Wordfill

Otherhalf

2011-07-19T00:43:00.001+09:30

When Lola was five her mother taught her the secret of the painting on the mantelpiece. She lifted her daughter up onto the ledge, and Lola reached out, and her fingers slipped right into the picture. For a moment they shimmered, and took on the appearance of paint on canvas, and then they dissolved. Frightened, she yanked her hand back. Her fingers reappeared at once. Her mother laughed at her fright.
"There's another world through the painting," she said, hugging Lola tightly, protectively. "The Other world. And on the other side of the painting is an Other house a bit like ours, and in it lives an Other family a bit like us."
Lola didn't really understand what that meant, but she liked the thought of a secret world through a painting.
"Nobody knows about the Other place except us, though," her mother continued. "So you have to keep it a secret. If you promise to keep it a secret, I'll let you visit there all the time if you like. There's a little boy in the Other house who likes all the things you like."
"Even fairies?" she asked, wide-eyed. She'd thought it was a Fact that boys didn't like fairies.
"Even fairies," her mother promised, laughing. "Go on, go through and meet him. Tell his daddy that Margie says hello. You can stay until it's time for dinner, but then you have to come back."
Although she trusted her mother completely, seeing her fingers and hand and arm and elbow disappear into the painting made Lola cry. She believed that there was an Other world, of course she did, her mother had said it was there. But she was still afraid that something would go wrong, and when she put her face into the painting it would disappear forever. Her mother shushed her and gave her a gentle push.
"It's exciting, Lo," she said. "Mummy promises. Go on."
And Lola leaned forward, pushing her face against the canvas. For a second it resisted, but then she felt something give, something a bit like tearing cloth and a bit like parting water and when she opened her eyes she was crouching on a different mantelpiece, facing out into a room that was almost like the one she'd been in a moment ago.
A man and a boy stood a little way away, waiting. The man came over and lifted her down.
"I'm Morgan," he said, setting her on the floor. "You can call me Uncle Morgan, if you like, or just Morgan for now. This is my son Lucas. He's been looking forward to meeting you for a while now. Ever since your birthday."
"Our birthday," Lucas said, reaching out and shaking her hand solemnly. "It's on the same day, both of us."
"Okay," Lola replied. She still wasn't sure if this was fun or not.
The room looked mostly normal, with a few couches and a bookshelf and a fireplace that was clean but obviously well used. It had wood in it, though, which she wasn't used to - theirs ran on gas. The light coming in through the window was much brighter than the light in her living room had been, and she wondered how it could be raining there but not here. How far had she gone when she went through the painting?
"Want to see my toys?" Lucas offered. "I have lots of toys, they're pretty good."
"Lucas," she asked, shyly, "do you like fairies?"
He shrugged.
"Sure, if you can catch them. There's some in the garden. They always steal the seeds out of the bird feeder though."
Morgan laughed at the way her eyes widened at this.
"Go on," he prompted. "Go play."
He continued to smile as the children ran from the room, but when the room was silent once more he looked with plain longing at the painting for a long time.

HIT AND RUN

2011-07-11T03:23:00.002+09:30

The intern entered the office cautiously, sidestepping the piles of paperwork that covered the floor. The director's head snapped up.
"I wasn't asleep," he mumbled, running a hand through his hair in a moment of forgetfulness. There wasn't much there, these days, but he never remembered until he touched it. It was disappointing every time.
"Of course," she replied.
He couldn't remember her name, though she'd worked there almost two years now. Alanna? Leanna? Something like that, he was sure. He watched her progress through the room. She carefully lifted aside the paperwork he'd been working on and laid a file folder in its place. The cardboard cover was fresh - not dusty, or faded, like the other folders in his office.
"A new prediction," she announced. He could hear excitement and curiosity in her voice. It had been months since the last - or longer, maybe. A year? It was hard to remember how time passed, here, marked by the ticking of the clock and the slow but inexorable decline in staff numbers. There was still one technician in the building, if the prediction had come through, but aside from that man and the girl in his office now, the director couldn't say for sure how many people still worked here.
"Thank you," he said.
She hesitated, torn between accepting his words as a dismissal and lingering in the hopes of finding out what the folder held. For a moment the director found himself impressed by her integrity. It was a long walk from the Receiving Room to his office, and the folder must really have called to her by the time she arrived.
The seconds passed too loudly in the still room. He relented.
"There's a seat somewhere..." he gestured vaguely in the direction he remembered a chair being, though the papers had really piled up and he couldn't see one for looking. She looked around, shrugged, smiled.
"I'll stand."
He smiled back. It felt strange, pulling up the corners of his mouth. Had it been so long? His memory felt dusty. He had sat in this office too long.

His hands shook a little as he reached out to the folder, and the paper inside was so white, blindingly white beside the yellowing pages he had grown accustomed to staring at. The words on the page were starkly black by comparison. There was a spot of ink on the side of the page that marred the blank margin and for a second it was all he could notice. It seemed - irreverant, that spot, given the gravity of the moment.
He skimmed over most of the information - time and location of testing, biographical information on the subject, details of the machine's last service - of course it needed maintenance, they all did, but who had the time? What he wanted to read was at the bottom of the page, under the heading of 'prediction'. He read it aloud, for his own benefit as much as hers.
"Hit and run."
From the corner of his eye he saw her face fall. It wasn't exciting at all, of course. It wasn't exotic. It didn't make up for the last year. He regretted the last two years, for her sake. She was a bright, capable girl. She did her job well. She could have gone places, if she hadn't come here.
"Shall I file this?" she offered. Before he could reply she closed the folder and lifted it, nestled it against her side. "I have a key to the Stacks. I'm sure I can manage that much on my own, sir. Just as I'm sure you have better things to do?"
Suddenly he was very tired. Yes, he had things to do. Decades-old paperwork that would never be reviewed but that, nonetheless, must be completed. That was his job, after all. Why else was he here?
"Yes, file that."
He watched her go, then rested his elbow on the empty space on his desk, and leaned his head against his hand.

Her footsteps echoed as she walked across floors that, she suspected, had not been walked on for a long, long time. Looking behind, she could see her footprints in the dust. To each side were the filing cabinets that stretched to the high ceiling, and every now and then a little stepladder that could be carried about as required. A few of the fluroescents flickered overhead, and more than a few of them had failed and never been replaced, but there was enough light to see by. She wasn't bothered by the semi-dark, because she knew there was nothing down here but old files, page after page of predictions that had been dutifully recorded and filed away against some unspecified future need.
She had heard it whispered that the facility had been set up as a safeguard against machine failure. They had a perfect success record, but the whisperers suggested that this was too accurate to be possible, that there must have been a helping hand along the way. And perhaps, in the beginning, there had been agents of some kind who had monitored the predictions, just in case. That certainly did not happen now. The machines had been proven. Even when they malfunctioned, or wore down, or stopped working entirely - if the machine managed a prediction, that prediction was true. There was no need to safeguard against the inevitable.
As she walked, she read the file. It was a long way to the 'T' wing, and by the time she reached the 'Th' room she knew that Mark Thomas lived in an apartment only a few doors down from the street-side death machine he had tested at. He lived alone, had no close relatives, had a degree in 'The Arts'. He was a few years older than her. He had broken his arm when he was seven, and his knee when he was nineteen. According to his biography, Mark had tested on his birthday.
She ran her finger down the fronts of the drawers as she read them, and when she finally found his place she was kneeling. There were a number of Mark Thomases in the drawer, so she placed this one at the front - then hesitated. She pulled out the next file and flipped it open on her lap. A quick glance was enough to show her that it belonged to the same person, from a year earlier. And the other Mark Thomases were the same Mark Thomas too, a file for each year, always on his birthday. There were twenty-seven of them. The first had been facilitated by the doctor at his birth, the next dozen by his parents. He had carried on with the testing on his own, after their deaths (in a house-fire, as they had known from their own predictions that they would die). She wondered if he did it for them.

With the director in his office and the technician somewhere underground - where vast halls of machinery sat mostly silent, gathering dust, waiting patiently for something to happen - she could go where she liked. Today she cleared a desk in a room that had once seated a dozen secretaries and set the Mark Thomas folders in a neat pile. She took her time to read each of them, examining the details as if they would tell her why he still tested. When it came time to go home she was on her third read-through, filling in the gaps in a mental map of how his life had gone. She looked around to be sure she was alone before she slid the folders into the desk's single drawer. Then she picked up a few of the boxes and papers she'd pushed onto the floor and covered the desk with them again. She wasn't meant to be reading these files, after all. Nobody needed to know that she had done that.

The next day she brought a notebook and pen, writing down what seemed to be the key events in his life, drawing lines around and between them, writing questions in the margin. Soon she had filled a dozen pages with notes. Still, she didn't know why he did it. There were plenty of possibilities, of course. She had guessed a whole bunch of them. It could have been because his parents had got him tested every year, and this seemed the most likely at first glance. But she also remembered hearing about people who obsessed over their predictions and got themselves constantly re-tested in the hopes of changing the fate they could not accept. And there was such a thing as addiction, too, where people physically could not stop themselves from taking the test, no matter how they felt about its moral implications or the results it offered. Or he could be some kind of test subject, paid to take the test annually by... some group... for some reason...

On the third day she let herself into the suite of offices that had once belonged to the organisation's managers and stakeholders. They were just as dusty, but here the floors were carpeted and instead of footprints she left little puffs of dust that slowly settled down again behind her. The chair creaked as she sat in it, and she could feel the cracks in the leather against her legs and back. The computer was much older than those she was used to using, and it took her almost a full minute to find the button to power it up. The monitor crackled as the system booted. A cloud of dust was blown out of the computer's casing as the fan started up. She had to wipe at the screen with the end of her sleeve just to read the words as they came up. The company intranet ran slowly but that was alright - she had all day after all. By home-time she knew everything about Mark Thomas that his file could tell her. But that wasn't much, in the end, and that wasn't nearly enough.

That night she dreamed about Mark Thomas. He didn't have a face but he had hands, and his left hand - it had to be his left hand, because he was right-handed and sometimes the death machine needle-prick reacted with people's fingers and made them swell up so that it was difficult to write, or so dream-logic told her at the time - was covered with little red needle-marks. His fingers were all swollen, too. He was standing in front of one of the machines, a dingy little kiosk on a street corner with a white, dotted line-up-here line thoughtfully painted onto the sidewalk. It was a good thing that there was nobody lining up behind him, though, because he was taking a long time with the machine. He would put his finger into the slot - his dreadful, already swollen finger - and, when the prediction slip was ejected, would read it, nod knowingly, and place it in his pocket. His pocket was already bulging. He repeated the process without stopping, and she couldn't look away. After a while the slips he put into his pocket just fell out again and fluttered to the ground. HIT AND RUN, they all said. HIT AND RUN. HIT AND RUN. She woke up feeling ill and sweaty.

His apartment building looked just as she had imagined it would, faded red-bricks and grimy iron-barred windows. There was a stunted tree growing to one side of the front steps and a pair of rose bushes flowered half-heartedly beside that. There was more rubbish in the dirt than garden, though. She considered ringing the bell, but what would she say? Better to stay outside, safely across the street, comfortable enough on the rough slats of a wooden bench to wait until she caught a glimpse of him. There was not much traffic on the road which was good, because there would be nothing to obscure her view when he walked past. She knew he would walk by sooner or later. He worked and shopped nearby; from his record she knew he received regular payments from a local bookstore (that was doing remarkably well despite the print media decline that had forced even the governments to abandon state-run libraries for more tech-friendly Computernet facilities) and spent regular sums at a local grocery mart. She could even see both of these locations from where she sat, on opposite ends of the street. It was so convenient. She smiled. She waited.
She did not see him that day.

The next day, when she should have been taking lunch in the tiny break room that only had a hot-water tap and in which all chairs wobbled, she stood in front of the death machine on Mark Thomas's street instead. Its paint was so faded, its front panel so covered by splatters of mud, that the little unloved kiosk almost blended into the walls around it without being noticed. Words that had once shouted at passers-by - LEARN YOUR FATE HERE! CHEAT DESTINY! - now only whispered. She had to lean in close to read the instructions. Someone had scrawled over half of them with a marker. Death to death machines, the graffiti said. We were never meant to know.
She wondered who had written it there, and when, and if anybody had ever noticed or cared. She remembered the protests, and how people had died when some of those turned into riots. She remembered wondering if any of the protesters had been tested, and if they had suspected that they would be SHOT or TRAMPLED or CRUSHED IN A FLEEING MOB at a rally to ban the machines. And if they had suspected it, had they come along anyway, because they cared so much about the cause?
When she was little she had been tested, when the machines were new and exciting and nobody realised that they were anything more than a gimmick. They had been installed in malls and supermarkets and hospitals. School nurses had been provided with them. Travelling salesmen had taken portable units door to door and visited nursing homes and showed up at fresh-produce markets to market their oracular ware. She had been tested at school, in the assembly hall, seventy-third in a line of three hundred and fifteen boys and girls who were half excited and half fearful that it would hurt. None of them even really understood what was happening, except that their parents had signed a consent form, and that they would have to have a needle stuck into their fingers. Nine children had fainted at the sight of the needle. And a lot of them had not come into school the next day, or the day after that... One of her friends hadn't come back to school ever again. Nobody had ever told her why. Thinking back, though, she remembered her friend confiding to her that her parents had refused to sign the form, and that she had forged their signatures on it. She thought she remembered that, anyway. Maybe she had just dreamed it.
The machine in front of her now didn't look much like the one she remembered. That had been such an ungainly thing, with funny stubby legs and a gaping mouth with its single, sharp tooth. It had gleamed. This machine was hidden behind its once-sleek panels, broken in three places - a coin slot, a ticket return chute, and of course the needle-hole - and it did not look anything like an animal. But still, as she watched her finger slowly enter that hole, she felt that it was going to bite her.
The needle sting felt like a bite.
When she withdrew her finger, a drop of blood welled up from the place where the needle had bitten her. The machine clunked and whirred and made sounds as if it was going to fall apart. When it printed out her prediction, it ejected the slip with something like a dying wheeze. She put it in her pocket without looking at what it said.

The next day it rained, and after sitting on the bench a while she was soaked despite her coat and umbrella. Water seeped under her collar and ran down her back. Her feet made squishing sounds when she moved them. Nothing interesting happened, and she did not see him. She went home with the beginnings of a cold and told herself that she would do the sensible, adult thing by going in to work the next day.

The next day she sat on the bench again. Work could wait. Mark Thomas had to leave his apartment eventually, and she intended to be there when he did. She tested at the machine three times as the hours passed, mostly to have something to do. The predictions joined the first in her pocket, unread. The paper was almost weightless and it seemed strange that they should be so light when they contained her fate. In the early evening a figure emerged from the apartment building where he lived and walked to the store. It was hard to see his features in the dim light, but she suspected it was him. It had to be him. He returned with a bag bulging with groceries that split and spilled onto the pavement. She wrestled with herself - this must be the perfect opportunity to talk to him. She would be a helpful stranger who politely enquired about his health. She would deftly steer conversation to the death machines - carefully staying neutral, allowing him to give his opinion without revealing hers.
But she stayed seated, and he picked up his things and left, and a little sigh escaped her as she stood to go home.

When she saw him a second time it was raining again, and when he entered the store she followed him. She shadowed him from the adjacent aisle and when he reached for a box of cereal their eyes met for a moment through the shelving. She blushed and left, and for the rest of the day she fantasised about the conversation they could have had if she had spoken to him instead.

Finally, on her third sighting, she spoke to him, a simple greeting as they joined the line at the grocery store. He said that she looked familiar, but that he couldn't say why and supposed he had seen her around at some point. She said that it was unlikely he had seen her before, as she did not frequent the area.
"I suppose I have that kind of face," she said, and he smiled.
"I think it's your eyes," he replied.
She told him he should be careful of such cliches and they both laughed. When he had paid for his groceries he stepped aside, then hesitated, and asked if she would like to get coffee with him. Her heart beat a little faster. She told herself it was because she would be able to bring up the predictions in conversation, but a voice in her head whispered that she cared about more than just the predictions. Her fingers were curled around the predictions in her pocket when she agreed.

It seemed like a good sign that the sun was shining when they stepped outside. They chatted a little as they walked to a cafe, mostly about the weather. She felt as though there were embers beneath her feet that were glowing brighter with every step. Even if she had wanted to, she knew she could not untangle her feelings any more. Her curiosity had grown into some kind of lust that, she suspected, the truth alone would not satisfy.
The coffee was gone too quickly, though, and when their cups were empty she found that she had not been able to ask him about the predictions. As they stepped outside he told her that he should really be heading home, but that he had enjoyed talking to her. They waited by the road for the lights to change and she knew her time was up.

"How do you feel about the machines?" she asked. The words spilled out of her like ink onto a page. "The death machines. The predictions, I mean. I've been tested but I can never bring myself to look, you see, and I know it's a controversial subject but I always wonder what others think of them. So I just thought I would ask. What you think."
The voice in her head was laughing and her cheeks blazed. Traffic slowed, then stopped, and the light changed. She resisted the urge to look at his face. They crossed the road without speaking.

Only they didn't both make it across the road, and it was not until she reached the other side and turned that she saw the car that didn't stop. He was knocked aside and blood spread in the puddles around his head. For a moment she could not breathe.
She fell to her knees beside him and grabbed his shoulders.
"Mark?" she said.
His eyes were closed. Somewhere behind her a woman was screaming.
"Mark? I need you to tell me about the predictions, okay?"
There was blood on her hands now, too.
"I need to know why you do it," she insisted. She hauled him into a sitting position and held him against her chest. "Mark, can you hear me?"
His smile, when it came, was slow and ghastly. There were gaps in his teeth, and blood.
"Hey," he croaked. "I think I've seen you around."
She held him with one arm and touched his cheek with her other hand.
"I don't live around here," she told him. She had to blink away tears to see him clearly. "You must be thinking of someone else."
"I think-" he stopped to cough and sprayed her with blood. "I think it's your eyes."
"Mark. Why do you use those machines every year?"
His eyes closed, fluttered, slowly opened again.
"I think I fell," he said.
"It's alright," she said. "I'm looking after you. But, look, Mark, I need you to tell me why you do it."
"Why I...?" he coughed again. She wiped his mouth with her sleeve.
"Testing. The death machines. The machines that tell you how you will die."
"Yes, those machines." His eyes struggled to focus on hers.
The screaming woman was further away now. A small crowd had gathered around them, but nobody dared come too close. She wished they would all go away completely. He was so far gone already, and she needed him to answer.
She needed to know.

"Mark." He met her gaze. "Tell me why, every year on your birthday, you get your death prediction."
"Why? What does it matter?"
His eyes were suddenly sharp. He understood everything. He could read her soul.
"I need to know. I need to understand. The predictions are always right and they never change. Why do you keep doing it? Is it a ritual? A compulsion? A tribute?"
His hand reached out and she took it. He squeezed her fingers.
"I wish I got to know you," he said.
"I know."
He sighed. His face was too pale. He felt lighter in her arms.
"I never even read them," he said, finally. "I always did it and I never even read what they said. Isn't that silly. I was always afraid. Ever since I was little. Always afraid to know."
His eyes closed again, and this time they did not open. She kissed him with tears running down her cheeks. He tasted like the sea.

Requirements

2011-07-05T00:29:00.000+09:30

Maude was nine when she realised that all the main characters in the really good stories were orphans. She wasn't entirely sure why this was. Did have your parents die make you into a more heroic (or villainous!) person? Was it a requirement? Were there people keeping an eye on who was dying, ready to assign adventures to the unfortunate children as a kind of consolation prize?
Over breakfast one morning she informed her parents that she was ready to be orphaned.
"I can't start having adventures until you both die, you know," she told them, with her best 'you are breathing pretty selfishly right now' frown. For a moment they were silent, and the only sound was Baby Laurence mashing his cereal into their father's hair.
Her mother laughed - unconvincingly, Maude thought - and made a joke to her father about monitoring what their daughter read. Her father suggested they enrol her in an after-school class in something that wouldn't give her Any Ideas. Something like pottery, he said, spooning cereal from his hair back into Laurie's bowl. Laurie threw his spoon onto the floor.

Maude realised then that of course they would never understand the necessity of their impending deaths. She resolved not to speak to them about it again.

Empires

2011-06-17T01:16:00.000+09:30

The three empresses met in a field high in the mountains. Each was accompanied by a single handmaiden who bore a covered basket and stared intently at the ground. The Empress of Flowers was the first to move forward, because she had always been the most impulsive. She climbed the three half-height steps into the gazebo and washed her hands in the basin that waited at its centre. The Empress of Oceans came next, limping a little as she stepped up, and washed her hands also. The Empress of Stones moved last and slowest, and when her hands were cleansed they hung at her side and dripped onto the floor. For a long time the three regarded each other from behind their veils, then each reached up and removed it.

The handmaidens knew better than to peek, but if there had been an observer at this moment he would have been astonished to see that the faces of the three women were more than a little similar. The same pale grey eyes lay below the same thick lashes over flushed cheeks with the lightest spray of freckles. The same half-smile curled lips that were all but mirrors each of the other. There were differences, of course - the Empress of Oceans' skin was ruddy and wind-bitten, her hair sea-bleached and tied in an intricate knot on her head. The Empress of Flowers' hair was long and sun-polished and hung in gentle curls, but there were traces of dirt beneath her fingernails. The Empress of Stones' hands were cracked and calloused with labour and there were dark circles beneath her eyes.

The sisters grasped hands, heads bowed, silent. There would be time to discuss the state of the Empires soon enough, and time to share the treats that each had brought, and time to be regaled by the singing and music and dancing of the handmaidens. For now it was enough to be together, for a moment, after so long. They dared not meet more than once in ten years, and though the years were far kinder to them than to most, still the weight of time was heavy upon them.
The Empress of Stones broke the circle first, gathering her skirts and sitting on one of the three benches.

"There will be war," she announced. There was no clue in her tone as to how she felt about this, and for that moment her sisters wondered how much had changed in the past decade. "It cannot be helped. Men are ever thirsty for blood and cannot be sated until it is shed."
"I feared it would be so," agreed the Empress of Oceans. She too sat, and after a while the third sister joined them.
"There is always a way to avoid it," she said.
But of course there was no way.

