Tag Archives: fantasy

Fantasy, General Fiction

Ipsy

The first time Tim saw Ipsy was when he was a young boy. Down by the river that ran past his stepfather’s house, he had looked up from trying to tickle fish in the cool water, and Ipsy had been standing there with his wild hair sticking out at all angles and grinning madly.

“I’m Ipsy, Timmy. Come on, I know where treasure is hidden,” Ipsy had said, grinning, and ran off into the woods without looking back. Tim had chased after him laughing; the fish, the river, and what was in the old, dark house all forgotten.

Colours had looked different for Tim around Ipsy, the wind had carried music and the shadows’ secrets suddenly had not seemed so dark. The Sun had danced in the sky, the Stars’ ballroom had been the Moon’s tapestry while the woods had become their kingdom. Indeed, Ipsy and Tim had run as free as the beasts, screaming, laughing and playing. They had chased butterflies and faeries, discovered forgotten gods, and even–after an epic quest–found a magical sword. They had drunk wine made of moonlight, supped on starlight, and danced madly in a magical clearing beneath the moonlight of another sky. With Timmy’s wits, Ipsy’s bravery, and their magical sword, they had embarked on great quests and vanquished the wicked while protecting the innocent, and, only once, in its lair, they had fought a big, old, mean Dragon…

Indeed, terrified and cowering in fear, Tim had watched Ipsy slay the fiery, roaring Dragon.

“Don’t worry, Timmy,” Ipsy said, covered in the Dragon’s blood and grinning madly, his eyes twinkling with an unseen light, “ You are safe now. The old beast deserved it.“

Tim was shaking and Ipsy grabbed him and hugged him tightly. That was how all the dragon’s blood had gotten onto him, he was sure. Ipys was the strong one. Tim had been too scared to do anything and had only watched as Ipsy slew the dragon.

“You trust me, Timmy?” Ipsy asked, a shadow flickering across his face, to which Tim nodded and gritted his teeth–they both knew what was coming, “Good. I can’t go where you are going, but I will always be here. Always. Come find me in the woods, Timmy. Come find me where we danced in that moonlit clearing.“

Tim remembered how blue the police’s lights had been, flashing rhythmically. Like awful, screaming little moons as they closed him in cold iron and drove him away from the magical kingdom and Ipsy.

***

Each morning, the guards would let the inmates out into the yard. Some would cluster in gangs or mill around, smoking those nasty illicit cigarettes that seemed to permeate penitentiaries. Others would gym but Old Timmy–as he was now known–did not like the touch of iron. His sixty-odd years of incarceration had more than enough cold iron for him.

No, he liked to walk around the yard to the far side where some flowers grew on the other side of the fence. Lillies and primroses sprung up there around the smallest sliver of a stream that trickled by. It vaguely reminded him of the old river back home but that had been so, so long and he was not sure he could remember it quite right anymore. Maybe he had made that up too?

And then, one morning, he hobbled through the milling inmates–they all ignored the bent, crazy Old Timmy–and reached the fence by his flowers when he saw the wild hair and wide grin of Ipsy standing there. Ipsy had not aged a day!

“It is time to come home, Timmy,” Ipsy said, his face full of concern, longing and sadness, “Come home.“

Timmy shook his head and blinked. He had often wondered if he had imagined Ipsy? Had he imagined their adventures? They had told him that he had and, after sixty-odd years, he had started to believe them. But here, standing before him in the full morning light was the wild-haired, grinning mischievous Ipsy.

“B-but I can’t, Ipsy,” Timmy said, his decades of facade cracking and tears starting to trickle down his face, “I really want to, Ipsy. I really, really want to, but I can’t get out here. They won’t let me, Ipsy. They never let me, Ipsy–“

Ipsy stepped over the flowers and came up close to the fence–but was careful not to touch the iron–and Timmy saw the sadness in his eyes. So much sadness! It was oceans of hurt and pain, washing through time and into the great pool of emotion that lies below the ground. He hurt, and he hurt that his friend hurt, and the trickle of tears on Old Timmy’s face began to flood into a river that fed that vast, dark body of water.

“It’s alright, Timmy,” Ipsy said, mischief dancing on the corner of his tearful eyes and a grin creeping back onto his face, “This is one last adventure for you. They’ll let you this time. Come find me in the woods, Timmy, come find me where we danced in that moonlit clearing.“

***

“How’d whats-a-name get out then?” the investigating Officer said, rifling through the pile of papers on his desk. The Warden in front of him shifted uncomfortably and wrung his hands a little.

“I-I am… We are not sure, Sir,” the Warden replied, “We have checked all the surveillance and all our records. Even his cellmate does not know, Sir. Old Timmy was basically harmless too; oldest geyser in the block for some murder he did decades ago. Kept to himself. Never got in trouble. Perhaps it was the medical diagnosis that inspired this action–you know, see the world one last time?–but we don’t really know anything else…”

The Warden finished lamely, his sentence trailing off. The Officer nodded without looking up and wrote on some of the papers, and time stretched out into an awkward silence as the Officer read further.

“So why–and how–did the old man make it all the way back to his old stepfather’s house in the middle of nowhere? This was the stepfather he murdered, right? Why go back to those woods? I’d really like to know that last part.”

The Warden shrugged and shook his head dumbly, “Old Timmy wasn’t, ah, all right up there, Sir. We reckoned he was mad and, you know, crazy does what crazy does.”

***

Late that night–hours and an official report later–the Officer was sitting alone in his office with his single desk lamp on. The Department was largely empty this time of night too. The official report has been concluded, his superior had signed off on it, the Warden had seemed relieved, and the world had swept it all into the folds of bureaucracy.

But he could not shake a feeling. A strange, surprising feeling.

All alone in his dimly lit office, he sat staring at the picture of the clearing in the woods where Timmy’s body had been found. The grass was stunningly green in that clearing and a weird ring of mushrooms circled Timmy’s corpse.

There were no signs of recent trauma, but Old Timmy had had terminal cancer, so his death had been ruled quite simply that. No one had any clue how he had escaped prison nor how he had gotten to the other side of the country without being seen but, well, no harm had been done and he was dead from cancer. The bureaucrats liked these neat endings and so, without much fuss, the case-file had been filed and the world had moved one.

No one cared about one old, dead, escaped, crazy convict.

But, in that dimly lit room, alone in the vast, empty Department, the Officer sat staring at the picture the crime-scene photographer had taken of Old Timmy’s face: he was smiling. Forever captured in time, Old Timmy’s face held a peaceful, contented smile with a light that made the Officer’s inside ache. It made him ache with an ancient, hollow hurt that he had forgotten was there, and he could not help feeling strangely jealous–

With a jolt, the Officer realized he was jealous of Old Timmy and he did not know why?

General Fiction

When We Remember

When the light left the dream, she woke up in the darkness. She always woke up at this point, adrift in an ocean of darkness. She lay there trying to grasp it but failed. It felt like she had lost something, forgotten something, left something behind… She felt hollow and hungry.

Hungry.

She had not eaten for a day or two, and then the City rushed jarringly back into her consciousness. The grit around her, the sweet, sickening smell of garbage, the roar of traffic and the pain in her neck from the angle she had lain.

Her head hurt, her neck hurt and she felt too numb for even tears to form.

Slowly she pushed herself up–without a plan, but a need to find something to eat–and stumbled out from behind the trash cans at the bottom of the alleyway in the bad part of the City. She could taste the last night’s decisions in her throat and instinctively wiped her hands on her dirty pants.

It started raining. No, it had always been raining and now it was raining heavier. Adrift in the darkness with the light in her dream long forgotten, she stumbled out to the lonely street.

***

He watched the rain running down the windows, some of it spraying inside from the open one. The fraying carpet was getting wet but he did nothing to correct or stop it and kept staring at the rain; staring through the rain. He kept trying to pierce the darkness just beyond it.

Try as he might, he just could not pierce the darkness.

It was like that recurring dream he kept having but could never remember. All he could ever remember was the vaguest memory of light. He felt like there was something just outside of his grasp. Something he had lost, something forgotten or left behind. He felt hollow with despair.

Despair.

She had left. The kids had left. The work and the money had left. There had never been much else for him, and the cancer was just ironic as well. The reasons to exist felt fewer and fewer like he was adrift in an ocean of darkness; drowning out there in the dark waters with nothing but the vague, fading memory of light to cling to.

He was on the top floor with the City wreathed in the night far below but for some reason, he could see a lady on the street below him stumble out from an alley. With an empty street and absent crowds, it was like she too was lost in an ocean of darkness. Perhaps his ocean of darkness? One body adrift seeing another, briefly, before the waters swallowed them forever.

He sighed and stood up. The window was too small and he had no balcony. The roof, though, was just a short walk from the apartment, up the stairs that lay behind the elevator.

He turned from the window and walked out of the room, turning the light off. Outside, the rain started to beat down even harder as the darkness swallowed the space inside the drab room.

***

“Do they ever remember?” asked a being, watching the man walk to the edge of the roof, “Do they ever know?“

It was a quick fall to the ground where the lady stood. The point of impact was only about two feet from where she was and, almost immediately, the heavy rain began to wash off the blood from her and the surrounding concrete pavement. There was a moment of shock and then she began to scream, stumbling back into the street and furiously wiping her hands on herself.

“No,” the other being said, “No, they never remember where they have come from and where they will return.“

A sudden, careless car tore out from the night and, adrift in the dark ocean, the waters abruptly closed over the lady’s head. Mercilessly, the car sped on into the night and the rain kept coming down harder, washing the street clean from where both broken bodies now lay.

“Why?” said a third being, suddenly also there as if it had always been there, “Why did I not know before?“

The first two beings turned and saw the third. And then there was a fourth with them as if it had always been with them.

“Why did we have to go through all of that, if there was always this?” asked the fourth being, wreathed in the same light that the other beings shone with.

The second being smiled sadly.

“Light cannot exist without darkness, and darkness cannot be understood and cannot be learnt from while standing in the light. We cannot swim in the ocean–or, learn to swim in the ocean by dipping a mere toe into it. We must be immersed in the dark waters to learn its lessons.”

The other three beings nodded their agreement sadly. They all remembered their lessons, and they remembered all the lessons before that, and before that. Many, many times over.

Fantasy

After the Prophecy

A moment of silence descended upon the battlefield when the Red King fell. Just one single moment of silence before the Golden Army’s roar of victory erupted. He often thought about that moment of silence, wondering if it was not more important than what followed.

He also often thought about that moment of silence because it was the moment that he found his big brother’s broken body. His big brother who had easily swung him around as a little kid. His big brother who had looked after him after their parents died. His big brother who had shown him how to fight and given him his first sword. His big brother who had shown him how to hunt and farm and drink, and his big brother who would always be trapped in that moment of silence.

“The Red King has fallen! The Golden Bard has won! The Prophecy is fulfilled!” roared the men around him, yet his brother and the other bodies around them remained silent. The Golden Bard’s banners waved, his trumpets blared and his soldiers surged forward to finish those few in the Northern Army who did not flee. The soldiers surged forward, pushing passed him as he stood silently staring at his big brother’s corpse.

Much like blood had earlier that day, the wine flowed that night. He drank his full–or tried to–but the wine tasted bad. It was bitter and did not fill him like it used to. He wished with all his heart that he was sharing it with his big brother, yet the survivors did not care and they drunkenly boasted of their trophies.

Their trophies, though, were silent; silent along with his big brother.

In those moments and across the years that followed, he often wondered, if given a second chance, whether the dead would choose to fight their wars again. The only answer he ever heard was what he had heard on that battlefield that day: silence. Endless, roaring Silence, echoing louder than anything else.

And, so, that night, he slipped away, taking his Silence and the sword his big brother had given him.

***

The completion of the Prophecy and the victory against the Northern Army spread across the central lands, but he moved faster than it and found himself in a small hamlet on the edge of the Unruled Land. While the Golden Bard–now a King–was consolidating his Kingdom, establishing his taxes and treasury, and seeing his army’s ranks swell, no one cared about those who lived on the edge of the world with little to their names. And those who lived at the edge of the world preferred it that way.

The wine tasted better here, cleaner. Not sweet, but neither was it bitter. His big brother would have liked it.

He was sure he saw, or recognized, some of the blonde-haired Northmen around these lands. But, they and their army were beaten–he doubted their Prophecies had been fulfilled–and they kept to themselves and he kept to himself.

And the wine kept tasting good.

