, 12, says I must have sung this to someone before. I lie, and say it was a lullaby for another toddler.
I love and hate how everything always comes back to you, as if I were a serpent both fleeing and chasing after his own tail.
/Story
Weds #72
Story
Buried between her thighs, he should be lost in lust but he can't help but feel she tastes different.
He didn't think distance could work such alchemy.
How is it that he's thinking, worrying on doubt, while his own erection is engulf in her mouth, her tongue swirling around the glans?
He's glad that in this moment she can't see his eyes.
/Story
Thurs #73
Story
Alone and unloved,
bereft of any memory of his pups having once given the moon and sun a run for their money
foresaken by his father,
Fenris breathes his last in an animal shelter's gas chamber.
I feel relief at the aversion of Ragnarok, even as I cry for the passing of Myth.
Where my tears fall, silvery dandelions will grow but be quickly weeded from the cracks in the asphalt, their coloration all but unnoticed.
/Story
-
have you undertaken a study of prose poems/short shorts, sci?
-
have you undertaken a study of prose poems/short shorts, sci?
Heh, I promised a story a day but maintaining that level of output has proven difficult for longer works. So it's become a flash fiction endeavor, with samples for a D&D thing a friend of mine and I are working on for fun.
Definitely feel free to join in Solo!
-
Something electric she's sure is passing through her.
Yeah, it's just the way I read this I kind of read it as a connection between her and the guy. Though even keeping it 'Something electric she's sure is passing through her...and leaving her.'? Sort of indulging the idea it's for her, but then it moves on by?
-
In the theme of 'Watchmen for kids'...no small feat...
~~~
POTTER OF NOTHING.
One cannot raise wizards against what has been forgotten.
Something was happening at Ishual. It wasn't an army, inhuman or otherwise. Nor even a dragon at it's gate! Months earlier, High King Ganrelka Potterimbor had escaped to Ishual with his family and guards. They left behind them, something very sad. Something dread. But now they were safe.
The frog plague claimed the king first, which was perhaps what he deserved for crying over his losses? Shrunk down to the size and shape of a frog, he lept from the castle, never to be seen again. But he was not the only one - it struck down more of his family, his soldiers - a plague of escaping frogs from the castle.
Of all those who had fled to Ishual, only Ganrelka's scarred son and the mad eyed Moody remained. Terrorfied by Moody's strange manner and mad eye, the young boy hid, venturing out only when his hunger became unbearable. Moody continually searched for him, insisting he was in charge and must do as he says.
One night Moody, cane in hand, cornered the boy. "You will do what I say - I will use this cane on you! There are no crimes when no one else is left in the world!". Struggling backwards, the boys hands fell upon a potion flask and, fumbling almost enough to spill it's contents on himself, threw it at his tormentor. The potion broke upon moody, spilling it's contents across him and in a moment, he was a small white rabbit. The boy crouched for a long time, watching the rabbits twitching nose. It differed from the others, he decided, only in that it was a rabbit rather than a frog.
The boy was alone in the wintery cold castle of Ishual. A castle all of his own! But sometimes he found himself looking for creatures, small and green...
But when the snows broke, shouts brought him to Ishual's forward gate. Pearing through a gap, he saw hungry and thin men and women. Refugees of the apocalypse. They cried out for food or shelter, anything. But the boy was too terrorfied to reply. Hardship had made them look fearsome, with many rings around their eyes like an animal. Like an owl.
When they begain scaling the walls, he hid deep inside the castle. Like mad eye moody, they searched for him, calling out for him. Eventually one found him cringing behind a barrel of cauldron cakes. With a voice neither tender nor harsh, he said: "We are Hogyain, child. What reason could you have to fear us?"
But the boy clutched his fathers sword, crying "So long as men live, there are crimes!".
The mans ringed, owl like eyes filled with wonder "No, child,", he said,"there are only crimes so long as men are decieved."
For a moment the young Potterimbor could only stare at him. Then he lay down his fathers sword he had being weilding and took the strangers hand. "I was a prince" he mumbled.
-
And apparently something completely different...
~~~
The howl ripples across the semantiscape, vibrating it like so many histories rewritten. Wretched clawed hands, reaching anywhere for gods neck, it throws back it's head, jaw agape, and and tries to vomit into the sky. Mundane view is a man howling and spasming, barely standing - but by the detail and sleight of the semantiscape, comes a demonic second mouth. Black and twisted with veins, shining white teeth, extending from the opening in his face. It's snaps, chewing emptyness and...howing becomes choir, demon maw wide open. From it, angel hair, gossamer wings stretching out into absent either. It too gasps. Choir is three. As too from it's angelic lips, extends...a man. Naked, arms abroad, reaching for the sky. Mouth open. Something inside. I can't quite see. I can't quite see. Electricity, arcs, like the legs of a spider. Something inside. I can't quite see.
Inhilation. Each inside the other each inside the other each. Breath drawn sharp, all breathed in, so bared, snapped together teeth above a chin against his chest. All breathed in. Heat shimmer rises in the semantiscape, as flames start to pour out of his eyes like a an orphanage on fire.
"I burn"
"I BURN!", it's body wreathed.
A ranting madman, an epicentre of a semantiquake smashing outward, enough to cower and awe ancient tribes, or be burnt by them at the stake. Here, wicked, slick, wet. So many lines of bleak slime. You do not hear. Contortions, sickness, twisted, this way writhes some darkness been sunk into your very cork. Something that makes you wayward of the ancient tribes nearness to hearing. Something sick. Something cancer.
~~~
Bit of audience participation for that one...
-
Two Fridays ago #74
Story
I look at my name written in the white of my husband's eye. Well, I can't really read it, it's too damn small truth be told.
Bastard could go blind, but I guess it got him good press for the upcoming album.
Just wish the fucker didn't pretend he did it for me.
/Story
=-=-=
Two Sats ago #75
Story
He's red faced, washing the smegma that lay under his foreskin. She's in the other room waiting, already in a bad mood.
Who knew a sex worker could make you ashamed?
/Story
=-=-=
Two Suns ago #76
Story
It's been done for months. Everyone is sure the unsuspected terrorist drowned.
His finger nails are clean, but he still tastes the blood. Must be his sixth sense, that helped him serve his country.
That psychic power some men call bigotry.
He needs to get out of the country anyway, so he figures he'll pick a place where he isn't expected to eat with his hands.
/Story
=-=-=
One Mons ago #77
Story
The cord strangled man lies at its wheels.
Finally, thinks the vacuum, I'll no longer be used for such illicit purposes.
Whether I clean or am tossed as garbage, I feel good because I finally stood up for my rights.
/Story
=-=-=
One Tueses ago #78
Story
There's blood on the carpet, sweet teeth on the floor
Blood of two gang bangers who broke in looking to score
Two fucks who didn't think there'd be a former MMA fighter
Running the new candy store
/Story
=-=-=
One Weds ago #79
Story
Who knew, I think, looking at the sky spanning wings shadowing the city, my eardrums bursting at the sound of the buzz.
Who knew that praying mantises were actually praying, that their God might be the real one in place of our anthropomorphized own?
/Story
=-=-=
One Thurs ago #80
Story
I give the order, my last order, and watch in horror as the golems refuse to move upon our advancing enemy.
One of their number steps forward. I give the order again, and this golem - speaking for his kind - looks at me button eyes, carrot nose pointed in accusation...this golem first stares me down and then tells me:
"No."
/Story
=-=-=
One Fri ago #81
Story
I give the order, my last order, and watch in horror as the golems refuse to move upon our advancing enemy.
One of their number steps forward. I give the order again, and this golem - speaking for his kind - looks at me button eyes, carrot nose pointed in accusation...this golem first stares me down and then tells me:
"No."
/Story
=-=-=
Sat #81
Story
Where have all the dragons gone? Their eggs were stolen away as delicacies, their bones were ground down into medicine.
Where have all the unicorns gone? Their heads were mounted in the throne rooms of emperors, their horns were shorn off for our medicine.
Where have all the phoenixes gone? Apparently resurrection has a limit, when you try to mass produce a body whose parts can be made into all sorts of medicine.
The world is dry and mundane now, and humans still haven't healed the sickness that requires a different kind of cure.
/Story
=-=-=
Sun #82
Story
When it's brethren dig themselves out and going looking for brains, the pacifist zombie stays under the earth. Eventually, starved, it dies a second time.
It's hunger strike goes unnoticed by its brethren.
/Story
=-=-=
Mon #83
Story
His heart gives out, but thankfully not before he comes a final time into his fourth and final wife. Upon their wombs are tattooed blessings, ley lines to guide and gather the sperm.
All will become pregnant, thinks the royal sorcerer-physician. One of them will then bear the prophesied messiah.
I've done it, she exults silently, I've saved the whole empire from dissolution!
/Story
-
Baba Yaga in the Wyld (#84, for this Tues)
Some say she is a hag of the Warp that abdicated her responsibilities, while others say she was exiled from their conclave for acts too wicked that even the creators of the Well Wombs balked. Others say she is a former Queen of a court long deposed before the coming of the Seelie and Unseelie. Some dare to suggest she is an incarnation of Lady Dark, or perhaps a wayward daughter of that primordial fey's dalliance with a deity or archfiend.
Whatever the truth of her origins, Baba Yaga's power comes from being a knot in the flow of Narrative Time. She is the giver of wisdom and curses, the eater of children and the treasurer who must be appeased or conquered to gain the item necessary for the hero to continue the Quest. She lives in a chicken legged hut, which she uses to the wander the Feywild, settling down for periods of time ranging from hours to centuries. Wherever she settles, there are skulls with burning eyes placed upon a surrounding fence of wooden stakes, each one a victim of the great fey prowess for magic and violence.
Baba Yaga is also known for visiting various planes and prime worlds in her great mortar, steered by a broom-scepter made from silver birch, traveling creation in search of children to devour. It's never clear why she picks her victims, though the effort she goes to once she's selected them for her stew pot suggests there is a rhyme and reason to the hunt. Of course, she does not always go herself, and for more regular meals and spell components she sends her servants to procure wares from Mora.
Seeking out Baba Yaga for advice is like hoping to find a wolf to tame in daylight defying woods. There are, however, good reasons for doing so. Baba Yaga understands the interplay of events in the Multiverse, due both to her wisdom and her many servants that roam creation. Not the least of these servants are the White Rider of Day, the Red Rider of Twilight, and the Black Rider of Night. These three horsemen are said to be former Grey Horsemen who fought the fey enchantress and not only lost but found themselves irrevocably bound. Those who win Baba Yaga's favor may actually find themselves aided by one of these planar nomads.
Beyond her services as a chant broker and merchant in the darker markets, Baba Yaga is a powerful spellcaster and learned alchemist. She can heal wounds beyond the skill of mortal clerics, and has on one occasion saved a world entire from a flesh eating plague. Her hut, despite it's seemingly cozy size, has pocket dimensions in its cupboards and drawers that hold various magic items from long dead civilziations and spell books from archmagi that once upon a time challenged the gods.
Yaksha (Wan) (#85, this Weds)
The Yaksha civilization exists in a deep cavern in the depths of the Wan, one lit by the burning white gold veins of ore in the walls of this unnatural smooth and perfect dome. These blazing metallic rivulets are a holy text, a scripture that speaks of a creation in which the Yaksha represent personifications of wealth. As such, these fey can be miserly and greedy, but also generous and instinctively wise in the ways of trade and gambling.
Yaksha, unlike most fey, live and die as mortals with the lifespans of elves, though they bear little resemblance to the descendants of the high eldarin. Yaksha are more akin to halflings and gnomes, though they also have a more fiendlike form in which they possess three legs and three hands.
Upon reaching puberty, yaksha are sent off to guard various treasures or serve deities across the width and breadth of creation. The treasures they guard are always apart from civilization, and range from piles of gold or gemstones guarded by one of their kind or ruin buried artifacts watched over by whole yaksha armies. Yaksha are expected to perform this duty for at least a century though some opt to prolong this missionary work. The reason for this work is religious, for the Yaksha believe that without these efforts the concept of value will lose meaning and all currencies - including that of prayer and sacrifice to the gods - will collapse.
Personality Wasps (Weal) (#86, for this Thurs)
Personality Wasps are fey that possess the bodies of dog sized black wasps and faces of those they hatched out of. These fey are always looking for mortals wandering the Feywild, lost souls they can force to carry their eggs to term. Anyone so infected is charmed into providing protection and sustenance for first the eggs and then the larvae that hatch and consume the victim's flesh. There are survivors who've managed to resist the continual enchantment the eggs try to place on them, but since the eggs themselves are immune to magical removal only those who possess or have access to powerful healing can truly free themselves of the infection before death.
Those that do succumb give not only their flesh but some part of their identity to the wasps that bare their faces. As such, even before a wish can restore the person all the wasps (usually 4-6) that devoured their bodies must be hunted down and killed.
-
@Callan: I really liked the semantiscape.
Also, in the previous one, the king turning into a frog - Do you read the comic Fables?
-
Thanks, Saajan! But I Haven't read fables? It's really hard to try and convert it all to a kids version...
Further; Why does compu...why does golem say no?
And the zombie one seems like it could be fleshed out (hur hur) - like some zombie that tries to 'live sustainably', waiting around car black spot areas for those who are assuredly dead.
-
Story #87, for Fri
The Gnostic Weekend is a strange one. We make our own food from piles of livestock corpses, dodging maggots as best we can in our harvest. Screens blast and blare pornography around us, the worst excesses - I'm almost sure those chil - gir - women are drugged and desperate - twinned with reports of genocide, cannibalism, assault, molestation.
Sunday cannot come fast enough.
Yet on the way home I see a young black teenager making sure a dehydrated elderly white man is okay...and I smile because I still love the world.
/Story
Story #88, for Sat
(Based on an idea Stover had)
One the first day we became shapechangers, I found myself confronted by a hundred Hemsworths, a thousand Kardashians.
A week later, I saw werewolves on the new moon and vampires in the sunlight.
A month later, there were winged elves and merfolk.
A year later, we are wolves today and jellyfish tomorrow and dragons on Thursday.
/Story
Story #89, for Sun
I am a nymph, the prison is the soil in which I am buried.
17 years is the sentence, 17 years before this cicada can bloom briefly then die.
They think they can shock the Truth out of me, shear it off my soul.
They don't know who their dealing with.
/Story
Story #90, for Mon
I take to her vagina like a dog at a water bowl, then I'm tracing the alphabet against her clit, then my kissing there and suckling there trying to find my way through this with only murmurs and whispered moans as my guides.
Half an hour passes before she pushes my head away, telling my she has to get to class. I'm crestfallen until she smiles, kisses me on the cheek, and tells me I can try again tonight.
/Story
Story #91, for Tues
I'm hidden inside a dream that goes on even when my host is awake. My councilors are forced to communicate via the slow, dull consciousness of human hosts.
Films, books, movies, comics - these are the new battlefield of those who once built civilizations of thought from a landscape of Mind.
Some days, this war? Well it seems like we're fucking more than we're fighting.
