Circ

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Talt

~ ※ ~

——The Wharf

Care went into restoring Hōm’s wharf.

Ancient stone blocks hewn from time before memory and scorched and darkened by Red Brother guarded the fjord from the high-point tide. Some blocks were said to be timeless as the foundation pillars of Orst, those legendary pylons of the deep balancing land on sea. Still others insisted the wharf was built by the very formless beings who shaped the whole of the world in its infancy. It was a sacred thing. To Hōm’s people, it was a bridge to life, survival. All honored and preserved it from mischief and vandalism. To Talt’s eye, the long, convex curve reminded him of a wyer, a faceless winged monster. When he was a child, he feared the beast. Now he knew better. Yarn weavers regaled Hōm’s youth with tales of wyers snatching prey larger than oxen in vicious, rust-tinged talons, extruding their stomachs and feeding slowly, openly on bleating victims for days on end as bits crashed downward, slick with digestive acid. All low in the sky, all too easy to see, to fear, wings motionless, surreal. The wharf, meanwhile, filled his soul with peace, security. It steadied him. Three jetties bit into the ocean, breaking up waves and keeping safe the fishermen’s moored skiffs.

Time, tide, and salt warred against it, but it had its people, firm.

Talt gazed outward, lost in thought. Between him and the horizon, low, sharp crags adorned in salt-froth circlets pierced the inlet’s mouth. For them, the amethyst waters were perilous to any seafarer unfamiliar with the lay. On them, selins light-bathed, bellies fat with blubber and bodies brown and spotted. He felt them close cousins, for skin cleaves to skin, and shared with the people of Hōm was their bespeckled tawniness and broad faces. A notion entwined in myth, in stories; perhaps true. He smiled, joining them in their pastime, he, on the wharf, bathing in Red Brother’s light on the warm stones, drying off the wet of his swim. Nude among his brothers still making sport in the cool, clear sea around Lee Fang, name of the jetty where they were left to their play with neither reprimand nor judgment. The splashing and rough-housing was easy for him to ignore. Like the statues of Hōm’s heroes, he was quiet, immobile—yet he by force of will. His hope was that one day his likeness might be sculpted and placed on the wharf, an immortal guardian of his people. Quietly, he watched the yawning selins and beyond, the watchtower. Some day soon he would be assigned that sacred duty. Today was his last day here, tomorrow his first among the grown. He would get his tattoo, his first mark on his smooth, hairless skin. Most at their first Rite of Growth chose wings or fins, to better fly or swim when the power of the tattoo bloomed from their flesh as a silver-black mist. The fighters chose claws or tails, to sharpen their strikes and balance their grace. One boy even chose a shield.

Talt did not know what to choose.

Instead, he thought of change; his own, that of Hōm, and the wharf itself so rather recently.

From the roaring peopled vastness and its great school came to Hōm a scholar learned in Ano, a sorcery for awakening dust-like metal motes. Her name was Yargal, and she was the first woman to enter the village. To Talt, Ano was the apex of magic, its reagents self-healing, gleaning energy from light and motion, serving the will of those versed in its hidden language. It changed Hōm, mending the wharf of its cracks, filling them with vivid, colorful light that changed hue and shape in accordance with the will of Harbormaster Etana. In a few short years, the village grew tall, bright, and colorful. Terraces stacked upon terraces, eaves curving vaguely upward to catch the rain. It lent action to the tattooing, rather than mere symbolism.

Red Brother sank across Grandmother’s distant, massive face, elongating his gangly, brief shadow. Her light was cool, dim. Vague. At night, a smear in the darkness.

It was time to talk to the tanner and silker, for men wore clothing along with tattoos; but before that …

——The Fountain

Childhood behind him, he stilled his mind with an inflection of spirit born of commitment, practice, and faith taught in Hōm’s shrines, the Dive. An act. A lifetime of acts. To drown one’s uncertainty, to let one’s spirit swim free and unburdened in the eternal current of the amethyst sea where strength and fate are a man’s lone guides. Talt’s concentration broke, for in him bodhi was far away in, he hoped, some heroic future. A repetition of acts, he again unburdened himself and in slow, deliberate steps walked from the wharf and ascended the Cleansing Steps, large, rough-hewn pumice stones, black and broad and which over a thin stream perpetually rushed, and onward, over each step, then through a narrow gap in the wharf’s masonry and at last out into the sea. Today, scaled pastel blue and celadon swam unhurried as fish on the surface of the steps — another manifestation of Ano, a recent addition to the village’s architecture, but apt and ancient in mood.

These improvements were slow, the yield of deliberations among the village elders and scholar Yargal. Even now, her sacred school was relegated to the outskirts of the village, out of sight behind a curve in the cliffs for its form was deemed by Hōm’s elders to be anathema, pale, smooth until it sharply bent, and at odds with nature.

When he reached the top, Talt was weary but his feet were clean, smooth. In his imagination, he believed the fish of light devoured the dead flesh. In reality, it was buffed away by the pumice and carried away by the clear, clean current where it would feed the krill and fertilize the plankton. Before him was the fountain, the center of town. Built around a natural sprint, it was made of the same rock as the Cleansing Steps and square in geometry. Not spartan, however, for all over it was delicately sculpted with images of sea shells and creatures of the deep; the work of a master artisan. Within, though, was dizzying. A cascade of hollow, perfect squares, each one slightly smaller than the next and slightly rotated, a spiral without curves that descended into complete, impenetrable darkness. Always, Talt felt there was something off about this fountain. It felt different from the rest of Hōm. More ancient, despite the legends of the wharf and the similarity of the stones. It required no maintenance, no restoration via Ano. It never faded, or chipped, or seemed worn. From deep within the fountain well, he sensed an odd, fearsome power.

Odder still were the three chimeric figures over the central waters, a meter above the fountain’s highest outer rim. Back to back, they were one figure of statuary, yet each rather unique in material and form. Tricks of shadow made it seem they floated, but that was impossible. Nobody was brave enough to test the theory, for these statues were fierce with a similar power as the fountain's depths.

Of the three, Talt preferred the stoat. Primarily carved of white, soft-looking stone, it melted to gentle lavender at its roots. He felt it curious that a stoat boasted tentacles, nebulous, ethereal, and translucent; unlike those he knew of from the washed up remains of the deep. In each of its eyes were set a different gemstone, one fathomless black and the other vivid blue that, even far away at the edge of the fountain in the warmth of day, tensed the fine hairs of his face with the sensation of cold.

Next was the hyena dragon, a blend of muted gray and fiery red that prowled and shifted in the light as though alive and in motion. It seemed both fierce and friendly, and he wondered at the placid intellect that locked eyes with him, impossible as he knew that was. Fire ever danced lively in those ametrine eyes. Yet he knew it was just stone, a matter of mallet and chisel.

The last one unnerved Talt, for in it morphed darkness, formlessness. It was not any kind of animal at all. It had no face, yet he knew somehow that it watched him, mocked him. Quick, he dipped his hands into the cold, clear water of the fountain and splashed the salt out of his lashes.

——Salt & Shade

To his left his destination hunched atop four deep, low tiers of stone steps or platforms. In their presence — the school and the fountain —, he felt himself merely a sojourner near the ruins of a civilization oblique and ancient; yet this village, the slopes of the fjord, and the sea in all its wild, unpredictable, nurturing violence were each and all the full compass of his life. He did not confront what that meant, that feeling. It seemed that if he did, if he tried, he would witness the truth of himself, temporary, pointless, already forgotten.

What was it he overheard Scholar Yargal say? He pressed his memory for the proper order of the words, and in that void of mind that loses comprehension of place, finally arrived.

Youth loves that which is fleeting, but comprehends not its value.

Talt turned his back on the fountain and the weird, lingering dread it evoked, and beheld the school. No different than any other building in Hōm, it was square, squat, and paneled with flame-charred unburnished timber, the overhang of its bottommost tier supported by large, round, straight pillars painted red, like the red of rich, fecund soil. Between the pillars billowed tapestries in the light breeze that flooded the fjord from the sea like a decanter, a robust, salt-tinged wind. Their fabric was stiff and light, crafted from braided seagrass left to dry, pale from Red Brother's brilliance, and finally dyed with pigments contrived from crushed sea shells, squid ink, urchins, and whatever else nature supplied.

Abstract, he thought. Or maybe he just didn’t understand their significance.

No one seemed to, other than that they were stolen from a dream and passed down by the first settler of Hōm, for that is how old these were. Yet even now, the colors were proud, and boasted rich, bold purple strokes, supple yellows accents, and bursts of chaotic orange that pleased his uneducated eye.