The Empire of the seas, where great city-ships rode the waters as a scent rides the wind and salt encrusted mountainous sails, had felt the change of the tides. Afraid and angered they were already assembling their strength, calling the city-ships to the Navel, the mountain-island that was the only land they ever set foot upon. They believed that the unrest in the waters was caused by some sorcery from the other Empires - they knew the sins of the landbound and would not be persuaded otherwise.

The Empire of the mountains and caverns had felt the tremors in the earth and seen ancient cairns topple into the great canyon. They had come, on foot and on horseback, in wagon and litter, to the Deephall to petition their Empress. As the earth trembled around them they cried out in rage, and nothing could dissuade them from their belief of the conspiracy between the sea- and plains-dwellers.

In the Empire of the plains, fields and plateaus and gentle hills and valleys writhed. Lush grasses yellowed and ancient trees toppled. In anguish they flocked to the Tree and beneath its time-wrinkled boughs they petitioned for an end to the treachery of their neighbours. Reports from all provinces agreed - sea- and stone-spies had poisoned their lands.

"So war it must be," the Empress of Stones repeated when each had relayed the situation in her lands. "Our beloved peoples cannot see beyond their fear of the neighbours they do not know. And so they will kill each other, or die trying."
The Empress of Flowers wept quietly. She knew well the dying of each thing in its season, and the cycle of new life nourished by each death. There was no beauty in war, though, and in her mind she saw the plains-grasses stained red with the blood of her people.
"But what is the true cause?" the Empress of Oceans asked. Her voice was as soft as the tide, and as moving. Her sister's tears dried at once and the Empress of Stones' frown deepened. "The changing tides, the quaking earth, the dying fields... I suspect a great darkness, sisters, that has gone unnoticed within one of our own borders."

Nightrun

2011-03-04T01:06:00.000+10:30

For almost a week Eleanor did everything she could to forget about Tobias Gorse and his impertinent kiss. Each night, though, she dreamed of him and in spite of herself woke each morning remembering the feeling of his lips against hers. Finally, on a night that was wild and windy and threatening rain, she could resist no longer. She tiptoed on stockinged feet to the side door and opened it with held breath - if it should creak her father or one of the staff would be wakened. Eleanor couldn't begin to think of an excuse plausible enough as to explain why she was sneaking outside on such a stormy night.
But the door was silent, and once outside Eleanor shoved her feet into her boots and began to run. She had never ventured closer to the Gorse manor than the water barrel where she had last seen Tobias, but in her dreams she'd been there a dozen times, and she moved through the darkness without fear of losing herself in the woods. A distant dog barked and small creatures made rustling sounds in the undergrowth. The moon peeked through the shredded clouds then was hidden again; the wind pulled her hair free of its nighttime braid and twisted the skirt of her nightgown until she almost tripped. There was no time for decorum, though, and so Eleanor lifted her skirts up to her knees, at once aware of how horrified her father would be if he found out and exhilerated by her own reckless defiance. She felt a sense of urgency as she ran that only seemed to increase the further she got, and she wasn't quite sure if the anxiety lay in what she would find at Gorse Manor or with her growing certainty that she was being watched.
When she passed the water barrel, the water within glinting in a sudden burst of moonlight, she paused, panting, to catch her breath. She could see the outline of the great house and a square of light that was a downstairs window. Quietly, Eleanor moved toward the window, mesmerised by the scene within.

Tobias sat in a deep and threadbare easy chair, a hugely thick book open on his lap. Much of his hair had fallen from its ponytail and hung down around his face, hiding his expression. Before Eleanor knew what she was doing her face was pressed up against the glass. Moths tapped the window around her head but she ignored them, too intent on Tobias to care. She couldn't work out what was so magnetic about him - perhaps it was only his boldness, or the strange claims he made, or that the way he had spoken to her had made it sound as if there was something special about her. All her life Eleanor had been certain of how ordinary she was. Until now.
Later she could not say which happened first, but she let out a tiny gasp and Tobias looked up. For a moment she was frozen with her nose flattened against the window pane and then, as he half-stood, she realised the ridiculousness of her situation. Hitching her skirt up again she turned and ran, hoping to disappear into the trees but knowing her pale skin and white nightgown would all but glow in the moonlight shadows.
She almost made it as far as the barrel before he caught her and as his hand closed around her arm Eleanor wondered how he could have moved so quickly.

"What are you doing out here?" he hissed. "At this hour? In the middle of the night?"
Frustrated tears threatened to spill onto her cheeks and she wished she'd a least worn a shawl. She was shamefully underdressed and when he father found out... Eleanor had never been in such serious trouble before and had never expected to be.
"Let me go," she replied. He did not.
"No," he said, looking around with something very close to fear, "no, I will not send you alone through these woods again tonight. Come inside and we'll discuss this properly."
Eleanor shook her head but she wasn't strong enough to pull free and so she allowed herself to be drawn inside his house and into the parlour.
"Wait here a moment," he ordered, "and don't think I won't notice if you try to leave before I come back."
From the look in his eyes she knew he meant what he said. She sat, folding her arms sulkily across her chest.

The Book of Maps

2010-06-03T21:52:00.002+09:30

The village's great prize had always been its book collection. Generations of mayors had striven to add to it, and there was now a full dozen. Of course, only a small few could actually read them, but they were generous with their skill, teaching those they could and reading aloud to the rest. Literate or not, the villagers treated the books with an awed reverence, and this is why they were so upset when they discovered that one of the books had been destroyed.
"Peace, friends!" the mayor called to those assembled outside of his house. "We must remain calm until the true nature of this travesty is uncovered."
Behind him the door opened, and his two sons carried out the family's dining table. The crowd parted to let them pass and the table was set down in the middle of the square. The mayor's wife followed them, with the wretched book held gently in her arms. She put it on the table. The crowd let out a sigh.
"The Book of Maps!" she said. "Of them all it was the most beautiful. This is too cruel."
Overcome, she covered her face with her apron. Her daughter took her arm and murmured sympathetically. The villagers looked, dismayed, upon what had been the most well-loved book in the collection. Fairy-tales were well and good, and had their place as all things do, but no fairy-tale had ever been as remarkable as a story that was true. The Book of Maps had been compiled by the Salamanders, a family of explorers and lore-gatherers of almost mythical fame. The detailed maps were accompanied by long descriptions of the places - of its climate and vegetation, of the local people and their customs. For a long time nobody spoke, and then the goose girl stepped forward.
"May I touch it?" she asked. The mayor hesitated, but she was one of the few present who could read, and he was at a loss for what to do. He nodded.
She opened the slightly buckled cover carefully. Ink oozed across her fingers like blood from an open wound. She wiped it onto her skirt.
"The map-pages have been torn out," she said. "There are only crumbled fragments here where they should be."
As if to illustrate her words, a breath of wind scooped up the fragments and swirled them away.
"But the words -" she frowned. "It's as if the ink has been taken up from the page, except for a few letters..."
Her lips moved a little as she looked at the remaining letters, turning the pages faster and faster until she reached the final page and closed the book with a snap.
"What do they say?" the mayor asked, though he was not sure he really wanted to know.
"Only three words, over and over," the goose girl said. She ran her fingers through her hair, not knowing about the ink streaks she left there.
"Over and over. It only says, 'she is dead'."

Succession

2010-06-02T21:27:00.000+09:30

At the top of a rather small mountain, the temple of the Mapmother waited. The scribes and parchmenters were on edge - the Mapmother was ailing, and her successor had yet to be found. Usually the new acolyte would appear before the 'Mother even fell ill, and there was time aplenty for their apprenticeship. But this time there was no acolyte, and this was very worrying.
What would become of the temple, if the 'Mother were - North forbid! - to die without training a successor?
The oldest of the scribes - whose hands were permanently shadowed by a lifetime of ink-stains - seemed to fear it most. They muttered about a dark time, an unspeakable time, when things were wrong. The youngest parchmenters found this dreadful and exciting, but could never manage to press anything more out of their elders.
"By the Four Cardinal Points," the scribes said, making the mark of the compass on their chests, "May we never be so directionless again."

But weeks passed, and no girl came to them, and the 'Mother died.
All across the world ships' sails shuddered and cart-wheels creaked. The pieces of sextants and compasses fell apart and ever map that had ever been scribed crumbled. Watchmen on their rounds halted, suddenly unsure of which street they were on. Carters' horses fought the reins and travellers on isolated roads wandered from the path. Many of them perished - into bogs and lakes, over cliffs or simply into the dark and merciless forests.
In the Mapmother's temple everyone fell to their knees and, in a little village that the world had never heard of, a girl with a strange birthmark on her face woke with a start.

PvN

2010-04-27T01:56:00.000+09:30

When I first saw John Sterling I knew he was a man to be admired. He was tall and muscular, sun-brown and salt-flecked, shaped more like a bear than a man. I was a kitten beside him. One swing of his paw would tumble me across the room.
I had never known anyone like him - all the men of my home town were small and lithe, with the kind of muscles that were hidden beneath the surface. John Sterling left nothing to the imagination. Even in his sleep he was intimidating - here was a man to command a whole fleet.
Here was a man it would be a pity to kill.
So, yes, I hesitated.
And that was when he woke up.

Burn Burn

2010-04-22T00:17:00.001+09:30

Of course there was always something strange about Sandra, but nobody picked it until the day that she snapped. The day that she came to school naked, and ran through the halls screaming until the nurse managed to catch her. The day that, escaping the nurse's office, she got into the art room and doused herself in chemicals before running outside into the yard. I was eating a sandwich when she set herself on fire. Multi-grain bread with lettuce and cold roast chicken. When Sandra was burning, she didn't scream at all. She just stood on the faded hopscotch grid, flames dripping from her fingertips, looking at us all with the deadest eyes. I'd always thought that was a dumb expression, until the day Sandra snapped.
It wouldn't have been so bad if she was the only one, but only a week later a kid from the preschool down the road somehow eluded his teachers and, standing on the exact spot where Sandra had stood, at the exact time of day, he took his daddy's lighter out of his pocket and touched it to his sleeve. I had an apple that day. It was green and shiny and juicy and I only had one bite, and later that night, when I couldn't sleep because I kept smelling the kid burning again, my appetite returned and I wished I hadn't thrown the apple away. It seemed even more tragic than the kid's eyes - dead like Sandra's, dead like the eyes of a fish laid out on ice in the supermarket - that I'd wasted such a delicious apple. My stomach rumbled loudly, and then I felt sick, and I only made it as far as the door before I threw up.

They closed the school but people kept coming there to light themselves on the hopscotch grid, even when the school gates were padlocked and security guards were hired and policemen with dogs patrolled the fenceline. Somehow, at 12:24 in the afternoon week after week, somebody was there, ready to die, and nobody could stop it and nobody understood what was happening.

A Fresh Start in a New City was...

2009-09-15T18:24:00.001+09:30

A fresh start in a new city was the last thing Abby wanted. It felt as though she'd only just found her place in this one, and to move now would make her a stranger in a strange place all over again. With a sad sigh she tore up her bus timetable - she'd have to get a new one, and who knew how long it would take her to familiarise herself with it? Too long to be practical in the middle of the term - how many times would she be late for school because she missed a bus, or waited at the wrong stop?
But when Abby told this to her parents they only sighed.
"The inconvenience of moving does not outweigh that of staying," her mother said sternly. "And there are plenty of positives that you're not even considering."
"Lincoln isn't even a real city," Abby argued. "Their population is less than that of a New York block! It's a million miles away from anywhere, only accessible by helicopter, and I wouldn't be surprised if they don't have penicillin yet, let alone electricity."
Her father hid a smile at her exaggeration - her mother was glaring.
"Lincoln is beautiful, and spacious enough that we will have a decent yard. It's remote enough that nobody has heard of our family yet, and for most of the year it's either raining or snowing. That place is gonna be impossible to burn."
Abby rolled her eyes.
"Mother. Please. It's not as if I'm some kind of serial arsonist."
"I suppose all of the fires were coincidences, like you keep insisting."
Her mother rolled her eyes.
"Or a set-up," her father added helpfully, pretending to be engrossed in his newspaper.
"You never believe my side!" They'd had this argument before - practically line for line - yet it still managed to make Abby's blood boil. "You call me a pyromaniac and a pathological liar as if I was some nutcase and not your daughter!"
"You wer emy daughter when you played with dolls and messed up the kitchen and pretended to do your homework. You were my daughter when a fireman dragged you out of a blazing inferno... the first time. By the third fire I was suspicious and by the eighth I was wondering if my daughter had been spirited away in the night and replaced with some demon."
Abby gaped - her mother had never said anything like this before. Even her father looked shocked, and had given up pretending not to be involved.
"Oh, you look like my daughter and you move like her and sound and smell and reason like my daughter, but you must be something else."
"Evelyn," Abby's father said, "I think that's enough."
Abby watched numbly as they left the room. Something else?
Of course she wasn't something else.
Holding back tears she ran upstairs, prying the panel of her wardrobe aside and pulling out the box of things she'd been planning on leaving behind - her library card, a hand-drawn map of the best takeaway stores in the neighbourhood. Two years worth of movie ticket stubs. A cigarette lighter with scratches on its casing.
That was the life she was abandoning, though it was too painful to destroy all of its relics, and too painful to take them with her.

Twelfth Brigade

2009-09-13T23:01:00.004+09:30

One moment of life can lead to many different lifetimes filled with moments.

That had been the philosophy she'd grown up with, and, when she joined the Corps, it had been the creed tattooed into their minds. When they woke in the morning, as they staggered through the training courses, while they drifted each night towards sleep - the words were there, echoing above and around and underneath their thoughts. It was a mantra, and a warning, and their god, all rolled up into one.

One moment of life can lead to many different lifetimes filled with moments.

Eleanor stuffed her feet into her boots, smiling at how well they fit. She'd finally worn them in, and just in time, because today she made her first jump. Her team were arrayed along the benches beside and opposite her, pulling their own boots on, checking their equipment, closing their eyes as they muttered a little prayer - one moment of life - and then it was time to go.
"Twelfth Brigade, report to jump deck seventeen," the P.A. crackled. "Twelfth Brigade to deck seventeen, prepare to jump."

"Nervous?"
The man beside Eleanor was her only real friend in the brigade, the only person she'd felt comfortable talking to. He'd been the first person she'd met upon joining, the one to reassure her when she felt like quitting, and the one who held her hand at night when she cried with fear.
"What if I get this wrong?" She would sob. The pressure of the Corps was immense - any mistake could cause a paradox that changed the timeline irreperably, and even after years of intense physical and mental training many recruits dropped out before their first jump.
"You won't," he had assured her. "You kick my ass in all the tests, remember, and I've done this plenty of times."
The advice hovered on his tongue today too, she saw, and she was grateful that he held it back. She would not show that kind of weakness in front of her team, especially not the others whose first day this way.

----------

It was a long way down, but Eleanor was determined not to fall. That kind of humiliation would follow her through death, and haunt her forever.

One moment.

Yes, this was definitely one of those moments. If she made it across the gap, her life would be very different to her life if she turned back, or sat down and cried, or fell.
That was personal stress, which was bad enough, but worse was the impersonal stress that came with the risk of disrupting the timeline. It was very simple to change things without even intending to.
For example, as she crept along the ledge, a drop of sweat could fall from her brow and onto the face of a pedestrian on the street below. The person would stop, raise their hand to wipe it away - and maybe, if they wore a watch, or a bracelet, the sun would reflect from it. The sudden flash of light could catch the eye of a passing motorist, who then might not notice the small child that chased a ball into the street. If the child was killed, everything they would have accomplished in their lifetime would be erased. It could be large, like a scientific discovery, or as small as convincing one person to take a sick day at work - when, if they'd instead gone in and passed on the flu to their colleagues, one overworked father or mother could have taken the virus home with them and passed it, in turn, on to a child whose immune system was already dangerously low...

It made Eleanor's head ache to think about it, because at every turn, at every moment, another line of moments spun out into infinity. And within that line of moments was another infinite number of moments, and they had their own too. And when she remembered this she began to imagine then, except that there was too much to keep track of.
It made her dizzy, made her sweat all the harder. She wiped her face on her sleeve, and closed her eyes, and repeated the mantra until it went from terrifying to comforting.

One moment. One moment.

That was the beauty of the creed, even in it's simplified form. Once you learned the trick of it, you could train yourself to focus on different aspects of its meaning. When she was afraid, the words were a calm hand on her shoulder.
This is just one moment, they said. What are you afraid of? Let it pass.
She had to have that comfort, or she would spend every second of her life agonising over what move to make for fear of its consequences.

Contract

2009-08-17T00:59:00.001+09:30

But this boy was something else entirely.
"Sign here," he said. A wisp of smoke escaped his eyelashes and curled into the air over his head. She didn't know how to say no to someone whose eyes were live coals. She took the pen. It was hot in her hand, warmed by his, and she wrote quickly so she could put it down again. Her palm felt very empty though, once it was gone.
"Congratulations," he said with a smile that could have melted icebergs. "You no longer exist."
"I don't feel any different," the girl said. "How do I know you're telling the truth?"
His eyes smouldered.
"What is your name?"
The question hung between them, heating the air, slowly sucking the oxygen out of her lungs as she came to realise what he meant. She didn't have a name - if she ever had, she could not remember it now.
"If I do not exist, then what am I?"
He patted her head condescendingly, and it took all of her willpower not to flinch away from the smell of her own singed hair.
"Whatever we turn you into." He held his hand over the piece of paper. It curled at the edges, and then into a tight scroll that he slipped into his pocket. "Follow me and we will find out."
She followed him, even though being so close to him was making her sweat. She certainly couldn't stay where she was, in that room that would have been unbearably cold without him there. She followed him through the doorway, and along a featureless corridor so long that she knew she could not walk its length in a lifetime. But they did, and at its end was another door, and when he pressed his palm against it the door shuddered itself open as if shrinking from his touch.
"After you," he said, stepping back with mock chivalry. The touch of his hot breath on her skin made her shiver. She passed him quickly, into a room as featureless as the first, and colder than the other had been, because after walking beside him for so long she had all but forgotten what cold was. He did not enter the room, but he did not leave either. Instead he leaned against the doorframe, folding his arms across his chest, watching her. When she turned she could feel his gaze on her, a trail of warmth like invisible fingers running across her skin.
"What will you turn me into?" Her voice began strongly but faded as she spoke. She cleared her throat and tried again, but every time she opened her mouth her words had less volume. Startled she looked at the boy, who laughed at her alarm.
"We're about to find out."
She could not have seen her voice being leeched from her but when her colour began to fade she could only watch as it slowly peeled from her skin and hair and clothing, floating away in swiftly paling streams that writhed like the smoke from his burning eyes. The silence pressed in on her, at first on her ears and then spreading until the pressure seemed to be on her chest too, and she could hardly draw a breath. Every desperate inhalation was sucked back again, until she was too dizzy to stand.
She did not feel herself hit the floor, although she was sure she could remember feeling it moments before, when her bare feet had pressed against the smooth, cold tiles. Now there was nothing, or nothing that she could feel, and when she put her hands on her face she could not feel that either, and when she turned to the burning boy he was still just smiling, watching as she faded away.
It was as though the girl floated inside herself, a shade of herself, unable to hear or see or smell or feel anything but her own erratic pulse. Frantically she held onto the sound of her heartbeat, and when it too began to fade she screamed soundlessly. She thought she was flailing against the floor, but when she opened her eyes she was not moving at all, not even twitching.

Blood

2009-07-11T00:26:00.000+09:30

The forest ended at our lawn. It was dark and intimidating but it had never worried me. I suspected it of harbouring delicious secrets, although I was twelve before I had any proof of this. One day a boy staggered out of the trees, bleeding from his palms, face and chest covered in arcane symbols. I could only stare as my father carried him into the guest room, and my older sister silently bathed and bandaged his hands. I was not allowed into the room but it was right beside mine, and I always woke to hear him screaming in fevered nightmares.
Eventually he was well enough to leave and I never saw him again.
He was not the only such visitor we had, however, and after my sister married it became my task to care for these odd people. No word about them was ever said between my father and me, and when he died I found myself alone in the dark house with a thankless task looming over my days.
The bleeding people only appeared when the moon was completely full or empty, sometimes all in a rush or years apart. By my nineteenth birthday I'd treated almost a dozen and most of them with no guidance but my own vague memories, gathered from sneaked glances at my sister - a cold cloth across a hot forehead, bandages changed each day and sterilised before hanging in whatever brisk wind or feeble sunlight could be found. Moaning and crying often filled the house. I washed more bloodstains than I could count from hands and sheets and shirtfronts. And always, when the fever left them, these people would leave without a word, back into the greedy forest. I never saw a person twice.
One winter, a man collapsed at the treeline. I did not notice him at first, until the wind dropped down and his weak cries echoed across the still air of the yard. I grabbed a blanket as I ran out, not caring that it was my favourite and soon to be ruined. The man was blue with cold - it hadn't snowed yet but I was sure that it would - and even when I managed to haul him upright he could barely stand.
"Just a few steps," I muttered. "I know it hurts. You can do it, just a few steps to the door, and inside is warm. You can sit by the fire, it's very cosy in that seat, and I'll bring you soup if you're hungry. Just a few more steps..."
He leaned against me. His hands dripped sluggishly, and he slipped in my grasp, so that we were soon clutching each other. I wished I had time to cover the fireside chair before settling him into it, but he was gasping desperately for breath and I knew he could stand no longer.
As soon as he was settled I ran for the bandages, frightened by the length and depth of his wounds. I had only seen cuts on their hands before, but his continued up his arms and onto his chest.
"I - haven't seen any so bad," I admitted. "I don't want to lie to you - I don't know much about this. All I can do is wrap you up and feed you, keep you clean and warm. It might not be enough."
"We -" his voice caught on itself, cracking in his throat as he broke the rule of silence. I waited impatiently - that one word was all I'd ever heard from one of them, and nearly as much as I ever got from the townsfolk when I ventured out for groceries. I wanted more. I ached for more.
"We should not speak."
I almost laughed. We should not, but he'd broken that rule just by telling me so.
"None of you ever has," I replied. "Not in seven years."
He blushed - I was surprised he had blood enough left to do so. He must have been bleeding for hours.
"I am the first to - break?" He hung his head. "How pathetic. How weak."
"I don't think you're weak at all," I said quickly, before he could decide to stop talking. "You haven't complained once, you were out in the cold all that time... I would be crying nonstop if I were in your place."
He smiled. It stretched the corners of his mouth without betraying any warmth at all.
"That is the very reason you are not - and never will be - in my place."
His words would have hurt if I were not so glad to hear them. I continued bandaging his wounds, trying to be gentle. He fell silent, until I finished with his arms and reached for his chest.
"Wait!" He growled. I waited dutifully as he struggled to focus his gaze.
"The - tattoos," he said. His voice was softer. I worried that he was getting weaker, because I had no idea what else I could do for him. "Do not - don't touch them."
I was curious, but did not ask why. I didn't want to tire him further.
"I'll do my best," I said. "Now sleep a bit. When you're a little stronger you can eat something, and maybe we'll get you into an actual bed. It's a good chair but it's not made for sleeping in."
He frowned and opened his mouth to argue, then sighed and slumped back.
"I'm always close by," I said, "Call out if you need anything."
I stayed by him all night, trying to occupy myself with mending clothes. It was slow work, hard in the dull firelight, but once I sank into its rhythm I felt the hours begin to slide by me. I didn't sleep, but I was well used to anxious nights.