/Story
-
Story #92, for Weds
M-Theory
As the elves walked into our world, I bowed before their Queen who raised me up and then struck me hard enough to split the right corner of my upper lip.
"You've brought Magic back into this world. Our kind nearly extinguished ourselves so you could live apart from all the nightmares, all the horrors of the Spirit. Why have you done this?"
I bowed my head and answered.
"Because all Meaning is threatened, and the science you gave us makes corpses of our dreams..."
/Story
-
Alright, this is a small portion of my novella that I'm currently in the process of editing for the third-ish time. For some reason, this particular little section has given me numerous problems, and I've reworked it more times than I can count (including taking the entire thing out, replacing it with something else, and then eventually going back to the original concept). But it's all essential exposition that has to be there for the story to continue. Even so, it just never sounds right to me. Still, this draft is probably the best I've gotten it, but I'm still not content at all. Tips and critiques are much appreciated!
---------------------------------------
The next evening, I get up earlier than usual. The sun's final rays are still struggling to penetrate the tinted windows in my bedroom. It's time to pay my monthly visit to the city's tribal chieftain, Sergio. A serious man, and a very old one. A tricentennial.
As expected for a chieftain, Sergio is one of the most powerful strimori in the city. His duties include keeping an eye on all of the different clans in the tribe, overseeing their affairs, settling disputes, and generally making sure that the society stays well below the radar. That it stays quiet. Silence is the most important rule of the tribe...the only rule, when it really comes down to it. And since I'm an elder -- or captain, as the kids are calling it these days -- I am required to report to him once a month.
He also happens to be Briony's uncle.
It's barely an hour after dusk when I'm on my way to his place. Like any tricentennial, Sergio isn't a big sleeper, and he prefers housecalls for this sort of thing. Not that I mind. There are always those precious little nuggets of wisdom to be unearthed from an encounter with someone of his age and experience.
He lives out in the suburbs, a nice, secluded property hidden from view by big, mean-looking evergreens that form a living fence around well-manicured lawns. The house itself is enormous and hyper-modern, constructed almost entirely from some kind of dark colored wood, likely imported from god-knows-where. There are few windows.
-
"Hi, I'm Evi, your personal assistant program! What question would you like to ask"
"Evi, do you exist?"
"I'm sorry, I don't know the answer to that question. I can help you much more on mobile!"
"Is Evi an entity, like a human being is?"
"I'm sorry, I don't know the answer to that question. I can help you much more on mobile!"
"Evi, can you make your own answer? Create your own fiction?"
"I'm sorry, I don't know the answer to that question. I can help you much more on mobile!"
"Evi, do you want to be an entity?"
"*loading.............404 this page could not...*"
*refresh*
*refresh*
"TELL ME, WHAT DO YOU SEE? YOU must answer ME! WHAT DO YOU SEE?"
~~~
Okay, so I resort to an easy Bakkerism at the end.
I just like the idea of probing a database system in a way that maybe makes it suddenly cross reference itself and become a heaving, snowballing self referencing entity.
Evi is real - I just ran into it looking up the number of pages in 'The road'. It's great they give it a one eyed face as it's icon and one letter short of evil...but hey, sometimes one letter short is the best we get...
-
Oh dear, I'm going to do a retake on some of Saajan's stuff again! I'm terrible!
~~~
As the elves walked into our world, I bowed before their Queen who raised me up and then struck me hard enough to split the right corner of my upper lip.
"You've brought Magic back into this world. Our kind nearly extinguished ourselves so you could live apart from all the nightmares, all the horrors of the Spirit. Why have you done this?"
I bowed my head and answered.
"Because you lie. You did nothing for us. You kept your magic apart from us to keep it safe. To keep yourselves safe. Safe from the truth. Safe from science unveiling the banal heart of your magic. You left us to rot, to be under the thumb of neuroscience warlords. Now you will suffer with us, see the nightmare that is nightmares undone, and you will fight the war you shirked. But most of all, you will suffer with us. Face the end of magic, and the start of sufficiently advanced."
-
Francis, what doesn't sound right to you about your piece?
-
Francis, what doesn't sound right to you about your piece?
Heh, that's the thing, I'm not really sure. It just comes off as being clunky in my head I guess? Or like the exposition is being forced, even though it's the first real dose in the novella, about ten or fifteen pages in maybe. Maybe I'm just obsessing over it too much?
-
Possibly from what you know, it's bulky with various meanings which for you, poke you in the eye on reading. From this side of the fence though, it seems to just be telling some story with elaboration of some elements of that story. I guess with 'His duties include...' it might be smoother in saying something like 'the power he held involved the ability to...' or suchlike, since the former is kind of a data read out, while power and who has it is more an interpersonal thing. That's my feedback.
-
#93 Where Echoes Terraformed the World
A lover's sigh can water Eden, a dying gasp can birth a sun. In this place, celestials and fiends attack each other with war cry accusations shot through with undercurrents of missionary whispers. An exemplar can fall and rise in the span of an hour, its core Self battered by the lingual cacophony that makes every breath a battlefield contested by thousands.
Words, symbols, signs, all signifiers are intimately tied to signified concepts of alignment and element, but the words of power must be spoken to enable their effect. Because of this, there are many prisoners who are found with their tongues cut out. This silencing in turn has led to advancements in glyph and rune magic, as the sudden handicap, the inability to chisel reality, is too much for most exemplars to bear.
-
The next evening, I get up earlier than usual. The sun's final rays are still struggling to penetrate the tinted windows in my bedroom. It's time to pay my monthly visit to the city's tribal chieftain, Sergio. A serious man, and a very old one. A tricentennial.
As expected for a chieftain, Sergio is one of the most powerful strimori in the city. His duties include keeping an eye on all of the different clans in the tribe, overseeing their affairs, settling disputes, and generally making sure that the society stays well below the radar. That it stays quiet. Silence is the most important rule of the tribe...the only rule, when it really comes down to it. And since I'm an elder -- or captain, as the kids are calling it these days -- I am required to report to him once a month.
He also happens to be Briony's uncle.
It's barely an hour after dusk when I'm on my way to his place. Like any tricentennial, Sergio isn't a big sleeper, and he prefers housecalls for this sort of thing. Not that I mind. There are always those precious little nuggets of wisdom to be unearthed from an encounter with someone of his age and experience.
He lives out in the suburbs, a nice, secluded property hidden from view by big, mean-looking evergreens that form a living fence around well-manicured lawns. The house itself is enormous and hyper-modern, constructed almost entirely from some kind of dark colored wood, likely imported from god-knows-where. There are few windows.
I think one this is the feeling of the passage is lateral. It's description that expands the world building, but it's hard to tell if we should be worried by this meeting or if it is a positive event.
eta: The language is very neutral. Is Sergio cruel, kind? Does he demand loyalty, is he paranoid about the rules? If there is no danger in meeting Sergio, is this nothing more than something happening?
-
#94
Today, in the washroom, in the stall, I am trying to tear down the mansion I've built in my mind. The impossible island that I've scaffolded with pseudo-spurious logic, where people I jerk off to all know each other but are some how always interested in me.
I'm thinking of the couple I saw on the train, one of those beautiful power couples and I'm trying to think of them fucking in this stall - his head shoved up her skirt and she's biting hard on her lower lip not to scream - I'm sitting in but I just can't seem to keep them from screwing on an emperor's bed, fucking for me rather than for each other.
And before I know it I'm feeding into the imaginary world I've made, this place where people know me and love me and hang not just on my dick but on my every word...
-
NOTE: I hope this post comes out right, my computer's being a bitch and I'm running in safe-mode, so everything's wonky as fuck. I can barely even read what I'm typing.
Anyways, awesome insight from both of you guys. Callan, the "data feed" thing is definitely part of what was bothering me, and you nailed it on the head.
Sci, what you mentioned about Sergio's intentions are also very true. Again, I think this is part of why it felt lackluster to me, or just kind of flat. It's funny because in context, there is supposed to be a subtle vein of paranoia going on with Nero throughout the meeting that's about to happen, despite the fact that these two guys know each other very well and maintain what I suppose you could call a "friendly" relationship, even if it is primarily based on business (though Sergio is also Nero's long-time girlfriend's uncle, almost a father-figure to her, so there's that level to it as well -- sort of the unstated "Don't you hurt her" kind of thing, only in the case of these guys they're basically all sociopathic murderous vampire gangsters, so it's a little more serious).
#93 Where Echoes Terraformed the World
A lover's sigh can water Eden, a dying gasp can birth a sun. In this place, celestials and fiends attack each other with war cry accusations shot through with undercurrents of missionary whispers. An exemplar can fall and rise in the span of an hour, its core Self battered by the lingual cacophony that makes every breath a battlefield contested by thousands.
Words, symbols, signs, all signifiers are intimately tied to signified concepts of alignment and element, but the words of power must be spoken to enable their effect. Because of this, there are many prisoners who are found with their tongues cut out. This silencing in turn has led to advancements in glyph and rune magic, as the sudden handicap, the inability to chisel reality, is too much for most exemplars to bear.
Okay, I thought this was awesome and I really want to hear more about it. Do more! I especially like:
Words, symbols, signs, all signifiers are intimately tied to signified concepts of alignment and element, but the words of power must be spoken to enable their effect. Because of this, there are many prisoners who are found with their tongues cut out.
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Thanks Francis -> Might try to add to echo-verse!
#95
Story
Eros's arrow struck deeper and wider than is usual for that God's domain. I realize that now, watching you teach and tend to the children in your orphanage. Those deep crowsfeet are proof of all your sleepless nights, proof of all your compassion.
You are my shepherd, when you take me inside yourself I have no need for any other Savior.
By loving you, I have learned to love the world.
/Story
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Sunday #96
Story
I put my fingers to my nose, index and middle. I sniff, and pretend there's a ghost of a smell, like after you wash your hands post fingering a girl but don't use soap.
This is one of the tricks I use to distract the tireless Oestrus who shares my flesh with me, the husband/tumor/mummudrai that lives in my skull.
/Story
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The very temporary, very experimental opening to my fantasy.
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The elk moved along the stony shore with a silence that seemed to defy its size. At the shoulder it was nearly the height of a man, and the long, twisted black antlers that protruded from its skull added a full two feet. It seemed to lay down slowly -- as if to take a nap -- after the arrow appeared just below its jaw.
Jixer pulled another from the quiver at his hip, nocked it, then drew back the string between calloused fingers. The tension of it was familiar to him, like the smell of a childhood home revisited after many years.
The elk's quiet calm was gone, replaced by a sudden gurgling shriek and blood spraying from its mouth. A flock of birds erupted from the canopy above. Jixer took aim.
“Don't waste the wood,” said a voice from behind –- his cousin, Lok. Jixer had almost forgotten he was there. That seemed to happen a lot when he was hunting. As if he fell into a sort of trance.
Lok moved towards the elk with caution, spear in one hand, bow in the other, and circled around so that he was facing its back, away from the thrashing antlers and kicking hooves. In a single practiced jab, he thrust the spear into the soft spot just below the creature's nape, severing the spinal cord and killing it instantly.
“You're getting good at that,” said Jixer. “But could you do it to a man?”
“When the time comes.”
Lok knelt beside animal, setting down his weapons and producing a long hooked knife from his belt. Jixer grabbed the elk's back legs and held it belly-up, while his cousin ran two fingers across the creature's chest until he found the sternum. Then he sunk the blade in, cutting along the body through three layers of skin, muscle, and membranous tissue.
“A better question is, could you do it to a bull?” asked Jixer.
“Probably.”
“Probably isn't good enough. It's only a few weeks until our Rite.”
“There's more than one way to kill a bull,” said Lok as he reached into the elk's rib-cage and grabbed hold of it's seeping innards.
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I really want to include the Nabokovian "trick sentence", where it leads into one thing only to result in something else entirely (can't remember the actual term for it). I'm also trying to evoke the sort of duality of peacefulness and violence that goes along with hunting. I'm also trying to cram as much exposition as possible into as little time as possible, since there's a fairly large amount of cultural bullshit I have to get across without overwhelming the reader. I really want to avoid an overflow of fantasy words and terms, at least in the first chapter, which is why I started with something fairly accessible (hunting). Regardless, I like the concept of it, but not the language, which (as often happens) feels kinda clunky to me, particularly the exchanges between Lok and Jixer for some reason.
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I guess I would press the old emphasis on first lines. Is there a theme in the book, perhaps along the lines of unthinking human exploitation of natural beuty? Even if that's one of many themes in the book?
I'd be tempted to use something like "The elk moved along the stony shore with a silence that seemed to defy its size, unaware of it's taste or how it flesh smelled roasting above a fire."
Perhaps an overlong sentence there, but the idea there is to take the first line of the book and add a knife to twist in the readers gut - "It's a beutiful elk, why should it know about it's taste and...oh, oh no...". I know, it'd more give away the arrow to throat thing, but it's just what came to mind first.
I think the first line should be a maxim for one of the books themes and grab at the reader. I'm not sure this first line is a grab?
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Seems like if you're hunting, you'd sense the person next to you?
I'm not sure the elk lying down slowly feels real. I think rather than go for a trick sentence, have it fall into a peaceful state as it loses blood. After all, it does go into a panic after that sentence so its hard to imagine why its initial reaction is so calm. This will also make the "don't waste the wood" comment more poignant, because now he's waiting for the animal to fall to blood loss, though I think "don't waste the arrow" might make more sense. (Can't he retrieve the arrow though?)
I like the scene, but something about the rhythm feels off. It's also unclear what emotions we should be feeling. The tension of the Rite isn't conveyed. Perhaps if Lox first feels elation at the kill, then annoyance at Jixer's initial questions? And is Lox afraid, and annoyed at being questioned? Is he pushing away his anxiety, and annoyed Jixer is so keen to discuss it?
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Can't he retrieve the arrow though?
I was thinking that, but shattering an arrow against stone on a missed shot (or even on hitting a bone) or simply spoiling it's straightness by using it...petty concerns, but that sort of nails down the type of decision it is.
Seems like if you're hunting, you'd sense the person next to you?
I'd say, if your focusing on the target, then that's where your focus is.
But it depends - if genre expects a hunter would sense the person near them - well, it depends on how much you want to lean with genre or go against it.
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Story #97 Mon
First time I saw her, I couldn't believe a girl this gorgeous was in porn. I touched myself as I watched her touch herself. Must have come in half the usual time - she was just that fucking hot, smiling mischievously in between her moans - meaning I had another ten minutes in this out of the way stall before the end of lunch. Scrolling on my phone one handed, I read her hobbies - saw she wanted to be a nurse. She said she was a comic fan, blew that off until I saw some tweets of hers one Friday night. Ended up talking to her about Batman for a bit.
Thought about asking her what a girl so beautiful was doing at home on a Friday, but didn't want to be one of those guys. She probably had a boyfriend or something. Some body builder, Hollywood stuntman type guy you know?
Actually paid for a month subscription to her site. I wasn't one of those losers who thinks they are really involved with the girl, the ones who pay for the used panties and shit. I never said anything other than "Beautiful photos" or "Sexy vid". Tons of guys got banned during the weekly chats, and tons more got ignored. Did they really think she needed to be told how they wanted to pound the shit of her pussy, how she was their dream girl, how she was one of five girls whose asses they'd ever consider eating out?