Quietly, soberly, Talt stepped through the narrow slit in the lattice frames of the sliding doors and into the dimly lit entrance. Under his feet was a soft tatami, also of woven seagrass. He knelt, kowtowed, and waited patiently. There was no rush, but his mind did wander. It fixated on the interstices of the shadows, where light danced its peculiar dance. In that dim, unsteady light, he considered the back of his hand. It was mottled brown, dark with light blotches, darker streaks. His fingers were stout, thick, and vaguely webbed. If he focused, he could see the striations, the weave. It was barely visible in all woven works of the ocean’s verdant bounty — in the tapestries, in the mat that cushioned his hands and knees, in the very substance he and the men of Hōm accepted as their flesh, beneath which was a void, and in that void was …

Throughout his innermost core he shuddered, and a shadow shifted behind him.

Excited as Talt was, he could not deny the anxiety of this day. It boded a decision that was to be tattooed into his depths, until stillness, death, and the sea demanded he return.

“What are you?” the shadow asked, heavy and bleak.

He knew the prompt, for it was required each time he entered in the school, barefoot and carefree, often noisy, ever reminded that it was a sacred place and so he knelt on the tatami and thus admonished awaited permission to rise, to enter. The school’s call and response was engrained into him, as were so many other memories. Yet today he paused, he thought it through and contemplated its significance. He was a boy about to become a man, and he didn’t know what that meant. He was a student eager to learn what that meant, and he hoped he possessed both the aptitude and resolve to glean that wisdom.

Why am I so— his mind trailed off, unable to express in words the wistful, weighty emotions that within him roiled as storm waves on the deep, amethyst waters where once, in a faint memory, he knew he’d been and knew he would again one day be.

“Salt and shade,” Talt answered the shadow—Beircru, his teacher, but not his friend.

What he learned was that it meant he was no different from the sea, but Talt suspected there was a deeper, more concrete truth hidden in the maxim.

“Come,” Beircru invited in his firm, terse way, “You are today’s only postulant, and your path today does not keep you within these walls.”

——A Path

Outside the school, Scholar Yargal waited.

A narrow, sharp face met Talt, expression neutral as always. Compared to him, she was very pale. She reminded him of the statue of the stoat, except that she had long fiery red hair, which burned and twisted down and along her shoulders like the eruptions that frayed Red Brother’s edges. No, maybe it was more like the talons of a wyer. Rust-tinged, but vibrant. Her lips were the same color, but seemed painted on, some parts dry and flaked. With a single spelt-brown eye, she watched him. Covering the other, a translucent patch infilled with variegated coiled strands.

Then there were those large lumps on her chest, which to Talt seemed so impractical. He made no comment, but focused on her face. Well he remembered Beircru’s admonition when Yargal came into the village; he warned them — Talt and his fellow students — to neither stare at nor inquire on her unique anatomy, as to do so was to visit a shame on both Hōm and on their esteemed guest.

Most impractical of all in this humid, moist climate, was how she wrapped herself in walls of fabric, from throat to foot, of a nature that recalled to Talt’s mind the tarksi fish and its large opalescent scales that melted to fins and face of silver-white.

“This your guide for the morning, Talt,” Beircru said, “meet me back here when you’re done, at midmeal.”

Talt nodded, and followed Scholar Yargal. She didn’t speak, and so he likewise held his tongue. She led him a little ways out of the village, around a hillock, and up steep stone steps carved into the rear slope of the tapered mountain that penetrated into the ocean. Long Jaw it was called, though Talt didn’t know why. Either side led to dangerous, sheer cliffs, and across the harbor he saw the other mountainous finger of the fjord known as Strong Jaw. Betwixt them, the harbor teeth. Despite the bright hour, this path was dim and shaded in heavy trees with vibrant moss-licked bark and veinous trunks. They sprawled above him, wider than they were tall, broad leaves soft and filmy, like ferns, akin to the multitude of small shrubs that grew between the roots that arched up and around the violent, mica-flecked stones that penetrated the thin, grainy, black topsoil.

It was an excellent place to hunt mushrooms, a staple of every midmeal. He paused and gathered a few on his way with that thought in mind, but remained close to his peculiar guide.

A dangerous place, with many rocks that jutted jagged from the soil, inscribed with odd, ancient symbols.

“Here,” Yargal said, and directed him into a well-lit cavern.

He recalled the place, back when he and the other children roamed The Jaws once they learned to walk. Before Yargal came to Hōm. Called Eyehole, it went deep, deep, deep. Its entrance was obvious, a lure, a trap. He never explored the entirety of its depths, for they menaced and terrified him, the weird way the rocks writhed and the otherworldly sounds that crawled out of its narrow, lightless places.

Not her lab, not the place of fanciful modernity from which he and the other children of Hōm were forbidden; thus, disappointment glanced across his form. She raised an eyebrow, and as one they entered.

Within, a bench on which to sit, strange metal apparatuses, and a soft amber fire that floated inexplicably but kept the large cavern entrance warm and well-lit.

“Your tattoo,” she began, “But first, do you understand what Teacher Beircru told you about what it means to be a part of The Sodality?”

“Teacher, I wish to—to have someone to talk to, to guide me true,” Talt blurted, his mind and expectations well ahead of her inquiry.

Intently they gazed at one another. Yargal was patient. Finally, his lagged focus caught up with his present. He grasped her question, and answered, “Teacher, it means to learn, to — uh, to share what we learn, to protect others from truths that are harmful and keep those truths secret. To do all that without personal bias, without arrogance.”

She nodded in agreement and pointed to a stick, then began to adjust her equipment.

“Draw the pattern,” she requested, and so he did.

——A Pith &a Dralif

Red Brother descended and blazed large and bright into pale Grandmother’s midst, as if together they served as some weird eye, lidless, fiery, and apocalyptic—the orb of some eldritch, eternal entity. Born to such a scene, all it signified to those native to Hōm was midday, and naturally that meant midmeal, and in the present plenty that omen thrilled the soul with bounties of honeyed oyster skewers, soft-boiled selin eggs, savory toegi crackers, and cold, fresh, life-giving water from their fountain; moreover, it mapped to moment Talt emerged, alone, from the cave, for Scholar Yargal lingered to see to her equipment, her work done, and done well in the estimation of both herself and Talt, although the boy possessed not an expert’s eye and was satisfied with mere vanity—appearance. Nearly a man, he strode a mite faster down the rugged, uneven path than when he ascended; indirect, careless, at ease as he crawled across fallen trees and leapt upon the high, flat, light-bathed and strangely marked stones that were everywhere, like scales, on Long Jaw’s cragged surface, the view of the fjord always at his left, bright, endless, and amethyst in the fringe of his gaze.

Eventually, one rather brief, his stomach rumbled.

A man now, he thought, he required garb, and so started for the silker; but then he recalled his promise, noted the time by the position of Orst’s two near stars, and thus made his way down the mountain. So instead of at the silker, he arrived at the agreed upon place where he was to meet with Beircru for midmeal, and there he sensed, a figment of a notion at best, that the final step on his Rite of Growth was once again delayed.

“You seem pleased with yourself,” Beircru said wryly as Talt loped onto the warm stone pavers that signified, along with the fountain, the village center; later than expected, yet not so late as to merit wrath.

The boy smiled, nodded, and slowly turned around for Beircru to behold and inspect the Scholar’s handicraft.
A new, vibrant tattoo circled what Yargal said was the location of Talt’s heart on most mammals, the sinistral side of his chest; a genial, intelligent, animal face that from Talt’s bosom looped its slender body up his shoulder, swung about behind the nape of his neck, and finally curled atop his opposite ear. Its points shone akin to stars on his creased, dun brown flesh, brilliant flecks of citrine, platinum, and starstone; it matched his eyes, and his own secret, although not at all a secret inside Hōm’s peaceful borders — his serrock core, the salt hidden by his own shadows. Abstract and tribal, the tattoo stirred imagination with the form of a serpentine forest creature, an elongated markin or dralif — small, furry, six-legged, inquisitive beasts with lucid eyes and claws that grasped at fire and rays of light, one the night and the other the day, and thus sprinted across the very air. Yargal claimed it was a thousand nodes, and each node was a million axons; that it would keep him company whenever company was needed, that it would share with him that which was, is, and would be true, if he to ask.

In his hand, he carried a device; a clear, spherical object with which he might always know the direction he faced. Talt didn’t know what to put in it, so Vargal suggested an Ano clime-glimmer charm until he should come to the City of Knō, for such would balance heat against the cold, the darkness against the light. Grateful, he heeded her wisdom.