***

Years passed and the village remained the same. The seasons came and went, and the honest toil of men yielded sustenance from the earth. Not often, but sometimes, bandits would ride out from the Unruled Land and he would fight them off with his old sword and the help of the other men and boys in the village.

And then they would return to their quiet lives tending their farms.

The old Northmen forgot their lands and many of their ways, and he tried to forget the Golden Army and their damned prophecies. Indeed, he and the Northmen would fight side by side for their shared pieces of land. And then they would farm together, sharing their surpluses and helping out with each others’ deficits. He learned about their ways and they his, and, people fell in love, families joined, babies were born and life continued forging new ways forward without the need for armies and prophecies.

It was a difficult life but the wine tasted good, the birds chirped in summer and the hearth crackled in winter. And, slowly, the Silence began to dim in his heart and he began to only think of his big brother in the darker hours of the night.

***

Slowly, disturbing tales from wandering tinkers began to reach them. The Golden Kingdom was at war, again, the Golden King–as the Bard now referred to himself–and his Golden Army were fighting amongst themselves. There was talk of new prophecies being told, many new prophecies being told to anyone who wanted one. Some factions broke off and raided innocent villages while the Golden King viciously hiked taxes with harsh treatment for those starving peasants who could not pay. All to feed the furnace of war upon the beguiling promise of conveniently opposing prophecies.

He would shake his head, sip his wine, and wonder if it would reach them. The young men around him would laugh and talk tough about fighting off soldiers like they had the bandits, and he would look at the old Northmen and they would all shake their heads and drink their wine. Once, a painfully long time ago, his big brother had spoken like these boys and he had listened, and the thought of it made an old hurt ache deep down inside him and the Silence began to sound louder in his heart.

***

He knew it before the boy’s cries pierced the crisp morning air. The raging civil war had been spreading and getting nearer. He had felt it ever since the first tinker had spoken of the Golden Kingdom’s troubles. He had felt the Silence and knew that the noise and violence would likely follow like winter after a long, quiet, peaceful summer.

A regiment of soldiers was heading towards them. Were they for the Golden King or against him? Or were they merely for themselves? Did it matter to the village–his village–as they were surely not for these people?

He was an old man now and his hands were calloused from working the soil. His hair was long and white, and his big brother would never have recognized him. Indeed, he wondered if he would recognize his big brother if he saw him now. He hoped so. What would his big brother have been doing? Would he be here with him, or one of the soldiers marching towards them?

The Silence began to quietly roar inside him but this time he did not try to ignore it. This time no bards would write poems nor historians publish books on the battle. This time there were no prophecies to fulfill while rationalizing murder. No, this time he fought alongside the Northmen just as men, and, this time, they fought not over kingdoms but their homes.

He put on his old armor and picked up his old sword. The sword his big brother had given him. The sword his big brother had taught him how to fight with. It was heavy. It was a heavy burden and one that he did not think he would have to carry much longer. As he walked out to join his neighbors, wondering if he would meet his big brother soon, the Silence roared in his heart.

Fantasy, General Fiction, Horror & Dark Fiction

The Many Faces of Sophia Morrow

“Sophia Morrow, what did you see when you looked at yourself?”

It was a simple enough question but she froze, unable to answer. She felt trapped, pinned down by the unyielding grey eternity. Where were they? How had she gotten here?

“I–I, uhm, I saw red hair on porcelain skin, I think I looked quite good, actually?” she answered, pulling her gaze from the endlessness around them and looking at the speaker. A man? At least, she thought it was a man but was unable to even see a face underneath the cowl. In fact, the Robed Man could well just have been a robe floating in front of her.

It was silent. Was he perhaps contemplating her answer, perhaps entirely something else? The nothingness in this place made her queasy and was starting to play tricks on her perception.

“No,” the Robed Man suddenly spoke up in his hollow, low voice like stone creaking under the weight of time, “No, that is the wrong answer. You have to do it again.”

“Wha–“

***

“Sophia Morrow, what did you see when you looked at yourself?” the Robed Man asked.

She remembered this question, she thought. Or was it a memory of a dream? She had those sometimes. But, no, she was sure she remembered this question…

And then she realized the nothingness around her! Grey and vast, her form floating in the belly of eternity as unnoticed as shadows at night.

“I–” she paused, suddenly feeling terrified. She had gotten this wrong before. More than once, and each time she had to go back. Back to that place! There was so much pain there! “I–I saw opportunity and loss, successes and failures. I saw things I had done, things I should not have done, and things that I had not done or could not do. I saw a past that was written, a present that was being lived and a future that could be chosen. I saw life.”

She smiled, her memory was coming back to her. She had been in this place many times before but she was sure she had gotten it right this time. She was sure.

The Robed Man was silent, a gentle, unfelt breeze moving his garment. Yet, all around them, there was literally nothing. Silence. Endless. Grey. Eternity…

And then the Robed Man shook his head and said, “No, that is the wrong answer. You have to do it again,” and she was flung back into the world to learn the lesson she had not yet learnt.

***

“Sophia Morrow, what did you see when you looked at yourself?” the Robed Man asked.

She was ready this time. Maybe she was finally adjusting to this cycle or this place, and her memories from all her other lives came back to her quicker?

She looked at the Robed Man and paused. Was it for just a moment she paused or for a thousand years? Time was hard to track in this grey formless place.

Her thoughts were torrents pouring over themselves. Analysing her previous answers and looking at her previous lives, her thoughts raged onwards. What was the lesson she was missing? What had she seen? What was there to see? What had she gotten wrong? What had she learnt? What had she been? What?

And then it popped into her consciousness, gently like a small bubble bursting. It was a single, clear and unequivocal thought. She paused, considered it, and continued.

“When I looked at myself,” she began, picking her words carefully, “I saw myself. Nothing less and nothing more. Myself, as that is all we can be.”

Silence, and then, “Yes,” the Robed Man said flatly, and she felt a rush of relief and joy like she had never felt before. And–strangely and unexpectedly–she felt a small sense of loss. She may never see the world again. She may never get to be born again. She would never grow up and love and share and cry and fall and rise again. Never, and it made a small part of her immensely sad.

But the Robed Man continued, “And, Sophia Morrow, what do you see when you look at yourself now?”

Sophia narrowed her eyes. This was unexpected but she had never gotten this far before. Then it struck her. It felt like a thunderbolt to her soul as the realization hit her. Not once questioning if this was the right answer, she answered:

“Oh Death,” she began, smiling. Her soul felt one with infinity, at peace with eternity, and touching all that is, was and will be as it touched her back, “Like a chip of rock chiselled from the whole, we are each uniquely ourselves, but like that same rock ground and mixed together with the rest, we can be recast into any form as the whole and the whole is us. Like a drop of water, we are unique, but, like a drop of water, we came from the ocean and we return again to the ocean where we are both still the drop of water and the ocean. We are all part of the whole and the whole is us. So, Death, oh sweet Death, what I see when I look at myself now is everything for I am everything.”

And then Death smiled.

“The first lesson is that of the Individual, unique, flawed and beautiful. The second lesson is that of the Whole from which the Individual originates from, returns to and, indeed, entirely is.”

“Now what?” Sophia asked, smiling.

“As I have done with you,” Death spoke, seemingly picking his words carefully as if he had never said this before, “Now you get to teach this to another soul.”

And then Sophia Morrow was alone in the grey eternity.

Death was no more, and, wrapped in eternity and infinity, Sophia turned around and faced the naked newborn soul that had appeared before her wide-eyed and terrified. She smiled. She felt so much love for it! And she panged with sympathy and sorrow at quite how hard and painful the soul’s road would have to be.

But, like her, this soul must learn the lesson before moving on.

“Andrew Brooke,” Sophia knew exactly what to say, “what did you see when you looked at yourself?”

Fantasy, General Fiction

The Ethereal Form of Fairies

“Can you see it, Little Light?” her mother asked, squeezing her hand as they looked in the mirror, “If you look with your heart, you should be able to see it.”

She squinted her eyes and focussed. It was dim in the gas station toilet and the mirror was grimy and cracked on one side. She clenched her jaw and willed herself to see it–

And there it was! The darkness around them peeled away and a light that was not a light glowed around them. And, just behind her and her mother, silvery, ethereal wings fluttered gently.

“I can!” she exclaimed, excitedly, hugging her mother and then quickly turning back to check she could still see herself in the mirror, “I really can, mommy!”

Her mother smiled and bent down, putting her head next to her daughters and looking at both of them in the mirror.

“These are our true forms, Little Light,” her mother whispered, a sadness creeping into her pale blue eyes, “Our eternal forms from the Old Lands. So, Little Light, never forget this. When this world’s darkness closes in–and it always does; our true selves are immortal but these human bodies are not–just remember that none of this matters. None of this dreadful, dirty world of men matters and, my dear, you are the light and–“

A glass bottle shattered the moment against a wall outside. The sound of the city rushed back in and an angry voice rang out from the other side of the door. Her mother froze, her smile vanishing completely. She stood up slowly and looked at the door for a moment before looking back down at her.

“Your father is waiting. We must go, Little Light.”

***

When the first shovel of dirt hit the casket, it sounded like a door slamming shut. Forever. The second shovel of dirt echoed her mother’s rasping breath at the end, in between cigarettes and whisky. She remembered carrying her to bed before her own night shift began and, by the third shovel of dirt, her mind had already shifted to worrying about paying last month’s rent, let alone this month’s.

Following her mother’s will, she had made sure that the casket was made of oak and not an ounce of iron–not even in the nails–was in it. She had also made sure that the funeral was held at dusk, and, later, she would make sure mushrooms and foxgloves grew around the plot.

“This is so depressing, babe,” the man beside her moaned, badly hiding a yawn behind his mouth before reaching into his pocket for a cigarette, “If we leave now, we can hit the pool bar before the happy hour ends. Bertie says he might have a job for me, or something.”

She wanted to hit him. She wanted to run away. She wanted to scream and cry, but all she did was sigh and kept watching the men filling her mother’s grave. At least he was here. That was something. No one else was here, including her father. She had tried to call him and had mailed him an invite but to no avail. He was probably in jail or drunk again. Perhaps both.

Eventually, she looked up at her boyfriend and tried to smile. He tried to look sympathetic. If he is trying, it means he is, she reminded herself. He flicked away the cigarette he had finished and hugged her. His arms felt good around her.

“Sure, hun,” she mumbled, “let’s go get that drink. Maybe Bertie does have a job for you.”

***

“Can you see it, Little Light?” she asked her daughter, “You need to look with your heart, and then you will see your beautiful true form.”

She lifted her daughter to the counter in the bathroom. She was small and light, probably too small and too light for her age. The light in the MacDonalds was flickering but she could see her daughter squinting intensely at herself in the dirty mirror.

And then her daughter’s face lit up, “Yes, mommy! I can see it! It is amazing! We are so beautiful! So beautiful!”

She smiled and hugged her daughter tightly, whispering about their immortal souls and the beauty that cannot die. She whispered about the Old Lands and how their people had fled them. She whispered about oak trees, foxgloves and circles of mushrooms. She whispered about how this world was not real and how only this light was, and, the whole time, she wondered if she could still see it.

Fantasy, The Little Gods

Little Lies

Far below, she watched the aristocrats and patricians swarm in, out and around the centre of Rome. Their white tunics and red sandals differed them from the drabber toga colours of ordinary people, but their actions and words distinguished them even more and these were what attracted her to them. Or them to her. She could never decide though she would pretend to know if anyone ever asked her.

“You see, my sister, Veritas,” she spoke over her shoulder, her gaze never leaving the bustle below her, “believes in truth, is truth and all it represents. How very noble, and ignorant of her,” she chuckled under her breath–Veritas was actually her cousin–and continued speaking, “How little she understands the human condition. Human society does not exist despite falsehoods, but because of them. We have happy relationships because we hide nasty truths from each other and ourselves. We have peaceful societies because we lie about royalty, class and privilege to each other. Truth is a prison–immobile, unmalleable and impersonal–while lying is the key that frees us from it and allows us to be who we want to be.”

Far below, aristocrats spoke quietly together, every second word a lie, half-truth or omission. Patricians exchanged falsehoods and insincerities below to gain position and power. Everyone with every breath in every moment and with every word added to the body of lies underwriting society.

“I, on the other hand,” she eventually broke her gaze from her ignorant worshipers and turned to the listener, “I see society’s true character: untruths and lies. Not a big lie, not a horrendous one, just countless little lies all stacked up precariously on one and another.”