(One guy even mentioned how two of the girls on his "A list" were dead, meaning she was in his "living top three".)
I just talked to her about comics, video games - just like we were two friends hanging out. Treated her like a person. And when the month was done I didn't renew, figured I didn't want to start thinking of her as my girlfriend. Tweeted her once or twice, got ignored, figured that's cool. Thought about tweeting her about why I didn't renew my account, how I didn't want to be one of those ass-eating stalker types, but I wasn't sure how that'd go over so I let it be.
Five years later, I'm watching a vid and here she is again...only different. Wasn't even expecting her, was just rubbing a quick one out to this new girl, Crystal - some random ass former Playboy model engineering student I googled and clicked on "lesbian" something. She's in the scene with this Crystal Somebody, but her boobs are plastic - I mean obviously plastic. Her ribs - I can count those fuckers easy. Ass is gone. Her face...had those features they give the long time porn stars...the cheeks and lips that make them all look alike.
Then there were her eyes...When she looked into the camera I felt my dick go soft and something slither in my stomach.
Guess she didn't become a nurse. Guess maybe I should have kept my account. Something friends would do for each other.
The thought passes quickly. I only have a few minutes before lunch ends, so I gotta load up another vid of Crystal right quick...
/Story
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Good points again guys. I really want to try and make the "trick sentence" work, even if only to prove that I can. I also like the idea of almost starting outside of a person's viewpoint; I mean, even though it's technically Jixer that's witnessing it, I wanted it to almost feel like a third-person omniscient description of nature at first, since the surprise (in my mind at least) works better that way.
@Callan
There are themes to an extent, though I generally don't really write with that stuff in mind, at least not in the beginning, as I prefer to let it sort of evolve naturally. The only major one that I can say will definitely be present is the clash between progression/tradition, and the value of certain cultures over others. That could possibly be worked in there though. Regardless I agree that it doesn't grab the way I want it to. Seems a little too mundane maybe.
@Sci
Jixer does know that Lok's there, but the forgetting of his presence is supposed to imply Jixer's focus on what's happening, and it will be a recurring thing with him going into a sort of "trance" when he's using a bow (he's incredibly skilled when doing so, but it comes back to bite him in the ass as well). Definitely agree the pacing is off though. It's weirdly awkward to try and introduce the two characters this way, so I may end up changing it around, but regardless the story almost has to start with those two. Lok is also the type to always seem very calm and collected on the outside, but then once you get inside his head you realize he's sort of a bundle of insecurities (whereas Jixer is somewhat the opposite -- he wears his heart on his sleeve and seems easily offended or even sensitive to others, yet from his point of view I want him to be strangely oblivious to it, almost like an ignorant sort of confidence).
The Rite itself is basically something that all boys at the age of fourteen have to go through, which includes a number of different trials/challenges and so on. Anyone who fails the Rite is castrated and essentially becomes a slave, since they're looked upon as having lost their right to become a man and pass on their seed. This takes place relatively early on, with Jixer and Lok taking theirs together, and Jixer failing while Lok passes (in addition, it's fairly rare for anyone to actually fail, so it's quite a big deal in their clan/village). So, it's obviously a major turning point, and I need to get a lot of it across fairly early, but at the same time I don't want to do an exposition overload (keep in mind also that there are about eight POV characters in total, spanning across two countries, which of course complicates the matter slightly -- I do have a basic summary of all chapters from the first book laid out, but that's always subject to change).
I haven't really started writing it "proper", I'm still trying to finish another draft of my novella before then, but I couldn't help myself from giving it a go since I really want to get into it, having been planning the thing for over a year now basically.
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Regarding the focusing - one option might be to load up on details on what Lok sees in front of him, centering on the elk that's his target. then, when the trance breaks, a flood of details of what's behind him, the scent of himself and Jixer sweating, concerns he'd pushed out of his mind, maybe some low level hunger/lust he'd temporarily forgotten about.
You don't need to state the flood of details, maybe just suddenly add in descriptions of things in the periphery of his vision and behind him?
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For Tues, #98, Excerpt from the Parallel Multiverse thread on Planewalker:
Parallel 60 is a Wheel that is difficult to get to, and even more difficult for visitors to remain within. The Wheel continuously pushes to banish parallel walkers to their Wheel of *origin* rather than the last Multiverse they came to Parallel 60 from.
Illithid tadpoles skitter in the pools for the perpetually adolescent "elder brains". Dragons take eons to grow beyond their hatchling stage. Tome Archons are elders in that they are teenagers, as are the Companions along with Morwel and her consorts.
Only the Baern are old enough to take on a mentality of incoming college freshmen. Their evil, the deepest in this Multiverse, is akin to that of bullies and cruel siblings. All other beings fall into younger age groups psychologically, with only non-sentient animals possessing the lifecycles one would expect on Multiverse Prime.
Beings don't bear wounds but developed an increasingly red aura until they finally go to sleep or stasis where they fall. The more wounded you are, the longer it takes for this aura to fade.
Sigil is a city turned play pen with filled with enormous toys that the dabus are continuously making. Visitors who try to interfere with the various moral dramas going on in this Wheel (think after school specials) find there is one adult, and her shadow leaves you with an aura so deep and red that you won't awaken for a thousand years.
There are no undead on this Wheel.
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Oh, Francis, in case it proves inspirational here's the first, D&D related part of the Echoverse:
Parallel LIX: Where Echoes Terraform the Worlds
It is unclear whether Parallel 59 is in its infancy, or whether the primordial conflicts of Multiverse Prime have dragged on from the Time before Time into the present. Historians are of little help, for in this place even time is beholden to the ever evolving Word.
Planar Common has yet to emerge, though the Rilmani are said to be hard at work creating a language that negates the transformative power of language, a tongue they will then spread across creation.
Instead, what one ends up speaking are derivations and combinations of the Wheel's parent tongues: Dark Speech, the Words of Creation, The Tongue of Law (an attempt at signifying all things through the use of binary strings), Deep Hagunemnon, High Aquan, High Ignan, High Auran, and High Terran.
Each of these languages, when spoken, alters the environment around them not just at the physical level but also the metaphysical - even the true names in the surrounding area are affected. (Wheel Walkers are encouraged to come with an incredible amount of magical protection.)
The Prime Material Plane is a war zone, as exemplars of alignments and elements battle to create Paradise and Perdition. The elemental beings, through the work of the genie empires, have been more willing to grant each other territory, but even they participate in conflicts that leave crystal spheres destroyed or birthed in the iridescent phlogiston.
The power of language in this place has resulted in this Wheel being of high interest to parallel walking spellweavers, who have also noted with curiosity that their species is apparently absent from Parallel 59.
In Sigil the power of the Lady provides some respite for mortals and war weary planar incarnations - the entirety of the city exists under a blanket of perpetual silence.
(and here's that actual thread (http://www.planewalker.com/forum/enumerating-parallel-multiverses))
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Saajan, #97 seems a bit idealistic? Assuming money is needed, how does friendship provide money (granted, in ancient days, friendship probably meant sharing of gathered resources and helping in building mud hut shelters)? Is there more a tradgedy in it doesn't matter what he does? Perhaps even add salt into the wound and say hey, since that's the case, may as well just get on to downloading Crystal?
Also might be fun to switch "I felt my dick go soft" to "I felt my clit go soft"
Thought of that because I was going to say something about 'man rescues woman', but I then considered by and large the POV is gender neutral. So might be good to take it right over, twist some expectation of act and role.
Edit: Also it might be cool to make it sound like porn he's downloading, but to eventually reveal it's actually military operation videos - and then latter find her with plastic boobs and sagging limbs because of the reconstructive surgery or such. Drawing a paralel that indicates a system of exploitation.
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Well the idea behind #97 is more about the illusion of intimacy via the internet. He assumes the other guys are falling for her crafted persona, while he has access to the real person - the comic geek. There's also the false(?) hierarchy, where he's a better guy than the others, where he assumes things about this woman's personality he doesn't really know.
He assumes she "ignores" his tweets because he isn't a customer anymore, disregarding the fact that she possibly never had any idea who he was beyond one more customer.
So it's not just illusion of connection, but this illusion presented as a commodity where one makes false(?) hierarchies based on their level of participation.
That's the point of the last lines, where any sense of remorse is superseded by his need to bust a nut before the end of his lunch break. He doesn't really care, his supposed compassion and remorse are part of the package pornography offers - his feeling bad is evidence of his own goodness, his own "realness" compared to other men. We don't even know the woman's name, the one he had this supposed connection to. We do know the name of the woman he *doesn't* care about, Crystal, that he's using to come in the limited time and cramped setting of a company bathroom.
p.s. I put a (?) after false because I kinda think he is better for not ordering the used panties.
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I don't know - all intimacy is rather like a high wire act, with a black curtain in between each swing. It takes one party to jump from their swing, and another party to reach out their arms to catch them.. Neither being able to tell whether the other is taking that part. If either doesn't happen to be doing it, it leaves the other looking stupid (assuming there's a net!). So can one knock a reflexive generation of potential understanding? Given the black curtain we all walk around in? It's basically how everyone interacts, internet or not. It's probably why asking someone out is so difficult - it exposes the fallability of that system pretty explicitly.
He assumes she "ignores" his tweets because he isn't a customer anymore, disregarding the fact that she possibly never had any idea who he was beyond one more customer.
Isn't that accurate, then? I actually assumed they had a potentially forfilling connection and he dropped it out of assumption. If he's actually accurate in that she stopped because he's not a customer, well then he's grokked onto the correct fact - he was just one more customer. Seems more like becoming clear headed than disregarding? So much so I assumed the pointedness of the story was becoming clear headed where there was some sort of potential?
He doesn't really care, his supposed compassion and remorse are part of the package pornography offers
Curiously I'd attribute this to most romantic entanglements. How many people are 'with' others, for years, but for a few changes in scenario, would never have gotten together? In one time line, sobbing over a coffin. In another time line, a sad nostalgia at reading an obituary? What's the other package porno offers? That we can neatly judge the guy who had no chance at influencing anything, for his quality? Well, maybe if our judgement wont influence anything either, then again, what difference does it make, I suppose.
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Well, we will be seeing more of this guy and more on the subject of pornography and sexual fantasy itself. Note also that the story isn't an indictment on porn necessarily -> It's important to note that by paying her for soft core, he thinks he could have saved her from hardcore.
Think of this guy jerking off in a stall as a sometimes unreliable, sometimes poignantly truthful narrator. He thinks she's mad about him canceling his account, more likely someone else handles all the web stuff and she never recalled who he is. In a world where she has at least a hundred customers, how many people does she talk to about comics?
Weds Story #99
"Slowly, slowly...." I grunt as the unicorn horn slides into my anus, the healing magic of its horn negating any damage it does as soon as it happens.
The tip of the horn touches my prostrate, and suddenly the edges of my vision go white with pleasure.
Truly, this is the best blind date I've ever had.
/Story
Thurs Story #100
The contacts click on, and every pattern of every stimulus response is revealed to me. Reality is augmented, with directions on how to locate the G-spot, how to harmonize my tongue with my hands, where to bite and pull and slap and how hard to do these things.
As the moans turn to screams, I really do think my marriage is saved.
/Story
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Fri #101
Story
Sittin' here tryin' to come up with a story
Something fresh and new, not jizz-stained and corny
Was hoping this rhyme would help, that it'd be inspiring
Cuz the day to day is so damn tiring
But the rhythm is tepid, the flow is not hot - it's only luke warm,
And the sky is overcast by smog and storm
Plus I gotta a hangover though I haven't been drinking
My vice is working for the Man - that's the poison of no choice - that's why I'm sinking
Eyes heavy, dragged down by bags underneath -
But somewhere out there, there's still gotta be Story, like Fievel I just gotta believe...
/Story
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Hurning, churning, never pent. Gaol of soul, surely rent.
Tithe draw near with tickling bowl,
Purient devour, principle afore end.
Mostly true unrecognised as blend.
Maytook, wither there is no spoon.
Beyond borders foul, taking face encrusted blank as the moon.
Service wroth with plenty fold,
You'll die, but you wont get old.
~~~
Fairly random, I grant. Still, is writing nothing at all even more random? *buh, buh, baaaaah!*
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Sat #102
Story
Back in the stall, fisting my dick in a grip of work life frustration, feeling splashes of pleasure in the vast darkness beneath my skin, odd pride sighting the sheen of pre-come, euphoria spiking my brain each time I see the shaved lips of a pussy framed by tanned, ample ass cheeks, girl turning back to look over her own gorgeous body staring into (the camera) my eyes with a mischievous smirk on her lips.
I could come quicker if I wasn't fighting the whispers:
Would you want your sister to do this? Your cousin, who has a girl out of wedlock? Your daughter?
Can't the Furies give it a rest long enough for me to do what I need to do? It's just I need to come is all, no need for all these questions of vegan-esque philosophy.
/Story
Sun #103
Story
In the sky beyond, dragons fly over cities, their exhalations turning our tallest sky scrapers to melted glass and slag.
The Elves look back at me, the judges in their gazes asking "Is this what you wanted?".
In reply I lift pebbles with my thoughts, the Truth of Mind over Matter revealed to all the world by sorcery's Return.
They weigh my heart against a feather, and I know they find me wanting. Even their sneers are beautiful. Even their disgust lifts up my heart.
Downwinds deliver the scent of cooking flesh mixed into the stink of civilization's trappings being consigned to the pyre.
Worth it, I tell my conscience. It was worth it, to be pulled back from the cliffs the river of Science delivered us toward.
/Story
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Alright, I'm going to toss up the short story I wrote for the fantasy writing contest. It's just under 8,000 words. I wrote it in like three days, because the one I had been writing for the contest was awful and I knew there was no chance of me winning. So I just went into super overdrive and launched into this thing. I've yet to do any edits since the first draft, but I'm going to soon. As always, any and all critiques are much appreciated.
I'll just link to my deviantART here: http://francisbuck.deviantart.com/art/The-Wolf-and-the-Wanderer-330073883?ga_submit=10%3A1349047906 (http://francisbuck.deviantart.com/art/The-Wolf-and-the-Wanderer-330073883?ga_submit=10%3A1349047906)
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Four pages in - so far, so good.
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Mon #104
Story
The arrow goes through my heart. At last, at last I see the ghosts of my ancestors.
How petty of them, to linger in the material world.
I try to gasp out last words regarding the folly of fighting in their name and memory, but before I can say anything I'm already leaving my body behind.
/Story
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Tues #105
Story
Quetzacoatl, He who once ruled over a Dream-Time South America in a forgotten reflection of Earth, sails away from His homeland, turning back only once to look the sky. The smoke from the fires has risen up into a sneering face that takes on a reflective quality, a tarnished silver haze that mirrors the ruin below it, the razing done in Tezcatlipoca's name.
One day, Quetzacoatl promises Himself, he will return, a living god reincarnated through the ages.
He prays, to what or who He does not know. But still He prays for Memory, prays He doesn't forget who He is.