The sun was almost risen when he began to dream, twitching and groaning and twisting from side to side. I wiped his face with a cloth, and whispered the things my sister used to, when the screaming began.
"You're safe here, don't be afraid. You are brave and strong. This place is warded. You're safe."
I wondered if she'd known what the words meant, or if she'd said them as I did now, over and over, a meaningless phrase that became a mantra against the fear of the sleeping man. He continued to writhe - I put my palms against his chest, hoping he would be stilled by my touch, before he could hurt himself.
But where our flesh met - it was as if fireworks were exploding behind my eyes, sparks melting my brain, colours dancing every time I blinked. There was a heat on my hands so great I thought our skin would sear together, and I could smell it burning before I felt it.
His eyes flew open, wide with pain or maybe horror. I thought I saw the same expression on my own face, mirrored on his eyes. The heat continued to build, until it was beyond pain, and I thought I was floating in the shifting colours of his eyes, colours that spun and exploded and tasted like candy when I drank them and drowned in them...
A sharp pain woke me, the man's teeth biting through my lip. The taste of blood in my mouth made me feel ill. He pushed me roughly away from him.
"No blood," he gasped. "No blood on the Marks."
The tattoos on his chest were livid - was this why he'd said not to touch them? I licked my lips quickly, swallowing the blood despite its sickly taste. Whether or not I believed in magic didn't matter, only that clearly something had happened, and if just touching those marks was enough to cause my brain to self-destruct then I could only imagine what might happen if I ignored his warning.
"What - ?" I tried to ask him about what had occurred, but my tongue was numb and clumsy, like I'd drunk hot soup too fast. I shook my head and tried again, forming my words slowly and carefully. "What was that?"
He looked at me through his lashes, as though his head was too heavy to lift.
"I told you not to touch them."
"I know. I'm sorry. It - slipped my mind. I was worried about you."
My palms itched as the heat left them.
"Look," he said. "What you did - was foolish. You're now Marked too, even though you were never tried. We're linked. Unless I can get the Marks off... do you have a good, sharp knife?"
I gaped at him.
"Uh - no. All of my knives are terribly dull." The lie was weak, almost amusingly so, and I scrambled to change the subject. "Besides, you won't be able to do much with those hands for a while. What do you mean, I'm marked? And we're linked how, and why, and what WAS that?"
"I can't explain it without breaking confidences," he said, and the apology almost sounded sincere. He was either truly sorry, or a far better liar than I was. "Not that you'd believe me if I told you any of it, even the things I AM allowed to talk about."
"Try me," I suggested, absently alternating scratching each hand with the other. "Please."

Coven

2009-06-17T03:58:00.001+09:30

It was windy on the rooftop - the storm was going to be a good one. Bea's hair whipped around her face, flicking into her eyes and mouth. She wished she'd tied it back before they left, but the weather had been calmer then. Nobody had said anything about rooftops, either, but the height didn't bother her. It was exciting, to be so high up above the city.
"Remember, Beatrice," said a voice from behind her shoulder. She thought it might be Isaac, but she didn't know them well enough to tell the boys apart. It didn't matter. "Stay away from the lighted areas. Annie's good, but she's not that good."
Annie's pale skin seemed to glow in the moonlight, a face and arms that bobbed in the general shadowy darkness.
"Are you ready?" She asked, eyes alight with excitement. Bea nodded. The older girl handed her an old, home-made broom. The handle was worn, and the bristles were falling out - and when she touched it, her fingertips tingled.
"She feels it," Duncan - or was it Isaac? - announced smugly.
"We told you she would," Isaadc, or possibly Duncan, added. Annie rolled her eyes and poked her tongue out at them. The childish gesture made Bea smile wistfully. If she was lucky - if she made a good impression tonight - one day she might be a part of this close group.
"It's a pity Cale couldn't be here," Isaac - Bea was almost certain it was Isaac - said. Annie glared at him and his brother punched his arm.
"Don't listen to them," Annie said calmly. Her hands were held out before her, palms up, and the air above them shimmered like asphalt on a hot day. Bea watched with open fascination as a series of rune-like symbols appeared on her palms and then lifted into the air, swirling around themselves to form a single, inky black sphere. Annie's eyes looked especially green above its blackness, and they bored into Bea's with an almost painful intensity.
"This might - tickle," she added.
"I can handle it," Bea said. She'd meant to sound confident, but her voice was little more than a whisper.
Annie plucked the dark sphere out of the air, and cracked it like an egg on the top of Bea's head. Something she could not see trickled down her face, and as it slowly spread - down her shoulders, torso, legs - Annie grinned.
"I can't even look at you straight," she declared proudly. "I've really outdone myself this time."
"What do you mean?" Bea asked. Annie pointed to a puddle nearby. Bea stared down into it and immediately felt disoriented. It wasn't that she couldn't see herself, but that her eyes kept wanting to look elsewhere, and for some reason she found herself thinking of how unusually large the park's owls had grown.
"Owls?" She said, looking away from the dizzying reflection.
"It's easier to suggest what they saw than to say they saw nothing," Isaac explained. "And when you're dealing with stuff that's already complex, it's always handy to have an easier option."
"Besides," Duncan added, "Being truly invisible has its drawbacks. With prolonged use -"
"That's a story for another day," Annie snapped. "Beatrice, it's time to fly."
Bea's legs shook as she climbed onto the low wall at the roof's edge. Sure, she trusted these people. She trusted their broom, too - she'd watched them fly it around for almost an hour before being convinced.
"Are you sure?" Bea whispered suddenly, too afraid to be ashamed of her fear. "There's no - less deadly way of doing this?"
"I'd call it only potentially deadly," Duncan said. "Since you're not actually going to die."
"How do you know?" She countered desperately. "Maybe you're wrong. Maybe I don't have any magic at all."
"You're questioning Cale?" Isaac shook his head. "Better not do it when he's around. It tends to make him very angry."
Bea remembered Cale as more bear than man - tall and hulking, with an intimidating amount of muscle and dark, shaggy hair. Even setting his bulk aside, there was something unnerving about him. His features were a little too smooth, a little blank - except for his eyes, smouldering with the heat of an internal anger. Yes, Cale was intimidating enough without making him upset.
"Cale's talent is seeing talent," Annie said quietly. "He is very good at what he does."
"But - " Bea gulped, bludhing even as she continued to argue. "I'm afraid. I'm afraid you'll all be wrong, and I'll fall, and I'll die."
"Don't be afraid. We wouldn't let you fall," Isaac said.
"We'll catch you," Duncan added. Their palms were glowing, too.
Bea nodded once, then turned, and, with her heart in her mouth, stepped off the rooftop.

Issa's Story - Second Night

2009-05-28T22:23:00.001+09:30

The next night, Mally demanded that the story be told again.
"But tonight, that boy does NOT die!"
"Alright," Issa said.
"So two children met at the edge of a desert, the girl followed the boy, but after two days and nights she fainted. The boy tried to carry her, but after a few hours he realised that if he continued to do so, he would not make it far. He had only brought enough water for one person, after all. So he lay her down at the bottom of a dune, where the hot afternoon sun didn't reach her. He apologised when he left her, and held his hands over his ears to block her weak cries. For two days and two nights he walked, and on the third day he had crossed the desert, and on the other side he found the city that shone in the sun. The girl's stories might have been true or they might have been just stories, but he didn't notice because all he could think about was the girl he'd left to die and the way she had called out, not understanding why he left."
Minutes passed in silence.
"The end," she added.
Mally turned off the light without saying a word.

Issa's Story - First Night

2009-05-28T22:22:00.000+09:30

"Two children met on the edge of a desert. The boy wanted to prove his strength by crossing the scalding sands, and the girl was running away from an abusive home. At first he didn't want to travel with her, because the whole point of his journey was self-sufficiency. But for two days and two nights she followed him, telling him stories about a shining city by the sea, where ordinary people rode kites on hurricane winds and swam through whirlpools. By the end of the second day the boy was fascinated and the girl was exhausted - her food and water had run out on the first night, and her shoes had been lost in the dunes so that her feet were covered in burns and blisters. She continued her stories until she collapsed, and then the boy lifted her in his arms. For two days and two nights he carried her, carefully feeding her and giving her water, and telling her stories about the shining city where little girls were princesses who ate delicious food every day and were carried around on their fathers' shoulders."
Issa paused, poking her finger into the wax drips that were pooling on the tabletop. It was still very hot, but she didn't seem to notice.
"And on the fifth day?" Mally asked. Issa smiled sadly.
"On the fifth day the boy ran out of water, too. He kept carrying the girl for as long as he could, until he too collapsed from exhaustion. They tumbled down the side of the sand dune and landed in a tangled mess of arms and legs in a valley so deep that it was shaded even in the middle of the day. He looked up at the sides and knew that he wouldn't be able to climb back up them. He looked at the girl and saw that she was awake, watching him but too weak to move. Carefully he untangled himself and tried to gently move her until she could lie comfortably. He took off his shirt and bundled it up under her head like a pillow. She was delirious from the heat and dehydration, and she believed him when he said they were almost at the city, and she died, smiling, at his side."
"The boy?" Mally said, though she already suspected the answer.
"He died, too, scared and alone. He was racked with guilt for allowing the girl to follow him into the desert, and for his own stupidity in coming out there at all. He had never suspected that he would fail."
"That's not a very nice story," Mally accused.
"I know." Issa's voice was filled with melancholy, and Mally could feel a mournful mood settling over them both. The words had been like a kind of spell, but the ending had shocked her. It was like drinking a cup of coffee in one gulp before you realised that the milk was bad - the pleasant expectation had been rudely destroyed.
"Why wouldn't you let them make it out of the desert?" She complained.
"I don't know. That's not the way the story goes."
"It's your story! You get to pick how it goes."
Issa shrugged.
"You'd be surprised," she said.

Patrol

2009-05-19T22:36:00.001+09:30

It began on a train, going through a tunnel.
In the darkness, his eyes glowed and I looked away. I didn't want him to think I'd noticed. As the darkness continued he stood, feeling bold, and staggered over to where I stood.
"Hey, Red," he hissed. His voice was sharp and cold, reptilian. "Travelling alone? That's dangerous."
I glared at him, silently, warning him to back away. Unless he misbehaved I would not be able to do a thing, no matter how loathsome his presence was.
"Cat got your tongue?" He teased, clearly no good at reading signals.
"I don't talk to strangers," I replied sharply, pointedly.
The man laughed, wrapping oddly sinuous arms around the pole beside me.
"Let's not be strangers, then," he offered. "My name's Herring."
"Ah," I said. "I thought I smelled something fishy."
He laughed again, but there was an edge to the sound. Normally the girl he spoke to would be hopelessly charmed by now.
"I'm sorry," I amended, putting on a falsely bright voice. "Wow, Herring? What an unusual name! My name's Charlotte."
"Is it?"
"No."
The train swayed around a corner. He pretended to stumble, and pretended that it was an accident when his hand rested on my shoulder.
"You're very unusual," he said huskily.
"Yes," I agreed, slowly taking the knife from my pocket. "I am."
The blade pressed coldly against his clammy skin, digging into the soft hollow where neck and shoulder met.
"I haven't broken any rules," he said, speaking more quickly than before in his sudden fear.
"You attempted a charm influence on an unsuspecting innocent," I snapped. "I felt your clumsy attempts at forced chemistry, so you can't deny it."
He whimpered as the train jolted and the knife drew a drop of blood.
"You aren't going to report me, though?" The question was almost pleading. "Think of all the paperwork."
"I like paperwork," I said, grinning. He groaned.
"I'm on three strikes. Even this minor will be it for me. I got a family to provide for!"
"No you don't. You vipers never stick with any woman long enough to have a family."
Maybe I spoke a little sharply - he heard some vulnerability and pounced on it.
"We can't help the way we are. It's our nature to be dissatisfied." He leered. "Besides, what can a man do but leave a woman if she can't hold his attention?"
Perhaps it was a little rash of me to dig the blade into his neck, but his deliberate needling was more than I could stomach after a long day working at a thankless job. As soon as the knife deliberately broke his skin he pulled himself away, holding the tiny wound with one hand and glaring at me from across the car.
"That's officer brutality," he said.
His blood bubbled on the bare steel - I wiped it quickly onto the cover of a nearby seat.
"More paperwork," I shrugged. "Maybe a light reprimand. It was worth it."

Starts With An Earthquake...

2009-04-21T23:20:00.001+09:30

"Well, lads."
Everybody fell silent when the Captain spoke. We'd been expecting him ever since we were summoned into the hall. In loose ranks we waited, shoulders pressed against those of our neighbours, feet shuffling with an anxiety that we all felt but could not name.
"Well," he began again, trying out a joke to lighten the mood. "It's the end of the world as we know it."
Nobody laughed. The song, though, of course, began running through my mind.
"Good news is we get to knock off ealy tonight."
Still no laughter - if anything, we were all frowning now. His news must be big if it was this hard to say.
"Look, it's been confirmed. Tonight's it. We can't pin it down, but tonight something so drastic happens that the future... The future is chaos. That's it. No civilisation, no order... no society, no art, no history or literature or movies made for tv..."
He paused, but did not look away. I admired him for that, for all I'd hated him most of my life.
"I don't know what the future will hold for us. We might not even be alive to see it. But if we are I expect you all here at the usual time, with your bravest faces on. Now go home. Skip dinner and go straight to dessert. Let the kids stay up watching cartoons. Crack open every bottle you've ever thought to save for a special occasion - there won't be any more of those."
His voice softened while his eyes hardened.
"Make love to your wife like you haven't since your wedding night. Call up old friends and say just how much you miss them. Tell everyone you love that you always will."
He turned away from us now.
"You are dismissed," he said. His words echoed somehow in the densely packed room.
For a moment nobody moved, and then one by one my colleagues filed out. I watched as, thinking himself alone, the Captain removed his tie and let it drop to the ground. Undoing the top button of his shirt he dragged a chair over to the window and collapsed into it.
"Get going, Richard," he called and I jumped. I'd thought he hadn't noticed me. "You've got a family to get home to."
I looked at him for a second, a weary silhouette of a man, outlined by a glorious sunset.
"Want company?" I offered, loosening my own tie.
"Not particularly."
It was almost like the clouds were burning, as if the catastrophe had already begun.
"Okay," I said, letting my hand rest on his shoulder for a moment. "See you tomorrow, Dad."

Ammy Emberling - Birth

2009-04-19T01:20:00.000+09:30

Ammy remained still and tried to ignore the woodsmoke that was beginning to surround her. She needed to concentrate, or she would never manage this. She had never controlled her magic, but she would need to today. She had to do something to escape.
Slowly, Ammy reached towards her magic, but it remained at the edge of her reach, jittering, taunting her. She managed to snatch a thread as the first flames licked at her feet. A gasp of pain slipped through her lips - the crowd cheered - and she jammed them shut. The magic slipped away as soon as she stopped concentrating on it.
The fire built fast, and the pain of burning alive gave her the desparate strength she needed - with a mental lunge she grabbed hold of her magic. It roared within her, dangerously powerful, and as it surrounded her mind she almost lost herself within it. But the fire drew her back. Ammy drew in a deep breath.
The magic breathed with her, and made her keep going even when her lungs were bursting. The fire was sucked up, and rushed into her, until only a crackling pile of half-burnt wood surrounded her. The fire inside heated her skin, burning away both the restraining ropes and the rouch sacking dress. The ashes clung to her sweaty skin as she stumbled toward the crowd.
Someone tried to grab her but immediately jumped back, crying out as they nursed burnt fingers. Ammy ignored them all as she began to run, just as she ignored the pain in her legs, because all she could feel was the raging, burning fire.
It had burned away her voice on the way in, and so she was silent, but on the inside she screamed and screamed.

Intimidation Tactics

2009-03-28T02:46:00.001+10:30

"Afraid of a woman?" He scoffed, "And one not even pretending to be armed? No, I'm not afraid. The one who should be afraid is you, mother-to-be."
Amry smiled secretively, but Selyn was angry. A low rumbling sound filled the air - she was growling. Amry put a hand on her arm in warning but was shrugged off.
"Let me teach this rodent a lesson," Selyn asked. "I'm itching to stretch my claws."
Amry was about to refuse when she saw the contempt in the man's sneer.
"Now don't you mind what your nurse-maid said," he taunted. "You're a big enough girl-"
Amry's nod was barely perceptible, but Selyn was waiting for it. Bone and cartilige crunched as a bear's paw slammed into them - even on a human arm it was frighteningly powerful and Selyn's animal snarl left him cowering. Almost immediately the paw lengthened, grew catlike, with long and vicious claws. The man whimpered.
"That's enough, Sel," Amry cautioned. Blood was gushing from his nose and pooling on the floor between them. "It isn't fair to lay hurt on someone weaker than you."
"Weaker?" The man spat blood as he spoke, "I ain't weaker'n no woman! She's a damn witch."
"Druid," Selyn corrected coldly.
"Ain't never seen a druid beat on nobody before," he insisted. "They're peaceful folk, druids. I don't believe you are one."
Selyn snarled again under her breath. She didn't speak again until they were well out of town.
"He was right, you know," she said suddenly, glancing over her shoulder. Amry shook her head.
"He was hurt, body and pride. You can't take any notice of what people say when they're hurting."
The cart jolted and she winced - Selyn cringed.
"Please, Amry," she begged. "Can't we take a room somewhere, just until the child is born? Every rut in this gods-cursed road could be the one that -"
"Enough," Amry interrupted. "I'm not afraid of that. There's healer magic in this body, and in the baby too. She'll take a little bumping around, and forgive us both for any discomfort in the process. This is important."
"We're not in such a rush to be there."
"More of a rush than this child."
Amry sighed and stretched out her legs, rearranging the stack of pillows propped behind her back. They rode on in silence a while longer, but Selyn could not forget what the man had said.
"Druids don't fight," she burst out. "It's a - it's like a code. We... commune with nature, maintain the balance. We're mystics, not warriors."
"And why is the first form they teach you that of a bear?"
"Well, so we can defend -"
"Ah. I see," Amry interrupted.
" - ourselves," Selyn finished. "And the grove, if it is under threat. But that's different to being a warrior."
"Come on, Sel," Amry argued. "You've seen the tapestries, and the mosaics. The painted urns. The mile-long mural on the Lycian Temple! Do you call our ancestors liars, or do you believe a bear would just fight at a warrior's side? That the trees littering a battlefield just happen to be mysteriously human-shaped?" The scorn in her voice stung. "The druids have long been a powerful ally to all they stood beside. Whether or not we agree with the side they chose."
Selyn hated to think of those druids who were corrupted by the power they drew from the earth. It was like admitting that your brother was a murderer. Selyn knew Amry had mentioned them deliberately.
"I took an oath of peace!" She said, frustrated tears pricking at her eyes. "I swore, and every violent act I commit is an act against my kin."
"Do not talk to me about kin," Amry snapped. "Kin do not leave a young woman to be starved, beaten, and bled half to death in a sultan's pleasure-house, peace-oath or not."
Selyn did not reply. She wanted to defend her family's actions, to explain that nothing short of an attack would have released her from the sultan's hold, and that such an attack would have ruined the druids' reputation. Claiming to be a druid would damage that image too, she realised, as long as she was going to be acting against their code.
"I'm not a druid any longer," she whispered, half hoping Amry would hear her. "Just a masterless shapeshifter."
"You would claim to be a renegade?"
So Amry had heard her.
"The druid forms are easily recognised in even remote villages. Few 'shifters dare to use them."
Of course that was true, Selyn thought sadly. She could never be a bear again, or a spotted, long-fanged cat. For the first time she was glad that she had not been tree-hearted. The healer-druids used this tree form to draw power from the earth. Their flesh turned to wood, and their toes to roots that sought down, deep into the earth's power. She had heard that it was the most dangerous form, impossible to give up. Some of the realm's greatest healers lived on yet in legend, and in the rumour that they were merely sleeping in their tree shape, drinking in the earth's magic.
"Well," Selyn replied firmly, trying to sound confident. "Then I suppose it is time for me to learn a new shape."
Amry seemed unaware of the significance of this decision - a clink of coins told Selyn that she was counting their money again. It did not take long.
"We couldn't stay anywhere even if we wanted to," she sighed. "Pretty soon we're gonna have to hunt for our dinners. Or perform. I heard you leanred some tricks during your schooling?"
"Yes, like making people who irritate me, disappear," Selyn growled.
"You know what I mean. Sleight of hand."
"They told us it was good for discipline," she said. "And a way to make at least a scanty living in the unfriendly cities. You don't need to speak the language if you're charming enough."
"Or intimidating enough," Amry muttered.

Zombie Cop, P.I.

2009-03-14T18:30:00.001+10:30

The office was dimly lit. A fan wobbled lazily overhead, and a wreath of smoke had gathered like a private smog beneath the hat-brim of the man lounging behind the desk.
Lucille Appleby knocked daintily before she entered, pausing in the doorway and throwing a truly dramatic silhouette.
"I'm looking for Zombie Cop," she drawled. "They tell me he's a man who - gets results."
The seated figure stirred only a little, turning to look at her. His eyes seemed to glow in the smoky shadows, almost as brightly as the end of his cigarette.
"Are you the man?" She asked, when he made no response.
On the wall, a clock ticked noisily; sounds of traffic filtered sluggishly in through the windows. Finally, he opened his mouth.
"Unnnnnh," Zombie Cop groaned, slowly creaking to his feet. The movement cleared the smoke and she saw a face that was long-nosed, strong-jawed, and slightly grey. Oddly empty eyes stared at her from beneath thick, mysterious eyebrows. A little tendril of smoke wove into the air through a slightly ragged hole in his cheek. Lucy smiled and held out her hand - he stared at her, making no move to shake it. Finally she shrugged, and dug into her purse for a cigarette of her own.
"Got a light?"