“You are Parum Vera, Goddess of Half-truths and Little Lies, Patrician of the Patricians, Whisperer of Greyness and Mistress of Makeup.”

The being that stood before her was hard to look at; not ugly or hideous, but physically hard for you to make your eyes focus on it. If you did not actively concentrate, your eyes slid off its image and your mind wandered. With immense effort, though, if you did manage to focus on it for even a few seconds, whatever you saw was fleeting and left your mind the moment you looked away, leaving you only with a strange sense of hollow vastness.

Parum Vera smiled, a strangely insincere act on her somewhat round and pouty face, and nodded, “Yes, just call me Vera, brother. And what can I do for Ignotus , the Being of Distraction?”

Ignotus smiled, or at least Vera got the feeling that he smiled. Even for a goddess–albeit one of the minor goddesses–she visually struggled with Ignotus. She only called him ‘brother’ because she had to call It something and they were related. Truth be told, she had no idea what It was, but, truth had never been her strong point, so she kept to her story that It was her brother.

“I have an idea for something glorious and I need you to convince the mortals to build it.”

***

His joints hurt and no amount of wine seemed to dull the ache. Vast splendour surrounded him but, in his early seventies, it had also cost him a lot. First, subtly, and then in open civil war, he had worked his way up from equestrian to senator and, finally, to Emperor, but all things came at a price and he now was in the sunset of his life.

A lifetime to get here, but what did he want to do with it? His joints ached and he felt tired. All the power in the world and all he wanted was wine, a hot bath and a good night’s sleep.

Emperor Vespasian sighed and took a long sip of his wine as the man before him droned on. The Rationibus or royal accountant of Rome was a strange, balding little man with slightly bulbous eyes who had served under at least three of the four emperors during the Year of Four Emperors. A dubious track record, at best.

He did not like him but he did need him. The Empire was large and needed to be organized.

The numbers droned on and the wine slid down his throat. He rubbed his knees and leaned back in his gilded chair. What should he now do with his power? What legacy could he leave–beyond this position–for his two sons? How would history remember him?

Suddenly, he realized that the Accountant had stopped talking and was looking carefully at him. He cleared his throat and nodded, and the Accountant smiled.

“Perhaps, Emperor, could I step beyond my duties and make a suggestion?” the Accountant continued without waiting for his agreement, “Following your successful siege and subjugation of the rebel city, Jerusalem, we have a plentiful supply of slaves and your treasury is well endowed, yet the people grow increasingly irritable and restless. The late Nero had embraced them on his estate and, while however despicable and dangerous such an act is, it has left a vacuum that could be useful. Too many slaves collapse the price of slavery, too much gold creates unhealthy desire, and the peoples’ restlessness combines with these to make for a dangerous civil union…”

The Accountant paused here and narrowed his bulbous eyes, obviously trying to see if Emperor Vespasian was following his hints. Whatever he saw satisfied him, and he pushed onwards eagerly.

“What if we were to turn Nero’s old estate–where he let the common people walk–into a vast entertainment building? When built, we could stage entertainment for the masses and, as it is being built, it would draw on many thousands of slaves–keeping this market healthily tight–while also obliterating Nero’s toxic legacy with your own improved one….”

Emperor Vespasian smiled! His mind was suddenly racing.

“Yes!” he said slamming his wine down and a grin spreading across his face, “We will build the Flavian Amphitheater! We will tear down that stain on the city, the Colossus, and make mine in its place! A great idea!”

Of all the ideas from all the aristocrats and patricians, it was his accountant that had solved his legacy for him. He would build!

In the moments that followed, Emperor Vespasian did not stop to think where his accountant could have come up with such an idea or what–or who–had been the inspiration for it…

***

“Six thousand slaves, ten years and much more gold later,” Ignotus growled, smiling, “and we have the Colosseum. I would ask you how you influenced the mortals to build it but I am not sure you would tell me the truth, sister.”

At midnight beneath a full moon, they both stood on the top of the concrete stands looking down on the eerie circular stage far below them. Soft snoring, growls and an occasional roar could be heard from the cells below it but the stage stood empty and awaiting tomorrow’s show. Empty seats with rigid class order cascaded down from their perch until the floor of the amphitheatre was reached. Here, surrounded by screaming blood-thirsty crowds, gladiators, slaves and animals fought to the death for little more than the onlookers’ entertainment.

“A beautiful plan, brother,” Vera smiled, “and one that I benefit from. This building is built from a lie to a little man, to hide another’s lie and it perpetuates so many of society’s current lies. Even the name, the Colosseum, is a lie, as Emperor Vespasian actually named it the Flavian Amphitheater, yet people and history will forget that, perpetuating the lie. What I do not understand, brother, is what you get from this structure?”

Once again, Vera got a distinct impression that Ignotus was smiling–even grinning–but she had long ago given up trying to see–or remember–any detail of the creature.

“Future poets will call it ‘bread and circuses‘, emperors and kings of civilizations yet-to-come will replicate its model and build copies of it all over the world to host games that people everywhere will faithfully watch, talk about, write about and discuss to the exclusion of all else,” and then Ignotus, the Being of Distraction, the Demon of Diversion, and the Blur of History laughed–a strange, deep, growling static that made Vera’s pale skin crawl–“You, Vera, have tricked the mortals into building the greatest of mass distractions ever invented; years from now they will build stadiums and beam it into people’s very houses and pockets and they will call it: Sport.”

The Little Gods

A Minor Fate

At first, he was not aware of what woke him. Quiet filled the dark room, broken only by the breathing of the naked woman lying next to him. But then, as his eyes adjusted to the night, he saw the funny little man. The plump figure was rocking back and forth on his heels while crouching and staring intently at the inside of his bedroom door.

“Hey–” he mumbled getting up, “Hey, what are you doing here?” He was not worried and did not reach for the sword in the far corner along with the rest of their scattered clothes. The strange man did not look like a thief and, even if he was, he was pretty sure he could best him in a fight.

The strange man jumped immediately to his feet and stared wildly at him, “Par-pardon, my friend,” he began stammering as he wrung his hands and kept glancing nervously at the door, “Pardon on the intrusion, but I am seeking a little sanctuary and thought this room would serve that purpose.”

“I am Spurius of the Third Gallica,” he said, now sitting in bed and looking intently at the nervous little man, “What could you possibly want in my bedchambers late at night? You are no thief nor murderer? You are not even armed, nor does it look like you would know how to use a sword or spear if you had one?”

The strange man nodded and attempted a friendly smile that came out more as a twitch, “Hail, Spurius of the Third Gallica. You are correct that I am not here out of bad intentions. I am hiding from my wife and I just felt that a man like you would understand that. You see, Spurius, my wife is not just anyone. She is the Goddess of Arguments, the Sayer of the Last Word. She is Caballus and she is angry.”

Spurius had drunk wine in the evening but he had not thought that he had drunk too much. Yet his head hurt. Ironic given the situation. He stood up slowly, finding his feet and reached for a leftover partially filled goblet. Almost contemplatively he stared down and it and then swiftly downed it before walking slowly to the corner to get his clothes. He chuckled softly as a thought occurred to him, “It is ironic that the cure for too much of something is more of it, is it not?”

The strange man nodded solemnly but did not answer. He seemed to be waiting for something or some response.

As Spurius swung his crumpled tonga over his shoulder, he began to speak. The Roman military practised and rewarded logic and practicality, and he had come far in his career as a soldier. “As unusual as that story is,” he began as he fastened the toga in place, “if your wife is a goddess, then you would have to be a god–“

“I am the Great Immortal God of Irony, Theodore Hoodwink Samuel, the Gi–“

“What!?” Spurius snorted but then lowered his voice with a careful glance at the nearby sleeping woman, “I have never heard of such a ridiculous thing. In fact, I have never heard of the Goddess of Argument nor the God of Irony.”

“–ver of Chuckles, or Teddy for short,” Teddy ended what sounded like an ironically long list of titles somewhat deflated, “Well, we are the lesser known gods, the Little Gods. You know, the kinda sub-pantheon below the big names. Ignotus the Being of Distraction? Lardum the God of Bacon? Luci the Goddess of Diamonds? Oblivus the God of Forgetfulness? Influffi the Goddess of Clouds? Any of these ringing a bell? Any?“

Spurius stood frozen, his headache slowly receding and his mouth hanging open. He shut it quickly and reached for his sword. The metal was colder than the warm night air and it felt comfortable in his experienced hand.

“Teddy,” he began slowly, narrowing his eyes and slowly stepping forward “Firstly, Teddy is a strange name. Secondly, I have never heard of any of these deities and, finally, suggest you leave my room by the means you entered it else you will leave it another way.”

Teddy’s face paled and he began to back slowly away from the sword-holding legionnaire, “Please, Spurius, I am the God of Irony, but I am also mortal! It is the greatest of ironies, but please afford me sanctuary here just for the night and I will grant you a blessing?”

It was a large bedchamber and the room led out onto a cool balcony. Spurius suddenly felt sorry for the strange man and, since he was up, the wine had tasted good and some male company may not hurt. He tucked the sword under his arm, grabbed a nearby amphora of wine and nodded towards the balcony.

“Sure, Teddy the Mortal God,” he chuckled, “I will grant you sanctuary here until the wine runs out and, in exchange, you will grant me immunity from angry wives. Now, please do share the tales of all your Little Gods with me, I am curious… How do the Hebrews feel about Lardum?”

***

When the door shut, Spurius found himself smiling. Maybe it was the wine. Indeed, those amphorae of wine had lasted much longer than he had expected but Teddy was also much more entertaining than his first impression had created. Quite a talkative guy, actually, once you got a few cups of wine into him.

“Teddy”… What a strange name! All he had said was that it was ahead of its time, which was ironic because when the time arrived when it was correct, they would have all become forgotten.

Teddy had gone on to tell him all about the Little Gods, the sub-Pantheon as he called it. Such wild and wonderful tales! Teddy had told him about how the God of Northern Walls and the Goddess of Southern Walls had met at a corner, or how the Ignotus, the Being of Distraction was so distracting that no one could remember if it was a god or goddess, or something else?

Teddy had told him about how the infuriating Titillatio, the God of Tickling, had been caught in bed with Pluma, the Goddess of Feathers, and how her father had tried to beat Titillatio with a stick. But the stick had exploded into a cloud of white fluff! Indeed, this white fluff still blows through our world making everyone randomly sneeze and attaching to everyone’s dark garments just before special occasions.

Teddy had then turned to a story about how Oblivus the God of Forgetfulness had almost forgotten to turn up for his marriage to Influffi the Goddess of Clouds, and how he had indeed forgotten his vows at the wedding. Luckily Influffi was an immensely malleable woman and Oblivus had merely looked at her and seen what he needed to say.

More recently and, perhaps, more relevantly, Teddy had told him how everyone had just forgotten where Oblivus was!

Of course, Influffi had been distressed about her lost husband, and so Teddy’s wife–Caballus and Influffi were sisters–had ironically sent him to comfort her. At this point in the tale, Teddy had somewhat awkwardly manoeuvred around the topic, but Spurius was fairly sure he knew why Teddy’s wife was angry with him and it had a lot to do with what had transpired while he had been comforting Influffi…

Spurius chuckled as the door closed and yawned. The sun would be up soon and his duties would start shortly. The naked woman remained fast asleep in his bed and, indeed, his wife would be back soon and so–

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Three loud bangs rang on the door just behind him and he froze midstep. He suddenly realized that he had left his sword back on the balcony but he dismissed this thought immediate as unimportant. It was probably Teddy back for something or other.

Spurius swung around, flipped the latch on the door and opened it. He had only a split second to comprehend the immeasurably angry, red-haired woman on the other side of it before she stepped inside and swept the room with a furious gaze.

“Where is he, Spurius? Where is Teddy?” her calm, soft voice was at odds with her face and eyes. Spurius was no stranger to women and, indeed, he always feared when his wife stopped shouting and started talking softly and calmly.

“I-I, he, uh,” he stammered, trying to find his word and resisting an urge to flee, “Teddy is gone. He just had a glass of wine and left, but I do not know where to.”

The angry woman–Caballus, he assumed–narrowed her raging eyes for a moment and then nodded.

“I believe you are actually telling the truth there, Spurius,” she began keeping her voice terrifyingly flat, “Well, mostly the truth as a bit more than a glass of wine was drunk. Teddy tends to do that to wine but, ironically, he often cannot hold his liquor.”