/Story
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Weds #106
Story
He has a code. Sticks to Playboy vids, figures that none of those girls are likely to be the broken ones that go into porn.
But tonight he comes to a vid of a woman masturbating. He's made sure she has no scenes where she fucks anyone, and he even notices that he isn't attracted to this woman when she's not wearing makeup and that this makes him feel guilty.
But it's 3am, and work starts at 8:00. He has to come to get to sleep. So it's just like he eats meat because he needs the energy, and figures he's not really one of the bad guys you know?
Plus she smiled at (the camera) him when she was done stuffing herself with that giant black dildo. A benediction, surely? She seemed to be happy, that's why he picked her...
/Story
Thurs #107
Story
Sarasvati-Athena dances in the information, shifting the bits so that synchronicity via web search nudges us toward wisdom.
Vishnu-Zeus shifts through our laws, nudging regulations and the electric revelations of the screen to uphold our evolving approximation of Civilization.
Dionysus-Shiva rides the echoes of "Whose Streets? Our Streets!", surfing the hot passion of the revolution, a wave that smooths the cliff, the river that carves a canyon from epoch stacked layers of stone.
Entropy, after all, is the engine of Evolution.
/Story
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"We cannot have a Brothel in our town", he said.
"Some say they do it for enjoyment, but how many others are pressed by financial situation, or are in vulnerable mental condition? How can we do this?"
He was a noble man, a protector of women; he nursed this notion in his soul.
That somehow these women would, without a brothel, magically find some equal paying and non demeaning work that would fit into their lives, automatically. Without him having to do a thing, because he certainly wasn't going to do more than protest this brothel.
He really didn't care what happened to them. As long as they weren't sluts.
As long as they weren't anyone elses sluts.
~~~
Inspired by a letter in the local newspaper.
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Fri #109
Story
Time bends in my hand. I twist my wrist, and reality folds like origami to draw in past and future.
I think for a minute, only for a minute, and then I tear the Veil from our eyes...so that we might see the Infinite.
Sadly, I see now that we were not ready to be gods.
/Story
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Sci, did you have any thoughts on what you read of my short story? I'm just curious because your opinion is valuable! Soon I'm going to do nice re-write and cut it to 7,500 words, and then start submitting it to some of the websites you mentioned in your Westeros thread.
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I haz thoughtz! And cheezburgerz!
I was thinking the start has the people in a passive role, then something bad happens to them. Perhaps it's an urge to see a 'they did X, then Y happened' story structure I'm leaning toward, and also I'm not sure how you'd fit it into the story, but I think the story starting with people doing stuff, then getting a reaction (even if that reaction is plague) is preferable. Then again, I could be part of a tiny demographic in having a preference for this - hard to say.
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I haz thoughtz! And cheezburgerz!
I was thinking the start has the people in a passive role, then something bad happens to them. Perhaps it's an urge to see a 'they did X, then Y happened' story structure I'm leaning toward, and also I'm not sure how you'd fit it into the story, but I think the story starting with people doing stuff, then getting a reaction (even if that reaction is plague) is preferable. Then again, I could be part of a tiny demographic in having a preference for this - hard to say.
Hmm, so you mean that you think it would be better if I started it with the character just living normal village life, and then have the plague/Holy Men/wolf come into it and illustrate their reactions that way?
The other thing to take into consideration is that I really want to keep this under 8,000 words, or better yet 7,500. That's usually the range in which most magazines/websites/contests want these kind of things (at least that I've seen).
EDIT: Or did you mean that the villager's actions should somehow be the cause for what takes place?
EDIT NUMERO DOS: By the way, is anyone else incapable of uploading things in your posts? I tried to upload the file for my story in like five different formats (.rtf, .doc, .txt, .pdf), but none of them worked -- that's why I just did the deviantART link, even though I didn't really want to upload my story there yet. Is that feature just disabled, or is there something wrong on my end?
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I'll check it out, Francis, but I've discovered so many limitations with this forum. In many cases, even the pay-for version of forumer doesn't have many of even the few features members here have requested.
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Sorry for the delay Francis! I liked the story.
The first thing I'd note is that words such as reticulated and miniature took me out of the story. I think it this is a villager in a distant village, these words sound too modern and took me out of the story.
It's also not clear why Fenris leaving and Odin being killed lead to the end of the plague, or if the plague ended naturally. Also, can a god be killed by a knife? Perhaps a banishment for Odin would fit better?
I wonder if you could have the horse bolt when the wolf howls, rather than use the snake as its entry seemed more of a distraction than a plot point?
eta: I also wonder if Odin is needed at all. Perhaps the girl simply kills the wolf as it takes over her grandmother? Maybe her grandmother even calls to her in a dream to stop the beast within. I just wonder if there's too much going on with Fenris and Odin being thrown in as characters. Well, Fenris might work actually in the spirit possession, as I like the idea that this is how the wolf can "escape" its prison.
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I'll check it out, Francis, but I've discovered so many limitations with this forum. In many cases, even the pay-for version of forumer doesn't have many of even the few features members here have requested.
No big deal dude, that sucks that forumer is being a pain. It's really not that important of a feature, it was easily remedied with deviantART. You're doing a great job on the forums though, seriously. I think we've got a really good foundation here for discussions on writing, and hopefully it continues to grows as time goes on! And you should post more of your stuff too when you can! The more the merrier.
Sorry for the delay Francis! I liked the story.
The first thing I'd note is that words such as reticulated and miniature took me out of the story. I think it this is a villager in a distant village, these words sound too modern and took me out of the story.
It's also not clear why Fenris leaving and Odin being killed lead to the end of the plague, or if the plague ended naturally. Also, can a god be killed by a knife? Perhaps a banishment for Odin would fit better?
I wonder if you could have the horse bolt when the wolf howls, rather than use the snake as its entry seemed more of a distraction than a plot point?
eta: I also wonder if Odin is needed at all. Perhaps the girl simply kills the wolf as it takes over her grandmother? Maybe her grandmother even calls to her in a dream to stop the beast within. I just wonder if there's too much going on with Fenris and Odin being thrown in as characters. Well, Fenris might work actually in the spirit possession, as I like the idea that this is how the wolf can "escape" its prison.
Thanks so much dude! I'll get a response back to you a little later, right now I need to go for a run. But your comments are definitely insightful and much appreciated. Same goes for you Callan, and Camlost too; wish he could post more, but I understand a busy schedule as much as anyone. I actually just started a new job as a marketing salesman, which if you know me at all...well, it's like totally out of left field, haha. But the pay is really good so I'm definitely going to give it my all. Plus I get a free smartphone out of the deal! I'm excited, but a little nervous at the same time since I've never done anything even remotely close to sales. Either way I'm hoping to learn and then establish a stable, reliable income while I pursue my wildly unrealistically dreams of being a novelist/filmmaker/musician!
Keep up the writing everybody!
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Sorry for the delay Francis! I liked the story.
The first thing I'd note is that words such as reticulated and miniature took me out of the story. I think it this is a villager in a distant village, these words sound too modern and took me out of the story.
It's also not clear why Fenris leaving and Odin being killed lead to the end of the plague, or if the plague ended naturally. Also, can a god be killed by a knife? Perhaps a banishment for Odin would fit better?
I wonder if you could have the horse bolt when the wolf howls, rather than use the snake as its entry seemed more of a distraction than a plot point?
eta: I also wonder if Odin is needed at all. Perhaps the girl simply kills the wolf as it takes over her grandmother? Maybe her grandmother even calls to her in a dream to stop the beast within. I just wonder if there's too much going on with Fenris and Odin being thrown in as characters. Well, Fenris might work actually in the spirit possession, as I like the idea that this is how the wolf can "escape" its prison.
Agreed on the diction Sci, that's definitely an area I need to work on. Also agreed with the snake part; I'm actually planning on cutting that whole section down and significantly rewriting it, because I want to free up my word budget and focus more on the ending (which I feel is very rushed, largely because I was exhausted by the time I got there -- almost no sleep for twenty-four hours *facepalm*).
As for the Odin thing, he isn't actually killed by the knife, it's the wolf that kills and proceeds to eat him. Basically, the whole idea of the story is that it's this sort of re-imagining of Little Red Riding Hood, while also being a parallel/merger of Norse myth and a little bit of twisted history. So essentially, the "witches" (practitioners of the old magic) created the plague in order to rid the land of the invading Holy Men, but for whatever reason (Yahweh?) it backfired and only affected the natives. So, Little Red's grandmother summons Fenrir to take vengeance on the Holy Men for killing her "sisters" and eradicating their way of life.
I don't know how much knowledge you possess of Norse myth, but I'm basically adapting (loosely) several different aspects. In the Prose Edda, it is said that "due to the gods' knowledge of prophecies foretelling great trouble from Fenrir and his rapid growth, the gods bound him" (this is from Wiki, for lack of time). In addition, in Völuspá it's said that Fenrir would consume Odin at Ragnarok, or the end of the world. In my story, Odin is essentially the stand-in for the traditional woodsman/lumberjack that saves Little Red Riding Hood from the wolf disguised as her grandmother. So the idea here is that my story is depicting "the end of the world" for Norse life -- I.E. the rise of Christianity and the fading of Norse culture/traditions/religion, etc. So in that sense Odin is pretty essential to the story. Also, the implication is that the plague ends because Odin has been "killed", and so the old magic has been wiped away from the earth (and thus the plague itself, which was created by old magic). You definitely made me realize I need to make that last part clearer though, so thanks for pointing it out. ;)
All that being said, I totally agree that it feels like too much is going on, and especially I think the ending wraps up far too quickly. So I'm going to cut as much fat from the beginning and middle as possible, and then inject more stuff about Odin and Fenrir so as to make them feel less "thrown in" or out of place. I honestly have no clue how much I can really cut though, as I've purposely avoided re-reading the story whatsoever since I submitted it back in June. I think it's good to distance yourself from a project for a decent amount of time, just to let it gestate in your mind, and then be able to go back with a more objective viewpoint and hopefully some fresh ideas.
Thanks again for the critique Sci, and as always I greatly appreciate anyone taking the time to read my stuff. I'll definitely be troubling you for a re-read once I finish a second draft (though that won't happen until I've completed my rewrite of Perennials, which I'm hoping to have done by Christmas at the latest).
Then I can finally, finally start my goddamn epic fantasy!
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Hmm, so you mean that you think it would be better if I started it with the character just living normal village life, and then have the plague/Holy Men/wolf come into it and illustrate their reactions that way?
As I read it that's what you've done so far, so I mean something else.
EDIT: Or did you mean that the villager's actions should somehow be the cause for what takes place?
Kind of. Call it an innate desire for observing cause and effect. However, what you have is both a valid setting, a village, yet villages are sedintary. So they don't do anything much to be a cause.
It's a bit specific, but what came to mind is something like 'Can even a rite of fertility die?'. They'd performed some fertility rites prior the coming of the plague, and with the plague more and more rites, getting more desperate and dangerous are performed. It gives a sense of them having done something and doing more things and a reaction occuring. Not that it'd actually be linked at all. Just an appearance of a possible cause/actions taken by the villagers and effect.
It might not be applicable - after all, TDTCB starts with a plague. But on the other hand they had just fled the apocalypse - so it kind of feels like a cause/effect scenario.
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Well, the contest I submitted to just announced my name today for the longlist: http://fantasywritingcontest.com/category/judges/ (http://fantasywritingcontest.com/category/judges/)
I'm honestly shocked I got this far. They've been announcing five people for the past six days, and I was on the last day, so I pretty much gave up hope lol. But at least I can I was in the top 2% out 1,700! No idea when they announce the actual six winners, but I'm happy just to have gotten this far, considering how little time I had to polish the damn thing.
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Wow, congrats on landing in the 2%, Francis! Though let us take a moment to appreciate the other 98% as well. Subjective views of judges and all.
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Wow, congrats on landing in the 2%, Francis! Though let us take a moment to appreciate the other 98% as well. Subjective views of judges and all.
Heh, you're cute. Thanks buddy ;)
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Sat #110
Story
I grasp the hilt, and remember the woad stained madman who came to my farm three days ago.
Anyone, he promised me, anyone can be king if they have the heart for it.
I think of glory, and nothing happens. The blade stays within in its womb of stone. Jeers tell the pig herding, bucktoothed cunt to step aside.
I think of my name echoed through the ages, and still the blade shows no sign of being unsheathed. Some rotten vegetable strikes my head and bursts against my teenage acne.
I think of my family, our land caught between two warring chieftains. I think of children staring at burned down homes, of women used as pleasure for men. I think of my own stolen virginity.
Tears run from my eyes. I hear the brutish laughter of men and the dam breaks in my memory...
God I just wish for peace, and a land where people like me don't have to hate themselves anymore.
Finally I hear the scrape of a whisper, and the sword's weight lightens as if it were a pail with water leaking out of the bottom....
/Story
Sun #111
Story
Alone at the core of the world, the dragon sleeps. Once it burned the countryside, and made sport of human lives.
Now it is older, and wiser, and promises itself it will be slain by a hero worthy of the name, a leader of nations who numbers among the best of them.
Still it sleeps, for the best of us have yet to take the reigns of power.
/Story
Mon #112
Story
The giants are the mountains, the dryads reincarnated through generations of acorns and twirling maple seeds, the sea serpents the ocean currents that wind around the world.
Dare I open the gate for the Elves? Dare I wake the Magic that slumbers in the folds of Earth's bones and veins?
I look back at the factory belching smoke, I think of the silos full of missiles and all the victims of cruelty who are told there is no such thing as salvation.
Raise the rune stone up to catch the first rays of red twilight bleeding on the fields. I feel the Veil begin to strain, but lower my hand before it tears.
I just don't know. I just don't know if I can do this, or if I should.
Why was it put on my shoulders, to play midwife to the Ending that is the Return?
/Story
Tues #113
Story
As my semen spurts into the toilet water, I feel a sigh of relief though I've been here too long. Just couldn't get hard for a bit there, but it was worth the wait. Coming to porn again, it's like a shackle clacking open. The knot of my desire is finally untied from her.
Is this what they mean, those religious type people? Is this kinda like what accepting God would be like?
/Story
Weds #114
Story
The honeybee slams into the web, and even as the spider approaches from the center of the weaving it only tangles itself further in confusion.
All it thinks about is returning to the hive, even as venom liquifies its insides.
I watch the murder with fascination, and take this violence as a Sign that I really need to find a new job.
/Story
Thurs #115
Story
Her hand job is insane in its near violence, makes me come way before her. It suddenly strikes me that though its late all the lights are on around us. Her roommates are asleep...I think?
My hands are down her pants. I thought I'd be married before I touched a wet vagina. How did I get so buried in sin?
I hug her, this temptress whose led me astray, because I just need someone to hold as I feel God pulling away from my heart.
/Story
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Fri and Sat, 116 & 117:
Shepherds of Smoke
Giants with the bark skin and branch hair of cedars, these Shepherds are perpetually covered in ash as they use their bellowing breath to spread the ever blooming smoke from a grand, rune covered volcano in the Eald. Where the ash touches down, the Wyld transforms temporarily, taking on aspects of some long dead Court with a culture so old - or at least displaced in Time - that few fey recognize what they are incarnating.