Carnival

2009-03-13T20:42:00.001+10:30

Brightly coloured balloons made a bobbing cloud above her head, the best bait for the kind of snack she preferred on such a dreary afternoon. Mostly the children clung to their parents' hands, but some were bolder and ran over to her alone. Smiling cheerfully she would offer them their pick of the bunch, and then she would crouch down to their height, enveloping them both in a fractured, bouncing rainbow.
"What do you want to be when you grow up?" She asked them, and they always wanted to be a ballerina or a fireman or an astronaut. She would lean over and kiss them, on the forehead between their eyes, and in the silent exchange that followed she was rejuvenated.
"And now what do you want to be when you grow up?"
"When you grow up?" They would repeat dully, staring at her without comprehension. Laughing, she would straighten up and hand them a second balloon with a wink. She only laughed harder as they wandered away, bewilderment plain on their pretty faces.
They always looked beautiful to her.

Glósóli

2009-03-10T01:39:00.004+10:30

I couldn't help but stare as the robe slid down her arms and puddled at her feet. Her skin, where it was not touched by sun, was even paler than the rest of her - parchment-pale, almost transparent, particularly where the lamplight gave it a ghostly illumination.
I held back, even took a step away form her, intimidated by the porcelain shimmer of her flesh. How could I think of touching her, when it seemed she would break if I even looked too hard? She smiled, reading my thoughts from the stricken look on my face.
"I am not so very fragile," she whispered, walking softly over to me. She put her hands on my shoulders and pushed. Surprised by her strength I stumbled backwards and tripped - without hesitating her hand snapped out, snagging the front of my shirt and hauling me back onto my feet. I turned my gaze away quickly, disturbed by the fluid grace of her naked limbs. I had seen girls unclothed before, in my home village before I began my apprenticeship and then in the city when my master's status took us frequently into society. Those girls had been different, though. They had been more rounded than she was, and though the colour of their skin had ranged from dark to light none had had such a pallor as hers...
"Do you want to know my secret?" She asked, standing so close to me that I could smell her hair. Peaches and apples, and cinnamon. That, and the warmth of her, made me hungry in a way I hadn't felt before, not with any of the other girls. "It is why you're here, after all."
I nodded, trying to appear unaffected by her proximity.
"Watch," she commanded, not that I could keep my eyes away from her. I was afraid and excited at the same time when she moved, because with skin so frail, how did her bones not slice right through? She led me to a low table where a white cloth was spread. It was not as white as her skin.
"Don't say anything," she warned, as she took the comb from her hair, and unfolded its edges into a knife. I watched in a kind of horror as she drew the blade across her fingertips, and as some kind of black liquid that was not blood welled up from the wounds. Silently she dragged her fingers along the cloth, leaving long, black smears. After a moment the liquid quivered, and when I leaned closer I realised that it had formed into shapes.
"... 'fearfully, we have lingered in the valley'..." I read, translating roughly from a language so old that I had not seen it anywhere outside of my master's library. She looked at me with a shrewd interest, as I concentrated on the second and third lines. "... 'when rain clouds threatened a flood' ... 'because we knew nowhere else to go'..."
"I am glad I chose you," she said finally. "I was wondering what I was writing. It's hard to tell sometimes but I believe I have been writing in that language for some weeks now."
I frowned.
"You wrote something you could not read?" That seemed to be what she was telling me, even though it could not be possible. I forgot that she was naked, and beautiful, and bleeding ink, because all that I could focus on was the extraordinary, the impossible truth. "This language has not been spoken aloud in centuries, outside of scholars' rooms at least. I am one of only four people alive who can read it, and two who can speak it with any fluency."
"Perhaps it would be more correct to say that - the words were written through me, rather than by me," she amended, squeezing her fingertips so that three drops of ink-blood splattered onto the cloth - after a moment's shivering they, too, were words.
" - and nothing else to be besides ourselves."
"How poetic," she smiled, "don't you like it?"
"I don't understand."
She shrugged.
"What is there to understand?" She leaned toward me, whispered in a conspiratorial way: "It's magic."
I looked again at her paper-thin skin, and, now that I knew what to expect, the too-dark web of her veins. Yes, I could believe in magic.

Public Transport Sucks

2009-03-09T22:15:00.000+10:30

I met him on a crowded bus. It was raining and my nose wrinkled at the wet-person smell that came from every side. The heat of so many bodies pressed together made me feel stupid to be wearing a coat, even though it was cold enough outside to instantly freeze this communal sweat in a horrible icy slick all along my back -
"Sorry," someone muttered when the bus shuddered to a halt, half-knocking several people over. I nodded and muttered acceptance, clutching my bag closer with one hand and with the other grabbing a seat-back. The boy sitting there turned around, even though I hadn't touched him, and stared at me with wide eyes.
"Did you feel that?" He asked. I shook my head and looked away, hoping that if I avoided any further eye contact he would forget about me and I could go back into the mindless state that allowed me to mentally survive the commute.
"Are you sure?" He insisted, reaching back to touch my hand. It was very warm; I jerked back instinctively, and he smiled at my reaction before continuing, almost to himself. "Yes, I thought so."
I carefully turned around so that I could hold onto a seat on the other side of the bus. I knew it was dangerous to move much while the bus was in motion - not to mention rude - but running into odd people was always a possibility when it came to public transport and I'd learned a long time ago that it was easier if you could ignore them. And besides, my hand still felt a little tingly and that in itself was enough to freak me out. This guy, however, refused to be ignored.
"I know you felt it," he hissed, standing and leaning over so that, even at such close quarters, nobody else would be able to hear him over the engine's roar. I shook my head and glared at him, hoping that he would take a hint even though I'd never been good at meaningful looks. He still stood, as if waiting for a response.
"Sit down," I muttered, "Or give someone your seat. You're being rude."
I looked around, expecting to have every set of eyes riveted on the two of us and every ear bent firmly upon our conversation. Nobody was paying any attention at all.

Drowning on Dry Land

2009-02-24T23:12:00.001+10:30

Was it that the world had gone into slow motion, to make her hair fan out so lazily around her face? Or had we been submerged in water without noticing it? That sounded right, because I couldn't breathe at all. She looked at me with the same gape-mouthed shock and I knew she felt it too, that we were drowning, here on this too-dry street. Dusty strangers brushed past us, heading toward home or a bar or the long and elegant neck of the night's bottle. We didn't notice them at all.

Into Squid City (did I use Emily already for this?!)

2009-02-24T12:46:00.000+10:30

"Why do you always shut me out?!" Jacob shouted.
Emily leaned her back against the door, feeling it shake beneath his pounding fists. He did not mean it literally of course but she did that too, when his words became too painful and she couldn't stand to see his scowling face a minute longer. In a way it would have been easier if the physical side of it was all there was but of course the pain was emotional too. She shut him out of her heart because he wreaked too much havoc there.
"Emily, open the door!"
"Leave me alone, Jacob!" She shouted back, slamming the lock across and retreating across the room. He continued to shout and she covered her ears with her hands, wishing he would just go away.
"This is my house too!" He continued. "You can't do this!"
The more he hammered on the door the more afraid she got. Jacob's voice echoed in her mind until she felt like she was going to go insane - and when she heard wood splintering she almost screamed.
When Emily had been little and her father was drunk and angry, her mother had taught her to hide. Those instincts kicked in now and without thinking she crawled underneath the bed. The dusty darkness smelled like her childhood and remembered terror overwhelmed her. Crying silently Emily shuffled in further until her face was pressed up against the wall.
"I'm going to break this fucking door down!" Her father shouted with Jacob's voice. The wood creaked and Emily scrabbled blindly at the wood as if she could open a hole in it and escape.
And then, just as the door gave and Jacob stormed into the room, the wall opened like a door before her and, without hesitating for a second, she crawled through.
She could hear Jacob raging as he tore the room apart but she had kicked the wall closed behind her and the darkness that closed in around her eyes seemed to muffle the sound too. After a few seconds she couldn't hear a thing except her own panting breath and the scrape of her limbs against whatever she was crawling along - and then the darkness began to ease, and there was a glow of light from ahead of her. She knew she hadn't headed downwards so that meant she was about to come face to face with clear air several stories above the street. There was nowhere to go.
With a howl of despair she threw herself forward again, because if he was going to come after her then she'd be damned if she was going to let him catch her. Then, without warning, the light was not in front of her but underneath her sweaty palms and the vent gave way. Her heart flew up into her mouth as she fell and then before she could scream she had landed on soft green grass, and above her the sky was a crisp blue chased with threads of cloud.
Bewildered Emily struggled to her feet, leaning against the tree that she had, impossibly, fallen out of. It was big and ancient-looking, and almost every inch of it was covered with door and windows and hatches of every imaginable kind. For a momen Emily thought that she must be dead, but death couldn't hurt as much as she did now - she was a bruise from head to foot. There was only one alternative.
"I've snapped," Emily whispered, brushing dust and grass from her clothing. "I've gone insane."
Tiny daisies nodded in the sunshine and, at the bottom of a short slope, the ocean gently lapped against the tree's little island. The water was clearer than any she'd ever seen, and beyond it a shining stone city rose up like some kind of miracle. When she compared this bright and warm place to the cold, gray world she had left behind Emily knew that it couldn't be true.
With a smile she sat down and then lay back, letting the sunshine dry the tears from her cheeks. She knew it couldn't be true, but she also knew she didn't want to leave.

A New Ribbon

2009-02-19T21:08:00.001+10:30

For almost three weeks she avoided further contact with Tobias Gorse, because it was easier than dealing with the confusion she felt when she thought of him. There was no way she could admit that she had felt exactly what he had described - familiarity where none could possibly exist. Instead she dismissed the encounter and after a time she could easily pretend it had been a dream. Perhaps she really had been ill with exertion, and the conversation had been some kind of fevered hallucination. Perhaps.
She came across him by accident on the eve of midsummer, as she wandered in the woods behind her home. The book she'd been absently reading as she walked dropped from her hand in surprise when she saw his naked chest bending over a water barrel. For just a moment she hesitated to watch him splash his face and then he had seen her, and it was too late to flee.
'Good morning,' she called politely, kneeling to pick up her book and examine the damage done. He hurried over, drying his face absently on his shirt, and offered her a hand as she rose to her feet. Eleanor raised an eyebrow.
'I do not believe it is considered appropriate to hold hands with a man who is - only semi-clad,' she suggested, forcing herself to look into his eyes and not the broad expanse of his chest. In the brief glimpse she had gotten, it was clear to see that his flesh was sun-browned, not a thing she would expect from anybody with such a reputable name.
'Among strangers, perhaps not,' he conceded. 'And yet, I do not feel uncomfortable at all.'
Eleanor shook her head and turned slightly away, pretending to be absorbed in a bent page. With a little sigh Tobias slipped his shirt over his head, and then she looked at him again.
'I apologise for disturbing you,' she said. 'I was not aware that you lived so near by.'
That was only partially true - she had been aware that the Gorse manor was in this direction, though she had not consciously searched for it. Tobias saw some hint of this in her eyes and smiled.
'Eleanor,' he began, but she interrupted him.
'Miss Aberfeld, please,' she said coldly. He bowed a little from the waist.
'Miss Aberfeld,' he began again, reaching into his pocket and holding his hand out closed tight. 'I have a gift for you, if you would accept one from me.'
Eleanor pursed her lips. Her father would not approve. His waved his hand a little, as if he wasn't sure she'd seen it. When she shook her head, however, his face fell. A moment later the look was gone but Eleanor had seen genuine hurt there. This confused her more than anything and she found herself shrugging in a very unladylike manner. He smiled. It made her feel reckless.
'Perhaps my father would not like me to accept,' she said, 'But he needn't know.'
She closed the book with a snap before tucking it into the deep pocket in her skirt and holding out her hands beneath his.
'Do I need to close my eyes?' She said, and didn't even blush. What was it about this man?
'If you like,' Tobias replied. Eleanor spent almost an entire minute thinking before she smiled, and closed her eyes, and waited. Finally she felt his hands on hers, not to pass something over but to hold them and draw them closer to him as he leaned in and kissed her.

Eleanor stood rigid with shock, eyes still tightly closed. Tobias had withdrawn very quickly but still their lips had met, and this was what had frozen her. Not that he had done it - though her father would consider that offense enough! - but that, when he had, she had not minded at all. That it had felt like the most natural thing in the world.
'Forgive me, Miss Aberfeld,' Tobias said from somewhere not so close by.
'Of course,' Eleanor replied breathlessly, not wanting to open her eyes. It would be improper to lick her lips now but she could still half-taste him on her breath. Slowly she turned to face away from where Tobias had stood and only then did she open her eyes. The sunlit woods stared back at her without accusation.
Her hands were clasped tightly together as he had held them, and she looked down to see a length of ribbon tucked between them, the same colour as her Sunday hat. With a smile she turned to thank Tobias, but he was gone.

At First Sight

2009-02-18T04:52:00.001+10:30

When Eleanor first saw him, she knew. That he was different, that he was special. That he was the one for her. It wasn't as simple as love at first sight, because it wasn't possible for her to love someone she'd never met. It was a gut instinct that told her that it would be love, whether either of them liked it.
And then, when they met - properly, as a young woman should meet a man, introduced by her father as she walked with him on their way to the market.
'This is Master Tobias Gorse,' her father said. 'He came recently to town on a matter of business. I hear that his connections are quite extraordinary.'
Eleanor nodded and smiled politely, but when he kissed her hand she felt as though a lightning bolt had struck her straight in the heart. She hoped her father would attribute her sudden blush to the warmth of exercise. Tobias gave her a smile that suggested he knew otherwise, which only made things worse.
'A pleasure,' she murmured, pleased by how evenly her voice came out. And with just the right mix of formal civility. Her manners had always been impeccable, and it was reassuring to know that she could rely on at least these instincts in a moment of stress.
'The pleasure is entirely mine,' Tobias replied. Her father smiled in approval at the exchange. 'And truly sir, you do me too much credit. I am the son of an old family with old friends, none of which I can claim as any personal success.'
'Good breeding is always a personal success,' her father interrupted jovially. Eleanor turned her head to hide a smile - Tobias still saw it. She blushed harder.
'Are you quite alright, Miss Aberfeld?' He prompted, glancing up at the sun as if to guage its heat. 'I do believe you look a little flushed. Perhaps you should rest a moment in the shade.'
'Oh, we really must be going on,' she replied quickly. The only faintness she felt was caused by the odd intensity of his eyes. She looked away before she could be drawn in. 'It is market day after all, and I was hoping to purchase a - a new ribbon for my Sunday hat.'
'No no, dear,' her father insisted. 'Give me a moment to send for a carriage. We shall attend the market next time - I am sure your hat looks quite alright as it is. Master Gorse, I do hate to impose, but I shall only be away for a moment...'
Tobias smiled again, looking terribly trustworthy.
'There is no imposition, sir,' he said. 'I would be ashamed to leave a young woman alone in a moment of distress. If you would consent, I should be honoured to remain by her side until a more suitable method of transportation can be secured.'
Eleanor hoped that she looked grateful as this relative stranger took her arm and led her to where a wide-branched tree overshadowed a low wall. Her father, as ever far too willing to trust a family name, rushed off the way they had come. Eleaner waited until he was out of sight before she pulled her arm free.
'I do not need to be fussed over,' she said. The man just smiled some more. 'And it is hardly appropriate of my father to leave me in the care of a perfect stranger. I wish he would show a little more decorum.'
Tobias laughed now, throwing back his head and letting the sound wash around them. Eleanor felt her blush deepen, a thing she had thought impossible until that very moment. He leaned against the tree trunk, looking at her with the oddest expression.

'I do believe we know each other, Miss Aberfeld,' he said finally. 'Do not shake your head - of course we have never met. But tell me, when you look into my eyes. Do I truly seem to be a stranger?'
'Master Gorse,' she protested quietly. 'I do not feel this is an appropriate conversation.'
'Forgive my being forward,' he added without feeling, 'but please, answer me this. Look at me once more. Say truthfully that you do not recognise something in me and I will never speak of this again.'
Eleanor's heart beast nervously fast but she shook her head.
'I cannot imagine what you mean,' she said. The lies burned her tongue but she made herself say them. It was easier than admitting to something so ridiculous. 'I am sorry, sir, but I must ask you to desist.'
His frown was sudden and bewildered - he had not been prepared for her denial. His expression was almost comical and she ducked her head to hide her smile. There was no need to act with compliant obedience as he expected.
'My apologies,' Tobias said briskly. Eleanor glanced up through her lashes, and saw hurt on his face. He hid it quickly, but it had most certainly been there. 'I have behaved improperly. Allow me to assure you that it will not happen again.'
'You are completely forgiven,' she said lightly, drawing a fan from her purse and half-hiding behind it as she watched him withdraw. He continued to make polite conversation - about the weather, and the market, and the colour of her Sunday hat. She answered him equally, with the same distant disinterest. Her father returned quickly, carriage rattling on the road's pitted surface.
'I do hope you are feeling well again soon,' Tobias Gorse said, as he handed her up into the carriage. Eleanor wished that it were not too warm to wear gloves. She would have liked to avoid the little jolt that his touch gave - immediately her face was red again.
'Thank you,' she replied softly, turning to look through the window on the carriage's other side. Her father did not see that anything was amiss, and chatted amiably for a minute before Tobias politely reminded him of his daughter's condition.
'Indeed!' Rupert Aberfeld clapped his new acquaintance's shoulder, thanked him once more, and then signalled the driver to move on. The lane widened enough that they could turn around - suddenly Tobias was visible through Eleanor's window, and his eyes bored into hers, filled with accusation. A little guilt blossomed in her stomach but she set it aside, turning her attention to her father's idle chatter and at least pretending to put Tobias Gorse from her mind.

This Isn't A Story...

2008-10-30T19:54:00.006+10:30

... but if you see me over here posting one then you had better kick my ass back over to http://qom-nanowrimo.blogspot.com/ where I'm meant to be, crunching out my 50,000 NaNoWriMo novel...
Not sure if I have that many words in me, let alone to be cranked out in just 30 days, but I'm giving it a go and I'm sure that earns me some points.
You are of course under no obligation to go and read it all, but feel free to drop by and give me a bit of encouragement. It's going to be a LONG month.

Furnace - Part I, Awakening

2008-10-23T20:54:00.000+10:30

The room was cold and dirty - breathing in meant inhaling the dust, and the racking coughs that ensued billowed whitely from his mouth. The floor and the wall he was propped up against were chilly enough that he was almost paralysed with shivering. A dull globe sat at the ceiling's approximate centre and gave off a fitful glow, enough for Peter to truly appreciate the bleakness of his situation. He could observe the room's features, and though darkness would have allowed him a kind of naive hope, being able to see at least let him be rational.

It was in fact a very typical kind of cell: bare walls, flickering light, a distressingly solid door. And himself, shaking so hard that his bones rattled, attached to this grim tableau by a predictably rusted chain. He recognised everything. Not through his own experience, but through his countless vicarious kidnaps, escapes and murders. A lifetime of horror films had taught him what to expect, though he had never thought the day would dawn in which those particular skills of survival would be called upon.

The day, however, had obviously arrived, and Peter was certainly not going to fail.

As he surveyed the room more closely, he felt a twinge of fear. Whoever had captured him had clearly done a reasonable job - the room was very deliberatel bare, and his pockets had been emptied. The search had not been thorough enough, though. They had found neither the pocket knife in his sock nor the crude set of lockpicks sewn into his jacket's lining.
That was their first mistake, he thought grimly. Their second was not killing him whilst they had the chance.

Peter allowed himself a final moment of doubt before he steeled himself completely. If this turned out to be some kind of misunderstanding he would be appropriately embarrassed. Until then, however, he would proceed with the kind of aggressive caution that was necessary in such situations. It was difficult to take off his jacket with cold-numbed hands and even more difficult to tear open the hem where the picks were contained. He doubted he'd manage to salvage the garment for use in public, but right now he was too cold to be concerned with fashion.

She Sells Seashells...

2008-10-16T23:28:00.001+10:30

We were calm at first, like we didn't really believe what was going on. We'd never seen any of these mysterious enemies they kept warning us about, and what did we know about war anyway? We were just kids.
They put us in an outpost on the quiet side of the county, where they didn't expect any action.
Tricky tides and rocks and sandbars meant low chances of attack from the sea, or so they told us, and the outpost's flank was toward the city itself. They gave us guns and knives and told us to keep our eyes open, and we were as alert as a group of bored teenagers could be. For a while it was easy. All of us liked being paid to sit around doing nothing. We played countless rounds of cards, used the seemingly endless stores of ammunition in target practise with the local gulls, learned French and German from discarded phrasebooks.
"Il y a une alerte a` la bombe, there is a bomb alert." we would say and laugh uproariously. "How are you? Wie geht es Ihnen?"
Everything was funny in the early days, before the war reached our outpost. The whole thing seemed completely absurd, that we who had only days before been skipping school and work were now to be soldiers against an enemy nobody really believed in.

There was a tiny stretch of sand, sheltered on three sides by seemingly sheer cliffs and on the fourth side open to the sea. The sand was white and soft, with just the right amount of pebbles and seashells scattered around. On sunny days we would go down there - never more than two of us, though. They had impressed severely upon us the dangers of leaving the outpost unmanned.
My favourite person to take there was Sarah. She was quiet around the others but when we were alone the words spilled out of her as if she couldn't help herself. It was nice to listen to her soft voice, complemented by the waves that washed around our toes and underscored with the harsh cries of the gulls. One day she was telling me about her family when the birds arrived, hopping around us and cawing loudly, expecting food.
Sarah was furious - I guess we all had short tempers by this time. We were getting cabin fever, closed up in that little building where the only thing to do was wait and wonder if the war was ever going to come our way. She jumped to hear feet, lifted her gun, and shot them all. The stupid birds didn't even fly away when she started shooting, just cawed and flapped and dropped one by one onto the sand. And then they were all dead, and she sat down hard beside me and started crying. The white sand was stained red in a great circle around us, and dotted with sad little bundles of feathers. We didn't know what to do with them so we just left, and overnight the tide rose up, and when we came back the next day the sand was perfectly white and soft and scattered with just the right number of seashells and pebbles.