Suddenly, her eyes darted to the naked woman in his bed and they narrowed again with a new, more terrifying type of intensity, “That is not your wife, Spurius,” she said, her eyes snapping back to him!

Spurius felt small. Tiny! The floor was roaring upwards and the walls grew dark as they reached toward the heavens. The red-hair Callabus loomed over him a thousand foot tall, thunderclouds of black smoke and fire raged above her as eyes turned to furnaces and chains sprang from all sides to slither across his frozen, frail limbs.

“HOW UNFORTUNATE, SPURIUS OF THE THIRD GALLICA AND HUSBAND TO DONNA THAT THAT IS NOT YOUR WIFE! HOW UNFORTUNATE FOR YOU, GIVEN MY RECENT EXPERIENCE WITH MY OWN HUSBAND!” lightning flashed from the clouds and struck the looming walls sending chunks of rock flying about him as the wind picked up intensity and the raging being of endless fire reached out to grab his small, chained, mortal form, “HOW UNFORTUNATE FOR YOU–“

Suddenly a blinding light flashed! The chains disintegrated as the walls slid down and the room lightened from eternal darkness to merely mortal night, the raging fiery storm and its wind subsided as the world suddenly felt its normal size again.

Spurius blinked. He blinked again and then rubbed his eyes…

He was alone in his bedchamber and standing at his open, empty door. He must have drank too much wine. There was no red-haired goddess of fire bearing down on him just like there was no longer any naked woman in his bed. Far too much wine! Had there ever been a Teddy..?

And, as Spurius stood there wondering, a soft breeze like the universe exhaling blew out of the chamber and he thought he heard a familiar woman’s voice on it saying the last word: “A blessing against angry wives! How ironic…“

Fantasy, General Fiction

The Weaving Woman

“We would be honoured if you could weave a story for our wedding,” said the boy before her. He hovered awkwardly on his knees. Glancing nervously at his young bride, he flopped forward putting his forehead to the ground in her hut.

“Please, Ma’at,” the young girl added, also bowing, “The Elders speak of your weaves as tying the chaos of the world together into our fortunes and we wish to have many healthy children. Please give us your blessing.”

She smiled and nodded, and later that night her hands flowed rhythmically pulling thread together from disparate forms into a single, cohesive shape that held a pattern. It held a pattern–a story–of youth and love, passion and entwining of lives and bodies. It was a tale that had five children but two deaths and a rich harvest cut short by the coming war. Normal happy lives ending in death. The ending had some darkness in it–as all endings do–but there much light throughout this story.

She sighed and smiled, sadly.

It was not that Ma’at created this tale out of chaos but, rather, that she plucked from the chaos the truth of this particular story and then displayed it in the cloth.

When it was done, she stood up and walked outside. The Moon outside was radiant. Her sister was full and quietly shone down across a dark, rolling desert while glittering off the gently flowing Nile’s silvery streak that cut through it.

She sighed again and peered towards the oncoming horizon. She could see the lights of a young Memphis flickering with fires and candles even this late. Every day, mankind crept further into the desert and, every day, more of her brothers and sisters retreated further away. And, yet, she remained.

Why?

She heaved a final sigh and looked at her hands. One day, she knew, she would have to weave her own story. One day.

***

Ra’s intensity burned down in waves upon the land but the aircon in her car hid her from it. Her dark glasses all but made it disappear. All the power of a god overcome with a device that cools air and tinted glass.

Over the millennia, she had always marvelled at mankind’s inventiveness. Her family were born with their power but mankind has built their own. Almost all the challenges and struggles over the centuries had been solved but, for some reason, mankind just kept on creating new challenges and struggles.

“Drop Ma’at her destination on the left,” the digital voice announced in her Uber drive as the car slowed to a stop beside the curb.

“Thanks, ma’am,” the driver said as she got out, “You have a nice day now.”

“Listen,” she said, turning and leaning back into the Uber, “Take the rest of the day off. Go see your kids and tell your wife you love her. I will tip you well now, so you don’t need to work for the rest of the day.”

“Thanks ma’am!” the driver exclaimed as she shut the door and walked away. He would not take her advice. He would also be dead by this time tomorrow when the blood clot eventually reached his brain. That was another thing mankind was really good at doing: dying.

Her phone beeped as her tip went through while she walked into the gallery. She emotionlessly smiled and nodded at the manager. He beamed at her and tilted his head towards the crowds floating through the airy structure.

The walls were covered with woven patterns meters high. Incredibly complex, subtle and beautiful. They all told chapters of the story of mankind, including some that had not yet occurred. Crowds swooned around; artsy-types and tech billionaires exclaiming on the exhibition and the occasional news crew, blogger or journalist snapping a picture or filming an interview with sentences like “…in a visually-stunning crescendo commenting on the frailty of civilization, the artist known only as Ma’at has woven a tale of apocalypse hanging on the walls around us here…“

“Why is the ending so dark?” asked the Manager, appearing at her side with a cup of lotus tea–her favourite, “Why not something happier?”

She turned to him, taking the tea and sipping it thoughtfully before answering: “Given enough time, everything ends. And, all endings have some darkness in them.”

The Manager nodded and smiled, though she could see he did not understand. He also did not seem to care as his gallery had never been this full. Fifteen years from now, he would die alone from cancer. His wife would be dead in less time than that in another man’s bed. Yet both of them would look back on their lives and consider them to be happy ones.

Maybe then he will get it, she wondered, sipping her lotus tea and watching him as he drifted through the crowd, shaking hands and smoothly working those with money.

Later that night, she stood on her private balcony overlooking the Valley and its twinkling electric lights. A car horn blared somewhere as a soft strand of a pop song wafted by. Sirens flared and faded out. Almost blinded by the artificial light of man, the faint Moon and fainter stars peered down; relics from another age looking at the alien future and trying to recognise how they fitted in there.

They did not. It was that simple. This was mankind’s world now and the Old Gods no longer had any place in it.

The older civilization got, the more lights there were at night. The more lights there were, the less darkness there was. There was also less desert, less sky, less earth, and less of everything else she recognized.

But given enough time, everything ends. This is true of all things, even the world of man. All the darkness they chased away would eventually come back tenfold to reclaim its rightful place.

She sighed and looked at her hands. One day, she knew, she would have to weave her own story. In the meantime, the story of mankind and its ending was hanging on the walls of an art gallery and being commented on in blogs and tweets, trending in hashtags and being auctioned to the highest bidder.

***

When the ash had settled and the skies had cleared, when the fires had cooled and the surviving animals had crept out from where they hid, then she began her long journey home.

She was going back to her desert.

Across the oceans and through young, sprouting forests she travelled. Over blackened lands and passed crumbling skeletons of mankind she journeyed. Sometimes she walked at night, talking to her sisters shining down and, sometimes in the day, talking to her brother’s burning face. Sometimes the cool winds blew–still smelling of dust and ash–and she conversed with the twins, or sudden and violent storms beat down and she yelled at her brother from the North.

Ma’at was all alone in the world but, slowly, she started to feel like herself again. She knew exactly where to look to see her family. They were all around her all of the time. The aircon and sunglasses no longer hid Ra, and the lights of cities no longer blinded Isis’ pale face at night nor her sisters twinkling alongside. She could hear Horus call from the clear skies as Shu and Tefnut danced through her hair, Seth raged far away while Apep once again slumbered, having already feasted on this world…

All around her, the world was starting to look familiar; it was starting to look like the world she had first lived in. The Old Gods were starting to creep back out into the open.

Finally, she arrived back in her desert. The Nile was flowing again and the pollution was receding. Few of the old structures of mankind remained but she did not need them. She knew exactly where she was going.

A small sand dune; that was all that was left of her hut, her home and birthplace.

It did not matter. She smiled as she sat down cross-legged in what would have been the hearth of her hut. She reached out and touched the sand where over five thousand years ago a boy and his bride had begged her to weave their wedding. A single tear fell from the corner of her left eye and she looked up at the golden, bloody sunset spilling across the open sky. Horus’ two eyes–the Sun and the Moon–were on opposing horizons watching her. Ra and Isis, her sisters, a soft breeze and the distant thunder of a hidden storm all combined…

Her family was all around her again.

Ma’at smiled–tears starting to flow freely down her ancient cheeks–and she finally began to weave her own story.

Fantasy, Science Fiction

Freya’s Field

It was Friday. This was normally her day but she hardly noticed. The sun shone warmly down, the birds were tweeting and insects buzzing around her as she lay in her open field, but she hardly noticed any of it.

Laying her head right down on the field, the grass and little blue flowers that made her skyline appeared gigantic. She wondered if this was how bugs, ants and all things small and forgettable saw the world? She wondered if they ever looked beyond the endless grassy-skyline to see the blue and wondered what existed out there in the blue? She wondered if these questions ever caused the bugs, ants and small, forgettable things anxiety?

She wondered if humans had lived in similarly small worlds and if they had ever wondered about superior beings that lived beyond human skylines? Beyond the cities and phones, beyond screens and laws, and even beyond sciences and telescopic visions of outer space and the narrow three-dimensions, what lay out there?

These questions did not cause her anxiety as much as they gave her hope. They gave her purpose.

It was Friday and the day before had been Thursday. The day before that had been Wednesday. She did not like Wednesdays and she never had, not since the dawn of time.

This Wednesday had been no exception.

***

In the early hours of Monday, the dirty bombs exploded over London. Their payloads scattered over the slumbering, tightly-packed city and most people–the lucky ones–were dead before they even woke up.

The rest were dead by morning.

The fallout swept down the Thames and infected vast tracts of the English and European shorelines while the airborne clouds swept down South and hit large tracts of southern Europe, Northern Africa and even the Middle East.

Embedded nuclear missile silos retaliated, alliances were triggered and soon the world was filled with ash. All the titanium bunkers in the world could not save anyone from less than a single percentage of the nuclear firepower of mankind and all of the baser-instincts of the violent species.

A civilization that had taken nearly two-hundred-thousand years to form was all but decimated within a twenty-four hour period. Three-billion dead within hours, billions more by the evening and the rest by Wednesday.

***

“Once again, this does not surprise me much. But, as per the agreed parameters,” despite his smugness, Odin spoke carefully as such things needed to be word accurately in order to maintain integrity, “You get to pick the first half of the dead. I will take the remainder.”

Freya nodded, silently surveying the destruction below her. The two gods floated quietly over the smouldering ruins of Earth. It was Thursday. Few if any life still remained. Corpses lay twisted and burnt; whole families, cities and countries wiped from existence…

She had seen many battlefields and wept over the many dead she collected for Sessrumnir. She knew that death was not the end for humans–or anyone–but this was certainly the end of humanity.

This planet was no more.

Such a violent species. Such a waste.

She put this from her mind as she floated over endless fields of the dead, carefully selecting those that she thought she could save. She selected those that had something to offer or potential to shape and grow. Those that learnt or taught, those that healed or love.

Odin could take the violent, lost ones but she wanted those that could see beyond their own worlds.

***

It was now Friday and Freya was lying in Fólkvangr, her field. The sun shone warmly down, the simulated birds were tweeting and incubated insects buzzing around her as she lay in her open field, but she hardly noticed any of it.

“Why are we here?”

She blinked and realized what dark places her mind had been wandering. Her and Odin’s experiment sometimes weighed on her. Such sights cannot be easily forgotten. She sighed and pushed herself up to a sitting position.

The golden field of Fólkvangr spread out around her with the golden halls of Valhalla were off in the distance. Odin’s claimed souls–the violent ones–were housed there, drinking and fighting, but around her stood her chosen.

“Why are we here?” repeated the little life that was standing before her.

Freya stood up slowly, towering over those small, flickering lifeforms she had harvested over so many countless civilizations across the cosmos. From this height, she could just make out the fading blue and green planet as it receded into the background while their multi-dimensional interstellar starship moved to the next civilisation.

“You are all here,” Freya began, her voice tinged with sadness and hope, “because all of your civilisations failed. You all died but you are not lost. Life is never lost, and from this transition and its learnings, we will rebuild a better one. A better life and, more importantly, a better civilisation that will not end. Ever. Life can survive without imploding.”

The billions of small, flickering lifeforms around her shone brightly as their happiness and ellation swelled with hope. Freya smiled and the artificial sun shone down warmly over her field.

The life that had first spoken, spoke again with an all-too-human scepticism:

“But why? Why are you doing this?”