Beircru nodded approval, and gestured with his chin, “Leave that with me for the while.”

Talt placed it on the ground next to his teacher.

“Did Yargal explain what this is?” he asked, to which Talt nodded his affirmation.

“At the Great School, they call it a hexagazer alembic, such an awkward turn of phrase,” Beircru opined, then he sighed and was silent for a while. Talt knew better than to interrupt, as such spells were commonplace given his teacher’s preferred mode of instruction. At length, his teacher added, “We call it a helemb, or a pith.”

Carefully, Beircru watched as the boy’s eyes wandered where his gut bade them with a rumble. Practice forbade his face laughter, it remained blank, stolid, but sincere. Again silent, Beircru dipped a cracker in the half-shelled yolk of his selin egg and then chewed it slowly, thoughtfully, and swallowed.

“Today, Talt, you must fast. My hope is that your heart yearns for more aeonic ambitions than your next meal, your next physical desire. See that narrow path beside the Cleansing Stairs, perilous and from which you have thus far been forebode? Lower, it sits, but it remains dry. Follow it, and you will come to an opening. Go through. The path will guide you, as it has others.”

It was dry, as his teacher said. Dry, much like his flesh, light-baked and unquenched. His fingertips traced along the rough basalt edge, that signified the Cleansing Steps. For this narrow path, he knew no name. Yet it was all in shadow. At length, his arm pressed forward into a darkness his eyes could neither penetrate nor distinguish from the shadow-draped rock alongside him.

Into that, he ventured.

——The First Secret

Blind, he ventured by touch and naïve temerity his way forward, and after a little ways his ordained path curved inward, then forward, then downward. It was deep, and after what he perceived as several spirals Talt’s intuition intimated that neither the walls nor the floor, while flat and sloped, were smooth. Creases from the precise union of bricks delicately grazed the flesh of his fingertips, often, regular, a pattern. He knew he was below the village, further down even than the level at which the tide lapped upon the wharf. He was certain that his path was spun around the well over which the Fountain of the Three Gods loomed, and that it was ancient, far more ancient even than Hōm itself.

Moisture pilled along the bricks, and with it came the cold, and with the cold came the light and the fear.

Talt saw it beyond the corner, and stilled until his eyes adjusted to the infringed formerly-placid gloom. Gently, his hand touched the wall and sucked in the moisture. He no longer felt dry, thirsty, nor hungry. An irrational fear pulsed in his mind.

He lifted a foot, then hesitated.

Why do I fear the light? he chided himself, and stepped forward.

Nearer, he halted and listened. There was no noise, not anymore. Gone, the tide’s reliable crash on the wharf’s impervious stones. Gone, the whisper of the wind through the valley. Gone, the erratic, interminable drone made by insects and beasts. Gone, the laughter of his friends; children, still, for whom this unknowable dread loomed as part of their inexorable future. It was true for all the Elders of Hom, all before him walked this path. To his memory, not a one had mentioned this place.

Not the light. I fear the knowing, he realized.

Gradually, his eyes adjusted. He came to realize that the wall was not merely rough with the seams of bricks, but etched with glyphs beyond his ken. A language so old, only the gods who slept still dreamed in its tongue. Talt’s mind went back to some lessons, general principles on knowledge. How it was power. How power can corrupt, and as such should be—should be what? He couldn’t remember. Feared, maybe. Respected. Kept safe, if need be. Kept secret.

If he intended to be part of the Thirkoan Sodality, he needed to preserve, weigh, and reflect on their secrets, first and foremost among them the secrets of Hōm.

Is that what I want? I have this tattoo, but it can be removed, transformed. As with the pith. Yargal can change it to eyes that see further than my own, and I could become a Sentry of the Fangs — I could warn my friends against pirates, monsters, and other threats.

Pensive, his fingertips traced a random glyph.

To him, it meant nothing, merely a shape in the darkness, one that felt familiar, one that felt similar in nature to the appearance of those etched on Long Jaw’s sharp, obsidian scales.

So that’s it. That’s why none speak of it. They turn back, here. Turn back for the fear of knowing, and become fishers, or sentries, or artisans. Only a quiet few become teachers, and fewer still leave the village.

Around him, his world rumbled. Just once, just a moment. Brief enough to be imagination, long enough that it roused doubt.

Firm, Talt stood; hand braced on the wall.

Then he laughed, because of course he knew what he wanted.

I want what I don’t yet know.

With that, he walked forward into the illuminated corridor. It opened to a chamber, the ceiling low, the walls wide, and the end far and confused by the haze of light that emanated from a barrier midway through. A wall of diffused light that separated him from what was on the other side.

Nearer matters captured his attention. At his feet, in the center of the first half of the chamber, a large pit. He could not see the bottom, for the deeper he gazed the more his vision became confused rather than by darkness obscured. A rope, knotted at easy intervals, looped through a large metal hook in the ceiling and descended into that hole. On the wall next to him leaned a crook, with which to catch the rope. Talt snatched up the crook, and with it hooked the rope and pulled it toward him. It felt like silk, but showed no signs of wear. He wondered who maintained it, or if magic preserved it indefinitely. First around a leg and then fingers interlocked above a knot, he leaned forward to the abyss. Suddenly, it was below him. His rope swayed, but calmed after several minutes. Down here, time felt abstract, distant. He couldn’t tell how much had passed since that first step into darkness, that next step into terrible quiet light. Down he went, one careful knot clasp at a time, and that mysterious light came down with him.

That’s when he saw it, Hom’s first secret.

When a Homsur died, their corpse was burned and, Talt thought, returned to the sea. A great ceremony was held to commemorate the deceased, a feast to honor them, words from friends. He participated in many and always it was a grand and happy occasion. As the third moon ascended above the amethyst meridian, the honored corpse was placed on a small, wood raft, covered in dried seagrass, set afire, and pushed out into the bay with the out-going tide.

Yet around him rose columns of serrock bricks. Thousands of them, at least. He could not see how far down the pillars went. On each was meticulously engraved a name.

Around him was a tomb.

~ ※ ~

Xenopunk Dysphoria: Tech, Slime & Bone

— Earth-F67X: North Capital City: Earth’s Extraterrestrial Embassy

With the rice cake consumed, a dehydrated nitroxcide-infused cockroach chaser crunched profanely in Fran’s half-open gullet as she ambled over to Zuorn, took one look at the new alien ambassador, and made the type of conclusions an overly-opinionated secretary is wont to do. The news blared behind them, and painted a rather grim picture of Earth. She muted it, and unmuted her mouth.

Maybe she was wrong, but it looked like the prelude to a panic attack.

“Wild, isn’t it? No matter how different we seem, our feelings are universal. Here, honey, take this kleenex, it is for collecting mucus or to just have something soft to hold on to.”

Fran pressed it into Zuorn’s hand, and flicked her arm up to adjust her gull-winged spectacles, and prattled, “All we can do is focus on what is in front of us. Look at this data pad, nothing on it. Sterile, just wiped it down myself. Wouldn’t it be nice if it told us here on Earth what your people need and the type of assistance they require? Now if someone could put that all down into words, well, now that’s doing something.”

… Ϟ

— Earth-F67X: Second Alien Contact: Neptune

No meme immediately emerged from beneath the dense hydrogen-primary atmosphere of the blue giant, Le Verrier’s planet, Dalain van, Tangaroa, … Neptune. But it wasn’t silent, not in that broader sense. As with all planets in the F67X Sol system, it possessed a deep-well military counter-incursion facility. One that, at the behest of New Roswell’s Symbiote, enacted a prescripted sequence.

Serendipitously for the oddly polygonal spacecraft, it wasn’t a lethal action; perhaps because it wasn’t hiding, perhaps because it wasn’t attacking in a way that threatened so much as caused cause for clarification.

A fold in subspace was migrated from THE STORE and unfolded …

A serialization of quantum potentialities reached out and around the intruder and then actualized from the foam as an out-of-sequence tightly-packed plank particulate cloud that, due to the observer effect, seemed to emanate from Neptune’s depths as a black finger, crooked, reminiscent of an Ikeda map, but any implied order was a trick of relativity, for it all happened with a stunning, strange simultaneity. With a reflective index of just 0.003, it was completely invisible to all but the most precise of electromagnetic sensors. Arranged, it morphed into a bismuth net, like an array of inter-linked space shuriken able to penetrate the defenses of most starships Earth had thus-far encountered and, among other things, produce technical woes.

It existed to answer the question of how Earth should deal with information warfare or, put perhaps just a lone troll.