It was Clare who saw them first; she was on sentry duty that day, sitting on the roof and staring out to sea. She shouted and we ran to join her, scrambling up the ladder and across the slippery tiles.
"Over there," she pointed, translating automatically into German, "Dort!"
We crouched, staring, wondering what we were seeing. There was just one ship, and how were we to know if they were locals or foreigners? But its shape was different to the boats we'd seen before, and there was an undeniable grimness in its silence that crept under our skin. A sense of self-preservation overcame us all at the same time and we dropped down onto the tiles, flattening ourselves as best we could. Had they seen us?
"Surely we're of no concern to them," Tom said, trying to sound brave. "We're just some kids playing on a roof."
"We're soldiers," I corrected. "We have to remember that, and we have to assume that they know. We can't be complacent."

Curtain Call

2008-10-13T00:55:00.001+10:30

The phone rang while I was working and I was tempted to ignore it, annoyed that it had interrupted my concentration.
“Hello?” I said, a little shortly. The person on the other end was silent and I thought they might be a prank caller. “Listen, punk, I’ve had enough of –“
“Rach?” My sister’s voice was quieter than usual. She sounded tired.
“You sound tired,” I said. She sighed.
“I am.” She paused and sighed again. I imagined her standing by the window, staring down at the park across the street. She never went there, but she liked to watch the children playing. She said they made her feel young.
“Want to talk?” I put down my pen and filled the kettle. She’d only called like this a few times before, and it always meant she was upset about something. I put on my most patient voice. “What’s up Sarah? It better not be Troy, if he’s done something stupid again -”
“It’s not Troy.”
The last time she’d called was when she’d caught her boyfriend, Troy, cheating on her. Since then we’d all tried to convince her to end the relationship, but she still insisted that they were in love and that he was a changed man. They could be together for fifty years and die holding hands in their sleep, and I’d still never believe that.
“I’m just in a bit of a mood. Do you want to go shopping? There’s that nice shop that opened up just around the corner from here.” She was trying to sound more cheerful than she felt, that much was obvious. “And you really should get some new curtains or cushions or something, Rachel. Your living room is so tacky.”
“Tacky? Just because it doesn’t look like a page out of a homemaker’s magazine doesn’t mean it’s tacky!” Just like that I felt like we were kids again, arguing over whose turn it was to wash dishes, or who had lost whose hairbrush, or why there was glitter all over the bedroom.
“I hate bringing people over there,” she said. I couldn’t see her but I knew she shrugged.
“Then don’t bring people!”
“Rach, you’re practically famous. If I don’t bring people over, then how will they know I’m related to you? Would it kill you to pretend to be normal in just one room of the house?”
I caught myself before I said anything harsh.
“Don’t change the subject,” I said. She laughed.
“Your house is tacky and you are weird. I don’t know why it upsets you so much when I bring it up.” She laughed a bit more and then she sighed again. “It’s good to hear your voice, little sister.”
“It’s good to hear you laugh, big sister.”
We were silent for a few minutes. The kettle boiled and I made myself a cup of tea, wedging the phone between my ear and my shoulder in case she spoke.
“It was Troy, wasn’t it?”
For a few seconds she didn’t answer but I already knew what she was going to say.
“With his hairdresser. Apparently she was just too exciting to ignore. Kinky, and stuff.” Her voice was strained – she was trying not to cry. The urge to say ‘I told you so’ was almost a physical need, but I knew that I shouldn’t say anything. She felt bad enough right now without me adding to that. It was time to be diplomatic.
“I wish I hadn’t seen it coming, Sarah, but he’s just that kind of guy.”
Damn.
“Oh,” she groaned, “I just knew you would say that! Do you think you’re so much better than me? When was the last time you even had a boyfriend?”
I bit my tongue. We’d had this argument enough times before, and no matter what I said, she’d find a way to spin it around. One of us was bound to end up in tears. She continued to rant, not bothered in the least by my lack of response.
“Do you want to stay here for a while?” I asked softly, and she stopped mid-sentence. “I have a spare room.”
“You annoy the hell out of me,” she replied. I waited.
“We’ll drive each other crazy,” she insisted. I took a sip of my tea.
“Can you pick me up? Troy’s out right now and I don’t feel like asking him to drive me over.”
I picked up the keys and jingled them near the phone.
“I’ll be there in half an hour,” I said, as I slipped on a pair of shoes. “Just know that you will help me with chores, and you will not be touching my curtains.”
“See you in half an hour,” she replied, carefully not promising a thing.

Visitors

2008-10-01T01:34:00.001+09:30

"They're coming tonight," she announced as I entered the room, not looking up from the charts spread out across her desk. There were more on her bed and on the floor too, A4 sheets she'd printed and taped together, mainly. Maps, and graphs, and calculations that I knew better than to try and make sense of.
"For real this time?" I joked. She frowned at me, eyes serious behind the glasses she wore for reading. The frames were thick, black plastic. They made her look like a real typical nerd, the kind of person people would expect to believe in aliens. When she wasn't wearing them, though, she looked almost normal.
"Yes, for real this time," she sighed, rushing to rescue the papers I had been about to sit down on. They crackled as she gathered them up. "I've worked it all out. There are reports in the paper, you know, signs. Proof."
"I thought you said the government stops the evidence from being printed."
"They do. But maybe they missed something this time. You can't be vigilant every second of every day-" She glanced nervously out the window, as if expecting them to have arrived when she wasn't watching. Without thinking about it I looked too, searching. Even though I knew better, I still secretly hoped that I would find proof one day that she was right. That she wasn't really crazy.
"I've tried to be vigilant, you know. I've worked it all out but there's no point telling anyone because nobody listens. Nobody would understand, there's no point telling anyone. Do you believe me, Sammy?" She had paused, but not for an answer, just because the words needed the time to get their point across. "I don't blame you. You have enough things to worry about without this one. Besides, they aren't going to end the whole world. Just mine."
I couldn't help but sigh, because she always talked like this. Like she was going somewhere.
"I'm going to miss you," she said, continuing to stare up into the sky.
"Good night," I replied. "See you at breakfast."

The Queen's Dog

2008-09-15T00:16:00.002+09:30

It was on a dark and stormy night that they met, in the infamously seedy Queen's Dog tavern. Both sought refuge beneath the creaking timbers, and if the air was choked with pipe smoke, or the bread was a little stale, well that was okay. They weren't there for the food or for the atmosphere.
He was totally at home at the splintered table, knocking back his ale as if it was water and leaning comfortably back against the wall. She was completely out of place, picking at her meal and constantly sneaking glances at those around her.
She had only been there only minutes before someone moved closer, undoubtedly meaning to steal from her. From her clothing down to her manners, she was a nobleman's daughter, and that meant the silk purse on her belt would be bulging with gold.
Despite her nervous surveillance the girl seemed not to notice the thief's approach. The other patrons watched with obvious interest. Three steps away and she hadn't seen him. Two steps. One. She did not so much as blink as his hand reached toward the purse -
"If you want to keep your fingers, I suggest you move on, friend," she said quietly, in a low and serious voice. The thief looked down slowly to find a knife's bare blade resting against his hand. He hadn't even seen her move.
"Begging your pardon, my lady," he muttered. "I must have stumbled."
She laughed, and even that seemed to have a dangerous edge.
"If you wish to call it so." She exerted the slightest pressure, drawing a line of crimson across his hand. "See that you mind your footing, next time."
He hurried away, mumbling. The lady's knife vanished as smoothly as it had appeared. All but one set of eyes hurriedly averted themselves - from across the room, the mercenary watched her with interest. He'd never known any noble with reflexes as good, or such a genuinely unnerving tone.
The room cleared quickly after the incident. None of the regular patrons felt like lingering to drink and though the owner looked discomfited he didn't dare to complain. Soon only the lady and the mercenary remained in their seats, he smoking thoughtfully and she frowning into the flickering hearth.

"Thirty gold pieces up front," she declared. "A negotiable amount to follow, depending on how you perform."
"In your bed?" He replied crudely, though neither of them was laughing. This was a time of testing and of gaging reactions.
"The green band on your sword declares you a second-rank hired-sword. The golden embroideries say you have worked for kings and chandlers alike. The knot claims a high charge for equally high skill."
She read the signs perfectly; he was impressed. He waited for her to continue - this was the part where the hirer was made nervous by his silence and upped their offer.
"I have known gold-bands to hire out for less," she said, clearly not intending to budge.
"I'm no coin-whore," he spat. "I take a job on its own merit, not on the size of its bounty."
One slim eyebrow raised - he had surprised her.

"I want a man killed."
Her words hung in the hazy air between them. The barman, who had been quietly cleaning tables, gulped audibly and hurried from the room.
"Which man? What is the nature of his offense?"
"Parading his integrity like a peacock's frill in the public eye, and beating his family behind bright-painted shutters."
"If that were all it takes, every man ought to be hanged for its like."
She stared at him a moment, then pushed her sleeves up above her elbows. Even in the room's dim light he could clearly see what she showed - pale, pale skin marred in its smoothness by countless welts and scars.
"Do you wish to see the rest?" She asked coolly, beginning to undo the laces at the front of her blouse.
"I have seen enough." He untied the green band and crossed the room to where she sat in three long strides. With the efficiency of much practice he fastened it around her forearm, carefully arranged so that its signs could easily be read by those who knew them. Each morning he would tie the band just so, as a sign of their continuing contract. After only a moment's hesitation she took the ribbon from her hair and tied it onto his sword in the band's place. It would remain there until she removed it as a sign of the contract's completion.

"I am Lady Saphryn of the Wild Hills," she said formally, gripping his arm as an ally and equal.
"I am Nikkuro, sellsword of the Saltcrevice Peaks," he replied, bowing his head respectfully.
The beams above them groaned in the wind and their flesh glowed in the dying firelight, and outside of the Queen's Dog the storm continued to rage.

The Bard's Bastard

2008-09-13T09:52:00.001+09:30

"Methinks the Bard's blood itself does inform your pen!" Eleanor's teacher exclaimed, as she read the prose scribbled in the margins of the page.
'I don't think so," Eleanor blushed.
"'Tis very like his form."
"What, 'the bloody corpse lay limply in his arms, and grinned'?" She quoted herself from memory.
"The wit, the form and feeling of the piece," Ms Gambol insisted. "Very like."
"If you say so." She didn't add what she was really thinking - Shakespeare is boring. I don't want to write like that. As if she could read Eleanor's mind, Ms Gambol sighed.
"Of course, most teenagers these days wouldn't consider that a compliment. Our mutual friend is not the most... accessible, of our literary ancestors."
Eleanor was torn between grinning and grimacing - Ms Gambol always spoke like that, as though they were comrades in arms, unified by their common love of language. Eleanor had never been anyone's comrade, and she had certainly never felt that words brought her closer to others. If anything, she felt alienated from her peers. How could she be friends with someone who couldn't use a semi-colon properly? How could she have respect for somebody who used language like it was a bludgeon? She didn't mean to be so superior, but there it was. Who can help the way they feel?
"It was such a pity that he never had any children," Ms Gambol continued, sighing again. "Of course a writer's talent is nothing to do with breeding, yet it would have been interesting to see... even if he had raised children, to see how they could have turned out."
"He didn't have children?"
"Not that we know of. Who can say what a man gets up to off the record -" she coughed politely. Eleanor knew what she meant. "But officially there is nothing, and it's highly unlikely that his bloodline ever carried on. It is a pity..."
Eleanor had to agree. Even though she felt just as distant from Shakespeare's works as she did from her classmates, it was a sad thought to imagine a person who lived on only through words.
But what if there had been a child, she wondered, because who could honestly say there hadn't been?

The Grid

2008-09-09T17:38:00.000+09:30

"I need your help," she whispered, glancing fearfully around as if they might be observed.
"Yes," he replied simply. "I've been watching their transmissions. They're closing in. Be calm, they have no eyes in my place yet."
"I need to get off the grid."
"How far off?"
"Well you said it yourself. They're chasing me."
"Didn't you delete your file?""
"Of course," she sighed, sinking into the empty chair next to his desk. "But they have physical data. They have memories of me. It's too late for simple solutions. I've left it too late."
She sank her head into her hands, and when she spoke next her voice was muffled.
"I need to disappear. It must be as if I never lived."
He watched her for a few moments, and when he finally spoke his answer surprised her.
"Alright. I can help you."
-
The chair creaked as her body convulsed; the machine winred up to her brain hummed as it fed. The measurements it took were relayed into a small, gun-shaped device, creating a map of her essence, of every neurological detail that made her who she was. A second device - running simultaneously with the other, because they were in a hurry - sorted through her memories, printing a list of every person she had ever met.
It was a tremendous strain on her body, perhaps even taking a few years from her life as it fed on her own vitality to speed its processors. He had to marvel at the ingenuity of this feature of his machine. He hadn't programmed it in personally, merely watched as it adapted itself during the testing phase. There was a kind of intelligence to his computers, and in communicating with the infinitely more sophisticated computer that was the human brain, it had learned.
With a mostly-clean handkerchief he wiped her mouth. Her brain was busy elsewhere, and she had forgotten to swallow the saliva that had gathered there. Racked with pain she moaned, and he awkwardly patted her arm.
"It's nearly done," he said.
The final sheet of paper fell onto the pile, and he neatened it before attaching the sheets to a clipboard.
"These glasses have an imbedded microtext reader," he explained, as he carefully disentangled her from the wires. "The names on the clipboard are in reverse chronological order."
"Alright," she said shakily, leaning a little heavily on the chair as she stood. "I have such a headache."
"It will last a few days." He handed her the glasses and clipboard. "Be sure to practise a little. It takes some getting used to."

ENGL1007 First Draft, Extended

2008-08-25T00:42:00.001+09:30

"That was not backing me up," Charlie said as they walked toward the bus stop. "What you did back there? That is not being a good wing-man."
"Maybe I'm just not a good wing-man?" Jen replied.
"That's not it and you know it," she insisted. "You know I like Sam but you told Susan that he was totally into her, which by the way is a total lie because he doesn't even look at her. What if she asks him out because you said that? What if he says yes? Why would you do that to me?"
Jen shrugged.
"Are you even listening to me?"
"It's going to rain," Jen said absently, peering up at the sky. Charlie stifled a frustrated growl.
"Jen, you always do this!" She cried. "Why are you so immature? I'd have a better friendship with a toddler. I'd have a more meaningful conversation with an ATM."
"I can be meaningful." She sounded hurt, but not for the right reason, Charlie thought.
"Not when it's important, Jen, and that is the prob-"
"I told you it'd rain!" She interrupted, holding out her hand to catch the first few drops of evidence. "Didn't I say it would rain?"
They ran to the shelter as the rain set in, and sat perhaps a little further apart than they normally would have.

"I think this is a bigger problem than you realise," Charlie said finally, with a sigh.
"Why?"
"How can we be best friends if you can't even pay attention when I'm talking to you? Let alone back me up against boyfriend-stealing bitches like Susan Macleod?"
"He isn't your boyfriend, Charlie."
"Well he should be."
A bus rattled past and they peered after it in the dying sunlight.
"That wasn't ours, was it?" Charlie asked, as ever paranoid that one day their bus would not stop for them.
"Nope, that was the Glenelg bus."
"Good. But seriously. How could you not remember that I liked him? How long have I been talking about him for, now?"
"A couple weeks."
"At least!"
"Only just. Before that it was Mark, and before him it was Sean, and Michael, and Hayden..."
Charlie glared at her.
"Are you calling me fickle?""Pretty much," Jen replied cheerfully. The rain was getting heavy - she splashed her feet in the little puddles that were growing beneath the bench.

“What about the sports carnival last week? You followed him around all day.”
“With a clipboard,” Jen added, sketching its shape out in the air.
“Yes, well, didn’t you speak to him then? About something? I.e. me?”
“No. We didn’t talk.”
Charlie felt like tearing at her hair with frustration. Was Jen being deliberately thick-headed? Another bus rattled by, sending up a fountain of spray.
“Marion Centre,” Jen said helpfully.

“If you can’t give me one good reason why not, then I honestly think I will have to go find a new best friend.”
“It’s hard to have a conversation with someone’s tongue shoved down your throat and,” she added quickly, “before you go jumping to conclusions I was not personally involved. I was referring to Sam’s throat and Henry’s tongue.”
Charlie gaped.
“Henry – as in that girl from Aberfoyle Park? Henrietta Price?”
“Nope. Henry as in Henry Thomas. The guy that cooks.”
Charlie was silent for a long time as the information sank in.
“And Susan’s going to ask him out, right?”
“God yes. She thinks she’s a sure thing.”
The silence stretched out a little more. The rain poured down. A bus stopped before them with a hiss of its brakes.
“That’s ours, Jen,” Charlie pointed out, grabbing her bag and trying to dodge the puddles between them and the roadside.
“Aren’t you going to apologise?” Jen complained as she followed her, searching her pockets for her bus ticket. Charlie looked back over her shoulder with a cheeky smile.
“After you spent the last half hour torturing me? I don’t think so. And besides, that’s what being a best friend is all about, Jen. You don’t have to say you’re sorry.”

That Was Your Bus, Frank

2008-08-21T19:23:00.001+09:30

I saw him at the station. While everybody else rushed around - between buses, checking timetables, checking their impatient watches - he simply waited. Still, calm, exuding patience. I was surprised to see such poise in someone so young - in high school still, by the uniform he wore. His bag was startlingly red on such a grey afternoon - red as virgin's blood? asked the poet-voice in my mind, red as hell's flaming waters?
He wore white shoes - white as sun-bleached skulls? - and a blue shirt - blue as the unpolluted sky! - and grey trousers - grey like winter rain and old men's whiskers,the poet suggested, grey like the falling ashes of a funeral pyre.
He hadn't looked my way yet so his eyes remained as mysterious as the untold secrets of the earth, as the epiphanies of angels. I imagined they would be deep, like the ocean's unfathomable depths.
I listened with amusement to the poet's ramblings, only half aware that they were of course my own. It was amazing, in a way, the amount of beauty that could be found in one young man. It wasn't that his looks were so extraordinary, but just the way that the colour and the light played on his stillness and - he moved suddenly, noticing me looking at him, and strode over.
"Hi," he said, flashing me a smile that caught the light and sparkled like a mouthful of stars. I could not think of a single thing to say.
"You're a symphony!" I blurted out, because the poet was never lost for words. My cheeks flushed immediately; he laughed.
"Do you have the time?"

Unspoken?

2008-08-20T20:12:00.001+09:30

"I don't believe in love," he announced, leaning back and folding his arms and obviously waiting for my response.
"Why not?" I replied, because it was my role to turn the statement into an argument.
"It's crap. It's a Hallmark holiday! It's a Hollywood cliche!"
"I am surprised that you'd say that, love used to be all you talked about. You're a poet after all, Frank."
"Maybe I used to be. But lately I don't feel like one. It's like... I am all out of fancy words. And so what if I am? Love, liberty, the beauty of the world? In the end we all die alone."
"I don't think you should give up so easily on love," I said, sadly, even though it was probably a lost cause. "Who knows who you will meet tomorrow?"
He just shook his head, dissatisfied with my logic or maybe my girly sentiment, and ordered another drink.

Say Unto Me This Proverb

2008-08-19T21:05:00.001+09:30

It was heart-breaking to witness, the deconstruction of a man. Even one as bad as this man was, who had sinned more than most people would in a dozen lifetimes. Even though the jury had deemed it appropriate and even though, outside the facility, crowds were clamouring for his blood. It was still a terrible thing, to see a human being on that table, with his skull opened and his brain hanging out, as the doctor stimulated first this nerve centre and then that one. The drug was in full swing, making the man relive each crime with painful, hyper-real clarity. The scientist - for all he liked to be called doctor, she knew that his true profession was very different - activated the man's senses and nerves and pain centres. He saw each crime through his own eyes of course, but the sensations were mapped directly from his victim's brains.

Classical music floated around the room as the operation continued, because he fancied himself a conductor, or some kind of artist.
Art! It was torture. For the criminal on the table, yes, but also for the nurse who must watch it all, ready at any moment to assist. For the nurse who was carrying a secret beneath her dull eyes, a secret that was hot and heavy in her pocket.
"Have you no compassion?" She asked in a dead whisper. He glanced at her briefly, without comprehension.
"Of course."
"For the victims," she supplied, "What about your victims?"

"I am not a criminal," he replied with absolute conviction. "I'm only doing my job."
He still had not stopped working. The criminal's mouth gaped in a silent scream. His eyes writhed - it was all the movement he had left. They had disabled everything else so that he could not possibly escape.
"You are a sinner also," she said softly, dangerously. Her hand closed around the grip of the hypodermic needle as she walked over to his side. He still was not bothered, he did not even flinch as she put a hand on his arm, and as the needle sank into his neck he only blinked. He slid to the ground silently, staring up at her in mute surprise.

"He's down," she announced, speaking to the surveillance camera in the corner of the ceiling. Soft thuds from outside the room told her that her colleaques were there - they burst into the room, drawing in their wake the hiss of the airlock.
"Surgical containment?" The leader asked briskly, helping to haul the paralyzed scientist onto the spare table.
"Within acceptable limits," the nurse replied, checking the display by the door.

"Physician," he muttered, as the bone-saw buzzed, and the scientist's eyes screamed. "Heal thyself."

Invasion

2008-08-18T23:25:00.000+09:30

Morgan woke, without really knowing why. She was comfortable enough, everything was still and quiet, and yet... her heart was pounding, her eyes were darting around the room as if she could see in the dark. She couldn't, of course, only the dim shine of stars and the dull glow of the hallway light from beneath her door.
She closed her eyes, knowing that she could hear better with less input from her other senses. It was as if her ears were wiggling with effort, stretching and growing to catch every little sound. Distant traffic, her mother muttering in her sleep and her little brother snoring, a ticking clock - and the creak of the old floorboards of the stairs.
There's somebody in our home, she thought, panicked. Somebody who is not allowed.
Battered by the harsh winter winds, the tree outside her window tapped against the glass.

