alfwriteshizz

[alfwriteshizz]

Crown

No theme (original content) // short story // content warnings: none

A traveler tells a story of a small town by the sea, and the strange tradition that it bears.

--

I went to a village on the southern coast once. It was a small fishing town, and it had a strange tradition. In the town hall sat a crown made of old netting, and driftwood, and barnacles and shells. It smelt of the sea. And, at the start of each week, the town would choose someone at random to wear it - and for the next week, that person would be in charge. They could govern the town as they saw fit.

I stayed at that village for a month, and I saw three people crowned. The first was an old woman, a widow. The second was a young man who had lost his legs to an illness. And the third was a little girl, only ten summers old.

When she was chosen, the widow insisted that she was too old for this sort of thing. But she took her responsibility seriously, and soon commanded respect from the townsfolk. She was sensible and calm under pressure and, under her rule, the town knew wisdom.

The young man was at a loss for what to do on the first day of his reign. The second day, he sheepishly asked the carpenter to make some ramps for the stairs to the town hall to help him up. By the end of the week, he had a small council of his friends and peers who also suffered from illnesses, disabilities, and injuries. They told the town of their struggles. How the world they lived in was not designed for them. And, slowly but surely, the villagers helped them make the town a bit more bearable for them, more liveable. Under the young man’s rule, the town knew understanding.

I wasn’t sure what to make of the little girl being crowned. Her decrees were more unusual than the other two monarchs - more time to play, work to end earlier so that parents could return sooner, meals to be cooked and shared by all. But the town learned what a wonderful thing it was to see the world through the eyes of a child. They rested and played. They wove circlets of flowers and painted with bright colours and stayed up to watch the sun go down. And nobody complained even once. Under the little girl’s rule, the village knew joy.

The first time I told this tale at an inn, the others were incredulous. Surely, one of them told me, the reality of this strange arrangement would be different. Surely neighbours would take advantage of each other with their power. Surely business owners would increase hours and drop wages. Surely this power would be wielded maliciously.

But, do you know something? It never was. And I think I know why. Because you only wore the crown for a week, and you never knew who would have it next. What was the point of wronging someone if there was a chance that they would be crowned next? Why waste your time with pettiness and violence and revenge?

Everyone who wore that crown knew that their power was limited. And they did what they could to make their town a better place as best as they could, as only they could.

We are, all of us, crowned - not by steel or silver, but by circumstance. By the potential good we might do, by our power to improve our surroundings. And this power is fleeting. While we have it, why shouldn’t we use it to help others?

[alfwriteshizz]

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Rho, the Seraph

Graverunners (original content) // short story - 1400 words // content warnings: chains, fire, captivity

A captive construct trapped in a maintenance frame attempts to break out of an outrider rig.

--

Rho thought. This was something she was usually very good at doing. With a mental capacity of 2500IPM (iotas per minute), augmented further by her superlightweight body that housed four mental relays and a dataheart with several exabytes of capacity, she had perfected the art of letting her mind drift through a sea of plans and ideas that bubbled to the surface of her awareness. 

Unfortunately, she didn’t have her normal body. Her consciousness had been crammed into a low-level drone shell with a dataheart barely big enough to house her core programming. She’d actually had to shed a couple of terabytes on the way in.

She forced ideas through her dull brain, peering through the flimsy receptors of the body that was her prison. The picture that came through was fuzzy and full of interference, but she could read the patterns of movement, the waves of pixels that cascaded across her vision in nascent rhythms like a digital image that had been compressed a few too many times.

She was in a small room. And it was swaying slightly. Which meant she was in a vehicle. A cargo hauler, probably. She tried to move the limbs of her drone. Nothing happened. She tried again, forcing herself into her left arm, funnelling every byte of concentration she had into movement. She felt it creak upwards slightly, then stop. It was being held in place by chains. 

Her captors weren’t taking any chances. She trawled back through her memory, straining to recall the events that had led to her predicament. It felt like marching up a steep hill. (The metaphor came to her easily, and gave her a small amount of satisfaction. She was still her, despite the outriders’ attempts to drown her mind in a body that could barely hold it.)

It had been outriders. A small party, but well-organised. The memories came more easily now, but they were fragmented. Out of order. But she could still get the gist, still remember how she had felt. Curiosity at meeting the small band of scavengers. Delight at their insistence she travel with them. Dread when they subdued her with violence and electricity and crammed her mind into this tomb.

She was still so naive. No, that wasn’t the right word. She was different, somehow. The conventions of conversation and social dynamics eluded her in a way that her fellow constructs didn’t understand. Interactions were a game, somehow, and one that she didn’t know the rules to, even after all this time.

She could see her mistakes easily now, even with her mind sluggish and inhibited; the way they had avoided looking her in the eye. The way their hands had always lurked close to their weapons, as though they were expecting a fight. The warnings had been there, clear as day.