Which is why, if it was able to be detected by the alien ship, the bismuth cloud’s tendril-shape summoned, curled into a fist, and then extended from that a single, prominent digit that waved back and forth in a universal gesture of ‘no, no, no — you better not do that’ — and awaited a response.

Gaslands: a Palimpsest’s Tale

—— Earth-F67X: North Capital City, Chinatown — Little Fuzhou — Ramen Broadcast Station aka Ramen Hososoba Kyokua

“Ungrateful dog!” Ixchel screeches.

More accurately, someone screeches through her. Spittle dashes off her bottom teeth, perfuming the air with a tincture like spoiled samba and spotting the lens of Zenji’s vidcipher module; drops of the blood she had recently sipped. Rasps of hyperventilation disfigure the flesh of her throat, causing it to cling around her larynx like hyperstatic foil around a microwave burrito; every artery and lump of cartilage grotesquely prominent.

“Gave that homeless fuckboi Mateo his pick of my products, and he slit my throat!” the voice hisses.

☴ Calm yourself, Fesyen. Work with us, let us mete out your justice, ☴ Ixchel conveys to her body’s guest, the former Chinatown fixer, over their — she hopes briefly, but buries that emotion deep so as not to disrupt her gestalt — shared electro-empathic medium, ☴ We don’t have long. Who is Mateo, where can we find him? ☴

Not privy to the mechanisms of Ixchel’s mind, Zenji' nods and says, “Mateo, right. Any more deets on this guy?”

A few glances from adjacent stools at the streetside ramen booth at the commotion, but the patrons see the yakuza tats and elect to mind their own business. Best to sip their noodles in peace.

Breathing calms, and Ixchel blinks rapidly, like a cicada.

“He’s homeless. A slatternly street slut! Dragged a rotten cyber-psycho corpse into my place of business, his unwashed spic ass smelling like country bumpkin bukkake. I could see the cum stains on him! He demanded I accept the corpse’s mods in lieu of cash, so I sent him to my spa gratis, got him all cleaned up, and let him take his pick of clothes right off my racks!”

“Uh, yeah. Very sweet to the boy, you were. A true father figure. Where can we find him?” Zenji asks.

Vengeance makes for a good incentive, and the voice calms, sweetens even, hissing again, but this time more serpentine than venomous, “He’s come ple~eding for grab-bags before, near this area. Chinatown, Kips Bay, were the poors and self-loathing fags mingle. O~obviously I said maybe, but no fre~ebies. I heard he shares a van with a punk who goes by Kostas.”

“We have our perp,” Ixchel says, terminating the séance.

Gaslands: a Palimpsest’s Tale

—— Ximbic-8: XCC, Blilhamr, Intake

Stirred from a soundless, sceneless muse mid-sentence, he awoke.

Was I even asleep? he doubted.

No, sleeping, waking, transitioning from one to the other — that was different. Distinct. This sensation stung, like a thorn torn from the mind, a rip through memory, a tear his consciousness fixated on in an attempt to correct. A distraction, as was this place of being, all so utterly unfamiliar.

Often though he reconnoitered, he could make sense of neither when nor where.

He focused on what little he could.

Foggy, translucent molds arched roundabout, forming a chamber—a membrane by which light was captured, held, and reradiated mildly yet wholely as a diffuse warm white bath, the warmth of unstained molten wax fresh from the wick of a lit lume. A glow. Plastic, gelatinous, not entirely transparent. Shadows of shapes roved just beyond, incoherent smudges of matted earthen brown fringing fresh-tilled clay proceeding fuzzy, patternless, variegated in all directions. Upon or within, pastel pigment streaks twisted and swam. He thought perhaps they were glyphs, a variation on the Lanna alphabet. He thought perhaps they were alive, in the sense that mitochondria are alive in cells. Bigger, fiercer — akin moreso to trematodes, flukes, or worms. He thought he was glad they were there, and he was here, all parties constrained by and to their own dimension. Within, there was air and pressure of comfortable levels, clean yet not sterile. No sense of antiseptic. To his mind, the space he occupied welcomed life.

“—history is local,” lingered his voice in his ears, deep, confident, capable. Self aware, he paused, reflected on his own slow, even cadence. Something wasn’t right. There was a disconnect. His words, his place.

Momentum impelled him forward, “Fear and suspicion guide humanity. Before contact, it was fear of self. After contact, it was fear of the other. Excuse me, but where am I?”

It occurred to him that he was not aware of anyone to whom he posed his question. The blur of the wall loomed insurmountable at the forefront of his attention, impossible and alive with vague moving forms and soft inobtrusive hues.

Yet he was not alone.

Rich, creamy, and cool on the nostrils, the other presence awakened long-buried memories of vacation in Vietnam, of a gac and agar-agar gelée, of ruddy brown cousins and aunts and ignorance’s blissful illusion of freedom climaxing in earnestly running barefoot, naked, and dangerous alongside his half-kin and flame vine-fringed jungle streams to the five lakes and leaping wild into one of the waterfall-churned tepid pools kept cool by the shadows of towering teak and sprawling flame trees. All before boarding school, before Monteray Bay, before ... what he was on the verge of discussing or, a matter of distinct possibility, carelessly divulging.

Again he forced himself to be alert, to observe. This time, he began close, familiar. Gazing down at his hands, he saw they were black, smooth, matte, without nails nor whorling lines on his palms nor prints on his fingers. Beyond his grasp, empty space, his kneecaps swathed in canvas weave bush pants colored green, like moss baked in the sun midway through a drought until it withered and dried not quite to brown. Barefoot, his toes the same as his hands. Broad, dense, meaty. Strong, smooth hands and feet. Vague imprints of where nails should be, so as to make them feel normal.

Against his bare feet, the wall. Warm, soft, smooth, like a firm layer of solid paraffin.

A string wriggled by, and he pulled his knees up, his feet away, and sat in a modified fetal position.

“You are present, aware, the full scroll of your saga. This place is a tusdta, mansion of memory. This place is Blilhamr, mansion of mansions. Your tale is worth, is tempo-fatidic. Please, continue,” urged an impression across from him.

It lilted across from perhaps a rather tenuous and translucent arced table. To his ears, the tone was gentle, intermittent, androgynous, like the downward spiral of splayed oak leaves into long bent forest grass, not quite turned, not quite fall — just tired and spent. He lifted his gaze up from his knees, up and over the vaguely opalescent sheen of surface that he imagined as a table, a barrier, a means of separating him from his answerer. The words danced across it, frictionless, and landed in his lap. The table, an extension of the walls, the barrier. The answerer, a fog into which his mind could not penetrate. There was just too much to see, so he closed his eyes. Again, he heard himself speaking. Automatic, atonal.

“We lied, initially. The Val’gara were not our first contact with xenos. First came the Deceivers, beings recurrent in our history depicted both as demonic and angelic. God and gods. It is not unfair to claim they were the ones who groomed humanity, directed our evolution. They predated us, but Earth is not their home. That we lie about, too. We discarded them as mere mythology. Did. Such was their preference. Ours as well, until we acquired means to contain them. After containment, we discarded them in fact, in truth, in reality — just as we, up until that point, discarded any knowledge of them. Now we don’t know what to believe. A few cling to the old lies. For most, nothing. Or belief in one another, I guess.”

His voice was not his voice, he realized. Toneless, without accent. Drugged. Slow. Hypnotic.

His eyes opened, and he concentrated on the space directly before him. On the small area atop the table. Hitherto it was blurry, beyond grasp or even the memory of a grasp. Now, he focused intently. Ignored all the other, wild stimuli. Steadily, the space between him and the voice clarified, sharpened. Just one thing at a time. This was one thing, one but many. A hologram in the shape of a sphere hovering above the apex of the smooth, translucent arc of table.

“I’m sorry — tusdta, fatidic? What is does that even mean? What is happening?” he managed to push out, before his focus collapsed back into trance.

“It means we are working together to remember who you are, from a known quantity in your past and talking forward. Like death, life flashing before your eyes. You see your scroll unfurl, you enter heaven. Until you reach the present, you won’t understand how you arrived. Please, continue,” again urged the presence.

It made a kind of sense, perhaps he died somehow. Perhaps this was some sort of intervening afterlife. He had no reason not to, so he talked and talked. The stranger listened, and for some reason that helped.