Leap of Faith

2008-08-17T23:59:00.000+09:30

"Help is coming," said a voice in my ear, though there was nobody there. "We’ll get you out of there."
On another day I may have been afraid, that I was hearing voices, that I was going crazy. But that much I already knew, because if I wasn’t crazy then it meant that what I was seeing was true, and it meant that I had just killed my family.
"Who are you?" I asked, searching for comfort. My voice was swallowed up in the roar of the flames but they heard me anyway.
"Friends."The voice was strange – disjointed, fractured, echoing. Not comforting at all. The fire was all around me and I could see my clothes beginning to burn, though I felt no pain. Shock, I told myself.
"Just hold on," the voice insisted, "We’re nearly there, Amy. Just hold on."
I wondered how they knew my name, but not for long, because the house was beginning to groan. The fire was eating it up. It was going to collapse. It was going to bury me alive.
"Please hurry," I begged, truly afraid for the first time.
"Close your eyes," the voice whispered and I obeyed without question as the first slab of roofing fell in a fountain of sparks. A second crash followed it but of a different timbre, this one accompanied by a glittering shower of glass. Footsteps pounded across the floor, hands grabbed at my arms, dragged me until I ran with them. I hesitated, knowing the window was close, and a ten-story drop below it.
"Trust me," said the voice.
I nodded, and jumped.

I Am My Own Bad Habit (Galatea Extended)

2008-08-16T23:59:00.001+09:30

as if they are precious
I collect the bruises you give me
and I hoard your curses and insults
and I gasp
..........drowning
..................without your scowl
.
your carressing fists
your stranglehold embrace
your poisoning breath as
you call me back -
"I love you
...................don't go"
so I stay
.
yes I have been oppressed but
we are both
the oppressors
.
.
.
(I'll fix this, I'll work this out)

Long Ago, Far Away...

2008-08-15T21:37:00.000+09:30

Once upon a time, in a land not so very different from our own, three sisters lived alone in an old house in the woods. The oldest sister was called Vanesse, the middle sister was called Clarine, and the youngest sister was called Gisette.
Now it just so happened, as it often does in these kinds of tales, that Vanesse and Clarine were the children of their father's first wife, who had turned out to be a terrible and nasty witch. He had made her leave the moment he found out, but had allowed their daughters to remain with him, because everyone knows that a witch makes a terrible mother.
In time he married again, a woman who was kind and gentle and not at all like the witch. She was generous and loving to everybody, and treated the witch's daughters like they were her own. After a little while she did have a daughter of her own, who she called Gisette, and whom she would have loved more than anything in the world if she had not, tragically, died not long after her baby was born. The girls' father was overcome with grief, and scarcely had he arranged for the baby to be cared for than he died of a broken heart.
Vanesse and Clarine were not fond of their sister. They blamed her for her mother's death, and hated her because everything their father had possessed he had left to the helpless baby. Perhaps he had recognised the jealousy in his eldest children's hearts, and thought that this would improve the girl's chances of life under her sisters' ravenous gaze.

We Are Eve, We Are Galatea

2008-08-14T21:04:00.003+09:30

we are human because we fell
from grace
Eve's sacrifice
considered a curse
must we forever carry the blame?

...............................................................

women have been oppressed
but we are both
the oppressors

ENGL1007, Short Story Assignment (Part One)

2008-08-13T23:32:00.000+09:30

Better The Devil You Know

2008-08-12T21:34:00.002+09:30

It had been a long day in Hell. He had been raking in the sinners lately, and of course it was her job to keep a record of them all.
"So none of them slip away," he would explain with that toothy, sleazey smile when she asked, for the millionth time, why she needed to chronicle each soul that entered his fiery domain.
"The clipboard is getting heavy," she pointed out, and he was courteous enough to look back at the wagon and the panting demons in it's harness. "I will need another."
"It's on my to-do list," he promised, patting the digital-personal-organiser in the pocket of his shirt. She'd given it to him for Christmas. She knew he didn't use it.
"I'll be needing another shipment of pens, too," she added, "The scribes go through so many that it just isn't funny any more."
"Then make them write in blood!" He snarled. "Money doesn't grow on trees, you know!"
Mirith sighed. He would bring it back to money.
"Don't talk to me like you're on a tight budget," she replied firmly, straightening his tie despite his protests that it was fine, not too loose at all, was she trying to kill him or something? "I'm the one who oversees the accounts, after all."
"Mir, honey, darling," he crooned, pushing her hands away and putting his arm around her shoulder. "What would I do without you? I know you work hard and you just don't get enough credit for what you do. Would you like a raise? I think I need to give you a raise."
"Please," she rolled her eyes. "You can't afford a box of pens but you can raise my salary? What's the point? I'm going to be here forever anyway. And don't try to charm your way out of this, either."
"I am charming, aren't I?" He smiled widely, white teeth gleaming in the bloody light. Someone not so far away screamed.
"And handsome," she replied, because they both knew it.
"Would you say I was - devilishly handsome?" He prodded, and she couldn't help but laugh, even though it was far from the first time he'd made that same joke. She could remember the first time, if she concentrated. It was a long time ago, countless generations ago; she'd been alive, then, and foolish enough to frequent shady bars after dark. He'd been masquerading as a mortal man that night (he often did) and had like the 'cut of her jib', as he so eloquently put it. She'd been little impressed by this supposed drunken sailor, but he really was handsome, yes devilishly so, and she had always been a sucker for a flirt.
"Pens," she repeated firmly, "And a new clipboard."

Five Minutes More...

2008-08-11T23:59:00.001+09:30

when she played
the angels stopped their work
and gathered round to hear her song
and I never could decide
where spirit ended and her flesh began
or if she were
an angel all along

An Immortal Legacy

2008-08-10T23:59:00.000+09:30

"Make something with me," she said to the Carver.
The Carver looked at the board, where his beautiful pawns lay broken and discarded by the childish goddess who was even now leading her partner around the room. He looked at the other gods, idle and content in their idleness, and knew that he needed something more.
"Yes," he replied. "Yes, let's make something special."
They wasted no time in getting to their work, because what was there to hold them back? The materials they needed they gathered from around the garden of the gods, the physical elements of fire and earth and water and air. This part of the story you can imagine, I think - immortal hands shaping the form of the very earth we inhabit now, though at the time it was a far more wild and fearsome place. The first beasts and foliage were more rough and primitive than those to which we are accustomed.
"It is not complete," the Carver said, when they had stopped at last. They looked down at the world that they had created and knew that this was so.
"It needs art and music," the Sculptor replied, glancing at the sisters.
"It needs laughter and passion," the Carver agreed, nodding at Love and Lust.
They looked down at their work, and at the materials that remained. There was not a lot.
"We will make something like ourselves," the Sculptor whispered, laying a hand on his shoulder. "To enjoy our world and to care for it."
The Carver took up his tools, and fashioned eight figures from War's abandoned pawns, and four of these they called men and four they called women.
"From these a mighty population shall spring," he announced, setting them gently down, pleased with his work. "Thought mortal, they shall be immortal in their legacy."
The Sculptor took up her tools, and from the materials that remained of their world building, she shaped eight spirits to inhabit the figures, two each of fire, air, earth and water.
"From these a might spirit shall grow," she announced, carefully fitting the spirits to their forms, smiling with pride. "They will pray and love and hope as we never have."
And then they set the figures down in their new world, and awakened them with a whisper, and watched proudly as they came to life.

In A Time Before Time

2008-08-09T23:59:00.000+09:30

There was a time before time, when men and beasts and the stars themselves did not exist. The very earth was nothing - there was only the realm of the gods, a garden of beauty surpassing anything ever witnessed by the mortal eye. It was here that the immortal beings resided, wiling away the ages with the passtimes they are known as the patrons of. The Carver with his knife, ever replenishing the pieces broken in War's vicious games. History watched from the sidelines, gathering dust, waiting for the times when she would grow tired of the game and then she would consent to dancing with him. The sisters of Art would play music for them, Melody and Harmony and Cadence with their flutes and drums. And the other gods would watch, and pursue the things that they enjoyed, but one day the Sculptor tired of it all.

An Evening's Entertainment

2008-08-08T23:59:00.001+09:30

Every culture has stories, that have grown and changed over time just as the people who tell them have grown and changed. They reveal more than you could imagine about the nature of the teller and their world, but that is not the reason that you have brought me here today. You asked me here to tell stories. I will tell you the stories that laid the foundations for all others. I will tell you the first stories.

Soft To-night The Spice-Wind Comes

2008-08-07T23:59:00.000+09:30

Cassiara couldn't sleep. The wind whispered through the trees, and strange moonlight shadows played on the canvas above her. She could hear her bodyguard's soft breathing at the tent's entrance, and the rough snoring of the men in other tents around them. And another sound, one she did not recognise - a scratching, and a kind of wailing hum. She stood, pulling her blanket around her gaainst the chilly air outside. Asima was awake within an instant, courched ready, eyes and teeth and dagger glinting in the half-light. Cassia put a hand to her ear, then pointed outside and Asima nodded. She could hear it too.
On soft feet they crept outside, following the sound into the soft-lit grove. There was little to be seen but Asima bade Cassia to wait as she checked all around. She returned with a frown, irritated by her lack of findings. Cassia closed her eyes, tilting her head as she listened carefully for the strange noises. And then they heard, very clearly, a soft screech from the cluster of newest saplings. Asima stepped between her mistress and the sound, stalking up to the little trees and peering among them.
Then she laughed - softly, yet it almost echoed in the still air. Her hand hovered over the trees for a moment before darting in. There was much scrabbling and several pained hisses before she finally straightened, returning to where Cassia waited, holding the struggling creature before her.
Cassia stared in awe at the little creature. It resembled a lizard most of all, long and lithe with soft sand-coloured scales. But it's claws - carefully restrained by Asima - were viciously long, and from its back protruded two wings almost as large as the body itself.
"A cinnamon-dragon," Asima announced, eyes gleaming with excitement.

The Desert at Thy Feet

2008-08-06T23:59:00.000+09:30

Cassia headed deeper into the grove while the men set up their tents, inspecting the season's new growth. Their work was paying off - the trees were healthy and growing well.
"It would be a shame to lose this grove," Asima said quietly, as ever walking silently a few steps behind her mistress. "Truly its location is the real treasure of your mother's legacy."
Cassia nodded, unconsciously running her hands over the map-case that hung from her shoulders. It was in a code, of course, that none but Safa's most trusted allies had known. Yet if the map were to fall into the arms of enemies, they would decipher it sooner or later. The hidden spice grove, the secret to the wealth of the Baysan family, would be revealed.
"We shall not lose it," Cassia replied firmly. "Any who learn of it and do not seal a blood oath shall be killed."
Asima's eyes flickered momentarily back, to where the gatherers were already beginning their work.
"If a single one of them breaks from my service, they shall be fugitives from all men," Cassia said with an uncharacteristic fierceness. The map-case held the men's contracts too, signed with a drop of blood that sealed them to the oath until death. There were few laws more stringently upheld - an oath-breaker would be killed by any who found him. Asima nodded, but she was clearly not content. Cassia was not surprised - she'd known the woman since she was just a little girl, and Asima was never satisfied of her ward's safety.
"Master Baysan!" Cried one of the men, interrupting their discussion. Cassia went to where he crouched at the side of a cinnamon sapling. Before he even spoke she saw the problem - the bark was slashed all along its length, and bore but a few leaves and berries.
"Sabotage?" Asima suggested in a low voice, as ever present at Cassia's shoulder.
"Perhaps."
The other gatherers were watching her, too - what did they expect of her? To fly into a rage? Safa would have, undoubtedly, but Cassia was not so like hermother when it came to temperament.
"Work fast," she ordered. "The sun sinks soon and I do not wish to linger here many days."They jumped to obey her as if they expected to feel a whip sting their hides. There was a whip; it hung from Cassia's saddle, another thing left by her mother. The fearful respect they had shown had always amused Cassia as a child. These were men who boasted and bragged and could kill in mere seconds, and yet they had cringed and cowered at the feet of a woman.
"I miss her," she told her bodyguard. The other woman did not reply but Cassia knew she was there. "She was wise and strong and beautiful. I don't think I will ever be these things."
"You're a child yet, Cassiara," Asima replied finally, ducking into their tent ahead of her, ever wary. "Give it time."

Once More A Desert-Child

2008-08-05T22:39:00.001+09:30

The spice-winds were fierce that day - they blew roughly through the caravan, fluttering robes and tugging at hair. Cassia smiled at its sharp scent but did not change her course. A lesser trader would have turned to find the wind's tail and the grove that lay there, but Cassiara Baysan was no lesser trader. Her mother, the great Trader Safa Baysan, had passed on many secrets before her death, and the most valuable of all had been the trick of the spice-hunt.

Prosevomit

2008-08-04T22:34:00.000+09:30

Aria scrabbled amongst the debris of her room, searching in vain for a pen. Or a pencil, a crayon, a charred stub of wood - anything to leave a mark on the page, anything to pin down the words that were bloating her. She could feel the drug working its way through her veins, gathering up the shreds of poetry and carrying them along in a rush that spiralled on, in and in and always in, toward her heart until she thought it might burst. When she could find nothing to write with she bit down on her own fingertip until it bled, rather than put up with the mocking stare of the blank page. The marks she left were all but unintelligible which suited Aria just fine because people always started to ask questions when they read the things she had written.

Bibliomancy

2008-08-03T23:59:00.000+09:30

Bibliomancy - A little known form of magic which relies on the written word. Adepts can give life to what is on the page, they are prized by kings and war generals to help imagine field reports etc. Rich lord sometimes hire them for an evening's entertainment, but other than that they are seldom noticed or even respected.
Bibliomancers often find themselves drawn to work in libraries, where they can find much comfort in the old tomes. Undiscovered mages of this branch generally find a fascination in books and storytelling.
A bibliomancer is also known as an illusionist; what they read is shown as images in air or on a screen. More skill can lead to sounds, smells, the need only to hold a book (not read it) or even just to speak the words at all. The most skilled Bibliomancers can make the listener's reality become that of their story.

It's Not Sounding Like Happy Times

2008-08-02T22:31:00.001+09:30

"We should go," Charlie suggested, backing away as the two men began to stagger towards them. Jen nodded, white-faced, and they began to run, as quickly as they could with their backpacks still on.
"Wait!" Jen panted, as Charlie began to take hers off. "We'll need them. We can't just run forever."
Charlie frowned. Of course, Jen was right. They'd never make it to the next town, and that meant hiding somewhere.
"We can go to Salbrook," Jen suggested.
"Do you actually know the way?" Charlie countered. "Because I don't. And maybe this - this happened there too."
"Charlie I think we're in a horror movie," Jen said, half laughing and half crying. "I always wanted to be in a horror movie. But I'm not sure I want that any more."
"I know, Jen.." Charlie knew her friend was just working herself into hysterics. Somehow, though, Charlie was calm. She didn't know what was going on or what they were going to do, but she felt a kind of purpose. If Jen was going to collapse, then she would need to be strong for the both of them.
"What was it, Charlie?" Jen asked. "And - and how do we even know it was real? Maybe it's all just a hoax. We're on tv. Where are the cameras?"

Maybe They're All Dead

2008-08-01T23:59:00.000+09:30

The screams grew louder as they drew nearer to the fairgrounds, and Charlie began to look anxious.
"That doesn't sound like happy times," she said. "That sounds like terror."
Jen nodded, suddenly afraid to speak. Charlie moved closer and took her hand.
"Don't be afraid."
They walked forward slowly, minds flickering over countless possible scenarios, each less likely than the last.
"The whole town is in there," Jen whispered. "What if something terrible has happened?"
"Except us," Charlie said firmly. "We're okay."
They were entering the car park when a man emerged from the big tent, running at them and shouting.
"It escaped!" He sobbed, and as he drew closer they could see that he was covered in blood from head to toe.
"What escaped?" Charlie asked, instinctively stepping between Jen and the man. He opened his mouth to speak but the words became a scream, as a second figure lurched into view and grabbed him with bloody hands.

Vinegar Hill Horror

2008-07-31T21:32:00.000+09:30

"I am never going camping with you again," Charlie announced as they walked home. Jen looked hurt.
"Oh! Why not?!"
"Because you made me do everything! You didn't cook, or light the fire, or put up the tent."
"That's because I can't do any of those things. I tried to, but you just got mad and took over from me. Also, I helped to carry firewood."
"Complaining the whole time about bugs and splinters."
"They were everywhere!"
"That's what camping is," Charlie sighed. "It's about getting closer to nature, not about sleeping all day and using all the torch batteries to listen to the radio."
Jen laughed, and kicked a piece of trash in her friend's direction.
"You know there's nobody else you'd want to go with."
Charlie grunted in what may have been agreement.
"Let's get ice-cream," she said suddenly. "I haven't had ice-cream in ages.""You had one on the way to the camp-site," Jen pointed out.
"Yes, well, that hardly counts. Anything you eat while exercising doesn't count." Her eyes dared Jen to disagree.
"Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but it looks like the store is closed." She pointed.

"What?!" Charlie shrieked, pressing her face up against the dusty window. The unlit interior was dim in the late afternoon sunlight, and clearly not occupied.
"Why?" Charlie asked, throwing up her hands dramatically. "Why would they do this to me?"
"I'm not sure that it was aimed specifically at you," Jen said soothingly, almost managing to hide a giggle.
"Now that I think of it, it is a little quiet today," Charlie said, looking around slowly. "There's nobody around and everything's shut."
"Maybe they're all dead?" Jen suggested cheerfully. Charlie responded with a glare.
"Maybe they're at the circus. That was meant to be in town this weekend, right?"
"Yeah," Jen agreed, sounding almost disappointed.
"They've got elephants, and tigers and stuff," Charlie pointed out. "And sideshow games. Maybe we should go check it out?"As if to confirm their theory a roar of delighted screams rose up from the direction of the fairgrounds where the circus always set up. Jen sighed - their homes were in the other direction, and she'd really been looking forward to a hot shower.
"Alright. Before they pack up.""Maybe they're selling ice-creams?" Charlie said, laughing. "Don't look so upset. We'll go home and clean up after they're gone. This is pretty much the most exciting thing to ever happen in this town."
"True," Jen admitted as they set off to the sound of distant screaming and laughter.

Before Sarin Searched, So Did He...

2008-07-30T23:47:00.000+09:30

Caderyn looked at the gypsy with open scepticism. Him, a great mage? That was never going to happen. He had no magic - his parents had sent him to be tested when he was only little, and there hadn't even been enough of a spark to light tinder. No, the fortune-teller must be mistaken, and that did throw the rest of her information into a more credulous position.
"Thank you," he said politely, for he'd been raised to be polite.
"You'll see," she replied cryptically as he left the dimly-lit tent, blinking in the harsh sunlight outside.
Caderyn stuck his hands deep into his pockets, feeling for the charms and trinkets he always kept there. For protection, and clarity of thought, and increased luck. That was another thing his parents had passed onto him, a kind of token belief in the supernatural arts and the power of little spells to turn the balance of fate in a positive way. If he ever thought about it deeply the whole affair seemed a little foolish, but he tended to avoid deep thought because it invariably led to headaches.
The road from the gypsy camp but to town was a long one, and if he dallied much longer he'd end up walking in the dark, but Caderyn wasn't terribly concerned. The opportunity to speak with storytellers of another culture was a temptation he could not resist, and they seemed like a friendly enough group of people. After a few enquiries he was directed to a campfire where a pot bubbled with an unknown, deliciously scented liquid. A stout woman stirred its contents with a wooden spoon, all the while keeping a watchful eye on the gaggle of children running around the camp. By her side sat a woman older than he'd imagined a person could ever be, hunched over a bowl of pea-pods.
"Could I help you with that, Grandmother?" He asked respectfully, ignoring the snort of laughter from the cook. The old lady looked up at him with icy grey eyes, gnarled fingers never ceasing in their work.
"That depends on your motives," she replied sharply, with a voice like a cutting winter wind. She may have been old, Caderyn thought, but she was not soft in the least.
"I wish only to help, and perhaps talk a little."
After a moment the woman shrugged, and handed him the bowl.
"Get to it." She paused, then added, "The talking will depend on the topic you intend to bring up."
Caderyn sat cross-legged by her side, settling easily into the task. He hadn't shelled peas in a long time, but when he was younger his mother had often allowed him to help her in the kitchen with such things. After a little while he got into a rhythm, and it was only then that he began to speak.
"I have heard much praise of your people, and their stories," he said, carefully watching her expression without looking directly at her. "It is said they are many, and of a quality not often found in the city."
"Of course," she snapped. "We have no tame tales to wave about as if we own them. Our stories are lent to us by the earth and the sky, and we pass them along with care and respect."
"Are they not changed with time?" He asked, noting her frown. "All things change as they are passed along. Each teller has their own way, their own words, their own embellishments that they bring."