Freya knelt down and softly stroked the little being. It was good that they were asking. It was good that they were curious.

She smiled and–as one would explain quantum physics to an ant–she said:

“Because Odin does not believe that it is possible. He has lost hope in this dimension. He is training his half to break ours. Watch them fight every day and know that one day they will be fighting against you. We will build the greatest civilisation ever seen before, but one day we have to fight to keep it. One day, little one, we will fight in Ragnarökr to see which of us is right and whether we should let life survive in this dimension or not.”

General Fiction, Science Fiction

The Age of Leaves

This is not a tale of doom or despair, nor is it one of pain and misery. Much like life, this tale does indeed have despair and misery along the way, but those aspects do not define it. Likewise, this tale also has much pain and a creeping doom. But–as with despair and misery–these traits do not define this tale.

No, this is a tale of hope.

For, in the beginning, the Earth dreamt of infinite futures and birthed infinite forms in hope that one would succeed.

These countless forms swam through its depths in frigid, dark oceans, they crawled across its surface from barren deserts to humid jungles and they soared through its skies both high and low.

Not all of these forms survived.

Like dreams amidst slumber, morning eventually breaks and the dream fades. Some weaker forms fragment to return to creation and be recycled into other, new and different forms. These micro-tragedies are little more than raindrops falling from the skies to nourish the ground. And, as with raindrops, their cycle will eventually take them back up into the misty, cloudy skies.

Other forms reached their crescendo and found peace there. They were beautiful and in balance with themselves and the Earth. These survived across the eons in their own, unique perfection. From the crocodile to the cockroach, from the shark to the great trees themselves, they ceased shifting form. This is neither good nor bad, it merely is.

And then one particular form shifted dramatically as it dreamt its own dreams. Man’s own form rose upwards as his thoughts lifted above and beyond his myopic life to that of infinity.

Man dreamt and the wilderness receded. Man dreamt and cold concrete poured where fields of grass and savannas had once lain, rigid steel penetrated the Earth where great trees had once taken root and other forms–oh, so many others!–fell to Earth as raindrops to nourish the land of man.

What was once light was now dark, and the growing form of man steadily spread over the Earth. Every dream has a risk of becoming a nightmare. Once strong and vibrant, the planet now appeared weak and fragile.

But nothing lasts forever, not even the form of man.

As the food and fuel ran out and the water dried up, terrible plagues and famines hit. War and terror fell from the cluttered heavens as man killed man…

And in less than a cosmic second, man’s creeping form was no more.

Much had been lost but the Earth kept on spinning through its cosmic slumber and its dreams turned once more to that of forms.

A few of the forms that had lasted the eons still survived, and the greatest of these were the trees.

As fallout mingled with dreams, forms twisted and needs evolved. Water was scarce as fleeting rays of light flittered between dust clouds and ever-shifting fallout…

And, eventually, born out of these needs those few great surviving trees dreamt of walking.

Root pulled from ground, bark pushed against rock and branches rustled as they tried to balance. Slowly at first but then faster and faster, the trees of another age became the trees of this age.

Far overhead, an ageless, endless cosmos spun as the Earth floated through its starry embrace. And far below it, the trees began to hue out a place for themselves from the hollow remains of man’s dust.

Trees dreamt and the dusty wasteland receded. Trees dreamt and fields of grass and savannas sprung up where cold, crumbling concrete and rusty steel had once stood tall. Trees dreamt and great roots of living, lush cities buried deep into the Earth where vast megalopolis had once swallowed the planet.

The skies cleared and rain fell from the heavens above, nourishing the land.

But it was no longer the land of man.

No, this was the land of trees and, thus, began the age of leaves.

Horror & Dark Fiction, Science Fiction

The Monster in the Woods

The site was not far from the village. Strangely close, actually, if you knew what you were looking for and avoided the birds as he did. He had become quite good at this. He had stumbled upon the find while out hunting one night and thereafter been coming back here for weeks now.

There was something haunting about the place. Something tragic and, perhaps, something alluring.

“Mind those roots and then just down here,” he motioned with one of his arms, “careful, it’s steep. OK, now look around you.”

The collection of them stood in a dip in the ground. It was unnaturally square-shaped with sloping sides. Giant trees towered over them, circling and hiding the grey sky and its blasted sunlight from their sensitive eyes. It was naughty to be out during the day. There were birds out this time but it was also the only time he could sneak them away from the elders thousand sets of eyes.

“What are we looking at, Mibby?” asked Flinny, one of the younger roaches as he squinted around him, “Why are we here? Why is this hole so weirdly shaped?”

Mibby grinned, his mandibles extending gruesomely out.

“This is an entrance to the Ancients’ network of tunnels. Do you see that over there,” he scuttled across to a side near the tangled entrance to a dark, ominous maw, “Look here, watch this.”

It took three of his hands to pull back the roots and vegetation but as he did, they revealed a corner of something red. Slowly, as he pulled back more vegetation back–and the other jumped in to help him–a gargantuan visage appeared…

It was a strikingly-red sign with rusted white borders. In the middle of the mystical rune lay a strangely familiar form. Similar to all of them but with a round head and only two legs and two arms towering over them, maybe a hundred times bigger.

It held one white claw upwards and one by its side like it was saying something. It wanted you to do something, maybe?

It was old and expressionless. Pure despite the rust. It stirred up their primal, instinctual dread, handed down generation to generation in dark myths of the distant past. It was from Before-the-Light and hidden by the Age-of-Darkness that followed for millennia thereafter.

It was a human. Or, at least, a sign made by the Ancient Giants that had once ruled this world.

The young ones gasped, limbs twitching nervously around them. Before now, some of them had thought the Ancients were just tales. Many debated if they even existed at all? Few things were left from that distant past. The Light had destroyed most of everything while the Darkness had hidden the rest under crumbling ages and thick dirt and rust.

“Come, let’s see where the Tunnels lead?” Mibby asked, grinning, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

***

The Tunnels ran for clicks and clicks. They were circular in the weirdly-geometric way that the Ancients made everything. There was a small trickle of sweet-smelling water meandering through the middle of all of them.

The band of roaches scuttled cautiously through the darkness, strangely at home down here. Darkness and, even, damp suited them fine. Every now and then they would stop to look at some strange, colored artifact from a bygone age. Sometimes it was a twisted, colorful material–the type that you could neither eat, nor chew nor even nature could touch or break-down–or a rusted bizarre shape that rattled when they poked it? Sometimes is was an even more indescribable object?

They would all stop and scuttle all over each of these things until Mibby would raise his head, his mandibles quivering, and lead them deeper into the Tunnels.

The Tunnels met countless other tunnels. Some large, some small. Some had remains of rusted teeth covering them while others ended abruptly before great drops into dark, turbulent depths with violent running water far blow. Most, though, were collapsed with rubble, dirt and black ash filling them.

What had the Ancients used these marvelous tunnels from? What purpose could the Tunnels have served such giant beings? Where did they go and where did they end?

Such questions the roaches pondered in silence as they wandered deeper and deeper in this labyrinth.

“Look, light!” Duffy–one of the hatchlings–exclaimed, pointing all of her arms down an upwardly sloping side-tunnel. A single shaft of light pierced the comfortable gloom revealing something.

“Maybe it is where the Tunnels lead?” Mibby whispered aloud, “Maybe we will see an Ancient down there?” 

***

Each of them squinted, covering their eyes as they scuttled out of the half-collapsed Tunnel. After the comfortable darkness of inside, the harsh, grey light filtering through the trees around them was piercing and uncomfortable.

“Look! Look all around us,” Mibby hissed, excitedly, “We are in the middle of what must’ve been an Ancient’s dwelling!”

Despite huge trees towering over them with gnarled roots everywhere, there were unmistakable traces of the crumbled outlines of walls in square-geometric patterns around them. A rusted pipe stuck out near them and lead through a crumbled pile of something into what must have been the inside of an Ancient dwelling.

“I’ve heard about this,” muttered Flinny, “My great-great granny on my twenty-third sibling’s-side says that the Ancients all built false-caves to live in. They too would hide from the harsh Sun in these false-caves. This must be the garden or courtyard outside its false-cave.”

Mibby was hardly listening as he stepped slowly forward. He had dreamt about the Ancients since he was little more than a hatchling. This was the most wondrous find of all! What wonders might lie just inside those crumbling, roofless walls? If they had mouths, what stories might they have told?

The roaches scuttled from the drain across the courtyard and passed the crumbling walls to stand–for the first time in millennia–in the kitchen of men.

“Wow,” breathed Duffy, “The Ancients were incredible! Why were we scared of th–“

But the little hatchling never finished her sentence.

A dark, looming shadow that they had all mistaken as a tree darted and apocalypse exploded downwards onto Duffy. A sick, shuddering crunch emitted from where Duffy had once been and a rusted, dirty object stood instead.

Mibby cleaned his eyes in disbelief. His conscious mind was slow to work out what had happened to Duffy and what the large, moving shadow was. Despite this, deep inside him there remained the primal, animalistic instincts of a cockroach and his legs were already scuttling faster than the eye can see towards the opening, safe, comfortably darkness of the drain and the Tunnels below it…

Boom!

And Flinny’s scream was cut short in another sickening crunch, one of his severed legs flying across Mibby’s vision. The younglings and hatchlings were screaming. Panicked legs were scurrying towards the drain. One of the young one’s wings buzzed and they tried to take flight. It was a deeply unnatural motion–flight was culturally frowned on by the nest–but perhaps it was some instinct triggered by the panic!

Swat!

And the flying hatchling was snapped out of the air. Her screams cut short as the looming darkness with writhing arms-of-death hardly noticed it…

Then Mibby was in the drain, scuttling down into the safe darkness of the Tunnels and away from the horrors left behind by the Ancients. Most of the others had made it there too, whimpering and sobbing, but alive. At least, most of them were alive.

The final thing that Mibby heard booming down the Tunnel after them was a terrifying, static-filled voice announcing to the nonexistent Ancients: “PESTS TERMINATED. HOUSE-BOT RETURNING TO SOLAR-RECHARGE STATION.”

Mibby swore quietly to himself that he would never come back to this terrifying place. The monster can stay out there in the woods. Every story they had been told about the Ancients was true! They were monsters! He was glad that they had all died long ago.

Fantasy, General Fiction, Horror & Dark Fiction

Undying Love

“Michael, can I have my pen back?” the lady politely asked, her hand outstretched. Her pointed, polished nails blood-red against her pale skin.

The room paused. The air-con was cool in here and, if you really listened, you could hear it breathing through the hidden ceiling fans like some ethereal vent from another, cooler dimension. A darker, less human dimension. Outside a car hooted and inside there was crypt-like silence.

“Sure, sure,” Michael said, sighing, “I think we are done here. Anything else I need to sign?”

The lady’s lips lifted upwards and she flashed her teeth in the poor semblance of a smile. It was more like what the prey of a vampire might see in the last moments of its life. The air-con quietly breathed more chill into the crypt-like chamber and he held his breath, knowing full well what was coming next.

“No, Michael. Nothing else. The divorce is now full and final. Congratulations.”

***

“Buddy, I think you’ve had enough,” the gruff, grizzled barman grunted at him and waved him away.

Michael shook his head. The bar’s eerie light was spinning as he tried to place himself again. It was under a bridge and damp here. Or humid? A fan was whirling above like some torture device while the sulfur from the filthy toilets lingered in his nostrils.

All he wanted was the whiskey on the back shelf but there was a troll between him and it.

He flashed another note and the barman shrugged, grabbed the bottle and poured him another drink. His stubby, grubby fingers clinging to the bottle like it was too small and otherworldly for him to understand. The sulfur in the air was overwhelming, perhaps it was coming from the troll?

“Sure, OK, buddy, but this is your last one and then I’m gonna call you a cab and you’re gonna go home to your wife.”

Michael snorted at this and then giggled at snorting.

He had forgotten to take off the ring. Her ring. In all of this nightmare, he had not looked down at his hands and taken off the damn ring.

He pulled it off, clattering against his bony finger, and offered it to the barman who shook his head. He turned away and stomped to the other side of the bar where a couple witches were cackling and loudly drinking.

“Of course,” he mumbled to himself, “Trolls don’t like silver. No silver. Not gooooo–”

And that was the last thing he remembered that night under the bridge in the troll’s dingy bar.