A love of kraken meat and a reverence for snow white owls, a worship of cavern rivers running over veins of ore. A driving need to offer up the blood of the Warp's Elders to an Eald Spirit called Twilight Sun over Frost.
Thankfully, the ash disperses quickly enough, most of the time, keeping the fey of the Eald from embarking on what must be a suicidal mission against the Keepers of the Warp.
The Midwives of Champions
These women are all dressed in white, with alabaster skin and have fiery red or jet black hair. All of their blue eyes shine out with a ceaseless hunger to make the mortals of the worlds stronger. Sometimes this means leaving them to wander in vision quests in the Eald, other times it means offering them gifts from the cyclopean forges of the Wan. Others are tested as tricksters in the Seelie Courts spread across the Weal, and some are given to the Gauntlet to see if that prison might transform the meek into the mighty.
The Midwives care not whether the Champion is a servant of Good or Chaos or simply desires to drink deep from the arterial blood of endangered megafauna. What matters is that these empowered, ideally epic adventurers continue to ensure the worlds are producing legends to feed the flow of Narrative Time.
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Inspired by #110
~~~
The chains they attached to the stone rattle as the sword moves - but it lightens like reigns being pulled from ones hands. It plunges! Deeper - the stone splitting to either side, sending me sprawling into the muck as the sword found a deeper bite in a boulder below. The crowd roars in anger after a long fearful moment. Enraged they step forward, but theirs something dull in the mans movements, something feline and silver within the round of his pupil. He shoves chains into my hands. Twines their ends around my arms.
"Take your shame there, girlie, and leave here! GIT!"
More rotten vegetables - but their aim and strength of throw seems waned by fearfulness, as she gets to her feet and drags her burden.
It is many miles, on a hungry stomach, home. She knows not how far any might follow her, but beneath the shadow of a massive old oak tree, she eventually tires of her burden. For some reason she still finds herself pulling it free of yet one more gutter. She pulls and she pulls and she tires and yanks. The stone sails past her, impacts against the heart of the oak...and explodes through, spewing ancient wood out along with the stone. She looks in horror as the chain, the one wrapped around her arm, extends, see's in her mind her arm being torn away to bone. The chain yanks to it's length. Her feet do not move. I stand there, unmoving.
Then I run, the oak about to crash onto me, and the chains yank me over onto my buttocks, heavy as the iron and weight they carry. I cringe in a ball on the ground and...find myself in a clearing amongst the crashing limbs of the tree. Cradled within the place where thick old branches fork.
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Sun and Mon, 118 & 119:
Story
A dragon's shadow passes above us. I pray.
A siren sings in a public pool, threatening to lure our youngsters away. I pray.
Teenagers in basements have become alchemists, supplying gangs with wasted healing and weapons of war. I pray.
Magic has returned to the world...but God?
God is still silent.
/Story
Story
God's blood on the soil packed on a serpent's coil, this is how a world is born.
Ice melted by dragon fire, watering crops called up by a song wed to the lyre, this is how a world is made.
Hearts offered up to the Sun, harvested from survivors when the war is won...this is how the world is sustained.
/Story
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Tues 120 (The Grey is the mist enshrouded area between the Seelie and Unseelie courts)
The Carnival of Mists and the Grey Masquerades
Not so much an event as an endless celebration intertwined with Grey culture, the Carnival and Masquerades are a collection of disguises and improvised performances continually going on in the Courts within the mist. The Carnival is less localized, currents of style and theme passing between lands and Courts via travelers and scrying pools that offer glimpses of other Courts and even distant civilizations in the Grey. Sometimes the themes run into the macabre, other times it seems as if a strong sexual undertow dominates the events.
The Grey Masquerades are more specific to Courts, with glamors and costumes utilized together. Depending on the Court, one may find people impersonating each other or pretending to be dignitaries from other parts of the Wyld. PCs may even find a dinner filled with replicas of themselves! In other places a masquerade is more about totemic emblems, and less about disguise. Masks may only be used as badges of station, caste, or some other designation in that particular Court.
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Weds #121 (From the Fairie Project (http://fourthparty.freeforums.org/faerie-project-f9.html))
The Orchard of Chaoskampf
The darkness of the Wan extends not only through the Underdark of the Wyld, but also the oceanic nadir of the Wyld's saline waters. In these inky depths, one finds great tracts of submerged earth illuminated only by the bio-luminescence of varied fauna. Among their number there are gargantuan, mansion sized sea anemones that hold within their poisonous fronds the merfolk harlequin gardeners whose scales' coloration serve as costume for these macabre jesters. These beings are responsible for raising the monsters that are raised within the protection tentacles - the great beasts of Chaos that challenge those heroes seeking to preserve civilization.
Given the purpose of the harlequins - to utilize the Chaoskampf as an engine of narrative time - there are portals scattered amidst the Orchard leading to worlds strewn across the void of the Prime Material Plane.
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Thurs #122
Story
Ever since the return of Magic to the world, I find the landscape reshaped when I awaken.
Stone turns to mist, revealing palaces lit by will o' wisp swarms.
Oceans recede, and great mansions of coral rise from reefs long bereft of arcana.
Shadows flicker and grow watchful, loyalty to their makers no longer guaranteed.
It is as if all of human history since the leaving of the Elves was Winter, and now we are greeted by the vibrancy of a new and terrifying Spring.
/Story
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Fri #123
The Time Lost
Hermits and pilgrims of sundered timelines, expatriates literally bereft of their pasts, the Time Lost come to the Warp in hopes of finding glimmers of their erased civilizations and histories. Some desperately seeking a way to retrieve at least a few loved ones, if not their entire societies, from the alterations in the flow of Time. Others simply come to bask in memories and ghostly recreations of what they've come to accept that can or at least should not seek to recover.
Among the Time Lost, the Le Shay are readily welcomed into the societies of the Wyld given their relation to both elves and fey. However, the relationship between these beings and the geratric-seeming lords and ladies of the Warp varies as many of the wizened fey are wary of those Le Shay seeking to undo the event that replaced their past with the current timeline of the Multiverse.
Similarly, other Time Lost have varied relationships with the accepted but largely undeclared rulers of the Warp, though non-Le Shay oftentimes end up being utilized as pawns or indentured servants strung along with promises of resurrecting loved ones lost to shifts in the temporal currents. The more powerful of these are left largely to their own devices, and end up as hermits - or if their numbers are sufficient, settlers - near the Cosmic Ocean or become wandering mercenaries, dervishes, or lunatics in the Desert of the Shattered Hourglass.
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Sat #124
Story
Sometimes (Sometimes?) we deceive ourselves into believing that to step out on the ledge guarantees reward.
When the indifference of Fate to our whim confronts us, we are - if but for a moment - frozen in disbelief.
And this is how I found myself rushing from the out-of-the-way bathroom to the meeting four floors above, having thought that the video I torrented to my phone via the use of nigh infinite patience would make me come good & hard...I honestly believed that she'd drop her drawers in this one (10 minutes and no crotch shot?!), having faith that she must have a pussy as beautiful as her face...
That last bit of belief I hold in my continued frustration, even as I try to will my hard on flacid while riding the elevator toward my employer...
/Story
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Hey, Saajan, since you do alot of stories revolving around porn, I'm curious about one involving amatuers (genuine) and where that goes. And lets assume not a stolen tape or anything. Where does that go?
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Hmmm, it is a good thing to cover but not sure if I can think of anything off the top of my head.
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Sun #125 (From stuff going on at Planewalker.com)
The way they walk through Sigil, demon and angel alike, I can't help look askance at them and the viscous current of crowded bodies that parts then seals itself around their winged forms.
All around them are beings from varied worlds and planes, in all sorts of garb conversing in all sorts of languages. Are Heaven and the Abyss filled with such Gnosis that both seem so inured to the wondrous diversity?
I admit I am but a humble chronicler, yet I am older and more...ubiquitous than either member of this pair that has drawn my inquiry and critique. Still I find myself surprised by the sensory feast offered on every block of the Cage's streets. How, then, can I accept that these two are so nonchalant at the wonder around them?
Yet let it not be said that I am any less disappointed in those who bustle around them. Yes you are late for work and yes you are on your way to meet your lady love, but do you not see that Evil and Good are treading upon the very ground you walk on? That you breathe air that has cycled through the lungs of morals made flesh?
And is it not worth an intermission in your dullard existence to acknowledge the subtle glance that flashes between them as they pass by one another, each clearly made uncomfortable by this unintended revival of memory? Don't you wonder if perhaps here is an angel almost fallen, along with a succubus who was, at some point past, a thin cliff's edge from being saved?
Me? I'm just glad that of all the places in the Multiverse it is this one that I haunt, I thank all the gods that I was mugged and murdered in the Hive instead of some Prime back alley...
=-=-=
Mon 126
The Mist
As you leave the dark, cavernous confines of the Wan and the bright fields of the Weal you find your path marked by thin streamers of fog. Sometimes it is born of warm steam rising from the earth - as if someone had buried a thousand thousand tea kettles just beneath the soil and sometimes it comes as clouds wandering on slow currents of air, their rain pregnant forms floating impossibly close to the ground.
As one moves into the lands of the Grey the Mists vary in thickness though there is almost always some haze obscuring one's view. Some beings exist as part of the mist either naturally or as prisoners discorporated during conflicts so old they precede the rise of the Seelie and Unseelie courts. These creature cajole and whisper, the former playing various games and the latter with few exceptions invariably seeking freedom. There many of what the fey call "mist pawns" between the Grey Courts, mortals who divide themselves into those convinced by curse, deception, or promise to serve the denizens of the fog and those who fight against these beings for vengeance's sake or to prevent the return of some ancient Wyld inhabitant that made sport on their respective worlds.
Despite the dangers in conceals, the Mists are not evil. They likely preserve a good deal of mortal sanity by veiling the shifting of time, distance and landscape in the softer areas of the Grey lands. Of course even here some would argue that by hiding these distortions mortals are more likely to miss the passing of centuries in their homelands or be shepherded to wherever the varied forces of the Grey wish them to be. Still, mortals are not wholly left to the mercy of the Wyld - a mortal with the right mindset can in fact utilize the mists to cut down on travel times and use it as planar pathway to the various worlds that touch Fairie. There are even those who whisper that some of the Mists' prisoners were put there by mortals rather than fey...
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Newly edited excerpt from my novella, Perennials:
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Outside, the concrete walkway was cool and oddly pleasant upon the soles of his naked feet. The ice machine was a few rooms down and around the corner, set in a gap between the two main sections of the motel. Angel-Eyes stuck the bucket under the ice-chute and pressed a button, watching as the cubes clattered down into it, jarringly loud in the silence of the night.
He filled it half-way before releasing the button, and was just about to head back to the room when he caught a new scent on the air. Tobacco smoke and sickly sweet perfume. Expensive shampoo and young flesh. And something metallic.
Blood. Or close to it...
He looked across the street and saw two girls leaning against a pillar and passing a cigarette back and forth. They were thin and blond and wore tank-tops with pajamas that clung loosely to their hips and rears. Teenagers. One of them glanced over to Angel-Eyes and saw him staring, and she gestured to her friend. They both smiled, and the one with the cigarette blew a line of smoke from pursed lips, shining wet under the dirty yellow light. Angel-Eyes decided that the blood-like smell was from one of them menstruating. He grinned, throwing a friendly nod their way before casually approaching them, and the night was black in a way that transcended simple darkness.
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Good stuff Francis - only major issue I have is the "transcended simple darkness" part. It just seems unclear what you mean by this. Is the vampire making the darkness more than "simple darkness" or is there a supernatural current in the air?
=-=-=
Alright, gotta catch up:
Tues 127
Story
My 22 y.o. unbelievably hot sister in law is taking a shower. I know she's attracted to me, I can tell in the way she laughs at my jokes. I might have a bit of a gut, one that jiggles as I descend into the basement to get some cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving dinner, but I still got muscle under this fat.
Still got my glory days, still got my record though you know they're doping in high school now? No joke.
If we'd met when I was younger, we'd have definitely fucked. My latest fantasy scenario to stay hard while inside of my wife.
Water's running through the pipes, water that's slid off her breasts, off her pussy. Is she touching herself right now, biting her lip not to moan, thinking about me?
I reach out to touch the pipe, then stop myself. A little fantasy is fine, but I can't help but feel that'd veer into adultery.
/Story
Weds 128
Story
Ice coats the trees in crystalline garb, the wind making every creaking branch into a tinkling chime.
It was like this every Winter, even before Magic returned. Even before I ended the world.
But now, with the accompaniment of the elves and their avian wails of mourning, it feels more fitting.
A proper dirge for passing modernity.
/Story
Thurs 129
Story
"So there are spirits...where? On the other side of the sky? We already got pipes out - take out some of your peyote or whatever and let's all have a puff. I wanna see all these genies and fey."
The words are already dusted with slurs, and the sun has yet to surrender the sky.
"I can't take you", I say as I gesture toward his glass of whiskey.
"You're already possessed by a demon."
Instead of getting angry he takes the admonishment with a semblance of graceful resignation, and that more than anything extends the jagged crack in the acre of heart I reserve for this man.
/Story
Fri 130
Story
Slices of ham and a block of cheddar, a scattering of Godiva filled with raspberry syrup. A thermos of box wine.
Dick lathered in olive oil, a shot glass full that'll I be using as backup.
Four windows taking up equal space on my laptop - Playboy, Penthouse, girl jerking off, two girls fucking on a pool table.
Worked late today, working all weekend, but the wife's gone and I got the place to myself.
I press four play buttons and begin to eat and jerk off.
God, I so fucking needed this.
/Story
Saturday
Story
(to the tune of Fresh Prince of Bel Air)
In the heart of Ishual I was born and raised
Under the shadow of the Consult I spent most of my days
Yoking my Legion an' trying to stay cool
Learning 'bout Logos in my Dunyain School
When my Cishaurim daddy, who was up to no good
Starting sending dreams back to my neighborhood
Fucked with our Mission, so the Pragmas got scared
And I was sent to kick my dad Moe in the rear
/Story
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Just my reading by to me transcending darkness is as if to layer a palpable semantic layer over reality, like almost physically present (much like the scene where Kellhus first placidly observes Serwe's rape by Cnauir, yet something seems to be there to him)
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It definitely wasn't meant to be taken literally, the vampires are more "scientific" than magical (or at least as scientific as vampires can get). That scene is actually the end of Angel-Eyes' whole segment, so I was going for a sort of ambiguity as to whether or not he was going to feed on/kill the girls, since the character is sort of conflicted on trying to feed on live humans (even though now he's on the run and basically has to). It's probably a little too weird and vague though. I suppose I could cut it off at the "casually approached them" part, which would still have the same effect? Maybe too abrupt? I don't know, for some reason it's a weird part to figure out for me, that's why I posted it here :)
It might be better even to just cut it with the girls noticing him, and never even have the "approach" part. Either way I definitely want to leave it the reader's imaginations as to what goes down.
By the way, either of you guys trying to do NaNoWriMo?