There Is No Why

2008-07-29T22:18:00.001+09:30

The store was quiet and dusty, filled with shelves and stacks of books and papers. Sarin moved through it carefully, afraid to touch anything. Wizards and librarians were known to be touchy about their craft, so she expected that the great biblio-magician Silverpage would be at least doubly so. It seemed odd that a man of such wealth and status should choose to operate in a place of business that was as dull and musty as this, but if librarians and wizards were both odd people, then Silverpage would be easily as strange.
The shelves towered over her, seeming to lean in at the top until it felt as if she tiptoed along a paper tunnel; a sound too soft to really make out followed in her wake, as if the books were whispering to one another as she passed.
"This way," called a voice from the dim depths of the literary cavern. "Don't be shy, I won't bite."
Sarin blushed and stepped up her pace, and after a time she found she could make out the flickering glow of a candle, not so far from where she was. The desk it sat on was almost clean, she noticed, but not quite - her fingers twitched unconsciously to the cleaning rag always tucked into her belt. From childhood she'd been raised to value cleanliness, and she'd never felt comfortable in the presence of dirt.
"How may I help you?" Silverpage asked, voice as fragile as the pages he guarded. The light was little but she could still make out his features, and she thought the stories held some truth: in his youth he would have been a heartbreaker indeed. But with innumerable ages his looks had faded, and Sarin thought he resembled an ancient tree, lined and gnarled and slow-moving.
"I wish to buy a story," she said, sounding less confident than she'd felt upon entering the store. He laughed uproariously, throwing back his head and slapping the countertop.
"But of course you do! Why else would you be here?" He fell silent abruptly, levelling his gaze with hers. "A story of any particular kind?"
She smiled.
"Of course. Why else would I be here? There are other storytellers in this city, and none half as expensive as yourself."
They looked at one another - he with the cunning wisdom of old experience, she with the shrewd eye of confident youth. Finally he nodded.
"A particular kind, then. Not the kind offered by my fellow vendors." He tilted his head to the side. "Is it an adventure you seek? I have tales that slip into your mind and enliven your dreams so that you would hardly wish to wake."
Sarin shook her head. The wizard guessed again.
"A romance, perhaps? I can spin words around you so that you feel yourself to be in the arms of a lover who exists only in your mind."
She shooked her head again. He narrowed his eyes, and gestured that she should speak.
"I wish to buy a truth," she said. "About people, and the world, and why."
"Ahh." He sighed, a little sadly. "A true story. I did wonder when this day would come."
She hugged her arms around her stomach, knowing that if she would ever find answers it would be here. A flutter of excitement stirred the embers of hope that had settled so low throughout her search.
"The biggest difficulty is not in finding it, of course," he said, "Any tale which exists may be found, in time, by one who knows the place in which to look. The issue is proprietary - there can exist only one truth, or one set of complementary truths. A tale once sold cannot be purchased again and here lies my problem."
"You have already sold the truth?" Sarin asked, heart sinking.
"The one you seek, no. Other truths to other questions. But the great truth, the truth of why, was sold by someone else, many years ago."
"If I find that person could they share it with me?"
"Perhaps," Silverpage said. "If they were willing to share it.""Why wouldn't they?" Sarin demanded.
"If the truth was not what they expected. If it were a burden more than a hope, perhaps they would wish to keep it to themselves."
"How selfish," she muttered. Silverpage nodded.
"A little."
"Is that all? You cannot tell me who, or where, or how I may find them?"
"I cannot. I am sorry."
Without another word the woman left the store, bumping a stack of books as she left. They toppled to the floor, falling open to pages that had not seen light in countless years. The great wizard Silverpage rose slowly with a groan, and shuffled over to where they lay. Bending to lift them he stopped, taking a little scrap of paper from the pocket of his robe. The words it bore were simple, written in a small and flowing script that had faded with time, as everything does. To anyone else it would probably have been illegible, but Silverpage had read it many times since he first bought it as a youth. It was short and poignant, the tale of people, and the world, and why...

Let Me Paint You A Picture...

2008-07-28T23:59:00.000+09:30

You asked me to paint a portrait of you but I'm so bad at colours. I have clumsy hands. I told you that and you were disappointed in me.
You have eyes that are like autumn, brown and green and flickering all over the place like they were caught in the wind... When it's windy outside your hair comes to life. Others tame theirs with sprays and gels and bobby pins, but you let it go, you let it float and fly around your face. Your mouth isn't used to smiling because you smile on the inside and you smile with your fingers when they dance on the guitar.

Where's My Happily Ever After?

2008-07-27T23:59:00.000+09:30

Dreams and news and fairy tales all mixed up in your head until you couldn't tell the difference. You told me it didn't matter, because they were all atrocities anyway, atrocities against life and hope and dogged survival.

She's Broken - Can't Hide the Fractures

2008-07-26T23:59:00.000+09:30

It was his voice she'd fallen for, and his fingers easy on the guitar strings. The songs weren't his own but that was ok, because the sound of them that night was his, all his. The sun was setting outside but she was oblivious to that, staring into the distance through her coffee as his words spun a dream around her. Calm enveloped her so softly she didn't realise it at first. When she did it was a kind of revelation, because in that moment she was happy.

Hope Piggy-Backed on Lightning Bolts

2008-07-25T23:59:00.000+09:30

It was dark; the moon and the stars hid behind the clouds as if they were afraid to watch such a night. Power crackled on the backs of stormclouds and made static in the hair of the late-night lovers on park benches. An electric expectation crackled in bus driver's fingertips. Anticipation left watchdogs drooling and cats prowling restlessly.

Julie Is the Wind

2008-07-24T23:59:00.000+09:30

Julie collected bruises like other kids collected marbles, hoarding them greedily like some delicious secret beneath her clothes. It wasn't that she was clumsy, just that she was more delicate than other people. Things others barely noticed caused her real pain. A sharp word or harsh tone was like a bludgeon to her fragile bones - it left her short of breath, gasping in pain and bleeding on the floor.
I always wished I could just kiss it better, but nothing is that simple.

Insignificance, Ernest

2008-07-23T19:23:00.001+09:30

After she'd gone, Ernest let himself collapse onto the sidewalk, propped up against the wall and with his head in his hands. Everything had been so simple until now. It wasn't difficult to go about your life, even one of constant repression, when that was all you had. But Xanthia had offered him rebellion - dangerous, life-threatening rebellion against an organisation with all the facilities of a nation at its disposal. Was his life a price he was willing to pay for a freedom nobody knew they were without?
But the answer came to him with an eerie clarity as he stared down at the cracked pavement. He would do it, just like Xanthia would do it, because there was nobody else who could.
Feeling very small, Ernest went home.

From Such Great Heights...

2008-07-22T23:42:00.001+09:30

Katie clung to him as if she were drowning.
"Don't let me go," she whispered into his shirt. He had one arm around her while the other aimed and fired, and she had never felt more secure in her life.
"Would I?" He asked shortly, swinging her around so that his body was between her and the current line of fire. Bullets and screams tore through the air around them as he cut a path through the sea of men and Agents that fought on every side of them. She pressed her face harder against his chest, wishing it could block out the sounds of battle. She had thought she would be ready for it, but here they were and she was barely holding back her tears.
"I'm sorry," she said with a little sniff, "I'm not strong enough."
"You will be, when you need to be," Shadow replied. "For now, you are alive. That is enough."

Inconspicuous, Ernest

2008-07-21T18:48:00.000+09:30

"We've got ten minutes," Sarah said. Ernest stared at her, barely blinking. "You can ask questions once I'm done."
She looked at him over the rim of her sunglasses, wondering how badly he was freaking out.
"I work for the government. They watch your every move, because you know about them. You are not a priority target yet, but the minute you start getting angry or crazy you will become one."
She had spent hours agonising over just how much to tell him. Too much and she would put herself in real danger of exposure. Too little and he may reveal them both out of ignorance.
"The name you will know me by is Xanthia," she said. "It will be a code if I need to communicate with you in a more public way than I'd prefer. For now all I will say is this - I have slight influence over the case of your surveillance. There will be short windows of time when we can communicate, and these must be the only times you speak of me."
He nodded, still wide-eyed, looking around constantly."There are safe places," she said, "Where the surveillance does not extend. This is one."
Sarah glanced quickly at her watch. Alice would return soon.
"At this time you are watched but not recorded. If they see anything suspicious that will change, and you will lose any chance you ever had of making a difference in all of this."
When she didn't speak again, Ernest took his chance.
"Why are you helping me?"
"Because what they do is wrong and somebody needs to do something. My job gives me an advantage that I can't pass up."
"When will I hear from you again?"
"When it is safe." She looked at her watch again. "I have to go. Please act normally."

Food For Thought

2008-07-20T18:58:00.001+09:30

That night, as Alice headed outside for her break, Sarah logged into the O-BAD console. Her own password would not work but she had watched as Alice signed in the night before. If she was quick, she stood a chance.
Ernest was in bed but not asleep, staring blankly at the ceiling. Sarah keyed in a command - his bedside radio switched on.
"I know that's you," he said morosely over the crackling static as it flicked through the stations. "Are you having a good time?"
"Listen to me," Sarah whispered, looking over her shoulder at the door, as if she could see anyone before the came through it. Hearing her voice Ernest's eyes widened - he had not expected this. "You're right. About everything. We must meet."
"Who are you?"
His voice was shaking. Sarah smiled.
"A friend. Be outside 31 Elston Street at this time tomorrow night or forget I ever spoke. Say no more now."
"Elston Street? Why?"
Sarah resisted the urge to reply, to tell him everything, to tell him she was going to help because what the government was doing was wrong. But instead she sat back, and signed out of the O-BAD console, and returned to her own desk to watch as Ernest tossed and turned and did not sleep for a long time.

Ernest Gets Angry

2008-07-19T18:56:00.000+09:30

Ernest Truffle was upset. He had risen that morning with his usual cheer, but it had disappeared when he saw the damp mess in his kitchen.
"You bastards!" he shouted, over and over, not caring if the neighbours heard. The neighbours already thought Ernest was crazy. A small voice in his head suggested that just maybe he was overreacting, but it was drowned out by the much louder voice of his indignation. Anybody else might have dismissed this as an unlucky chance, but Ernest knew better. It was too obvious, too much of a coincidence that the sprinkler system could malfunction the very night he found a way to beat the system. It was too neat.
On the outside he raged, but on the inside Ernest was calm.
It was time to fight back.

Office-Based Active Duty

2008-07-18T19:19:00.001+09:30

An ominous voice crackled over the intercom - "Destroy the box."
"Can we do that?" Sarah asked, surprised. Alice laughed.
"I keep forgetting that you're new to this department. What we're about to do is known as "Office-Based Active Duty"."
"O. B. A. D.?"
"O-BAD. It's fun, believe me."
Alice pished off from the desk, rolling on her chair to where the room's third computer station sat. Sarah had always assumed it was there to cater for a possible third worker. But as Alice keyed in her password, the interface that loaded was very different to the one she was used to.
"This is the O-BAD interface," Alice explained, opening up Ernest Truffle's profile. "I haven't had a chance to use it since coming onto the Truffle Case, but they use it all the time on priority cases."A house floor plan appeared, and after a moment Sarah recognised it.
"That's Ernest's house."
"Bingo!"
Ernest had gone to bed but his box was still in the kitchen, so Alice chose to make a quick demonstration.
"We can turn the lights on and off, as well as any appliance in the room that's connected to power. We have remote devices to cater for anything more portable, but they're a little less reliable."
"That's insane," Sarah whispered. "That's absolutely unbelievable."
"Interns get a bit frisky with the O-BAD systems sometimes," Alice admitted, "Flicking lights on and off, that kinda thing. Making people think they're being haunt or going crazy or something."
"I don't blame them," Sarash admitted, "But-""But how do we destroy the box?"
Sarah nodded.
"I'm surprised you didn't think of it for yourself." She grinned as she tapped in a few commands, and then the fire-sprinkler switched on. It went to work, silently and without fuss, and before long the box was no more than a soggy heap. Alice chuckled to herself as she headed outside for a smoke, but Sarah felt bad. She knew what it felt like to be constantly under surveillance - besides Ernest, only those who worked for the Department really knew that feeling. So she did not blame him for wanting a little privacy. Taking that box away had been an act of spite.
She leaned back in her chair with a sigh. There had to be a way to do something nice for Ernest, without anybody actually finding out.

An Event that Made it Into the Report

2008-07-17T22:36:00.000+09:30

"Doorbell," Alice announced. Sarah sat up with a start, dropping the pen she'd been absently chewing the end of.
"Visitors?" She asked, trying to find the pen without taking her eyes off the screen.
"As if," Alice snorted. "You know Truffle doesn't have any friends. No, it looks like a delivery..."
They watched in silence as a large box was wheeled into the room.
"Refrigerator," Alice nodded, satisfied that everything added up. Truffle had ordered it earlier that week, though they had not noticed any problems with his current one. Truffle signed for the delivery, then took a knife from the drawer behind him.
"I suppose you're wondering what I would want with a refrigerator, when the one I already have works fine," he said, addressing them again as if he really knew they were there. He slashed at the box with the knife, undoing its bindings until he could put it to one side. "Maybe I just want a little privacy?"
Without another word he lifted the box and set it down over his head. They could hear him giggling as he shuffled around the room.
"I think this is going to make it into the report," Alice said faintly.

The Truffle Case

2008-07-16T19:11:00.000+09:30

Ernest talked to the invisible cameras as he cooked his breakfast.
"I hope you can smell this," he said cheerfully, "I hope you know what you're missing out on. Fresh eggs and cheese, a bit of bacon, a good omelette to start the day off..."
Sarah sighed, because it looked so much more appetising than her own cold-toast breakfast.
Alice sighed, because the lens of the kitchen's camera had steamed over, and they had to switch to an alternate viewpoint.
"I thought they'd installed defoggers?" She complained.
"On some units. Priority cases."
"Isn't Truffle a priority case?"
"To be honest, I don't think so." Sarah shrugged. "He would become one the moment he showed any hostile inclination. I think he's more of a novelty to them than anything else. They keep asking if we're sure he's sane, as if it's impossible for him to be so complacent about us."
She looked down at her current notebook, and then to the rusted filing cabinet where its predecessors rested.
"He's sane, though," she said finally. "I'm quite sure of it."
"Don't think I'd be able to cope with it," Alice shuddered. "It's bad enough to know I'm recorded out in public. But in your own home? Thank god this job gives us that much privacy. It's about the only reason I stay.""Is it so bad here? Comfortable chairs, easy workload. No job stress. Lifetime financial stability."
"My eyes hurt from staring at a screen all day, and all these computers give me a pounding headache." She rubbed at her temples, frowning, then attempted a smile. "At least the company's good."

If You Don't Hear From Me Again, This Is A True Story

2008-07-15T20:19:00.001+09:30

"We're all being watched," he said to the wide-eyed sales assistant, "All of the time."
He gestured expansively. She giggled.
"Of course we are, every store is fitted with security cameras."
He sighed and handed over the money. That wasn't at all what he'd meant.
It was a good coffee, though. He drank it with relish as he walked through the park to his home, smiling at the warm sunshine. Whoever was watching him should be jealous, he though, stuck in a stuffy little office on a day like this.

People called Ernest Truffle paranoid, and he called them ignorant. Was it his fault he knew more about surveillance technology than the everyday citizen? Was it his fault the rest of the world was so oblivious to the government's actions?He had worked out what was happening when he was 23 years old, and it had been the day his life changed. At first it had been the strangest thing in the world - to live under constant surveillance, to eat and sleep and bathe with unseen cameras recording every moment. He'd spent hours on end searching and never found a thing, but that just meant they were more clever than he was. In time he stopped searching, and then he stopped caring.

--

"Ernest is talking to us again," Sarah announced, turning up the volume at her station. "Do you think we should log this?"
"Depends on the content," Alice said with a sigh. "If he's just ranting again there's no point."They listened for a while, pale faces intent amidst the monitors' glow.
"I know you're there," Ernest said to the empty darkness of his bedroom. "Watching me. Recording me. Taking notes on everything I say."
Sarah's pen stopped moving, and she glanced over at her colleague.
"You don't think-?"
"No. He's guessing. He's not even sure we ARE here."
"He seems sure."
"He has no proof, and no way of getting any," Alice insisted. She rubbed at her forehead and sighed again. "I need a break. Can you handle things here for a while?"
"You may as well go home, Al. He's a heavy sleeper, I doubt there'll be a need for even one of us tonight, let alone both."
"Thanks, hun," Alice patted Sarah's shoulder as she passed. "I owe you one.""Another one," Sarah replied, and they laughed.

"I hope they're paying you a lot," Ernest said, "I can't even image how fucking boring it must be, just watching me all day."
"Boring for some," Sarah whispered. At her prompt the camera zoomed in on Ernest's face, and she watched as he closed his eyes. He was still talking, but more softly now, about the weather outside, about his day, about nothing in particular. He often talked himself to sleep.
"Get out and have a life of your own," he said finally, "You're only dying, in that office."

Before Ernest, Sarah HAD felt that her job was just a slow and dull death. But then she'd been put onto "The Truffle Case", and in a way her life had changed. He was the only person in the city who believed without a shred of doubt in what she did. Oh, others guessed, or wondered, or feared that it was so. But only Ernest Truffle really knew what was going on. Sarah sure of this, because she'd checked, using her precious free time to search millions of profile records.

She fell asleep at her desk, the office filled with the hum of the computers and the soft rumble of Ernest's snores.

Royal Courier

2008-07-14T20:16:00.001+09:30

"This is my escort?" Emily asked in disbelief. "Surely the Queen warrants a few more soldiers?"
"You must attempt to remain inconspicuous, my liege," the armsman replied softly. "As of yet, only a handful of people know your current appearance, and you are safest as long as it remains so."
She frowned but nodded agreement. It wasn't Emily's annoyance but the crotchety old woman she carried within her.
"I am - we are afraid," she said at last. "We do not want to die."
"You will not die," he said, and he held the girl's chin so that she could not look away. "You are Lady Emily Graystone, accompanied by a small courtesy force of kingsmen to your family's winter lodgings. The only person to know otherwise besides myself is Captain Elmshold."
"Thank you," she said, taking her horse's reins from him. He offered her a hand but she leapt easily into the saddle and, with a last cheeky salute, trotted over to her group.
"Are we going to stand around here all day?" She called out, voice ringing in the still, cold air. Half a dozen sleepy faces turned to her, and with a start she found them to be familiar. Though she'd never met them before, Emily knew each one by name - grey-haired Captain Elmshold and three of his men, Lady Umika Shadowhands, mage of the court, and George Bardspell, a mage also and widely renowned. The familiarity was strongest toward him, accompanied by a warmth that told her the Queen had liked this man. He smiled at her as he mounted his own horse, and laughed aloud as the armsmen scrambled into position.
"Apologies, my Lady," Elmshold said, bowing from the saddle, "My men are new recruits and unused to discipline so early in the day."
"A trio of recruits is to be my guard?" She asked quietly.
"Young but talented," he replied, "Their skills will rival my own some day."
Emily did not know the Captain but the Queen did, and his words quieted the old spirit.
"I hope you set a hard pace these next days," she said as they rode out the gates, "I don't want those mages slowing us down."
"They are tough, for mages. They will not hold us back."

Elmshold decided speed was more important than comfort and so they ate first- and midmeal in the saddle, and stopped only as the sun began to set. The King's Road was designed for travellers and at intervals along its length the bordering hedge bowed outwards, leaving little clearings with soft grass, clear-water springs, and starapple trees. The trees had a magical power gem amongst their roots, and it was through these that the royal gardeners coaxed the trees to bloosom and bear fruit throughout the year. The starapples were a sweet contribution to the rather tasteless travel rations provided by the armsmen.
"Will you play for us?" Emily asked once the meal was done, spying a baliset among somebody's bags. "Nobody carries a baliset who is not skilled in its use, and I do love music."
Umika Shadowhands had not spoken all day but now she did, rising and bowing elegantly to Emily.
"It would be an honour to entertain the Lady Graystone," she said formally, taking the baliset into her lap as she regained her place beside the fire.
"I didn't realise -" Emily stammered, "I could never impose -"
Umika ignored her protest, silencing the girl with a raised eyebrow and a few plucked notes. Despite her protests, Emily would not be so rude as to speak over the performance of a court bard, let alone one who was also a mage. Umika tuned the baliset with loving hands, and when she was ready she asked if anybody had a particular request.
"A song you wrote yourself," Elmshold suggested, which drew a little smile from the solemn mage.
"The baliset does not like new songs," she said softly. "Only old songs that it knows, or melodies it composes itself."
"It writes its own songs?" Emily broke in, incredulously. Umika nodded but it was George who replied.
"The baliset is an instrument like any other, but in the hands of a mage such as Lady Shadowhands, it draws on the musician's magic. When they've been together for as many years as these two have it tends to develop a kind of will. They model themselves upon the player - Umika's baliset is notoriously stubborn."
"I would like to hear that," Emily said, prompted by the Queen's own memories of Umika's playing. She wasn't quite prepared to hear the amount of longing in her voice, but that was what it meant to be a host. The minds remained separated, with the carried soul as a quiet passenger, but emotions were more powerful than the magic and often mingled between the two. Emily had been afraid, at first, that this would be uncomfortable, but so far she had only felt it as a kind of dim compulsion, or a tingle of feelings that were not her own.

Days Like These....

2008-07-13T22:41:00.000+09:30

Days like these make me wish that I drank coffee, or smoked cigarettes, or had some kind of addiction to draw relief from...

Prophecy

2008-07-12T09:13:00.000+09:30

"You know that I don't believe in prophecy," The woman said sternly, peering out from beneath a black veil. "Yet you try to foister this one upon me, and you claim that I am to have a part in it."
"Indeed, madam," The man replied humbly, bowing low, his grey robe looking unusually bright beside the widow's mourning black. "Through no choice of my own, for the Dream came to me and I am but its servant, bound to inform those who must be informed, like or not."
She sniffed, and when she spoke her tone said clearly that she believed it all to be nonsense.
"If, as you say, what must happen shall happen 'like or not', then no action on my part may prohibit its happening to me." She paused, and he nodded in agreement. "Then why tell me at all?"
"My lady," He bowed again, not noticing the way the woman rolled her eyes at the gesture. "My true aim tonight was to impress upon you the importance of your role. If you fail, then we are surely doomed."
Still bent almost double, the man left the room, watched steadily by the woman whose finger still bore the ring of her beloved. She had never held with priests or any of their strange ceremonies, yet something in the man's voice had impressed itself upon her - an undeniable sincerity, an utter belief in what he said that left the woman uncharacteristically inclined to believe his words too. The prophecy he had spoken of had sounded so authentic, the way she had always secretly believed one should sound; filled with dark omens and impossible conditions. Despite the beliefs of a lifetime, suddenly the widow found her mind changed. She would play the priest's game, and await the coming of the prophesied one, and fulfil her part in their destiny.
With a heavy heart the woman looked around her at the room, at the heavy drapes that held out the sun's cheerful light, at the severity of the furniture, at the grim portraits of past generations. Perhaps it was time to end her mourning. Perhaps it was past time. With the tiniest of sighs she stood, knuckling her back, so sore after such a short time in that uncomfortable chair, and threw back the curtains of the nearest window.
Sunbeams lanced the air, and the dust that flew into the air seemed like tiny, dancing particles of gold. The woman stared at them, entranced, and some of the lines that had creased her forehead in recent days faded. Breaking free of the sunlight's spell, she moved about the room in a frenzy, tearing the curtains down and throwing them in a heap on the floor. The paintings followed after, without regard or care, and then she was running down the stairs, head brimming with plans.

Tempest

2008-07-11T14:40:00.000+09:30

You said the only way to cure bad memories was to create new ones, so I agreed to go out with you. And even though you only said it to give yourself a chance, it worked for a while. Besides, I always knew what kind of guy you were. Why are dangerous people so exciting? When we fought you were a hurricane that tore me up inside, but I am grateful that you taught me how to shore up my defences. Bad weather doesn't last forever, though I'm left with new bad memories, and sometimes I still hear your voice.
Your words are cloudy skies that always herald rain.