No time for regrets, though. Rho didn’t have the luxury of self-pity or frustration, even if she could feel them in this slab of cheap metal, which she severely doubted. She craned the drone’s neck to one side, then the other, testing its field of vision. She felt the rust in the neck motors, and endured the sheer discomfort that rattled through her mind. She would have gritted her teeth if she’d had any. She always wondered what that would be like. Having little tombstones of enamel in your mouth.

She forced her thoughts back on track. They were drifting more readily than usual, leaking away from her. She had to focus. She took in her surroundings, reading every detail she could. There were two guards posted just to her right, roughly two arm widths away, slouching over a crate. She couldn’t reach out and touch one even if her arms were unbound. 

So she opened her vocal synth and tried to speak, burbling out a few syllables of gibberish before getting the hang of it. Whether she wanted it or not, this got the attention of the closer guard, who turned and regarded her through a visor emblazoned with stark white markings that resembled bones. She thought they were white, at least. Everything she saw had a faint coating of brown. The receptors were probably caked in dirt.

He stood up, and he said something, pointing to the other. Her sound receptors were barely functional, and Rho had to concentrate to hear anything. Her efforts were rewarded.

“-t’s awake,” the first guard said. “Go tell Captain Slake.”

“Why me?” The second guard asked. His voice sounded much younger.

“Because I said so. Now hurry up.”

The second guard eventually shuffled to the back of the room, vanishing through a door that Rho saw only as a wedge of blackness through her cheap receptors. The first guard waited a moment, then scooted round to the other side of the crate, leafing through the belongings the other guard had left behind.

Rho felt a pang of panic, dulled by the stifling confines of the shell but still tangible. They had made no effort to talk to her. That wasn’t a good sign.

She forced her vocal synth open again, and tried to speak in words this time.

“Hel…hel…hell-o?” She said, forcing out the last syllable. The guard didn’t even look up at her. 

She tried again. “Wh…Who? Who are? Y… You?”

The guard glanced up. “Shut up. That vocal synth sounds awful. I didn’t even know it still worked.”

He turned back to the stash, plucking a battery from the pile and holding it up to the weak neon light. It glowed a ring of feeble ember around its crown.

Rho felt anger building, felt her rage growing. But when it reached a certain point, it stopped. Like she couldn’t physically feel past a certain point. She remembered being like this, long ago, when she first made the jump from the Underworld. It was a feeling she’d never wanted to experience again. 

But she’d learned how to manage it. So she let the anger chill to a cold fury. And she spoke one word, spitting it through her synth like ice.

“Why.”

The guard didn’t look up.

“Why?”

His fingers tightened around the battery.

“WHY!”

Her shrill voice echoed through the metal confines of the room. The guard jumped, dropping what he was holding and holding his hands up to his helmet, trying to cover his ears.

The battery slipped from his hands and fell onto the crate.

“Gah!” He exclaimed. “Why? Because it’s what we do!” His breath was ragged, his hands clenched into fists. “You’re just another score, construct. I’m sorry.”

To Rho’s surprise, he sounded like he meant it. He stormed from the room, slamming the metal door shut behind him. The cheap metal walls of the room shuddered.

The battery fell to one side and rolled off its crate.

With the lurch of the vehicle, it made its way towards Rho with a slow inevitability she had estimated and hoped for. The volatile power held inside winked up at her. A pinprick of raging red light. 

It rolled to a halt just shy of her right foot. Which she raised, slowly, inexorably, as high as it would go.

Then she slammed her metal heel into the battery, rupturing its core. Unleashing the fire inside.

Golden flames blossomed underneath her foot. She withdrew it as quickly as she could. Exlondum was an extremely volatile fuel source, and could burn for hours, even on metal. It could chew through the room, certainly, but it could also eat through her weak body. And while she wasn’t fond of it, it was the only thing keeping her consciousness intact.

She kicked the ruptured battery towards the crate where the guards had lounged, and the flames began to lap at the bundles of gear eagerly. They were no longer a brilliant orange, but a pale, spectral blue. They danced ever higher, sending smoke billowing through the air vents. Within moments, Rho heard distant shouts. Within seconds, the vehicle trundled to a halt. 

Rho was pleased. She had achieved chaos. The fire would immobilise the scavengers for some time, and the smoke had a real chance of attracting a rescue party that would discover her. Her gambit could pay off. 

But that was then, and maybe. Now, the flames grew more ravenous, more bold, inching closer towards her shell. Rho peered at the fire through her receptors, and felt what little fear her body would allow her to feel.

---

[alfwriteshizz]

Alf’s masterpost, index, and gift shop (not really)

Hello! Welcome to Alf writes shizz, a writeblr blog belonging to @the-alfreton​!

Oh that’s cool, what kind of stuff do you write?

I write mainly in the sci/fi / fantasy genre, with my main original story, Graverunners, being a weird combo of the two. I also write Destiny fanfics centered around my guardians, Fireteam Argent.