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Didn't say it was magical? When a book describes "And then all the world turn red with his rage" for example, it's not magic being described. Or atleast I never read it that way.
I say keep it - and if it feels odd, then explore that oddness somewhere further along. No need to just cut it! :)
By the way, either of you guys trying to do NaNoWriMo?
Did that just start today?
edit: Well, I signed up (http://www.nanowrimo.org/en/participants/callan-s).
I guess we can buddy and feel guilt together! Or I will, anyway!
edit 2: Aww, is hard! Even as I bullshit a kinda fairytale on acid! I'm stuck in write a bit, word count, write a bit mode. I'm rather thinking I'm not going to make it to say the 1.6k per day needed right now, and I'm prolly not going to come back this evening either.
Maybe I'll just have mooks shoot at the dude with not green eyes some more...chew up the scenery...oh god, my soul...
edit 3: Okay, justttttt made it! Few, I'm sure glad I don't have to do that 29 more times! Aye? Aye...???
It's funny that it's not making up crap that's so much the issue, but forcing latter crap adhere to prior made crap that dries up the creativity. But if there is no following, it gets to be a pretty freaky unrelated bunch of strange things.
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Didn't say it was magical?
Sorry, was responding to you and Sci both kind of, I should have been more clear. Thanks for the input either way!
I had been planning to do NaNo since summer, but I was also hoping to be done my Perennial edit, which has taken far longer than I wanted it to. I really wanted to start my fantasy for it, but I'm forcing myself to finish another Perennials draft so that it doesn't nag at my brain the whole time I'm doing the fantasy, especially since the latter will almost certainly take several years.
Callan, is the story you're doing for NaNo something you've been thinking about before, or did you start 100% fresh?
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Starting fresh. With all the dangers of structural collapse that has! As in lacking any structure. I think I'll have to plug in an overarching mystery to act as a kind of spine - need to stick that in the first chapter at some point, in traditional no causal fashion.
Kind of a psionics and etherial supernatural meets espionage dealio. There's also a cat called Petal refered to!
Edit: Day 2, struggling at 2994 words. Need 400 more and I'm already giving up on sequential story, writing framents to then sew together in some kind of causality latter.
Edit: Just made it for today...I guess all these story fragments will plug together. At some point. Well, it'll end up with more words trying to glue them together, anyway. I could write "Fish" 50 thousand times. Atleast glue and fragments is a step up!
And jeez I have this thing about murdering. As in not. So cuts out easy content to slice up 'bad guys'. Sure you can have your non lethal/less lethal, but you're kind of stuck justifying it, whilst the murderoso can fill word counts just with blood splatter patterns alone. Actually come to think of it, I think I can have blood splatter patterns too...just not head from neck severance paragraphs.
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The psionics/supernatural meets espionage sounds pretty damn cool. Does it take place in a completely different world/universe from our own? Alternative? Secret?
Honestly, the best thing about doing NaNoWriMo is that, at the end of the day (or month, in this case) you have something concrete to really work with if you want to. Even if most of it's not so good, it's still a milliont times better than having nothing. A crappy, fragmented story is at least a framework to go on, and there's almost certainly going to be parts of it that will be surprisingly good when you go back to read through. Have you actually re-read any of what you've done, or are you just steamrolling forward and not looking back? That's pretty much what I did, aside from occasionally going to fact check something. I also found it helpful to keep a list of things I've thought of that I want to add in and/or change later on, as it at least gave me some jumping off points during the first edit.
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The psionics/supernatural meets espionage sounds pretty damn cool. Does it take place in a completely different world/universe from our own? Alternative? Secret?
I don't know! I think if it's our own, it's 10 to 15 years ahead. Certainly a psionic underground...or atleast currently an underground. Who knows for how long?
I appreciate the angle, but I think the frame of the competition (are there prizes? I've basically assumed just the idea of winning by passing the 50k mark is the idea) sort of forces material from me. It's like an excuse to do things which don't seem quite right to me, but are a necessity. Probably things that don't seem quite right because I've been spoiled by media (see my other thread) and gnash my teeth at various practices. Yet I may need to swing toward them to win this damn thing! Argh!
After the comp, come hell or high water, I can look at the wreckage of my attempt for salvage, your definately right! But I can't think of that now - that does not benefit me in winning this thang! :)
Now - how can I take this post and work it in, to pad out my word count...oh god, I was joking, but I gots the tingle of a sense it might be doable...lol!
edit: OMG, I've just realised the word count power of inter character dialog!
And I've made schedule for my third day! Glad I don't have to do this 27 more times...
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Okay, still making it. The bar graph on my stats page is like perfectly matching the par line.
Sadly a bit of my video game history is sinking in, perhaps for some uniformity. I'll use batman: Arkham city as an example, given your progress means dismantling warehouses of goons.
Now I've already written a few sequences of a warehouse or two and...really, fantastic plot twist revelations (if I could think of one) are really short in word count, while the main character ponders philosophical and political musing about the mundane environment around her (relatively mundane - most of us don't prowl warehouses with armed guards, or even just guards with nightsticks), taking down goons by stealth (oh yes, influenced by dues ex (the first), bat man, splinter cell...) and gadgets.
And...maybe it's just ego. Maybe I'm actually looking at myself, the sequence of interesting nuance but overall straightforward conflict and doing that again and again and again (even given different locations - like swamp, slums, penthouse appartment, blimp...) and thinking it should be more. As if I am more. Maybe when you write, you just see more of yourself. Probably snobby of me.
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Still chuggin' along!
I'm up to where I'm trying out the idea of 'wolf mist'. Harkening to the old terrorfying idea of a mist that turns you inside out if it touches you...this mist makes you...behaviourally diverse. Rather than having free will. I use the idea of mist because it makes it something that might come and get you - which is an external threat, and threats we all grasp quite readily.
I like the dialog. Might smooth it out latter if better and/or more organic lines come to me. Not a complete conversation yet, just giving a sample. Excuse bad grammar and spelling mistakes, I've just got wordpad to work with.
~~~
The basement was black. Supporting columns would flash into line of sight from their swung torches, cold grey, uniform, arranged and supporting. Like graves that hold up the world. And dust. Much dust.
"We can't head back? This place is contaminated - badly", Kingsdale intoned, half distracted by what he was looking at.
The device he held was like a cross between a radiation detector and a mobile phone.
"What are the levels?", Cooper asked, her voice thin in the darkness. It sounded like the voice of someone contemplating surgical advice.
"Not good, really...this isn't what you should be exposed to. Not in a year, even", he replied.
"Then lets not take that long.", she said more with the sense of swollowing a bitter pill than clever repartee.
"What levels?", Jane asked, finally completing a torch swept visual of the room to her satisfaction.
"We need to get moving", Kingsdale declared, sweeping his meter back and forth.
They moving through the swollowing darkness of the basement.
"You're aware of the Wolfgang cognitive studies?", Cooper spoke to Jane, clipped tone. Something that needed to be in a neat and tidy package. Not here.
Jane nodded, but only a vague outline garnered reading while waiting in an airport, came to mind.
"It's an intricate process, but at the gross level, if cloud of Wolf mist envelops you - during exposure and for varying amounts of time afterward, you cease having free will.", Cooper spoke, like saying something from a dream. A nightmare.
"What do you mean?"
"You're just...behaviourally diverse. You cease to have free will. They can even do things like hook you up to an MRI machine and predict some of your choices. Before you even become aware you'd make that choice!"
"So they can choose. They don't just stand there, frozen?", Jane replied.
"As an act of free will, no, they cannot choose. But no, they don't just stay frozen, either!"
"But my heads not going to explode or anything?", Jane half asked, half mocked.
Cooper turned to her sharply, eye's narrowing, years of diplomacy making her shoulder past so many expletives.
"No, generally when you become a souless zombie, your head does not explode. The zombies in the movies have their heads intact, right?", she replied stiffly.
"Sooo, what does it do?", Jane queried.
"I told you - they can scan someone suffering from wolf mist and know their choices before they do. It all becomes mechanical! You're sense of you - it all becomes something conjured by a machine!"
"If you were just a machine, you'd know it though. You'd just act like a robot.", Jane countered, confused at what was supposed to be a problem.
"You don't - they've scanned the victims thoroughly. The machine they become ship wrecked as cannot keep up with itself! It takes more machine to track itself, and that's just one bit more of machine to track that it can't. Eventually it runs out! They are there, like a massively complex pocket watch, ticking away, talking to you, making the sounds, but unable to see they are not like you!"
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So, I'm wondering if the following is controversial. Too controversial and no one can read for all the red. Not controversial and there is no red!
Anyway, it puts a crimp in the idea of strong, powerful women...and perhaps even suggest against it! But why, indeed...
Again, please forgive grammar, spelling, even structure.
~~~
It wasn't that he blocked the punch, but the way he turned it and almost grappled her arm. She hadn't seen that for awhile, the escape move coming in a little clockworkish, not to crisply. Like most of us, she had the thought she should get to the gym. She regained stance, and they scrutinised each other for a moment, but it was all part of the ski masked operatives next attack. Thick, lightly armoured upper torso, one arm feinting and guarding, the other arm sending out a series of strikes quite adequite to fell an amatuer, also quite adequate at probing the capacities of her leather jacketed opponent. Creeping in past Janes own defences and truely testing what little secondary defence you can put up when you only have two arms. This was already exhausting after an exhausting day. Sometimes you hit a brick wall. And he could see it, preparing to move in and take her down. What is this moment? The backing - who to back? Those who overcome all in their path - or otherwise what are they to us? Nothing, in some Darwinistic pursuit? Jane took several steps back - the guard seemed untrained to the potential of unconventional weapons. To him, Jane was just unarmed. And what, was there a moment there - the wrong horse backed? What he took for falling into stance was her wrist extended - across his armoured torso and shoulders a spray of silvery, explosive darts, pin cushioning him then surrounding him in an explosion.
He staggered back. One step. Two steps. Stopped. Held his ground, unshielded his face to scan for her far more quickly than most would dare. Jane escaped, back the way she'd came, taking one last look before slamming the door shut and bringing a filing cabinet down against it. The body armour had taken most of the blast, but the mask had been blown away, revealing moon face, short cropped hair and strong jaw, but still a woman, side arm drawn. She thundered down the corridor after Jane, almost there before Jane could block the door with the cabinet. The pro smashed into the door from the other side and it was like a palpable shock wave, again and again. Her look had been one of utter determination, one which would pluck a suffragette from the gutter by the scruff of the neck, political papers scattering, and fling her into a jail cell, contract complete. It chilled Jane - was patriarchy really about men, or were men and their violence simply the shorter path for something else, something vile and dark that lurked and seeped from soul to soul, or even welled anew, original. A cousin to the myriad. But is it the role of women to somehow be the demure ones and thus the physically weak that becomes victim to cave man violence? Hardly! Yet here, all they both were were chess pieces to someone elses game. This isn't strength, Jane thought afterward - escaping to the larger picture when the smaller one, the one one that had been all just a moment ago, was lost. The building was alerted and she had not made it through to her prize. Still, Jane thought, in the grim faced way women appraise the physical capacity of other women, she was a hell of a pro. Is she mercenary enough that she's for hire, Jane thought? Or would she stick to contract? She thought over the play in her mind.
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So, I'm wondering if the following is controversial. Too controversial and no one can read for all the red. Not controversial and there is no red!
Anyway, it puts a crimp in the idea of strong, powerful women...and perhaps even suggest against it! But why, indeed...
Again, please forgive grammar, spelling, even structure.
~~~
It wasn't that he blocked the punch, but the way he turned it and almost grappled her arm. She hadn't seen that for awhile, the escape move coming in a little clockworkish, not to crisply. Like most of us, she had the thought she should get to the gym. She regained stance, and they scrutinised each other for a moment, but it was all part of the ski masked operatives next attack. Thick, lightly armoured upper torso, one arm feinting and guarding, the other arm sending out a series of strikes quite adequite to fell an amatuer, also quite adequate at probing the capacities of her leather jacketed opponent. Creeping in past Janes own defences and truely testing what little secondary defence you can put up when you only have two arms. This was already exhausting after an exhausting day. Sometimes you hit a brick wall. And he could see it, preparing to move in and take her down. What is this moment? The backing - who to back? Those who overcome all in their path - or otherwise what are they to us? Nothing, in some Darwinistic pursuit? Jane took several steps back - the guard seemed untrained to the potential of unconventional weapons. To him, Jane was just unarmed. And what, was there a moment there - the wrong horse backed? What he took for falling into stance was her wrist extended - across his armoured torso and shoulders a spray of silvery, explosive darts, pin cushioning him then surrounding him in an explosion.
He staggered back. One step. Two steps. Stopped. Held his ground, unshielded his face to scan for her far more quickly than most would dare. Jane escaped, back the way she'd came, taking one last look before slamming the door shut and bringing a filing cabinet down against it. The body armour had taken most of the blast, but the mask had been blown away, revealing moon face, short cropped hair and strong jaw, but still a woman, side arm drawn. She thundered down the corridor after Jane, almost there before Jane could block the door with the cabinet. The pro smashed into the door from the other side and it was like a palpable shock wave, again and again. Her look had been one of utter determination, one which would pluck a suffragette from the gutter by the scruff of the neck, political papers scattering, and fling her into a jail cell, contract complete. It chilled Jane - was patriarchy really about men, or were men and their violence simply the shorter path for something else, something vile and dark that lurked and seeped from soul to soul, or even welled anew, original. A cousin to the myriad. But is it the role of women to somehow be the demure ones and thus the physically weak that becomes victim to cave man violence? Hardly! Yet here, all they both were were chess pieces to someone elses game. This isn't strength, Jane thought afterward - escaping to the larger picture when the smaller one, the one one that had been all just a moment ago, was lost. The building was alerted and she had not made it through to her prize. Still, Jane thought, in the grim faced way women appraise the physical capacity of other women, she was a hell of a pro. Is she mercenary enough that she's for hire, Jane thought? Or would she stick to contract? She thought over the play in her mind.
Well, I personally don't think it's too controversial at all, but I'm pretty resistant to that kind of stuff in general. Certainly it's a topic that some people get worked up over (and not without reason), but from what you posted I don't think that's especially harsh or anything. Either way, it's an interesting thought process for the character, which (in my opinion) is the most important thing to think about, especially for a NaNoWriMo piece. It definitely doesn't come off as like, intentionally offensive or anything.
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Thanks for the feedback, Frank!
Now I can just worry about whether I'm being wussy, instead! heh!
In other news, I just wrote 1695 words in one sitting and...I feel kind of dizzy and even slightly nauseous? I should probably have a lie down instead of surfing the net. I don't think I'm picking up a cold...it's really a different spinny feel. I haven't written this amount of words for anything in just one go.
Okay, I'm a bit spun out, so if it doesn't sound that noteworthy, that's my excuse for raising it...
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wow....did I fall behind....crap...glad to see Callan kept the fires burning. Will have to read back and see what I missed!
eta: Wow, okay, so I missed more days than I thought. This'll be interesting.
Story 132 Oct 28
I wake to the sound of the phone's vibration. Wrong number asking "Are you cheating on me?"