The Welcomer

2008-07-10T23:59:00.001+09:30

The first thing Emily saw was the sea, blue and green and sparkling in the warm sunlight. Without a thought she let the door close behind her, taking in her surroundings with awe. She stood on a tiny grass-covered island where little white daisies poked their heads up and nodded contendtedly in the salty breeze. At the base of a gentle slope a wooden dock jutted out into the water and a pair of beautifully decorated boats bobbed beside it. And, beyond a stretch of placid ocean, a shining city rose, layer upon layer out of the sea. The buildings were made of a smooth white stone flecked with silver, twisting and merging with one another like salt crystals grown on the rock.
"I don't believe this," Emily muttered, turning back to the door. It sat behind her in the trunk of a gnarled tree, but when she tried the handle it wouldn't budge.
"It's locked," said a voice from behind her, and she span to see an old man dangling his feet in the sea. "You won't get through that door in a hurry."
"What you you mean? Who-"
"Who am I?" He interrupted. "And then you ask, 'What is this place?' and 'Why won't you let me leave?'."
Emily scowled as he listed all the questions she'd been about to ask. He tried a smile on her but faltered when she merely frowned back.
"Why do they always become hostile?" He asked the empty air. "I am the Welcomer, you are at the Doors, and you cannot leave because it was magic that brought you here and magic is a fickle fiend at best."
"That didn't tell me anything!" Emily cried. She was in a state of shock, she supposed, as her mind numbly sat back and watched her body throw a tantrum. "Why are you being so difficult?!"
The Welcomer watched her wearily.
"It is my job to welcome newcomers - that's you - to Squid City. Through a network of magical portals, people like yourself are transported here. The doors only open on our side at the Festival of Lights, so if you're going home it will be then. Unless of course someone else finds the same portal you did, assuming it's still there, and that we manage to keep the door open. The longer they're open the harder they are to hold onto," he explained to a wide-eyed Emily. Now that he'd mentioned it, she could see that there were in fact many more doors than the one she'd come through. They were of all shapes and sizes throughout the tree's massive trunk, and all of them were locked tight.
"What is Squid City?" She asked finally, deciding that this had to be a dream or a hallucination. She would play along, for now.
"Squid City!" The Welcomer repeated brightly. "City of Heroes! City of Adventure! City of Squid!"
"Do they pay you to say that?" She asked. He shrugged.
"It's all part of the job." He brightened, and pointed to the boats. "Ready to go to the City?"
He moved very nimbly for his age, she noticed, as he helped her into the smaller of the boats. Seeing the question in her eyes he smiled sadly.
"The other one's grander, but it's too big for us. Couldn't do it even if I made you take an oar, and that's no way to welcome anybody." They both watched it as they pulled off from the dock, and Emily could see that it was faded and dusty. "Back in the day, there was a whole team of us Welcomers, ferrying people too and from the Doors. There were grand welcoming parties every day! Guests are rare now, though."
He sounded so sad that Emily could tell how much he'd enjoyed his job.
"I can tell people about Squid City," she offered, "I'm sure lots of people would like to come here."
"No!" He shouted, and she shrank back involuntarily from the strength of his reaction. "You can never tell people - we know what your 'government' is like. One of them came here, once, and got all agitated about our presence being a 'threat to national security'. We had to seal up that door after he went back."
Emily nodded. The Government would be interested in Squid City, and probably in a bad way for its people.
"Don't worry about that," the Welcomer said kindly. "Squid City is about having a fun time! The Festival of Lights isn't so far away, and then you can go home. Just think of it as a holiday."

City of Heroes! City of Adventure! City of Squid!

2008-07-09T23:44:00.000+09:30

The cave showed no signs of ending and Emily was getting bored. She was on the verge of giving up and turning back when her torch flickered and died. Cursing, she fiddled with the switch but nothing happened. Frustrated she shoved it into her pocket - and then realised that she could still see. A faint glow of light showed from around the corner. Was it possible that the cave was actually a tunnel that led somewhere?Curiosity dragged her around the corner and those that followed until it ended abruptly in a little cavern. And there, against all probability, was a door.
Even if it hadn't been in a cave underneath Emily's town the door would have been remarkable. Smooth silvery wood with copper-wire inlays framed the window that provided the only light in the tunnel - an extravagant stained-glass panel depicting a shining tower wrapped in the slippery embrace of an enourmous squid.
Nobody could have resisted the temptation to open that impossible door, and Emily had always been ruled by her curiosity. With a half-suppressed giggle of excitement she tried the handle - it turned easily, and the door swung open before her and for a moment she was blinded by the brilliant sunlight beyond it...

Battlecry

2008-07-08T22:23:00.000+09:30

"You must wait here with the other women," he commanded, and the tone in his voice told Selyn there was no point in arguing. Nikkuro was often serious, but he only gave orders when he believed it to be absolutely necessary. "There are enough soldiers that your presence would not turn the tide of battle. I won't risk you again."
Tender words always remained unspoken with Niko, she knew, but it still hurt when he turned and strode off without another word.
"Is that it?" She called angrily, running after him. He turned and looked at her so sternly that she realised he was trying hard to manage his emotions.
"That's it. No goodbyes. I will see you when the battle is over."
She grabbed his sleeve before he could go again, kissing him deeply as if she could convey in that one action everything he would not let her say.
"No goodbyes," he whispered, touching her cheek gently, and then he was gone, tall and proud on his charger and leading the masses of troops towards the field where the battle would take place. Selyn blinked back sudden tears, frustrated at her own weakness, and angry that he had insisted she stay behind.
"He has a good point, Sel," Amry said softly, hand resting on the bulge of her belly. Selyn looked at the woman with admiration - despite being quite heavily pregnant she was bristling with mistmatched armour and weaponry. If the enemy did break through to the stronghold, Amry would lead the women herself in the last desperate defence of the children.
"Besides, if it comes down to a fight back here, you will make a difference."
Selyn smiled. They both knew what would happen.
"I'm sorry Amry. But while I live, no enemy soldier is going to set foot in the Vale, let alone give you cause to draw that sword."
Amry smiled too, but sadly. She could see the grim set in Selyn's eyes, and that the woman's fingers were lengthening into claws with anticipation of the fight.
"Take care," she said. "I will need you around to help me raise this child."
Selyn nodded, and turned to watch as the soldiers crested the rise that hid the Vale from view of the battlefield. She needed to be sure they were occupied before she joined the ranks, or Niko would sense her at once and send her right back. It would cause a scene, and she didn't want that. Not today.
A sudden surge of shouting voices led the charge, and as the soldiers disappeared from sight Selyn knew it was time to go. As she ran up the incline she felt her body shift, and in the form of a long, spotted cat she loped along, easily catching up to the lumbering human-shaped soldiers. Without warning she broke through the sea of legs, and for the length of a heartbeat she paced alongside Nikkuro's horse. With the enemy so close he didn't even notice her, and she was glad.
The sight of the enemy soldiers filled Selyn with rage and she sprinted the final gap, leaping ahead of Niko's army with a howl that turned into a roar as she changed her form again. Her cat-sprint turned into a bear's lumbering run as she clashed with the first of the enemy and she didn't even feel the blows of their weapons against her thick hide. Anger overrode all common sense and she tossed the enemy soldiers aside with love-taps from her massive paws. Her fur was matted with blood - hers or theirs, what did it matter? All that mattered was that they died.
"Selyn!" Niko screamed as a sword ran through her side, and she realised that the man holding it was their general, a feral triumphant grin on his face. With a howl she swiped at him, and her gore-coated claws scraped furrows across his face. He fell back but the sword was lodged deep, and she could feel her blood spraying from the wound. A voice in the back of her mind warned her that if she didn't change now she wouldn't have the strength, but she was already so weak.
The general wasn't dead. Even as she forced herself upright he was crawling away, but when she lunged for him she stumbled, and her anguished howl turned into a wail as she changed back to her human form.
The sword fell from her as her mass shrank, and she picked it up with a groan. It was impossible to walk but she could manage a crouching lurch, half supporting herself with the sword and half dragging it through the churned and bloody grass. The only sound that registered in her mind was that of her heart pounding, though she was vaguely aware of the screams and shouts of men fighting and dying on every side. Her attention was narrowed, though, to the trail the general had left as he dragged himself along. She felt hands on her arms but shook them off. This man had murdered her friends and family before her eyes, and sent her battered half to death as a living message to the Council. He would suffer at her hand and he would die by his own sword, bleeding and snivelling on the filthy field of a battle he should never have begun.
She threw back her head and howled wordlessly, and the bloodcurdling sound stopped the general in his tracks. He turned, trembling, backing away as she advanced - a woman bruised and bloody and fiercely determined to end his life. He pleaded then, begging for his life in the dirty, snarling language of his homeland. She ignored him, and lifted the sword above him, though her arms trembled weakly at its weight.
"You are filth," she snarled. "You are nothing!"
"Selyn," said a soft voice in her ear. "Do you wish to become a murderer?"
"He deserves to die!" She said, and her voice trembled too.
"He will be captured and sentenced in a fair trial, Sel. He will get what he deserves."
"No!"
"Selyn, I know you are not like this. To kill in battle is one thing but this is not you. Put the sword down."
Strong arms surrounded her, and gentle hands pried her fingers from the blade. The general's expression turned from blind fear to contempt, and he spat at her. Nikkuro set her gently aside and kicked the general square in the stomach. The man bent double, coughing and spluttering as Niko led Selyn away. By some miracle the battle was over, and Selyn could see easily the men she herself had killed - they lay in mangled pieces, torn apart by her rage. She felt sick at the sight of it now, and turned her face into Niko's shirt.
"Time to go home, Sel," he said gently.

Sail or Stay, Make My Day

2008-07-07T11:04:00.000+09:30

In a vast and empty sea lies four islands - Furl, Roost, Perch and Weir. Their inhabitants are largely sailors and fishermen, superstitious folk who quietly worship the many sea-gods of their Islands. Each island serves a different purpose in the community, and to outsiders it can seem a very strange way of life.

Furl is the true sailor's haven - this is where sails are furled, this is the town where the sea-dogs rest by the glowing embers. The architecture is a masterpiece, from the earth-bound buildings of the taverns and shops to the wind-swept, sail-decorated houses of pleasure at the city's crows-nest. The isle is one based largely on the pursuit of pleasure - those who live here do so for the fun of life, for the gambling and the carousing and the enjoyment of all things to the fullest extent. Few families grow here, save for the accidental children, and they become the oddest folk of all, old before their time or eternally young, but one and all with a sideways view of the world, with pleasure-seeking at its heart. This is the place for dancing and drinking, this is the place of salt-crusted men and slim-ankled women, where musicians are gods that play all the night long and wine flows as freely as ale, fine dishes beside coarse, orchestras beside folk-songs.

Roost is a gentler place by far, with its idyllic sheltered bay and covered liberally with ocean-loving flowers. The grass is green and lush and shaggy, brushing the calves of the bare-footed children that run fearlessly along the clifftops. Flowers grow everywhere - not only in the earth beside the paths that criss-cross the isle, but beside roads in the towns, in window-planters and indoor pots, and on rooftop gardens and balconies. It is a cheerful, sunday-picnic community-bonfire town. It is where old men retire and women raise their children. It is a simple place and dedicated to a different type of pleasure, the comfort of a stable, peacefully beautiful life.

Perch is the isle of knowledge, where the scholars gather in their palaces of hewn stone so cold and grand. The universities are here, of all the kinds of learning - herblore, carpentry, cooking, and magic alike. Guilds lead each school of thought, and anyone who wishes to learn can do so here. The buildings are as large in ideals as in scale, wood and stone together forming buildings that are both solid and pleasing to the eye.

Weir is a place of adjustment - it is the halfway house of the lands, the home of lost souls and hermits. Its seemingly harsh landscape of steep mountainsides provides plenty of hollows where a recluse may hide, and its cities provide houses of the illest repute where a young man or woman may find themselves learning the kinds of lessons Perch does not provide - to keep your purse light and out of sight, your arms strong and your feet nimble, your tongue fast and your timing precise. It turns out the best of people and the worst of people - those realising they wish only to roost and forget the compications, those of a more crooked nature wanting to live the fast life of Furl.

Cinder and Smoke

2008-07-06T10:20:00.000+09:30

I planted a cherry tree on your grave. The petals falling looked like snow, and the fruit was always sweeter than any from the store. As I was growing up I brought my problems to you, and if I was very quiet sometimes the wind rustling the leaves sounded like you whispering to me. I always brought my boyfriends to meet you, but I only told one of them the real significance of the tree. When he proposed to me beneath the branches of your tree the wind whipped a flurry of blossoms from its branches. I took it as your blessing, and I was glad that you approved. When I married we held the ceremony in your shade, and when I thanked you the cherry tree bowed down as if you were listening.
The summer that mum died was the last time any cherries grew, but you still gave me the fragrant snow of falling blossoms.

Reia's Roost

2008-07-05T22:47:00.001+09:30

Reia's Roost was the highest part of the island, a windswept rocky spire coated in moss so that it was difficult to tell, at a distance, where the grass and rock met. Nobody knew if the spire had been named after the island or the other way around, but all who lived on Roost visited it sooner or later. It was here that couples spoke their bonding vows, and here that babies were named. Young children watched in awe as older children dared each other to climb higher up its slippery sides. Sailors made their offerings to Reia here before setting out, and it was the only place in the Islands from which you could see all of the others.
It was widely accepted that those who perished at sea had displeased Reia or one of her numerous underlings - there were countless Island gods, but Reia was the mother of them all - and as sailors are a superstitious lot, most were careful to make generous offerings, particularly before long voyages.

Your City Needs You!

2008-07-04T23:05:00.001+09:30

The sound of panicked screaming was always a beacon for Turtle Girl. She jogged through the city streets, silently cursing her inability to run fast. It was distances that bothered her, but speed was a problem. Most super-heros saved the day just in the nick of time, and Turtle Girl was always a few steps behind the action. It didn't mean she didn't try, it just meant that more innocent citizens tended to die in her area than any of the others. That wasn't her fault. It didn't mean she stopped trying.

The source of the commotion was evident from blocks away - a gigantic, long-eared and fluffy demon was systematically tearing down the city's main shopping district. Turtle Girl winced as the cinema's balcony section flew overhead, crashing into and partially destroying the city library. Stray seats fell onto the road around her, occasionally ricocheting off her shell. She ignored them, because she still had some way to go and anyway she hardly noticed the impacts.

"CITIZENS OF TWILIGHT CITY," said a familiar voice over a loudspeaker, "FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY, PLEASE RETURN IMMEDIATELY TO YOUR HOMES."
Even the Mayor had beaten Turtle Girl to the scene. That was embarrassing - no politician was ever on time, and Mayor Bradford was one of the worst.

Turtle Girl halted, panting, at the end of the street. The rabbit was now chewing on a portion of the jewellery store; the emergency spotlights that were directed onto its face highlighted the glimmer of a necklace stuck between its teeth.

"Don't panic," she puffed, resuming her jog, "I'm here n-"

"Never fear, citizens!" A cheerful voice cried over the din. "Your savior is here!"

Turtle Girl watched, bewildered, as a girl in a neon-bright green and pink bodysuit swung into view, swinging Spiderman-like from building to building on sticky pink ropes.

"What's going on?" She demanded when she finally reached the police car. Mayor Bradford looked up from where he cowered at its side, wringing his hands nervously.

"Well, you see, Martha-"

"Turtle Girl," she corrected coldly.

"Turtle Girl. Well, you see, things just aren't working out. We really do appreciate you stepping up after Captain Speedo's untimely demise, however since you took over Twilight City's defences the mortality rate has risen inordinately, and the repair bills are - well, you understand that the budget is somewhat strained."

From the corner of her eye, Turtle Girl watched as the neon-clad girl tripped the rabbit-demon up, entangling its feet with those same sticky ropes. It fell onto the road with a thud that knocked Turtle Girl to the ground.

"Crap." She muttered, scrabbling to right herself. Mayor Bradford got to his feet, leaning over her until she could see his face.

"You understand Martha-"

"Turtle Girl!"

"-Turtle Girl, you understand that you just aren't an economically sound choice for Twilight City any more. I'm sure there's a small town somewhere out of the way in need of a new superhero. Ah, well. Good luck."

He turned in time to see the girl stop the rabbit-demon's howls with a wad of that same, mysterious material. She turned and gave the bystanders a thumbs-up.

"Candy Apple - sweet as candy!" She cried, basking in the praise of those assembled.

Turtle Girl rocked from side to side until she managed to tip over, and slowly got to her feet. Nobody even looked her way - with a little sigh she turned, and began to make her slow way back home.

Furl

2008-07-03T19:06:00.001+09:30

"I can fly!" She cried over her shoulder, stil running along the wall, "Can't you?"
He ran faster, desparate to keep up - he didn't believe that she could fly, and if she jumped from this wall she'd be dashed to pieces on the vicious rocky shore.
"Wait!" He said, fingers grabbing at her sleeve as she leaped out, but catching only air. He skidded to a halt, inches from the wall's end, eyes searching frantically for a sign of the girl with the feathers twisted into her hair. There was nothing - neither in the air nor on the rocks below.
"Safa!" He shouted, and the wind snatched at his words, teasing and tossing them across the bay. Far below a fisherman looked up, shading his eyes against the sun. Panic and confusion filled him; his heart ceased to beat in that terrible moment. A single sea-hawk wheeled overhead, it's harsh cries mingling with his own.
"Safa!" The boy and the sea-hawk cried.
Fly with me, whispered a thread of the wind, brushing past him.
"Where are you?!" He begged.
I am here, the wind breathed, and a single feather drifted down to land at his feet.

Dear Jeremy...

2008-07-02T12:19:00.000+09:30

Dear Jeremy,

I died today.
The 319 is known for arriving on time, and I suppose one stray pedestrian wasn't a good enough reason for it to slow down at all. Passers-by freaked out, of course, running over to me to see if I was alright. When I got up and waved them away they left; at first they were bewildered, but I know they forgot me before they were a block away.
I can't explain how I was able to get up and walk home, but I tell you now my heart was not beating. I haven't taken a breath since that moment. I cut myself making dinner and the blood dripped out in a lazy trickle, and of course when I sat down to eat I found I had no appetite.
I'm writing you this letter so that you know I am still alive, in the way that matters, at least.
In my soul I am alive, waiting for your return.

Dear Jeremy,

When are you coming home? You've been away for so long that sometimes I think you have forgotten me. I have trouble remembering your face but I look through our photo albums all day. I read through the letters you sent, in the early days, when you had just left.
I still love you, even though my body is decaying. It bothered me at first but now I just ignore it... what good is there in worrying? I know why I am here, because I cannot die without you by my side, love.
I will wait for you.

Dear Jeremy,

I dialled your number today, and when you answered the phone I would have cried with happiness, if I could. Then I heard her, calling out to you, asking who it was on the phone.
Until today, it was love that kept me alive while my body fell apart. Now it is rage, and I will not stop until I have had my revenge.
See you soon, my love.

Bloodseeker

2008-07-01T18:30:00.001+09:30

The pain in her leg was dull, a distant throbbing that nagged but did not distract her from the task at hand. They were almost at the compound now, she could tell; the blade in her hand was almost too hot to hold in its excitement. The blood it sought was close enough to taste.
Faster! it urged, more a feeling than real words, an itching sensation in her brain. Faster!
She picked up the pace a little, vaguely aware that the throbbing increased with every step. The sensible part of her knew that this was a bad sign, but she had long ago pushed sensible aside. She needed nothing more than dogged endurance right now.
Lights ahead guided her to the walls of the compound, tall and sheer without hope of a foot- or hand-hold, but that was alright. There were other ways to get into a place like this. Gathering her almost non-existant reserves of energy, she took a deep breath and stepped into the shadows. It was deadly to breathe in this non-air, but she had long ago mastered the art of shadow-walking, and she moved with easy steps through the suddenly-permeable compound wall. The blade hummed silently with its lust for blood, almost wrenching free from her hand. With an irritated frown she dug the tip into the palm of her hand, knowing that her powerful blood would subdue it for a time at least.
Again she slid into the shadows, this time running arrow-straight towards her target. Buildings and figures tugged slightly at her body as she ghosted by but she ignored them just as she ignored the bursting desperation of her lungs. Finally, sensing through the knife that no blood was near, she crouched down and left the shadows, allowing herself to breathe in quiet gasps.
She felt nothing at all from her leg now, and this would have terrified her if she'd been capable of emotion but the chill of shadow-walking had filled her to the brim with cold, cold purpose.
Now, the knife insisted as she slowly stood and turned to the wall that separated her from the target. She nodded and embraced the shadow-world for the final time, slipping through the wall and across the room to where a lone figure sat hunched over a desk.
He was old, which was unusual - the older a person was, the less likely they were to need her particular attention. Of course there had to be a reason for it, or she wouldn't be here, but the thought made her pause for just a second.
"Who's that?" Asked a quavering voice and the man straightened up, holding a bent and cracked pair of spectacles up to his nose. "Is somebody there? Come into the light."
She stepped into the light, knife held before her so that its blade glinted in the flickering lantern light. Shock filled his eyes as it plunged into his chest, but it was not the blossoming stain that had caused his surprise.
"Alisa?" He said, incredulously, and for the longest seconds of her life they locked eyes in mutual astonishment. Then the blade had slipped free, silent and content and slick with blood, and the man fell to the desktop with a terrible thud.

Listmaking - Silence

2008-06-30T23:59:00.000+09:30

There are five types of silence. The sleepy silence of dusk and dawn and the silence of emotion too big for words. The inheld-breath-silence of anticipation. The silence of absolutely nothing exciting happening or, the most interesting kind - the silence that accompanies a sound so loud all other sounds are obsolete beside it.

Welcome to Wordfill

2008-06-30T22:01:00.000+09:30

I decided that a writing blog could be a good way to encourage myself to write more often; if not every day, then certainly on a more regular basis.
Wordfill is going to be a dumping ground for every time I write something without making a completed, polished piece - this is my landfill for words.

For the polished (or at least finished) pieces, go to my deviantART account: http://queen-of-marigold.deviantart.com/ .

Um... that's it!