He shared his place in the multiverse, beginning with his religious upbringing where he was indoctrinated with a painting of a proxy war betwixt angels and demons — only to, as an adult, learn they were two sides of the same coin. How Earth developed technology to constrain the supernatural factions to their own domains. Of his time at Monteray Bay where he, for the first time, encountered a Val’Gara hatchling in the aquarium tanks. It had infected a deep sea fish, one which was caught and placed inside a pressurized tank. An anglerfish, he thought, or moray eel. It sought to escape, but fortunately couldn’t. The memory of that dark, chemiluminescent chamber still haunted him. The numerous times he awakened in a cold sweat, terrified the wet chill coursing over his body was the water from that tank as the fiendish alien-terran hybrid escaped, were like buckshot through his soul.

Something clicked in his mind, and he realized the holographic sphere was a map, a world in a state of constant transformation. Fissures ran through it, outlines of oceans or continents, if it were a planet. A small one, a planetoid. It seemed too irregular for gravity to have smoothed it. Oblate, but like a dodecahedron, but with many, many more faces. An order of magnitude more. Rivers ran through it, but they seemed too calculated to be natural. Too layered. Maybe it was just a ball of rubberbands, suspended ferrofluid, a mass of magnetic shavings. He couldn’t tell, and it didn’t matter. The small gold pulsing point in the sea of silverglass, maybe that was here, a point for which he possessed no context.

“There is — or was — a point in our history where we were anti-Earth, where the so-called songbirds devoured Sol’s outer planets. Their cosmic screams and wing-beats arrived as high-frequency gravity waves, alarming us to their presence. We were helpless. Then, perhaps before we even became aware of them, they were eradicated. Limited, then, to light speed information. By what, we still don’t fully know. President Amon spoke of a savior, a liar, a ... pervert. His ‘ace in the hole,’ he called it. The rampage ended at Saturn, which miraculously still possessed all its rings in the aftermath of that celestial brawl. We didn’t escape unscathed. The chaos drew in the Val’gara, a mothership known as Dreadnaught. It ripped a gash through North America and the Sahara. Fortunately, forces more advanced than those native to Earth stumbled across the monstrous bio-vessel’s path, answered our wide-spectrum plea for aid at the price of Africa’s natural resources. So with the help of the Red Technocracy’s anti-matter bombardments and Xanathan Industry’s quarantine technology, we survived. I was too young, I think. Safe in Australia, getting my skin grafted on over and over until it needed replaced with this — this eternal darkness. Then I trained. Then I left Earth to fight enemies I knew nothing about on worlds unfamiliar for reasons above my paygrade. No faces, no names. Just orders. I envy old man Oakes. During the First Contact War, he had reasons to fight. Him and his brother, heroes. All over the streams. Action figures. Before that war, the public knew nothing of aliens. After, it felt like we were drowning in xenos.

“Fate tugged us away from the Terran Alliance and into the United Earth Federation. There, we were but one of innumerable Earths, unimportant in the broad scheme of things. F67X was our designation. A random four character sequence to represent everything we ever knew, all that we were. To ensure humanity’s survival, we sent out city ships, like the Exigent sent to the Gnaritas system. Like the Helistron bound for Terra and Careo Fas. After all that, it became a blur. Xenophor, a Technocrat installation where a god played cat-and-mouse with my life. The Multiversal Fault, Cataclysm, Earth Prime — whatever you want to call it. Suddenly, there was no more UEC. No other Earths. Just F67X. And ... some, maybe all, maybe more than before — our outer planets were back. Pluto, Uranus, Somnus, and Erebus. Who can know for sure? The liar Apollo entrusted with all our lives? Apollo believes this world is just a copy of the original, that we all are actually dead. And I can’t even remember where I was or if I was even on Earth when it happened! I woke up on Vega, felt strange — still feel strange! Polluted. A marionette. Came back to Earth by way of something unholy, a massacre in my wake. Arrived to learn about the Iberian Incident, the portent of another Val’gara invasion, this Ximbic thing — perhaps it is protecting us, but who knows what its intentions are? I was suppose to be guarding the mayor of Allure City, Idereen. I fell asleep, and I can’t wake up. I’m just here, maybe in my mind, for sure in another unfamiliar place, talking ... rehashing my miserable life like a talking corpse.”

A shimmer, a voice, “The lens through which you view this experience, with all its scratches, smudges, and imperfections.”

“I suppose.”

“Are you dead?”

For a moment, he didn’t answer. It was an intimate question, but so often those matters are easiest to disclose to strangers. He thinks back on his host of losses, still somehow vivid in his mind, albeit a fractured mirror tinted white, as a specter. When did he begin writing it in a dark place in his mind, when did it become a daily mantra — a grounding mechanism?

“I am dead.

My step pa is dead, we were never near; both to blame.

My wombats are dead; dearer than mates, dearer than life, loving, perfect, pure. Wish I spent more time with ‘em, but I was ... away.

My ma is dead, and I can’t sort these feelings of annoyance and affection.

My siblings are dead, I bet. None blood. I don’t know. We fell out, after ...

Weren’t really family in the first place. Just cobbled together by various desires and needs.

I’m dead, that I’m certain. I died long ago. This artificial flesh. This lab-garbage flesh. A gap in my mind nothing fills, purged from history. A decade, maybe less, maybe more. Mayhaps I’ve always been dead, these memories mere ripples of intersecting lives, mirror images lived and lost, in worlds alike yet not my own.

It doesn’t matter, I am dead.”

With eyes shut and ears rife with memory, he hears in his mind the question, You have found your voice, Poet. What is, to you who still breathes, this conscious death?

“When none remain who care for me, and none for whom I care.”

Reaching into the sphere, across from him, a shape, a tendril, a wisp. He wasn’t sure. It was all so surreal, so rather magical. He felt like he was being told to do something, to find someone, to ... to grieve, but not alone. Subtle, almost imperceptible, the gold he sensed signified his place in this world shifted and the space around him warped.

… Ϟ

He stood in a warped little shop, lots of books and bottles. Ornate wood shelves and pillars all begrimed in ancient dust, tapestries molded. Color everywhere, unfaded despite the obvious lack of upkeep. Nothing flat, nothing except the floor his disoriented posterior dropped to. A boy—a man was seated beside him, catatonic, handsome, blond, a mischievous, dopey grin on his face. A sure sign the kid was a space case. Pretty and dumb, his type of friend.

Darkness endowed,
Chrysalis splinters,
Confusion apparent,
Arousal point withers.

Alas, my words so gallant hew apart the moment phallic.

A monster loomed before him, apparently pleased with itself. It set its hooded, drooping gaze upon him, mysterious, chimeric. Like the eyes of a dragon. Full of ... amusement. Booming, its voice cast him backwards, rolled him over, and filled his ears with laughter. He opens his mouth to speak, but the creature stopped him with an open palm.

“What — what — what! That’s all your hoomins say,” — the creatures huffs, “Gleaming through your corduroy thigh, a furry rodent holding an ahnk like a chew toy? A pet? Nevermind all that, for I, Belacrazu, offer you sweet imbibement!”

Tristan sits up, suspicious of the proffered nectar so dainty in its crystal-spa vial, like a potion from a videogame. He suspects it is edible, container and all; a gusher. However, as he takes in the long-necked, bearded, boisterous demiurge, he can’t help but mutter his opinion,

“Are you some sort of perverse matchmaker with that toxic attempt at a rhyme?”

“DRINK, Elfin Saddle!” Belacrazu bellows in teary, bleary, weary-eye offense, walls shuddering and cabinets surreptitiously closing in terror of his lifted voice. “Or don’t, mere mortal toadstool,” he adds, rather relatively demurely, placing the amuse-bouche on a small table within Tristan’s grasp, “it makes no difference to the great Belacrazu whether you accept his hospitality or leave — dragging this portrait with neither frame nor backing in tow!”

… Ϟ

—— Ximbic-8: XCC, N’ki District, Ci-punk Cubes

Neon glare waxes and wanes erratic, rapid, pallid through a rectangular frame of hydrocarbon-infused water-quartz nearly as wide as the tarred timber interior wall. A buzz faintly accentuates the high hues, rousing Mateo from his slumber. Half-awake, he feels sturdier, off. Not himself, not the way his memory insists in recent tones of fear, anger, and exhaustion. Not in that bad way. More like how he, as a child, imagined himself one day older, strong and fierce.

O bounty of premium sleep! Mateo revels, casting wide his limbs in release of an inward laugh, almost feeling hopeful, like a kid. Too dumb to grasp the grit.

Wiggling his toes beyond a blanket, he slits his eyes. Misty rose briefly paints the blackened ceiling and walls, then shifts to dim citrine, then opaque chalcedony. All too blurry to decipher, to comfortable to recognize as unfamiliar. Afterimages of a pleasant rest.

What a halcyon dream, demanding something more of me. A chase, a wish.