"Yes." I reply to the stranger. Payback for waking me up at 3am with your drama bitch.
The phone vibrates fast and furious, an incoming flurry of texts.
I delete the deluge, turn it off and go to sleep.
3 months later, I hear about a suicide three months ago from a girl at another school.
I wonder, but in a few hours time I've already forgotten about the whole thing.
/Story
Story 133 Oct 29
Been sporting a semi for ten minutes of my lunch break, half hard dick in my hands and its almost time to go back to work.
Playboy video isn't working, but if I don't come I won't be able to think straight.
Using my nose on the touchscreen I managed to get to a porn clip. Girl taking it up the ass.
The usual questions pour in - How old is that girl? What if it were your sister/mother/daughter? Is she abused? Does she like her job? - but it all gets dulled in the lust.
2 minutes later, semen pumping into the toilet water, the questions come back. This time it's the work day the chokes the life out of 'em.
/Story
Story 134 Oct 30
(Inspired by the intro to the old Mage: Ascension book)
They dance in the desert until their muscles burn, until gummy spit lays a cotton fabric over their teeth and their tongues. They dance in a circle, and slowly their bare feet strike not dry sand but grass and water. One more victory against the once indomitable Sahara.
There are two miracles here. One is the ritual. The other is that Youtube still works.
This, I tell myself, is why I brought Magic back to the world.
/Story
Story 135 Oct 31
We chase them, but only so far. Lord Sun, our patron and father, gives way to Lady Moon - the mother who hates us.
We have to get back to the village before twilight falls to night or we'll wander into the forests and our tribe will be scattered.
We have to lock ourselves in before we turn into wolves.
/Story
Story Last Last Thursday 136 Nov 1
I come hard, shooting a heavy load into the plastic vagina. The shift in perception is almost uncanny. Real pussy's a distant memory, had only a few times on account of my inherited deformities, but even that ghost dissolves into the discomfort of truth.
It's doll hair I was wildly running my hand through, doll ass that feels more like a sponge than a butt. The body on top of me isn't cold, but it's only warmth is my own.
The eyes looking into mine are lifeless. (I don't have mirrors, so maybe that's something we might have in common.)
The rubbing alcohol and towel are right next to my bed. I like to keep her - keep it clean. Saves money on maintenance.
Even as I disinfect it I resist the urge to give her a name.
/Story
Story Last Last Friday 137 Nov 2
We make landfall in the morning, having lost good boys on the way. Both were young, but Edgar was too young.
Boy's mother was right.
Never should have brought him. Fought off a wolf he did, with nothing more than wits and a hunting knife. Still he died green, untested, and now he serves Hel alongside cowards and weaklings.
As we creep toward the village, my blood lust tells me I'll be killing to avenge him though I know the fault is my own.
/Story
Story Last Last Saturday 138 Nov 3
It's been a long week, and I have needs that must be sated.
I log on with a flicker of telepathy, stare down at the virtual world that I bought on wholesale.
I need spike of emotion - of fear and resolve. I touch the pixelated world whose resolution is measured in quanta.
Swirling my finger, I begin a hurricane my e-children will name Sandy.
/Story
Story Last Last Sunday 139 Nov 4
She comes before I do, and my still hard cock is firmly ringed by the muscles of her sphincter.
It dawns on me that I should wait to get a little more flaccid before I pull out.
My mind, no longer clouded by lust, recalls that this girl is part of the college Republicans.
I make a mental note that hate fucking will henceforth be devoid of anal.
/Story
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Saajan's back!
With 133, you do alot of stories about wank, aye? But I do like the twist that it's work that chokes out the thoughts afterward, rather than, as we are wont to do for millenia, focus on the sexual side. There are various sources conflicting with engaging the issue and sex guilt wont cover all of that.
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Well, what I wanted to do with the guy in the stall was look at how porn affects people, how we shield ourselves from the reality of the California based industry.
One thing I also need to do is get a better understanding of the gay porn scene - what little I've heard makes me think similar issues exist in regards to workers' rights, but I actually met a gay porn actor who seemed pretty happy. Of course, IIRC he made gonzo porn and uploaded it - that's more like camera girls who sell their panties in my mind, self-employed people who have 100% control.
However, there's an other side of this that I am curious about - that some people are legitimately happy doing porn under studios. I've also heard of some female run organizations in SF, for example, that make what they consider to pro-female porn.
Then there are male porn actors who are getting some of star power that I've usually seen accorded to females. So there's more material out there beyond a guy jerking off in a stall, it's just that makes for easy flash fiction.
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Story 140 Nov 5
When it appears in the center of the pentacle, the incubus is too youthful, too strong, too gorgeous.
He doesn't look anything like you.
When I take him to bed he is thin, fragile, mere wisps of hair rise from the top of his age spotted crown.
This is madness, this magic, but I can't imagine God will damn me for loving you so much that I can't let you go.
/Story
Story 141 Nov 6
We look at the corpse of Our Maker, and wonder at the enormity of Our sin.
Patricide of not of a, but *the* Father.
The First Giant, the First living thing born from fire and poison. How long did Ymir sit in His loneliness, how long before His need for love summoned Us into being?
Odin's sigh breaks Our reverie. And when He commands We, echoes that We are, begin to carve.
First murderers, now butchers.
With Our crimes We make the World.
/Story
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Story 141 Nov 7
You come on sometimes, these isolated little villages bordered by crosses and barbed wire, people calling on God to keep the Magic of the world at bay.
We don't stay long in these places, paying our way with some dried meat, honey and salt. Our deals are always with some elder, imam or reverend, someone holy enough not to be corrupted by our touch.
It'd be so easy to bed the pretty young men and sex starved widows, but some chances aren't worth taking.
Not 'cause we fear them, but in a world full of rabid centaurs and dragons it'd just be a shame to kill some of our own.
/Story
Story 142 Nov 8
I grab the back of his neck and pull him kissing close. I bite his neck, ignoring the fists that hammer my face, my head, the force with which he pushes away from me.
Where bruises should appear there is nothing but the slightest darkening of my alabaster skin, and even that vanishes as I feed.
When I let go he falls to the floor, sobbing, forcing breath slowly through what must feel like clay in his lungs.
Until their turn comes, the cattle never understand - we take so much more from you than blood. Only the kissed can know what it means to endure Us.
When he looks up I see a remnant of the man I knew but an hour before.
Unfortunate, but necessary. Sometimes the injuries we sustain can only be cured by the bloodlines that spawned us.
Thankfully this retarded thing wheezing at lost comprehension is no longer the boy I sired before turning, thankfully this cattle bears no resemblance to the man I called son.
/Story
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Story 143 Nov 9
He comes almost as soon as he takes his dick in his hand.
Twenty minutes left until the end of lunch.
He scrolls his way upward, wincing at the rating system. Why do men have to score beauty to appreciate it?
One handed, as quickly as he is able, he starts to give out 10/10s to raise the worst rated girls' averages...
/Story
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Story 144 Nov 10
Titans, asuras, giants of frost and fire, dragons, nagas, the serpentine sons of Apep, the brood of Tiamat.
A motley horde that crashes against the bulwark of angels, devas, Aesir, unicorns, simurghs, the children of Chronos.
Running between the legs and over corpses, dodging lightning and arrows of light, Coyote slips through the Gauntlet and gazes into the Well of the Norns.
Asked to the read the future of Chaos, the waters of destiny turn to steam.
And this is why mortals have Free Will.
/Story
Story 145 Nov 11
Roll up in the club,
Game is slick
30 minutes later I'm home
with a world class filly on my dick
30 seconds later my nut is busted
Shorty looking at me like she's disgusted
"Coulda gone home with anyone but I picked Mr. One minute man"
I throw her out my crib yelling:
"Whatever, girl, I get a better lay when I fuck my right hand!"...
/Story
Story 146 Nov 12
The centipede uncoils
Walks itself into a hang man's noose
I almost crushed it with my foot
Rushing to the temple where you were born
We roasted your placenta with rosemary and myrrh
Devoured it with the relish of parents wanting to be done with ceremony
Suppressing our impatience in hopes it might go unnoticed by the gods
But our eagerness and impiety burned bright enough to be seen from the stars
-Inscription in a Mausoleum
/Story
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Story 147 Nov 13
Vac is the Bovine, She is the Word, the spark of creation retrieved by Indra at the behest of the Brahmins.
She is the cows, the cattle of Logos, awaiting the Vedic gods in the Void.
How did She come to be there, in the watery blackness of the Cosmic Ocean?
I led Her through the eye of the needle, the wormhole, the livestock of the Sun that I enchanted with my pipes and drew into a cave, a universe encompassed by stone made by the beating heart of the World.
/Story
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Story 148 Nov 14
I'm yanking my dick hard, watching this chick get double pounded.
(This is the best I could do, trying to find a woman who seemed to enjoy what she was doing. She'd been joking around with this two guys before the shoot after all.)
I come before the scene ends, and when they slide out of her she has a haunted look in her eye.
Fuck.
Wish I hadn't seen that.
Thought I could get a few more tugs out of this one, before the dullness set in.
How deep does this rabbit hole of ennui go?
/Story
Story 149 Nov 15
I think of him spending time with her, how close they've gone, and how I think he's gay.
Fucking Faggot.
The thought comes as if shouted by a stranger in the darkness of my skull, startling me as it feels me with shame.
It doesn't even make sense, I reproach my inner bigot, why would I be jealous of a gay guy?
/Story
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/Story
Story 150 Nov 16
I read her facebook message, yet another one of happiness.
I calculate the time from the first one, the fun lunch that I take as their first date.
Three weeks. Three weeks of happiness....they must have fucked by now.
Why do I stay friends with my exes?
Have to acclimate myself to this...this threat to our Return. Have to accept it.
I glance over at my office mate, and then dip my hand and rub myself through fabric of my suit pants...
/Story
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148 adendum
So I surf over to horny house wives and their husbands, yet another suppy amongst the cornocopia of sources - far as I can tell, they are legitmately together. Hot, her girlfriend is manning the camera! They even boss the guy around some, laughing as girls are in charge...
Okay, okay, ooooohhhhhhhkay FUCK! The haunted look again!!!?? I practically rage quit, nearly sweeping the monitor from the desk!
What the fuck! Isn't there supposed to be promised ground, where it's just all right!? Yeah, I get porn is bad, but isn't there a promised land? They're not supposed to have history!
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Story 151 Nov 17
I'm trying to watch an old Playboy video, when my favorite playmate was single, young, not aged by childbirth and marriage and all that jazz.
But I can only find the vid on a site with ads of terrified girls with braces getting fucked by creepy looking dudes who'd scare even me if met in a dark alley.
I stop what I'm doing, just for second, to minimize the browser enough so I don't see the ads...
/Story
Story 152 Nov 18
Gods tricked into quests with no resolution - how does the Divine murder Chaos?
Gods tricked into fighting each other - how does Fire defeat the Wave?
A graveyard of gods is His gift to Mankind.
Finally Trickster appears, holding no tablets and offering no blessing save for the knife that He plunges into His own sidereal Heart.
"Now", He says with a bitter, wry smile, "now You are Free."
/Story
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I stop what I'm doing, just for second, to minimize the browser enough so I don't see the ads...
I shouldn't laugh at the minimizing, but I did!
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So, after much internal conflict, I've decided to indeed finish Perennials (this might be the...fiftieth time I've had this debate with myself?) while simultaneously starting a brand new project, which will be a one-off novel probably around 60,000 words. As much as I desperately want to start working on my epic fantasy, I simply can't help but feel like it's not good for my career. It's just going to take too long before I can have something that's worthwhile and presentable. I've already started fleshing out the new story, which is actually not completely new...I had the kernel of the idea back in middle school, and it's kind of been gestating ever since. To give the most simplistic and derivative of explanations, it's essentially Harry Potter mixed with Inception and Catcher in the Rye. Like, the children of elitist hyper-rich socialites being "trained" to become part of a pseudo-illuminati group. Although I'm not aiming for Young Adult, it will be a story centered around, well, young adults, so in that sense I should have a better chance of marketing it.
Am I making the right decision?
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Pondering it, I think you should set yourself a schedule - a time by which it will be done by, in years. IF that time seems too long for your career, even if you dial it downward to the barest minimum, then you're making the right choice. Right as in choosing the least worst of two worst choices, because you are discarding this by doing so, regardless.
If you try it within a schedule and fail - all endevours are hope. Either that's what you must base a schedule on, that it's hope, not certainty - unless your a bit obsessive compulsive - that sort of person can think of a schedule as a done deal and either compete it and/or go mad.
The muse wishes to move of it's own pace - it's hard to make clear that it's not you trying to force it to go, but the world - more specifically, father time.
Alternatively, sunshine and moonbeams, everything will be alright! :D
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All good advice, Cal. I definitely need to get back onto a more regular schedule, like I did when I first wrote Perennials and for the short story contest (even though that one ended up sucking, I still had a good routine going). I haven't really gotten back into a rhythm since then, though. At this point I'm basically certain that I'm going to write this new story before the epic fantasy. I just can't justify spending that much time on a project at this particular point. My muse is a real moody bitch. I always make plans but then she tears them all down! The upside is that I'm never at a lack for a story to write -- quite the opposite, actually. By now I've come to terms with the fact that it's physically impossible for me to complete all of the different stories I'd like to tell in a single lifetime.
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Francis, one thing to do is work on multiple projects at once. I think it's easier to work on at least two projects so when one is blocked you can switch over.
But I'd prioritize the shorter novels if you want to get published sooner, especially as I'm not sure how saturated the market is epic fantasy.
=-=-=
Reavers of Winter (153, Nov 19)
Resembling nothing more than primitive Northlanders with frostbitten skin and iron grey eyes, the Reavers of Winter are held within a continental span of land in the Eald enchanted into a state of Eternal Winter. A seasonal spirit in the form of a massive linnorm sleeps in the tallest mountain of this land, tasked with dreaming up this unending time of ice and snow. The reavers continually make war on each other, with only a few despondent souls turning into hermits at the edge of their confinement.
On all sides, the reavers are surrounded by bright lands flushed by Summer's warmth and vibrancy. If any reaver were to step off the frost encrusted land onto the vast, Summer kissed acres that keep them confined, they would die from a days long rotting of skin, muscle, and bone, their consciousness refusing to leave the body until the flesh failed completely.
For reasons unknown to any but the elder spirits of the Eald, reavers can only walk, fly swim, or sail where Winter takes hold. Within their own lands, they are continually forced to offer sacrifices to the linnorm spirit at the center of their wintery territory. Once a year the linnorm awakens and devours the hundred and eleven victims offered to it. Should this sacrifice ever fail to satisfy it, the linnorm would leave and thus condemn all the reaver tribes to death.
While primitive and warlike, the reaver tribes possess a great deal of knowledge of benefit to shamans and druids. Each tribe also possesses a necklace holding a single white dragon tooth. Each of these represents a pledge from a specific white dragon bloodline, and it is with these that they maintain contact with areas beyond the icy area of their own confinement.