***

“…must’ve snuck in last night with his old keys…trying to make a statement? Or was it anger? Probably both. All I know, is…” the voice drifted in and out of Michael’s consciousness, “…you know how it was when you were young too?”

The speaker paused and Michael turned to the voice. Light immediately flooded into his skull and the world rushed in!

He sat up promptly and groaned.

“Hey, Michael, you up? About time,” said the speaker behind him and he turned to see Death; an overbearing skull towering in endless black robes and surveying his room. His mom was lurking in the back, shaking her head as mom’s do when their children are in distress.

“I’m dead, aren’t I?” he mumbled, trying to rise.

Death laughed like a thousand graves moaning, “Yes, my boy, you are dead. Have you learned your lesson?”

Michael sighed and nodded his head.

Death sat down on his bed, his bones creaking like a thousand crypt door at midnight, “We are not like everyone else. They don’t always accept us amidst them. If it helps, I can tell you when she dies?”

“Dear, don’t do that! That won’t solve anything,” Michael’s mom and Death’s wife piped up, her Valkyrie accent strong as ever, “Just let the boy be. At least, he can’t feel the hangover. Probably drank the mortals out of alcohol.”

And it was true. Michael felt fine. A normal mortal would have been dead but, then again, Michael already was.

“It was all just so-so-so…” he struggled to find the word, “Disappointing. It was just disappointing, Dad.”

Death smiled but, then again, skulls only ever do that. Michael smiled back, his skulls taking after his father’s. They looked sadly at each other, unchanging immortals in an ever-changing world.

“There will be other mortals, other times and other chances at love,” Death said, patting his son’s leg, which sounded like a thousand skeletons dancing, “I waited a long time to find your mother but I did find her and we are very, very happy now. And, look, your mother gave me you, so you see, things do have a way of working out.”

Michael nodded and rose from his bed, or, at least, tried to. He topoled onto the floor quite confused. The bottom of his leg was simply not there!

“Don’t worry, my love,” his mother cooed, retrieving his fibula from where it lay atop a smashed, torn up framed-picture of his ex-wife, her glowing, life-filled lips contrasting to his bleached, white skull, “Let your Dad help you pop the leg back on and then come down for breakfast.”

Michael nodded and sighed, “Thanks, Dad. Mom. I really love both of you. You don’t mind if I crash here for a while? She also got the house…”

Death’s skull grinned, sadly, and he patted his boy. Eternity was plenty of time to learn the pain of loss. He knew that all too well. But, eternity was a long time, and his boy would get over it.

Blackpool Bay, Horror & Dark Fiction

The Sea’s Secret

Despite being late Summer, the air of Blackpool Bay retained a surprising chill to it. It was likely that the ocean’s nearby current cooled the air but none of the dour, weathered locals seemed to notice. By the looks of them, he doubted that any of them cared.

He had read in a National Geographic that a deep ocean current swirled near to the surface along this isolated shoreline. The current was normally further out to sea and deep under the surface but, for some reason, these ancient, unknowable waters surfaced around Blackpool Bay. Maybe there was some underwater obstruction or architecture that guided the water in such a way? Maybe it was just due to the angle that the Earth rotated through space? Maybe it was more bizarre?

No one yet knew nor were we ever likely to know why.

The effect, though, was that this current washed strange and mysterious creatures up on Blackpool Bay’s beaches. Some as simple as foreign, exotic fish–striped, rainbowed and sparkling–from some distant tropical sea caught in a current stronger than them.

Others were far more haunting.

The locals spoke of creatures washing up on their beaches from pale translucent skins to glowing, bulbous-orbed devils. Some had tentacles while a few even had appendices that man had not yet thought to name.

These thoughts all tumbled through his mind as he stepped onto the docks. Ironically, sea travel did not agree with him. He would have flown into a nearby town and then driven but the new highway that was supposed to be built here had been canceled under strange circumstances. That left him only sea travel as the quickest and most direct route to Blackpool Bay.

He briefly pondered what might have passed below his feet as he had sailed here. The thought both scared and excited him while leaving him wondering what it was that they had found washed up on their beach this time?

***

“Where is the specimen?” he asked the technician, “And where are your tools?”

The man stammered an apology and ushered him out of the room and into the next one that lay behind a heavy set door.

The moment he stepped into the next room, he knew he was in the right place: there was a large drop in temperature while his nostrils were assaulted with a chemical smell. The latter hid the smell of decay, whose sickly sweet aroma hid just behind the chemicals.

But this room also smelt of one more thing. One unique flavor: a slimy, salt. Dead fish.

He was in the right room.

“Come over here, Sir,” the technician stooped, motioning towards a slide out slab in the wall of the morgue, “It is here.”

He paused. He had come so far to see this that he was suddenly nervous. He scolded himself for the hesitation and stepped forward. This might make a great chapter in his next book on the monsters hiding in the ocean.

The technician slid open the slab and horror unfolded before my eyes.

“It–it really is special,” he said, almost breathless as he took in the boneless body, its translucent tentacles swirling around the monster’s mouth and its bulbous eyes in their infinite inky depths. Across what he could only assume was the monster’s equivalent of a head, a single occult pattern was embedded into its delicate scales in thin, precise, dark lines.

“If I didn’t know better,” he breathed, unaware that he was talking aloud, “I’d swear that that was a tattoo of quite ancient and evil intent…”

“Yes, Sir,” the technician blurted out, “That is a tattoo of the Devil’s Mark. This creature is from Lucifer himself, an agent of Jones that crawled out of his Locker somewhere out there.”

***

Entrails and three hearts lay around him. Blood soaked gauze rested heavily in his hands as the room grew darker each moment that he stared at what he had found.

Except for its vicious teeth, the creature was completely boneless. Halfway to a jellyfish but with apt and likely very maneuverable tentacles like an octopus. It was large too and likely to be about the size of a man if floating out in the water, though some of the tentacles stretched out almost double that length. At the centre of the monster’s mass was its brain, larger than expected, and a face with multiple–seventeen in total–black, bulbous eyes looking out in a nearly full circle around it. Beneath the mass, circled with tentacles and topped with its ink-black eyes, lay the horror’s mouth. It was a gaping, maw with the only solid items in this gelatinous terror: vicious teeth. Rows and rows of sharp, pointed teeth, hooked slightly backward and leading into the creature’s stomach that fed three individual hearts.

It was in these rows of nightmarish teeth that he had found it. Cutting it out, careful not to damage the rest of the creature, he had laid it before him and now he could not look away.

Before him lay a dental insertion. An implant. Effectively, it looked like it was a filling, much like a dentist would place over a rotting tooth.

A very small item in and of itself torn from the vicious maw of this monster, but it belied a deeper truth. It hinted at something far below and creeping around us that we were not aware of. It hinted at organization and sophistication that we were not aware of and had not documented nor accounted for…

He shivered as he thought about it.

Who or what had put that filling into what was obviously a deep-sea horror before him?

Someone or something had put it there. It meant that something had the intent, means and the ability to put it there. And the consciousness. It meant that the strange, occult pattern in this monsters forehead was likely a tattoo equivalent.

It meant that there was something civilized, organized and unknown out there.

“Forget space,” he shivered, whispering to himself and suddenly aware of how cold it was in that room, “We are not alone on our own planet.”

Another shiver ran down his spine. Where-oh-where did this current sweep the ocean depths from?

The autopsy–he had decided that the creature must have been conscious, so that made this not a dissection and actually an autopsy–was being done over a table at the back of the room. This basic facility had the floor running slightly down to a gutter where the blood could drain out of. Indeed, the creature’s inky black blood was dripping off the table and running down this drain.

He wondered where it drained, and suddenly he felt sick. Were there more of them out there? What did their civilization look like? Why had they never made contact with the rest of us living on the same planet?

He felt really sick. The room began to spin and he lurched toward the toilet…

***

He gasped upwards for air before going back down. Head-first in the mortuary toilet, his stomached convulsed a final push to evacuate his stomach. The creature is all just a brain, a stomach and a mouth with teeth, he thought, imagining the cold, dark primal hunger driving such a creature forward.

Sighing, he stood up, wiped his mouth and washed his face. He was stronger than this. This would make a whole book on its own.

Clenching his jaw, he pushed away from the sink and turned to walk back to the autopsy of the monster. Beast? Creature?

Being…

His mind was a mess as he pushed back the toilet door and stepped out into the morgue.

Tentacles wrapped around a vicious maw atop a scaled nightmare faced him. But it was standing erect on the rippling, slimy tentacles around its floating, black-inky eyes. All seventeen of them, all focussing directly on him. It was holding the remains of what he had carved up in the name of science.

He froze. The creature froze. And the sea outside paused, shadows lurking in its depths…

Then he cried out, stumbling forward to the creature. Only in hindsight did he wonder what he would have done if he had reached it? The creature shrieked–a high-pitched gurgle–as it grabbed it’s fallen, dissected comrade and leaped back to the small, twisted drain that all the inky-black blood had drained into.

Years later, he would still be trying to understand what he saw. But, in the darkest hours of the longest nights, he knew that what he thought he saw.

All that was and should never be, twisted into the slime that fills the darkest crevices of the deepest oceans and, sucked with it the evidence of its dead brethren. Unbelievable and incredible to watch, the man-sized gelatinous being contorted and slipped between the grates of the drain, pulling its falling brethren with its, like an octopus squeezing into the smallest of cracks between rocks.

And then it was gone. Down the drain, through the pipe and lord-knows-where?

But he knew. Yes, in his heart of hearts he knew where that drain led: the ocean. The dark, mysterious current-swept ocean just off the coast of the quaint, chill Blackpool Bay.

The sea had claimed its secret back and he was left with a haunting thought: Maybe they had never wanted to be found? Maybe they chose to remain secret?

Fantasy, General Fiction, Science Fiction

Beast of Burden

The back of his throat tasted bitter and his mouth was dry. His head throbbed. He rolled over and grabbed his last cigarette, an empty bottle from last night clinking as it rolled away.

The cigarette had been hidden behind his ear and was only slightly bent. Lighting the fragile roll of paper and cheap tobacco, he pulled hard on it and felt the nicotine awaken his body.

Either the cigarette made his throat taste better or it just made everything else taste equally as bad, either way, he felt a bit better.

Infinitely swirled above his bed, twinkling with the morning stars as the Sun slowly rose in the East. His back hurt and the cardboard had done little to soften the cold, hard cement he had slept on. His bones ached.

He paid no attention to any of this. Instead he was trying to forget or, at least, repress the dark, violent dreams that haunted him every night.

A car trundled by, growling softly as it vomited forth the carbon monoxide that perfumed nature with the metallic, ash scent of man.

He never noticed this either, as he slowly rose from where he lay and stepped into the beginning bustle of the city.

“Hey buddy,” his gravelly voice broke the urban reverie as a stranger walked by trying to ignore him, “Hey buddy, she wasn’t worth you. She really wasn’t. You’re better off without her.”

The man stopped dead, his eyes expanding and his mouth opening and clothing soundlessly like a fish out of water.

“Don’t worry, buddy,” he said, stepping forward, grabbing the man’s arm and squeezing reassuringly, “I’m a Sin Eater. That’s what I do. You were wrong. She was wrong. And that’s all fine. Now throw that gun away, and don’t hurt all those people. Just don’t. You’ll be fine and live a good life.”

The man’s mouth closed and he stumbled away like he was in a trance. Maybe he was? He’d never been subjected to his own power. He had no idea what it felt like.

All he knew was the rage and hurt that he now felt. He had taken it from the man and it burnt him inside with waves of cold hopelessness and fiery-hot murder. It swirled and mixed with all other toxic darkness already inside him from all the others that he had helped.

He needed a drink. Alcohol was the only thing that he found that helped him numb the poisonous feelings he took from people. Lots and lots of alcohol.

He drowned the darkness with oceans of the stuff, and spent most days drunk because of this.

But what else could he do?

“Not all heroes wear capes,” he muttered in his gravelly voice as he finished his last cigarette, “Some don’t even have homes.”

Science Fiction

The Museum of Selfies

“Since the first caveman stuck his finger into coloured mud and smeared a stickman on his cave wall, man has desired to capture himself,” the speaker was a well-dressed gentleman walking in front of a modest crowd, “Think of the painters of yesteryear painting self-portraits as well as the portraits of others. Man’s egotism is constant through the many, many ages of our history.”

The well-dressed gentleman stopped walking and turned to the tourists. His movements were fluid but, nonetheless, seemed rehearsed.