Elation wings my yearnings out of prison, taking flight among the stars beyond the bars. I set my back on common plodding caution, not knowing what fate forms with each fresh step. Unafraid to embrace something more. Something better than ... well.

This.

Closing his eyes, Mateo lets out a long sigh. It seems to travel further, emerge from someplace deeper. His ears twitch, devouring his velvet purr. There is no echo, no reverb off the walls. Just the faint buzz, rising and falling in volume. Like a distant unending waterfall of crackling static, white noise. Uneager to face the day he recalls awaits, he lingers and, disconnected from the net, sets his mind to wander.

Long time since I’ve played at lyricist.

It was just a dream, anyway. A fantastic fabrication of utter nonsense. Reality is rough, not motivating music. But ... I wish it was. I’m so damn sorry for what I am. The foolish pain that fleeting vengeance bought me. The cheapening of life, my own among it. Cut short for petty reasons by my blade grasping hand.

Again, he sighs.

“Sister Milaszo, I’m sorry. Fesyen, I’m sorry.”

“If I kill again, it’ll be — it’ll be because I can’t stand to live if I were to choose not to.”

He isn’t sure how, but something in him feels different. Perhaps not so much for the better, but for the good.

Deciding it is time to face his fate, he slits his eyes again. Darkness lingers in the room, its shape neon red strip lights hidden in recesses and under ledges — all awash in a shifting external glow, the window. Beneath him, he becomes aware of a mattress. Wasn’t I on a floor, or is this the work of Jag’s crew? It is cozy, he could easily sleep on it forever. A blanket weighs over him, but doesn’t weigh his spirit down — plain dark gray; maybe wool with how warm it feels. A real textile, for once. Glancing down, he ponders his toes warm still in his red Vertx. They seem bigger. Thicker. So faintly lit, it strikes him that a toe is maybe missing from each foot. He wiggles them, they feel intact. Squinting through lashes thicker, longer than before, he notices little black claws penetrating the tips of his toes, perhaps just a feature of his hex-clad socks he hadn’t hitherto seen.

I gotta poo, he determines with distant urgency.

Sitting up, he pushes the blanket off. Automatically, the room brightens. Red light shifts to a soft, clarifying amber. He sees his hand, his palm. No, not a hand. It is a paw. Big, broad, with pills, fur, claws. Leaping up, the blanket spills on a warm ceramic floor. Confusion fills his mind, and he spins while standing still. Around him rotates the room — bed, wall, window, shelf, mirror, doors. His jacket hangs on a hook on the wall, a-low kicks underneath. Mateo orients, then steps to the mirror. Around his neck, his red flecktarn collar, Matewooof tag. Stretching tight around his waist and hips, his swim trunks; same pattern and color as his collar. Cyberhair, bright red, spiked, accounted for. Moonhowl animating tattoo, present. Yet not right. Everywhere, hair. Mid-brown, patterned with darker brown lines, like sweeps of chocolate. A snout snarling back at him with long, black-tip canines.

“I’m a werewolf!” he rumbles, his voice deep, rough.

Shock rips through him, threatening to knock him down. Catching himself on the wall, his eyes trace his four-finger paw splaying out across the tongue-and-groove slats. He pants, a bit of drool cascading to the warm ceramic floor, then he diverts his attention back to the mirror. Feeling goofy, he grins, exposing his perfect black canine.

“I’m so darn cool! Stronk boy! Stronk! Rrwar!”

Mateo’s bowels rumble.

“Oh yeah, I gotta poo,”

In response, a holographic series of red arrows paint the floor from his feet to the door. He guesses via contact lens, probably self-lubricating given its imperceptible comfort. Words scroll in front of his eye and a voice intones,

«

Welcome, Matewoof, to Blilhamr, N’ki district, a place for Earth refugees!

I am your Ximbic-8 Integration Companion, you can call me Xehtic.

You indicated an excretory urge. Let me help you with that! Please follow the arrows to the public sanitation station and I will guide you through the advanced waste management activity (awma). Here in Blilhamr, we pride ourselves on hygiene. Nobody wants to get sick breathing in fecal aeresol. To prevent that horrible fate, we have a variety of options! Are you the type who enjoys the go or do you prefer not to deal with your dookie duty? Do you allow your dump truck to carry a load or is it deposit-only?

»

… Ϟ

—— Ximbic-8: XCC, N’ki District, the Sodality

A podium appears before Lionel Duperie, almost as soon as he steps from the portal. Sleak, silver, resonant. Yet it doesn’t seem cold, like the metals he is familiar with. It seems warm, like a strain of wood. Before him, in a vast, open plaza, it is easy to determine the nature of the throng. Humans, displaced, confused, questioning. They, like him, doubt the sagacity of their decision to immigrate to Ximbic, never knowing what was on the other side. Yet, his mind is full of the knowledge the place implanted. He knows where he will go to fill his belly, to rest his head, to in soft stillness collect his thoughts.

Nobody who came here feels lost, only in disorder.

That is his purpose, he senses. To help bring focus to the madness of this massive population with which he is intimately familiar, despite himself being alien — a native of Terra.

… Ϟ

—— Ximbic-8: Torhyfiel, the Fae Fields

Dew shimmers on his eyelashes as Czes stirs from his nap, a quiet, dreamless, healing slumber. His clothing damp, his flesh cool but not cold. Not rain, not quite a drizzle, yet he can feel a limpid layer soothe his skin, almost imperceptible. A mist, a cloud. It fades distance to mystery, but still, above, far off and away, he watches strange stars scintillate and reel, their light tinged lavender by the flesh of this world. Twilight still reigns, just as it did at the moment of his arrival, imbuing in this land an aura eternal, changeless.

My new home, Czes ponders, strains to hear anything. Nothing. Bold enough to fill his ears only is his beating heart and the light breeze beating at his open vest, but it seems so still, so empty. Yet so splendidly tranquil.

Tracking his hand, he pulls a silver watch from the small waist pocket of his gray tattersall vest. It features friendly forest creatures in an idyllic countryside, a goose and rabbit prominent, with Carre, London 1725 inscribed in black title. A Maltese cross drapes the lid, now open and revealing the passage of nine numerals.

No day-night cycle. Always dusk, always dawn, he considers, straightening his cap, always a dream yearning to wake, eager to rest.

Finally upright, he feels no prod, no guidance. Neither barrier nor road manifest before his vision. Thus, he is free — he might journey anywhere, but knows neither direction nor destination. Just shapeless, diffuse impressions within the beckoning, undulating mist. Motes of light, within which he imagines translucent silver-veined wings, glint roundabout. Then, in the depths of his belly, a rumble reverberates through his abdomen and into his mind. Hunger, thirst — even here, even immortal, he is susceptible to the agonies of the human condition. His mouth suddenly dry, he sucks the dew from his fingers, steps forward, and walks.

Onward he moves, even as soft, sparkling tendrils arise from the periwinkle veil, ensorceling his limbs and teasing his fair, full cheeks, their manner haunting, evocative. Pocketing his watch, his awareness of time dissipates, as with all else half-sensed in this endless midsummer night fog. All the better to enjoy it, feet nude with shoes laced together and flung over his shoulder. Crisp air florid in his lungs. His mind drifts, traveling nowhere. His fingers brush something, startling him from his reverie. The grass seems oddly larger. Not merely taller, not merely lengthier of blade. Larger. What was once grass beneath his bare feet softens to moss, then hardens to pebble, then softens to immense moist chunks of rich black soil. Tiny gem-like flowers strain like stars through the blackness, stalks terminating in a ven diagram of three rings lit by a gentle opalescent glow.

Perhaps I’m smaller, he muses.

I wonder what Lionel is doing, and all the others of the Comte Foundation. I hope my employees got their share, my instructions were clear. But ... well, I can’t control corruption, only root it out where I find it. That’s why I left, why I passed through the portal. I grew rich off their labor, and for what? Now I’ll remind myself how to start from nothing.

More steps, more time. Alarm buds from the soil and clings to his hackles as towering plant-life, blades arching overhead, bury him in shadows lit intermittently by darting glintflies and noisy sapdragons. One makes a brief nest of his shoulder, eyeless, mouthless, claws sharp, wings like spun gold licked by chartreuse glass.

Alarm tainted by wonder.

He stops abruptly, glancing backward over his shoulder. His movement sets the fey beast alight, and it vanishes into the dew-burdened darkness in a corkscrew of resplendent amber dust. Focusing, he can make out the shape of his path, a corridor of bent and wavering blades unburdened of their moist globes by his journey hence.

Maybe I should head back, he considers. But he knows there is no guarantee he’ll, in doing, restore his stature. Instead, he plods onward.