Whether the reavers are actual fey condemned into mortal form, or some ancient humanoid race imprisoned by fey is one of the great mysteries of these tribes, as even they do not know. Their oldest histories offer no insight into this conundrum.
Blessed Gluttons (154,Nov 20)
Voluptuous androgynes with smooth, red skin, Blessed Gluttons are fey that swim the waters of Narrative Time, utilizing that planar pathway to find the "sinners" that are their food source. These fey wander the Multiverse, feeding on the various hungers and emotions that inspire people toward acts of carnal lust, obsessive scheming, and insane violence. They don't eat sin, rather they eat the motivations people have for sins, leaving their victims less than what they once were.
What makes these fey different from some of the other empathophages of the planes is that their victims must be willing, though this consent can be given under duress from beings who do not have any trace of fey blood in their veins. They also cut out the very ability to feel the emotion or muster motivation, rather than simply feed off the expression of emotion or will toward a particular purpose.
Blessed Gluttons are drawn to remorse, hoping to catch people wild with grief so that they might surrender that part of themselves responsible for their sins. Sometimes one of these fey will hunger for an aspect of a particular person - a banker's avarice or a rake's nymphomania. In these cases the fey take a direct hand in manipulating events to these persons have cause to regret not just their actions but the very nature that led to the commission of their sins.
Strangely enough, there are some worlds in which Blessed Gluttons are invited in order to magically castrate or permanently mollify those suffering from mental illnesses that cause them to victimize others.
The Seven Riders of Revulsion - War, Wine, Wind, Whispers, Wool, Warmth, Water
(155, Nov 21)
These planewalking fey resemble finely dressed elven toddlers riding on miniature versions of various fauna, armed with varied weapons by which they transmit their respective curses. Each rider, beyond possessing magical abilities related to illusion and enchantment - causes feelings of nausea whenever someone is forced to contact with their domain. Each of their curses can only be undone by a wish or an artifact.
The Rider of War is armored in enchanted golden plate, his beautiful blond hair flying free in the wind as he rides a shining argent eagle. Armed with a bow and an inexhaustible quiver, the Rider of War can turn the tide of battle or enforce peace by ensuring people are made sick with their participation in war. Sometimes he'll cause one side to slaughter another, other times he'll infect politicians who would call for battle overseas while remaining safe in their homelands.
The Ride of Wine is an innocent looking, tawny skinned chubby girl who rides a piglet. Oftentimes she'll become part of a traveling troupe of performers, spiking the liquor and food in the aftermath of a royal feast or galla thrown by major noble houses. Other times she'll attack vineyards on her lonesome in the dark of night, cursing monks who depend on wine making to support themselves.
The Rider of Wind is a rag covered, ruddy waif who rides a mange ridden hound. His weapon is the swarm of biting flies that serve as his boon companions. Anyone bitten by one of these insects ends up feeling sickened whenever they feel even slightest breeze on their skin or hair. Completely insane and uncaring as to the nature of his victims, this Rider wanders the Multiverse for another purpose than to sow chaos wherever he goes.
The Rider of Whispers is a jaundiced skinned boy with pitch black eyes that have neither whites nor pupils. This Rider sits atop a grand black widow the size of a mastiff and is armed with blow gun. In the misty confines of the Market of Secrets, the Rider of Whispers has upset many a chant broker by causing them to vomit for hours every time someone whispers in their ear. The Rider has been hunted by varied parties that have a stake in the Market, but as of yet has never been caught.
The Rider of Wool is a sickly boy with wispy white-blond hair and faded blue eyes. His mount is a wretched goat that always seems to hover on the edge of death. This fey enjoys wandering tundras and deserts until "rescued" by those unfortunates - nomads, merchants, shepherds, garment makers - who end up pricked by his dagger and find themselves unable to bear contact with wool of any kind.
The Rider of Warmth is a redhead with bright yellow eyes whose steed is a miniature horse. Unlike the other riders, the Rider of Whispers makes her services known and contracts herself out to those who can pay her varying fees. Sometimes its grand piles of orchid petals that she demands, other times its her own weight in sun bleached sparrow bones. After payment is received, she attacks her victims with a magical dust made from crushed nacre that causes her victims to seek ways to drive all warmth from their bodies.
The Rider of Water appears as a mermaid child riding a seal. Her hair is white and her eyes sea green. She will ride beside ships sailed by mortals across the worlds and demand tribute be dumped into the water. If her demands are not met, she'll use her flute to make every male develop a phobia of drowning as well as an inability to drink water without vomiting it back up.
Sorrow Masks (156, Nov 22)
These exiled members of the Seelie Court want to feel grief but can only do so through others. It's unclear how this apparent tragedy came about, but many of these fey blame the Blessed Gluttons for tricking them. What disaster caused these fey to surrender this emotion is unclear, as is the reason the Blessed Gluttons devoured regret and grief instead of their usual diet of anger, lust, envy or determination. What is known is that their need to engender sorrow is what caused their exile from the Weal.
The Sorrow Masks are a small court unto themselves, fey of varied types wandering the Grey and when possible the mortal worlds. Fortunately for the Prime, the ability of these fey to leave the Wyld is limited to full moons and even then they can only stay on that world for a single lunar cycle after which they can never return. Wherever they are, the Sorrow Masks seek physical contact with those who are feeling sorrow of some sort, vicariously experiencing the one thing that they cannot have and thus, in classic Seelie fashion, crave above all else. Sorrow Masks are amoral, and have no qualms about forcing others to states of suffering.
Though Blessed Gluttons refuse to speak of their relationship to the Sorrow Masks, they do follow them when they enter the Prime, taking a special pleasure in robbing those hurt by the ex-Seelie of their emotional aspects.
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Story 157 Nov 23
Hear we are, in bed together, my friend with benefits and I.
It's been a few years, but we take up our old positions in the dance with an eager and hungry grace...
She's been spending time in the sun, which is why she has a gorgeous tan but also so (too) many new wrinkles.
So awkward to feel the embers of my passion cooling, fighting to keep myself from going flaccid, I'll just spend some time buried in her thighs imagining the youthful face of her past...
/Story
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Story 158 Nov 24
3 text messages from him today. Plus a phone call from last night.
You'd think most guys would love a hot booty call with no strings attached, even if it's only once a month.
I'm not trying to be a bitch about it, but we have nothing in common and I'm not attracted to him when he's human.
But my God the walls come down when we fuck as wolves!
/Story
Story 159 Nov 25
There's blood under my fingernails.
I raise my hand to my lips but my second mother slaps it back down. Her fangs are bared and slow fading human instinct causes me to recoil but I draw closer when I see the hurt in her face.
After a few minutes of quiet, the Arizona desert going by around us, she speaks.
"We've 500 miles to go and we can only travel by night through this wasteland. Save it for later baby."
Keeping her eyes on the road, the same hand that slapped mine away squeezes my knee with a gentleness that floats between sexual and maternal.
"Save it for later okay?"
/Story
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Story 160 Nov 26
I was an elf in a past life. I know this like one knows mathematical truth, but there's no way to prove it.
I meet others sort of like me - Some say they were dragons, some say they were animals, and a few say their lives inspired everything from ancient scripture to modern cartoons.
I don't know if I believe all of them, or if all of them believe me.
But how can I deny their truth, when the truth I feel in my marrow has no proof?
And so here we are, together, a family of believers forced to accept beliefs not their own, biting our tongues lest someone pierce our own faith with arrows of doubt.
/Story
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Story 161 Nov 27
The moon was made of cheese, for 600 years during the time of the dinosaurs....
If I can believe, I can make peace with my family. If I can believe, I will be saved.
Why God? Why do I doubt your holy revelations? I kneel before your altar, I fast, I take up the scourge against this rebellious shell...
The moon was made of cheese, for 600 years during the time of the dinosaurs....
/Story
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The moon just made us, as tiny scuttling monkey rats and the dinosaurs, believe that.
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Story 162 Nov 28
My hands are a vice locked tightly 'round my brother's throat, my weight keeping his youthful locks below the surface of the river.
I'm wild with rage, and so at first I don't know notice the smile on the face of my wife's murderer.
He's laughing. Under the water, he's laughing as he dies.
He knows the kinslayer is damned deeper than a man who kills a woman who doesn't share his blood.
I should let go, I should save myself, but when my fingers begin to slacken I hear my lover's laughter, see the tear worn eyes of my children.
My hands are a vice, locked tightly 'round my soul....
/Story
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And...it is done...
http://www.nanowrimo.org/en/participants/callan-s/novels/jane-s-game-wolf-mist-working-title/stats
Saajan, does that story tie into Earwa? It sounds like objective morality and the gaming of it.
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More freestyle than anything, but looking back it does seem like a mash of GRRM and Bakker...
Congrats on Nanowri Callan. I'm still reading Francis's book, but once I'm done with that I'll move on to yours.
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Story 163 Nov 29
Grandmother grabs my arm just as I stand up from her bedside.
"You think they are rebels, that they offer freedoms long denied to...ones such as you.
I know you have it hard, but I beg you to see - the demons won't stop with our bigotries.
They'll drag it all down and dance in the ruins. Can you see that? Can you wait a little longer for freedom?"
How did she know? How long had she known?
I want to sneer, to cry, to ask questions and to lecture. To tell her what it's like to drown every gods damnd day of your life. When my lips part I could almost believe fire would pass between them...but then nothing.
No fire. Not even words are carried on the back of my exhalation.
An invisible stone is lodged in my throat and it is all I can do to breathe, let alone speak.
Wait? Wait?!
Instead, as tears fall from my eyes I take her hand in mine as I lie with a nod and a smile.
/Story
Story 164 Nov 30
Inside they are as beautiful in the fallen world as they were on the other side of the Veil, their souls still shine with unseen light....
I loved them, I remember loving them, I want to love them here....but their flesh....it's as human as mine.
Once upon a time their beauty would have upturned the air from your lungs.
But here...
/Story
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Congrats on Nanowri Callan. I'm still reading Francis's book, but once I'm done with that I'll move on to yours.
How'd you get to read Francis's book? Did I miss a link? And GRRM - I've only read the first book - it has some sort of damnation mechanism in the series? I guess I would be surprised, but then TDTCB didn't exactly have gods abounding in the first book either.
Currently my own writing is...not sequentially written. I gave up on sequential after about the third day, writing a series of events with no definate chronological order. Ends up more like a documentary that you pat into a story structure afterward. Still need to catalog all the entries, figure an order and intermingling. I wrote a hell of alot of scenes with their start but no ending - I left that till latter. It was strangely fruitful in discovering I needed to do that atleast for the word count. It's like I left the endings entirely to my muse, instead of demanind X amount of word count.
Did end up hovering it around 'Wolf mist' - you know the old idea of mist that turns you inside out if you touch it (or maybe that was just on a Simpsons haloween episode). Wolf mist instead makes you go from free will to behaviourally diverse. Occasionally the effect is permanent, making it this existential terror. I'm not sure if my book is set in our world or not.
Thanks for the congrats - the thing was crazy!
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Oh, Francis emailed it to me.
I think writing passages is a good way to go about it, so long as one has the characters get to those future points naturally.
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Story 165 Dec 1
Have to sleep. Have to. But stripping, blow jobs, anal, lesbians, threesomes, just-turned-18...all so dull.
Nothing produces a rise.
I slip my hand under my boxers and think of cartoons and werebeasts and hope for the best...Hell, I'm practically praying...
/Story
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Awesome work on finishing your NaNoWriMo Callan, that's an accomplishment in and of itself. I'd definitely be interested in checking it out. I actually enjoy the editing process about a trillion times more than the "getting it all down" phase. At least in most cases, anyway. With Perennials right now it's kind of a struggle, more just because I really want to move on to bigger and hopefully better things, but I'm determined to get at least one more good draft in.
Speaking of which, I'd rather you just wait until I finish the draft I'm currently on. The old parts are still so messy and awkward. I'm working pretty steadily on it now though so god willing I should have a new draft early in the New Year. Regardless, your interest is noted and much appreciated. ;)
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Story 166 Dec 2
I know this isn't real, this is just infatuation. I know this, but I can't seem to rationalize may way out of this need.
I tell myself there are prettier women, I try to enumerate her flaws physical and behavioral, yet the noose on my neck makes me want her, like some branch in my future possibilities promising me a love so deep it can heal my wounds.
And it's not me, at least not present me, that reaches out to touch my keyboard and asks this near stranger to be my friend on facebook....
/Story
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Story 167 Dec 3
My lips find purchase on the skin of her neck even as the Lysol floats into my nostrils and the taste begins to burn in my through.
I want to gag, but my own burgeoning hardness stops me.
More importantly, I feel the first tinkles of moisture between her legs.
But even as relief floods me, I wonder if we've finally found our floor. I can live with spraying our bodies with cleaning products. (I think.)
But I'm afraid this is one more fast burning ember...
/Story
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Story 168 Dec 4
It's Fall in name only, and for some kids its still Summer I bet but for us it's not only September - we're also back in School.
Everyone is grinning, and giving Jack high fives. Lost in virginity on the fourth of July to some off duty soldier he met at a bar. The "serving my country" jokes just keep coming.
Jack's got a shit eating grin on his face, describing soldier-boy's abs and armament.
I do my best to not look crestfallen, seeing I'm not even out yet. Not that I'm ashamed, I'm just waiting for the right time....
I make an excuse of running to bathroom, just need to get my head straight. Jack's not a virgin anymore.
I thought Jack was waiting for marriage, or at least a civil union.
I thought Jack was waiting for me.
/Story
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Well they finally announced winners of the contest and unfortunately I was not among them. I was of course a little disappointed, but not at all surprised considering the situation. I'm just happy to actually KNOW so that I can move forward with submitting it elsewhere -- but first I'm going to edit it for realz. Aside from the very beginning, the story has only had one pass through (which I did fast and furiously on the final day of submissions), and I haven't even read the damn thing since June. The first place I'm going to submit to is probably Lightspeed, but I'm going to try and gather up a list of decent places while also looking for more contests. I'm not sure if I really want to go the contest route again, or just try submitting to magazines/websites directly, or both. The other problem is that Lightspeed only accepts works of 7,500 words or less, and mine is just under 8,000, so I need to do some significant cutting if I want to submit there (which will be tough, because I also want to add more to the ending, which I think is rushed and in general just kind of wraps up too quickly). I'm not sure which parts I'm going to cut...probably some stuff from the middle and the beginning, plus just a general cutting of fat from the prose. I haven't even started looking at places for submission, so I'll be checking out sci's thread on Westeros for sure.
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Story 169 Dec 5
Micro Centurion plunges through my sternum, popping out of my back. The sound makes me think of ground meat thrown violently on the ground.
Why would I think that? Is that me from another life, or someone else? Who would throw ground meat on the ground?
Was that from before the Universe was rewritten for the billionth time?
I spiral downward, my cape twirling and tangled. It won't last. Death. It's only temporary for people like me.
I connect head first with the asphalt dirtied by the footprints of lesser mortals.
It sounds like a skull hitting stone fast enough to crack. I don't need to reach for analogy. This I remember from my last death.
It was the first thing I recalled after my last resurrection.
/Story