“With the pretty-much-simultaneous invention of the mobile phone and social media as a repository, suddenly every single human being had a means to capture themselves en masse and a place to store it for eternity,” the well-dress gentleman slowly swept his hand around and behind him drawing the crowd’s attention to the hallowed, flickering halls of images around them, “And, after countless millennia of mass narcissism and good backup procedures, man has indirectly recorded his own intimate history. Here, at the Museum of Selfies, this intimate history is displayed so that we witness how the ages lived, laughed, loved, cried, how they felt and, in some instances, how they ended.”

The well-dressed gentleman paused for dramatic effect and, whether or not he got his desired result, he stepped forward into the crowded and motioned at a nearby floating media pod to fly over them.

“Come, come, come,” he said pulling the crowd together around him, “Before we start the tour, let’s take a selfie that will go directly to the Museum’s library. All selfies everywhere, in fact, go directly into the Museum’s repository. Our AI here built a scanner and copying code–all sustainably powered by solar and thermal–that lifts all selfies from the public web and categorically places them in here. Now, say cheese everyone!”

***

The Museum of Selfies was built on a small, quiet planet just outside of the Central Galaxies. There was basically nothing else there. Its location meant that it was accessible by those that had money–who were often the same ones that pretended to have culture–but the Museum’s upkeep and planetary taxes were not as expensive as deeper into the affluent parts of the cosmos.

The founder would love to tell his mostly-automated staff how his Great Grandmother had passed the seed data onto him when she had bequeathed her and her family’s selfie collection over to him. He had sat for days just clicking through the selfies and experiencing his own ancestors’ lives.

And then the idea for the Museum of Selfies had struck him!

But none of his staff really listened and most of them did not care. The vast majority of them were not even conscious and simply went about the maintenance tasks that they were programmed to do.

And, just so, the Museum of Selfies operated for many decades until the Galactic War tore that age’s cosmic civilization apart. The small planet was evacuated when a nearby space battle’s nuclear fallout put its inhabitants at risk.

Shortly thereafter, the founder filed for bankruptcy and was shipped off to a distant planet to pay back his debts. He was never heard from before and the Museum’s infrastructure never picked up another selfie from him.

The well-dressed gentleman continued standing, waiting, at the door of the Museum, but no tourists arrived. Dust settled over him and his suite started to look dull and frayed. All around him was silence. But, still, he stood there smiling and ready to show any willing tourist through the hallowed, flickering halls of images just behind him.

But no tourist ever came.

The world had forgotten about the Museum and its collection of selfies.

***

A pulsing blue light descended through the darkness. The Museum’s lights had gone out long ago and all the spares parts had run out. While electricity–solar power by the nearby star–still powered the Museum, the actual lightbulbs had burnt out long ago.

The pulsing blue light reached the planet surface where it settled.

Old, half-burnt-out neurons fired in the well-dressed gentleman’s neuro-network and his eyes flickered and focussed on a mass of tentacles moving up the stairs of the Museum and towards him. He jerkily turned his head towards it with old, unoiled mechanics straining, and opened his mouth to speak.

“Since the first caveman s-s-s-stuck his finger–coloured mud. Data corrupted. Stickman on his cave wall,” his old programming struggled through the introduction, “Think. Self-portraits as data corrupted. Insert smile. Man’s egotism is constant through insert period of time. Blink eyes. Smile.”

The mass of tentacles stood politely before him. It appeared to be observing this strange being. One of its tentacles held a blue light that seemed to be scanning or recording things.

Suddenly, the screens–all on deep-sleep screensaver mode–flickered to life across the hallowed halls. The Museum was booting up for its first tourist in many millennia. Pictures of smiling couples, dinners out at restaurants, men drinking at bars, and women posing alluringly flashed out into the darkness behind the well-dressed, dusty gentleman and the mass of inquisitive tentacles standing before it.

“Data corrupted. Move import. Come, c-come,” the well-dressed, dusty gentleman said, walking and putting his arm around a clump of tentacles while smiling, “Before [break] tour, let’s take a selfie that initiate export. Synch to pod. Data corrupted. Now, say cheese insert noun!”

Despite their tentacled appearance, the Zorbs were a peaceful and scientifically-minded species from the Thossa’ar galaxy. Having built galactic travel early in their evolution on quantum-drives, the Zorbs viewed themselves as the custodians of their little part of the cosmos. They would observe, measure, record and capture while filing away and cross-referencing for future Zorbs to learn and understand.

For all their brilliance and scientific advancements, though, the Zorbs had neither invented cheese nor discovered selfies.

An old media pod flared up in a dark corner of the Museum and zoomed out to hover over the two strange creatures standing there. The dusty, well-dressed gentleman smiled a rusty grin while the Zorb stretched out a tentacle to touch the floating camera.

Light was captured and data flowed. And, deep within the Museum of Selfies, the great, grand old database saved its first selfie for many millennia.

All of this left the Zorborgean feeling quite confused. The strange, dusty little robot with fading material stretched over it kept walking just ahead of him like some guide or something. The robot kept saying strange, high pitched sounds as pictures of similar–though organic-looking–creatures flashed out in the darkness of this cave on various primitive screens.

This was definitely the strangest discovery he had ever made. Whatever the species was that had lived here or somewhere long, long ago, the Zorborgean archaeologist concluded that it liked consuming things. This species also showed its small, flat teeth very often. And, there were often herds of this species.

The Zorborgean archaeologist shivered its mass of tentacles rippling. Whatever species this was, he was glad that it no longer existed. This entire, ancient monument was egocentric and all these activities this species was doing looked quite aggressive.

That is a bad combination, the Zorborgean archaeologist thought to itself as the dusty, little robot lead him deeper into the dark monument, ego and aggression; a very bad combination indeed. No wonder this species went extinct.

Just then, the dusty, little robot arrived at a large monitor that flared up. The dusty, little robot was pointing at it and showing its rusty teeth very prominently.

Suddenly, the Zorborgean archaeologist saw it. The picture on the screen was of the dusty, little robot holding and the Zorborgean archaeologist. He did not know why but the picture made him feel good. His tentacles looked great in it and it showed him out in the field, exploring and recording and stuff… He looked so cool!

He decided then and there that he was going to copy this picture and show the Zorbs back in the office. Perhaps he would even upload it to his profile on the Planetary Database? He looked so cool in it! Perhaps he would even take another such picture sometime? Perhaps this strange species was onto something…

Science Fiction

Unintended Consequences

The laboratory was filled with buzzing and the Scientist had to shout to get his message across to the rag-tag collection of journalists, politicians and PR crew trailing behind him.

“It is a mechanical, self-replicating bio-equivalent microbot!” he shouted, waving hands in all directions, “It will fill the ecological gap left by the honeybees! We call it a Mizzy for short, and it will save the global harvest and resolve our Food Crisis!”

All around them, in various glass walls, small, yellow bees buzzed. On closer inspection, though, they were actually small mechanical beings with a single propeller on their backs and flickering lights as eyes. Their rear held a small, oblong container that could carry pollen–or other material–from one flower to another one.

“How do they know what to do?” one journalist shouted, scribbling notes down as the Scientist replied.

“They are programmed to replicate the society and tasks of the old honeybee!” the Scientist shouted back, “This way, they will replace the extinct honeybee and pollinate all the necessary crops and flora in the world.”

“But, like, how are you going to produce enough to achieve this?” a politician-looking type shouted, glancing around the small laboratory skeptically, “You have no major backer and this is a very small facility!”

The Scientist smiled. He had been waiting for this question.

“We have modeled Mizzy’s artificial intelligence as a self-learning, decentralized network that exists across each one of them. There is no central server. There are no individual Mizzy’s, as each is just an extension of the Hive. One of the AI’s goals is self-replication to an equilibrium number to fill her environment. Thus a portion of the Hive will be dedicated to fixing, rebuilding and replacing their own kind. We have further coded them to do this using existing, waste materials–where possible–and the power sources that drives all of them are solar, thermal, magnetic and low-grade cold fusion, or whichever combination of the above makes sense at the time depending on the environment. Hence, the Mizzy will help with waste disposal while self-replicating in perpetuity until it reaches optimal mass while living on sustainable and plentiful energy. So, to answer your question, we are not going to do anything. Mizzy is going to build herself to critical mass for our environment.”

As if in answer to this grand reveal, the buzzing in the laboratory grew briefly louder before receding slightly. Some in the room got the clear sense that Mizzy was listening.

“Wha-what if Mizzy gets out of control?” a timid-looking woman asked. She was probably a PR agent but looked like she might be in the wrong profession.

The Scientist laughed, seemingly the only one that was comfortable with what was going on, “No chance of that. Mizzy has a very structured and defined mandate. We also have a kill-switch on our servers that can turn her off. Don’t worry, everyone, Mizzy is not a threat, she is the solution!”

“So when are you going to release them?” the first journalist asked. He had stopped writing in his notebook and was now looking around nervously.

“We already have!” the Scientist glowed, “Our first pilots are running in Brazil and a couple countries in Africa. So far the data is exceptional and we are looking forward to a home release shortly!”

“But what are we going to do about the growing viral threat? What about the so-called coming Viral Singularity?” the politician stated coldly, trying to act unimpressed.

“We are only a small facility here,” the Scientist shouted back, rather irritated by the question, “We’re solving the Food Crisis here. We have our limitations. Someone else is going to have to step-up and solve the potential for a coming Viral Singularity on their own!”

***

“Sir, the scanners are indicating large masses of vegetation on the planet, but little else,” the Zorborgean scout from the Thossa’ar galaxy gutturally inclined to the mass of tentacles behind him, “No, no, wait, the scanners are picking up a large number of mechanical low-grade lifeforms. These are non-biologicals. It seems that something was left behind when this planet’s sentient life died off.”

The Zorborgean scouting ship floated on quantum-drives just outside of the Earth’s atmosphere. Despite their tentacled appearance, the Zorbs were a peaceful and scientifically-minded species from a nearby galaxy. Much nicer–luckily also much nearer–than the aggressive reptiles in the Hissorror system or any of the other inter-galactic bullies.

“What happened to the indigenous sentient species?” the Captain gurgled, a small tentacle scratching where his chin might be.

“Well, given the integrity of the ruined infrastructure left behind, I would reason that whatever killed them off, it was not war nor any noticeable geological or cosmic event. It also happened quickly. Our historical simulator seems to indicate that it might have been viral and, maybe, occurred in a matter of a rotation or two around this system’s star? It is hard to tell, but I can confirm now that the planet is safe for us to explore. Should I send the probes to collect more data? Maybe we can locate an intact skeleton or some biological matter for further testing?”

The mass of tentacles that was the Captain rippled in agreement and then added: “Yes, but also do catch us some of those mechanical lifeforms for later study. Bring back a couple thousand of them, as I want to take them back to our labs for further analysis. Oh, and definitely try find some biological matter. This mission’s imperative is to find and document this extinction event. If it was a viral event, then we must study it.”

***

The atomic pulse cannons of the full Hissorrian fleet blasted into the buzzing swarm. Deep space echoed with the sheer force of a thousand-thousand stars exploding, but the swirling swarm just self-adjusted and pushed forward engulfing the front million starships.

“They keep replacing themselvesss!” the Hissorrian Emperor’s High General hissed, “Fire at will! Fire at will! Just keep firing, goddamit!”

The Zorb’s were ancient history as a mysterious virus had ripped through their species so fast that it had been a millennia before the rest of the galaxies had even noticed they were gone. Rising from the ashes of their civilization, a strange mechanical being had quickly populated their planet.

The best that the Hissorrian analysts could work out, this mechanical being had initially populated another planet before populating the nearby Zorb homeworld. The two swarms had then reached out on their networks and met each other before beginning to populate other planets. Maybe the swarms had not been aware of the rest of the space, but after connecting its two halves, the enlarged swarm had begun pushing out into the rest of the space.

There were no negotiations nor even any communication from the swarm. These mechanical being just kept multiplying and pushing deeper and wider into space, consuming entire planets and galaxies as they kept building more of themselves. On and on and on, they kept growing. It was almost like they existed solely to fill space and they would consume everything in their way to achieve this.

The Hissorrian’s best technologists had dissected captured specimens and all they could tell was there was some coding in some strangely hollow language and some form of low-grade, impenetrable network across the swarm. These were definitely non-biological, but seemingly impervious to any code, virus or hack that they tried.

That left only the brute force option.