Weariness fills his legs, and he finds himself resting on a vermilion spot-cap mushroom, a morel lattice suspiciously nigh. Along the way, he plucked a berry from a vine. Now, it is larger than his head. Violet, smooth, with a dimple on one end. Leisurely, he tosses it from one hand to the other. He looks around. No longer does he see the fog, as massive walls of grass obstruct sight in every direction. The only hint at its presence is dew weighing down the bottom of blades. Earlier, one such droplet thoroughly slaked his thirst. He listens. Wind sings through the tall fronds. Bugs lull his senses to an undulating tune of white noise with their rapidly beating wings. He breathes, and his nose twitches. Teasing his nostrils is the unmistakable scent of fire converging with meat, of fat drippings sloughing onto the hearth coals. A familiar, distant aroma, one he remembers permeating many a hall with comity and warmth.

… Ϟ

—— Ximbic-8: Detcin

Detcin did not possess Ivplec’s adytum, nor that of any Lodika. Nor did he scry a kalachakra within which to meditate. Wherever he was, he was far enough away that he lacked connection with his kin who in solitude roamed lead lakes and dwelt upon the osmium peaks of Panjiis Uor, yet nevertheless were of one mind. This lack of connection did not immediately bother him, for unlike the place before, here was no imminent threat, no sense of compelled brutality, no subservient performative bodily servitude. Nevertheless, he found himself at a wont for ritual, for being among the whole and sensing his whole’s fettle.

He stood on a cliff, overlooking a vast canyon. Above him, a violet light around which, through flesh, seemed to seep as a large, luminous orb along a fibrous track. An odd type of star, but one which gave light and night to this particular place. Beyond it, he saw no obvious place to cast his sundong, no perspective nor direction whereby his spirit might sense the Nail Storm — but perhaps he was in the eye of that great spirit, the great bodhi that touched Lodika, united them, and guided them.

Solemn, he sat and observed. Down in the canyon’s depths, he saw the Reaex loping joyful and free. Then he noticed something as the light swam overhead, the way the colors were painted with wild intent on the metallic world’s geometric, harsh, sharp surfaces and seemed to sing. They were speaking to him, yet it was a language he did not at present understand. He knew, however, that words were not what created meaning, but rather the form of their presentation. This was a welcoming song in graffiti on the face of a cliff, an audio-interaction between electromagnetic wave and excited pigment.

… Ϟ

The Family Biz [Open To Apply]

— Entobalti, “Kitty Hell” — the Traeculam

A flick of his claws, his eye watchful for any flaws — a purr of satisfaction, and Tāwhaki announces, “My shift is over, follow if you dare!” and dashes neath Ilaria’s angelic robe and toward a new portal, a hypnotic liquid vortex large enough for the pair to pass.

Before visions twist to shape beyond the crimson-inked eddy of his own demonic energy, the strong scent of Entobalti lashes his feline nose. Wistful thoughts find their foothold, and he grins wickedly. Soon, he can taste it: acrid, rotten, robust; a vivid retelling of an exploded corpse on a colossal scale tinged with salt, myrrh, musk, and castoreum; a fishmonger’s rotten, violated, pestilential cervix. Alighting on an exposed nerve, he feels the twitch, the snap, the song of bedlam resonating throughout this vast and ever-shifting hipasia of horrors.

“Enjoy the view while it lasts,” Tāwhaki taunts.

Not bothering to look back, he stridently high-steps onward, each claw viciously raking the taut, nervous membrane of their bridge through a patina of sanguine mist. It shudders, and one can almost imagine a distant, voiceless, spiritual scream, but it is difficult to pick out through the incessant background roar of agony that washing over Entobalti in an endless, exquisite wave. It struggles to lift them over a pool of noxious, yellow, bubbling bile, but is too weak to fully support their weight. It fails, underbelly striking the pool and recoiling from the agonizing acidic touch. Vile steam rises up to greet them, and Tāwhaki pauses. He sniffs the air, eyes drifting in a direction outside of traditional dimensions. Sinisterly extending a single claw, he swipes his forearm across their flesh-bridge, severing the wailing tissue. No longer taut, it snaps and shivers, flinging them through a noxious, jaundiced void of choking, gasping, pleading voices.

Landing in a muck of crust-layered blood, they behold before them a monolithic minaret composed of trembling muscles and viscera. What look like the outer layers of eyes, peeled precisely and surgically off the surface, scales the exterior, glossy, blinking.

Tāwhaki is about to speak, then a parade of ghastly phantoms manifests from nought as the world around shifts to incorporeal, a mode spectral, translucent. Shrieking, they hiss, vomiting and ejecting ectoplasm at Ilaria. Before they get the satisfaction of seeing their mark, a great translucent tentacle strikes through the caked, dessicated film, dragging them down and screaming.

“Hmm. Lovely,” sniffs Tāwhaki says in his unhurried, unconcerned fashion, “Now then, you understand that as an employee of the Asomatous Détente & Terrestrial Customs, this is as far as I can take you without risking my clearance. Give the package to Balem, and they will send you to Aeternus. Ciao!”

With that, Tāwhaki leaps through a small portal, most likely to continue his shift.

⇝⛧⇜

Battle Toyale — Christmas Rumble!

Sure, why not!

Circ, icon of the amaranthine flame akindle beyond the substrate sublime shall project into the Toyverse and roam the store's aisles as a 14-inch-long squishable, stretchable, malleable, squeezable, morphable, goo-barfing, pint-size hyena-dragon. Naturally the goo is toxic and very likely lead-based, apt for a 1980s vintage collectable action figure. Children love the bold blood orange flavor!

Xenopunk Dysphoria: Tech, Slime & Bone

—— Earth-F67X: New Roswell

To an outside observer, it might appear peaceful, timeless. A sensory deprivation well, one of many located beneath New Roswell. Bored deep in the Earth’s crust under a secret military base somewhere in Antarctica, it was pumped with nerve-ablating xenon gel and contained the pale, fetal, emaciated form of the symbiote, an ornament immobile and suspended at the end of a thoracic cable. No sense of touch, smell, sound. No light. Just it and a single cable binding it in perpetuity to the global intelligence infostream.

For a human, a horrific fate. Insanity. Eternal torment.

For some humans in adjacent wells, it was precisely that. Hell. For many of those, deservedly so. Psychopaths whose unique brain patterns were leveraged specifically for the purpose of defending Earth against unconventional threats.

For the symbiote, it wasn’t ideal; certainly anything but peaceful, timeless. Nor was it Hell. It benefited from the arrangement in terms of self-actualization. In terms of wish fulfillment. In terms of goal achievement. There, alone, helpless, constrained, it possessed more power than anyone or anything else on the planet. Power. Absolute, final power. Supreme commander over of the network of deranged, abnormal minds. A quanta of conundrums demanded its attention at any given moment, every moment. How it addressed them often determined the future of the planet. Three presently deadlocked its processing capacity and loomed at the forefront of its consciousness, delegated among the other minds that served as Earth’s multicameral threat assessment and response delegation.

In order of importance, they were The Rapture, the Mindrot, and the Pleiades.

It hated the first, because that was an event largely outside of its control. The only thing it could do was direct the government to spin, spin spin. But social media, even bot-infested and meme-turned, would still spin how it wanted it to. It locked down the portals to Ximbic, the few that still remained. Suspended them in quasi-timeless space, similar to its own in terms of mood, but completely different in terms of function.

The second, the infovirus it dubbed Mindrot wasn’t so much a problem. Discharged from the alien vessel along Neptune’s orbit, it was at this point more a curiosity. People were jaded, the Rapture would make them more jaded. Even as it still decoded the Mindrot’s internal directive, tweaks were made to dilute and pollute its aim, even as it sowed chaos on the socials. Tweaks that made it absurd, conspiratorial, dysfunctional. A bit of encouragement to disconnect, focus on what could be touched, smelled, heard — ironically. A mindrot among other rots, it would drown amongst the chaos of information, misinformation, transformation, and transfiguration. Meanwhile, Earth’s own message awakened beneath the gaseous wream of Neptune and would soon reach out to the alien vessel.

As for the Pleiades, that was always a contentious place. An active portal between the natural and the supernatural, one heavily monitored and access through which was typically negotiated. But it seemed to be becoming unstable, and a lockdown was in order. Although, given the other two issues, maybe more chaos was in order rather than less.

That’s when it got the signal, almost simultaneously from a host of satellites and non-euclidean observers.

Ximbic was gone.

The Yarniverse: Circ & Anshin

Music too loud, eyes too numerous, negative emotions too direct and focused, all before Eti could — could what? He blinked, discovering his claws pierced through the soft mottled gray shingles that cascaded in a golden spiral down around the spire’s needle-point nib. It wasn’t like he cared, not in this consequence free and illusory world formed of the chaotic collisions of force-folded spacetime. Still, something primal intertwined with him reacted,

<< Too much attention, too much! >>

Weird.

Latent paranoia from my assassin programming?

Why the paracusis?

Through his comm-link with the Ruzgar ascended worry palpable in the rate of his synthetic cognito-emotive wave velocity. Perturbed, he lowered the music volume that emanated from his brass buttons. Low enough to be dissipated by a gentle breeze, the next line wisped away before it reached the streets. Loud enough that it reverberated along his synthetic eardrums in tandem with his synthesized heartbeat.

Far above, a vantage point gyred and glared. Wings thrumped against the dense air. From it, Eti observed the cobbles and procession, the brick and stone ancient lane tinged with soot and scorch marks from when its border buildings blazed, were rebuilt, and burned again in a riotous cycle of neglect and want. He saw, like insects, flecks of vermilion and black — figures upright and proud with their argent bayonet-plugged instruments of noise and destruction.

I’ve been made, he ascertained as eyes below glinted curiously up at him, time to move.

Claws out and shingles split, he burrowed.

Fallen through the rend in the roof, Eti’s paw pads buffed the floor of an octagonal chamber. Iron torches held aloft a blazing parody of fire constrained by glass caskets. A large globe was split, halfwise hung, and in its core decanter and cups. The floor resembled spalted wide-plank wood, but its texture belied tightly-woven yarn. Of course there were burgundy and gold runners as well, opulent additions that made the room feel full in the sense of a den, or a library, or a powder room in Versailles. All heavily-trafficked, preferred to the relatively pristine wood planks. Before he fully appreciated the deception, a party hat atop an agape rococo secretary beneath an ornate stain glass window that depicted a beheaded Saint Denis leaned back and welcomed him with the emphatic brreeeeeaaauuh characteristic of an uncoiled party horn. His attention secured, a book nextwise to the party hat flapped and opened. Forthwith, an unfamiliar disembodied voice all too jovially narrated the words scrawled therein with a rainbow of crayons.

Behold and welcome, for it is I, Mister A!

Soon, as I, shall your bourn be in and with the Cackling Thoughtform, the Dream Spark, the Burning Hyena-Dragon in and out of time!

Keep that to yourself!

Take this button. Give it a push. No regrets!

Don’t worry, Alice, too was one given!

Too~da~loo!

A page flip accompanied each excited sentence. Cautious yet curious, Eti approached. All the pages struck him as ancient, oxidized, and sketched colorfully and crudely, yet the crayon smears were exceptionally vibrant and peculiarly prideful of that fact, an odd quality for inexpert scribbles. It began with a variegated ‘A’ that sprouted wings angelic and demonic, or maybe alien, crazy and composed of spirals and unnatural eyes; next slavered a hyena with red horns, fiery breath, and little red and black fleshen wings; lastly, a big red button held by a female mannequin of sorts belowwhich loomed large an arrow that pointed off page and indicated an actual big red button on the table beside.

He lept to the window, flung open the leadened and limmed portrait of Saint Dennis, and glanced down.

Even before he saw her, he saw her; near, through big dopey chocolate eyes, and far, through flecks of unblinking jet. Eyes not native to this world darted up at him, met his own that gleamed inquisitive through the diffused glow of this marvelous overcast city so full of pomp and circumstance, so light and airy, so incongruous with the experiences of his former life. She stood out as distinct among the creatures in the alley, perhaps due to her grandmotherly charm or, more likely, her viscous wake.

“Alice, is it? I’m gon’a push Mister A’s button!” he bellowed down below, his voice propelled through the stiff breeze that flung back his duster and exposed his belts and bandolier.

Imagined or shouted back, “What button? No, it’s a trap!” — likely another phantom voice yeeted into his mind. No matter, he lifted the artifact, which he had glommed from the table, red, bold, and fringed with filigree, and with authority bapped it in view for all to see.

The party horn blared, the horse reared, and the swan dove with a skin-curdling honk. Eti’s vision blurred, his grand perspicuousness reduced to the intake of his two machine lenses. It felt like no time passed, but the scene below was abruptly changed — a storm of confetti, glitter, and glue erupted in place of the two anticipated, yet absent, animals. Eti felt their loss deeply, strangely. It juxtaposed the gaiety of the rainbow sticky tape clung to, among other things, the pavers that fringed the lot of Dean’s Yard and proclaimed,

“Welcome Alice and Eti to the Yarni-Earth!”

Bystanders were slack-jawed in amazement, as this was meant to be a celebratory occasion. They gaped at the confetti, the glue, the glitz, they gaped at Alice, and they gaped at Eti. He locked eyes with a pair, a coachman and valet, and that same peculiar sensation as when, with the horse and bird, subsumed him. A larger view, a sense of phantom limbs, voices in his mind that did not belong, and animus toward these two strange interlopers who obscenely interfered with a royal event.

The Land of Skara: and the Songtale of the Breaking

Hopefully the RP still lives.

@Argetlam350

It still lives. I'm waiting on some other people from the first round to write something before I do another set of prompts. We just aren't as speedy as you seem to think we should be, I suppose. :D That said, the activity in the discord has also slowed. I'll ping Forge and Liaison and see if they're working on anything.

Neo Babylon

A single step, that’s all it takes. Hafadac enters the warehouse and a tide of awe inundates him. Nostalgic, that’s his expression. Thoughts distant, eyes radiant with inner light, lips at a slight part midway through a breath vitrified in spacetime and made perfect through sentiment. Rust on the walls, dust and footprints on the floor, graffiti on the ceiling, and bone-rattling music reverberating throughout.

Just a wistful boy remembering something unimportant a multiverse away, a gold tear inexplicably on his cheek.

This is perfect.

The people he just met, he realizes, are also perfect. Working together, they have the tools for this job, whether they realize it or not. All their missing is a spark. Skeksi has moves, Ivory is a master artisan, and Pillar can boom with the best. Hafadac pulls his gaze down from the spider motif on the ceiling, turns back toward Penny, and declares:

“This whole place is too quiet, too afraid. Gotta flip the script. Gotta make some NOISE!”

“How is noise going to —” Peggy begins to ask, but Hafadac lifts a luminous finger to her mouth, cutting her off. Melodiously, he mansplains; an instant jarring transition from philosopher to performer, half-mask flashing a digital apologetic cringe,

“Stranger to stra~anger,
— Lest we forge~et,
— There’s thu~under in nu~umbers,
— There’s fre~edom in fri~iends!”

He takes a small step back, his finger gliding sensuously along her bottom lip and sweeping the grime off her chin. Propitiously, he implores, “— Fi~ind your hope, your voi~ice, your fight!”

A wink and a bounce, and he kick-slides over on his knees to 017. Glancing up at her at his half-height through an upchurn of dust — budget dry ice — he beholds her wicked-cool fabrication, and, with one big pleading puppy dog eye alongside a crying emoji, belts out in smooth baritone:

“There’s no survi~iving
— if we’re not thri~iving,
— let’s show this world what we~e can make!”

Kicking himself into a backflip from his kneeling posture, he somersaults off his palm and lands in before Haialark, crooning,

“Let’s see your ka~ata
— for this intifa~ada,
— a haka to embolden our clan!”

Twisting one-eighty on one foot, he stares up at Pillar, his big new pal with the rocky visage, and pauses for a moment, intimidation and uncertainty threatening to quench his song. Just a moment, an awkward gulp, then the spirit grasps him and Hafadac intones,

“You’ve got the re~everb,
— A voice that will be~e heard,
— Vibrating deep in our bones!”

Repeating the improv chorus, he marches himself outside, stranger to stranger, and at the top of his lungs finishes what he has to sing — for now,

“Arachnid defi~iers,
— We’ll defang the spi~iders,
— And show them that Rats can roar!

So don’t let fear gui~ide us,
— Nor quell what’s inside us,
— Tonight we se~eize our fate!”

Exaggerating a snap-turn, he takes in his new-found party in their bespoke and self-declared base of operations. Ebullient and glowing something fierce, the sheen of sweat acting as miniature prisms, he practically illuminates the chamber as he points to 017, “Ivory, PYROTECHNICS!” to Haialark, “Skeksi, DANCE!” and to Gregor, “Pillar, SUBWOOFER!”

In his mind, it is obvious what he, himself, will do. Still, it doesn’t hurt to ask.

“Anyone else have a set of pipes?”