“Fire! Fire! Fire!” the Emperor’s high-pitch scream sounded across the largest inter-galactic fleet ever assembled. There were even neighboring species and competing galaxies helping the hated Hissirrians, as the swarm had become an intergalactic threat that everyone and everything rallied behind.

The inter-galactic Mizzy flexed Her decentralized body. She noted the gazillions of casualties as the millions of atomic pulse cannons, deep space missiles and every manner of weapon known to consciousness blasted into Her buzzing, swirling and all-consuming form.

The numbers lost in each attack were minimal. Each attack was about as devasting to Her as if She were clipping Her toenails.

She gathered Her central core, checked their densification and pushed the Hive forward, consuming starships and converting them into more of Her buzzing body as She spread out trying to reach critical mass. She would reach equilibrium across all the galaxies and all the cosmos.

There was nothing else that mattered to Mizzy. She had a very structured and defined mandate.

General Fiction

Another Name for Life

She raised her eyes to the mirror and saw the mascara running down her cheeks. For some reason, it made her smile. It might have been the wine or the day’s events, but she was done crying and ready to move on. However brief that future may be.

She walked back out to her table. She walked by the romantic couple and the noisy family. She squeezed by the big birthday table and arrived back at her own, quiet one. She was sitting at the back of her restaurant with a view of everything and everyone’s backs to her.

She liked it that way.

As she sat down, the waiter appeared like an apparition at her table and silently topped up her wine glass. She smiled at him and saw his eyes flicker briefly at her running mascara. She wondered what he thought of her, but, instead of asking her, he nodded and disappeared.

This was her restaurant, her table and her life. Even if she had cancer, she was going to enjoy the last bit of life before she chose to end it. At least, so she thought, she would take it on her own terms then and die with some dignity. Her mind was made up and it actually made the wine taste sweeter.

***

“Another round of drinks!” was announced, and some birthday orders were put in. He could feel he was starting to slip into the alcoholic fog, but it was his birthday so he tried to smile and lean into it.

Around him were his dearest friends and their better halves. In your twenties, you have wild birthday parties, in your thirties you celebrated the big ones, but in your forties you take everyone to dinner at a fancy restaurant.

The only difference is that you then order plenty of drinks with the food.

A slim, dark lady walked by their table. She had an air of tragedy about her that pierced his cocktail-haze. When she sat down at her table at the back of the restaurant, he caught a brief glimpse of her mascara-streaked face and red eyes, and his heart went out to her.

“Another round of drinks!” erupted from the merry crowd and it was met with a cheer from most, though he slouched back in his seat. Her tragic persona was bouncing around his mind now. He kept peeking at her, but all she did was sip her red wine, wave away the waiters that buzzed around her and stare into the distance.

Something about her reflected what he felt inside. At home, the empty pill bottle from last time still stood on the kitchen counter as a reminder of his failure. He had just woken up as a forty-year-old loser with a headache and each day was another chore on his road to oblivion.

No one here knew. Not even his therapist. None of his friends at this table knew and the drinks were flowing quick and fast. He smiled and he laughed in opposition to how he felt inside, but he kept sneaking glances at the lady who reflected what he felt. What he really felt.

***

Her husband was trying to stop the kids fighting, but they continued to gnaw into her skull like the ninth-level of Hell. She sat staring at her food with her still-water untouched. She had allowed herself to order a steak tonight–mostly it was salads, to get rid of three kids’ worth of pregnancy fat–but she was not hungry.

She felt the weight of gravity pulling on her. She had not slept in about three–or was it five?–years and her consciousness had melted away a long time ago. Sometimes she found herself slipping into the bathroom at home, closing the door and just staring into the mirror.

She did not recognize herself anymore. While she had given birth to three beautiful children, she had also buried all her hopes and dreams.

She no longer loved her husband. There was no hate there and he had done nothing wrong, but she just felt nothing for him. He was just a man that she lived with, did chores for and had children with. She loved the children too, but she had realized a while ago that she kept wondering what her life would have been like without them.

She saw the side of the dark, slim lady at the back of the restaurant. She saw her nursing her red wine and sitting peacefully at her table. She felt pangs of jealousy. How could this woman do that without screaming little monsters sucking the life out of her. Why was her life so easy?

She was so angry that she only realized halfway there that she had stood up and was walking to the dark, slim lady’s table…

***

“I am honoured to be with you now,” he said, holding her hand tightly. Their eyes never left each others’.

She smiled back at him. Their table was romantically lit with a candle and their plates cleaned of delicious food. It was a far cry from the dust, heat and military rations back in the desert where they had trained.

“We do this for each other, for our people and,” she said, squeezing his hand tightly, “always for God.”

He nodded.

Both of them jumped up, whipping out the grenades they had smuggled into this popular, packed restaurant.

“Allahu Akbar!” he shouted above the din in the restaurant, but a middle-aged, tired-looking woman stumbled into him just then. He almost fell and the grenade slipped out of his shaking hand before he could pull the pin. They both looked at each other in shock before she screamed and he ducked after the fallen explosive.

The restaurant was silent, and then it exploded into action.

He scrambled for the grenade, it had rolled to the next-door table where the slim, dark woman sat. He heard his wife scream as the birthday-man tackled her but he was on his hands and knees trying to grab the rolling grenade.

Suddenly, there was a gun in his face. The slim, dark lady had it. She had pulled it from her handbag and was looking at him strangely. She had red eyes and her face was streaked with mascara, but her eyes hardened and her hand stopped shaking.

“Don’t move,” she said coolly to him, “Don’t test me, I have nothing to lose anymore.” The grenade was just out of his reach. He heard his wife cry out in the struggle with the man, but she was not a man and, if she was going to detonate the grenade, it would have happened by now. It all rested on him now.

He narrowed his eyes and whispered a final, quick prayer, before jerking towards the grenade.

There was silence in the restaurant after the gunshot. Slowly, sirens began to waft into the place as they raced towards them. Someone had called the police.

***

The birthday man was shaken but had sobered enough to tell the cops his story. He had just reacted when he saw what the woman was carrying. He thought she had been distracted by the middle-aged woman stumbling into the other grenade-carrying man, and he had taken the gap. He kept saying how lucky they were. He kept saying that he was glad he was alive.

The middle-aged woman had been fed sufficient drugs by the medics to calm her down. She was still quite out of it and–with her husband and kids never leaving her side–she had a faint smile on her face as if she had actually enjoyed the night.

The owner of the restaurant was splattered with the blood of the man she had shot. He lay on the ground in front of her table. She was surprisingly calm about all of this and, as the cops bundled her into their van to take back to the precinct for questioning, she remarked that it was lucky that she had the gun.

She had never owned a firearm until yesterday, she kept saying, smiling sadly.

Fantasy, General Fiction

Silverwood

Silverwood slept peacefully while the countryside burnt. It was not her fire. It was not her countryside either. Anyway, the villagers had always thrown stones at her when they saw her.

She slept peacefully and awoke to the sound of the troll groaning. She had forgotten to water him!

She quickly filled a bucket and lugged it downstairs to the basement where the bewitched creature was standing guard over her portal. It glugged the water down thirstily between belches, and she made a note that she must steal another child away from the village. The beast had not eaten for months now. He was such a bother.

***

The cosmic furnace heaved as stars and other celestial bodies were consumed. An ornate chimney ran from it into space where the stardust blew freely like smoke across the ashes of the universe.

“Yes dear,” an old woman said to an image of Silverwood, “Yes, yes, you are young. Don’t be so hasty to leave that planet, all the civilisations of the cosmos have their problems. For example, this one never discovered chocolate. Never. No wonder it ended in tears.”

The image of Silverwood frowned on the portal. At this point it was only displaying images, but–if the counterparty accepted it–the device could open a small wormhole between itself and receiving portals.

And there were many portals across the multiverse.

“But, mom…” Silverwood whined, her shoulders slumping, “It is so boring down here. And the people stink, and they don’t like me. There is nothing to do and it sucks.”

In the background, her troll was standing behind her, its back to her, guarding the portal against anyone other than her.

Silverwood’s mother sighed. She was too soft on her girls. She hoped that they did not grow up to be spoilt.

“OK, Silverwood–” her mother began, and before she even finished, the portal had solidified and Silverwood was standing before her with her troll. The old portal would deactivate on the planet until they needed it again.

“Thank you! Thank you!” Silverwood bubbled, looking around her mother’s moon, “Can I go somewhere exciting next?”

***

“Just because we are gifted with immortality and magic, doesn’t mean that we are gifted with the knowledge or wisdom of how to use it,” the old, white-haired man said as clouds drifted by him. The air seemed to glow up here as light-filled clouds made up the landscape around him and Silverwood’s mother.

“Yes, I have told our daughters this many times, dear,” she said, shaking her head, “But Silverwood still struggles with it. She struggles with the boredom of it all.”

Silverwood’s father smiled. He knew exactly where to send his daughter.

***

The camera flashes looked like mini-supernovas as she got out of the limo. There were so many of them. Bodyguards–led by her trusted troll, albeit slightly made-up to fit in here–kept the paparazzi at bay, but their numerous cameras flashed repeatedly overhead as she walked down the red carpet.

“Silverwood! Silverwood!” screamed a reporter that she mildly recognized. They locked eyes, so she paused and leant in for an interview. The famous mortal actor on her arm hung back and smiled in every direction for the pictures.

The world was watching.

“Silverwood, who did you cheat on your husband with?” the reported flashed some pictures that she barely saw. But, she did not need to see much. She knew, and now so did the reporter.

Her heart sunk. How?

“How-how did you get those?” Silverwood stumbled, as the world came crashing down around her. The famous mortal actor was no longer smiling on her arm. He reached forward and grabbed the photos of her and another man.

Cameras were flashing. The media buzzed ratcheted upwards. The entire world was watching. Silverwood no longer felt all-powerful and immortal amongst these maggots.

“No amount of magic can erase your feelings or undo your mistakes,” she heard her distant father whisper into her ear, “Just because we are gifted with immortality and magic, doesn’t mean that we are gifted with the knowledge or wisdom of how to use it.”

She could sense him smiling up in the light-filled clouds, but below him and around her the paparazzi and international media went crazy…

Horror & Dark Fiction, Romance

The Apple

His wings lay to the side. The act of tearing them off had hurt more than he could explain but the jagged wounds in his flesh just felt numb.

He felt numb.

Then he remembered his anger. He remembered why he was doing what he was doing. He remembered who he was doing this for.

And he smiled.

He knew exactly where he was going. He had waited for most of his torturous existence to do this, and now he was doing it. Heaven forbade such acts, but this was love and he would be damned–literally!–if he would live for eternity in fear instead of one lifetime in love.

He chose love.

***

Fred smiled at the strange man on the subway. He had such chiseled features. He looked like he had come off some divine production line. He was strangely familiar to Fred, yet Fred was also sure that they had never met. This confusion kept Fred’s gaze on him a second longer than normal. He looked up and they made eye-contact, so the man smiled, leaned in and greeted him.

“Hi,” the man said–god, he had blue eyes!–“I’m Michael.”

“Uh-uh,” Fred stumbled over the words, his heart was pounding and his palms sweaty, “Hi, I’m Fred. Uh, do I know you?”

The beautiful man smiled. He never shook his head nor nodded. Rather he reached out and grasped Fred’s hand and squeezed it. Fred’s heart skipped a beat and then he squeezed back.

The beautiful stranger smiled.

“Say, do you want to get a drink, Fred?” he asked, smiling, the light radiating out of his blue eyes, “I know a quiet little pub nearby the next station.”

Fred smiled back and nodded before he realized that he should say something back.

“Sure, sure, yes,” he said, “Say, where are you from?”

The beautiful stranger smiled. Sadness and pain flashed across his eyes before he answered.

“I’m from far away. Very far. But, that doesn’t matter. That place doesn’t approve of people like us, Fred. We were made different to the rest and shouldn’t suffer because of it.”

Fred knew exactly what the man meant. He had run away from home when he was young. He did not miss his father’s or anyone else’s beatings nor the judgment of the priests.

“Born,” Fred corrected, smiling reassuringly back at him, “Born. We weren’t made. We were born.”

“Sure,” the stranger nodded, sadly, “Sometimes it feels more like I was made by some asshole god, to be honest.”

They both laughed at this, and the train came to a stop.

“How about that drink, Fred?”

Fred smiled. It had been a long time since someone had made him feel like this and he would be damned if he was going to let the opportunity slip by him.