Okay but what kind of stuff is it?

Dragons, kingdoms, living swords, AIs, bargains made and bargains broken, foxes, thieves, spellswords and outriders and daughters of kings and vagrants of dust. Rivers in the sky, everyday miracles, second chances, third chances, regret and renewal, broken hearts that can beat again. But above all, hope; hope and love.

Also everything is safe for work!

Sounds cool! Where is it?

Right here! Just below this line!

INDEX

GRAVERUNNERS: 

Introduction (start here!) | Iplah | Allister, the Mercenary | Scarla, the Thief | Rho, the Seraph | (more coming soon!)

DESTINY: 

The Calypso | Contact | (more coming soon!)

OTHER:

Crown | (more coming soon!)

[alfwriteshizz]

Scarla, the Thief

Graverunners (original content) // Short story: 1400 words // content warnings: knives, explosions

During her latest heist, a thief is approached by a monarch with an intriguing offer.

--

The thief yawned loudly, stretching her arms behind her head, kicking her feet up against the desk. The construct remained motionless at the door to the office, and hadn’t spoken since it had first addressed her, a few minutes earlier. It made no signs of moving or speaking, despite the long wait. The thief could respect that. It was a sign of strength, as subtle and as important as a silent knife.

She contemplated its offer. “So…” she began, retrieving a thin, curved blade from a sheath somewhere. “You don’t want me to steal something. You want me to put something back?”

The maintenance construct nodded its metal skull. “A simple escort mission,” It said, in the voice of a monarch she’d never met and didn’t care for. “But it will not be easy.”

The thief grunted, idly tracing the intricate frosted patterns of the desk with the edge of her knife, the glass singing softly under the edge of the blade. The glass-topped desk, like most things in this opulent office, likely cost more than most houses. “No risk, no reward. And there is a reward, correct?”

The construct nodded again. “Yes. You will have access to the entire resources of the Kingdom for one singular request. This can be for aid of a military, economic, or personal nature, and is negotiable upon completion of the task.”

The thief kept tracing the pattern, not taking her eye off the knife. “Cut to the chase. What are you offering me?”

“One wish.”

The thief grunted. “How poetic. But you said something about economic aid. That I understand. How much are we talking here?”

The construct stated the amount, and the thief nearly lost her grip on the knife. This would have been disastrous, as she would have had to start tracing the pattern on the desktop all over again. And she didn’t have time for that. Already, she could hear raised voices beneath their feet. The guards were starting to catch on. They’d probably found the virus she’d hired and set loose inside their security system.

She buried her surprise and her awe, focusing on the blade between her fingers. “Hmm. Okay.” She decided. “That’ll do.”

“No haggling?” The construct asked, oblivious to the movement downstairs. Then again, it had nothing to worry about. The guards would likely see it as nothing more than a simple maintenance model - hell, constructs were practically invisible to most people, as common as dirt. The thief would have a harder time persuading them that she was a bystander with her tactical gear and Daemon horns.

“No time,” The thief grunted, finally finishing the tracing, her knife sliding up to the corner of the desk’s surface and the end of the intricate pattern. The glyphwork carving beneath her fingers pulsed a gentle amber, accepting the tracing and the code embedded in the edge of the thief’s stolen blade. A drawer opened by her arm, before another drawer inside of that one obligingly opened as well. A hidden compartment, revealed by the meticulous tracing.

Rich people. The thief never got used to them no matter how many times she took from them. What was wrong with a lock and a key?

The construct stepped over to the desk, depositing a small metal sigil onto its polished surface. “Meet me at the co-ordinates provided.” The construct intoned, bowing its head. “I look forward to meeting you in person, Miss Scarla.”

The thief’s head snapped up to the construct. Her eyes narrowed. “How do you know my name?”

The thief heard door at the end of the hallway heave open, and the heavy footsteps of a dozen guards echoed towards her. Blunt, stupid footsteps. Hired muscle that was paid to solve any problems through violence. But still she focused on the construct, which simply smiled back at her.

“The Kingdom’s resources are considerable. But you did well to hide it. Rest assured that your identity is safe with me - consider it a gesture of goodwill. I will leave you to your business.”

The construct stood to one side, shuffling into a corner. Scarla barely had time to close her fingers around the sigil and tuck it away before the door to the room flung open. Half a dozen hired thugs streamed into the room, completely ignored the construct, and focused their various weapons on the thief. She stood, alone behind the desk, her hands raised behind her head in as non-threatening a manner as she could manage with several knives strapped to her person and one in her hand.

One of the goons barked an order at her. She was barely paying attention. She was counting in her head, staring at the construct in the corner. A couple of the guards followed her gaze, then frowned. 

A single light winked at the centre of the construct’s chassis, as the charge of exlondum that the thief had planted within its frame silently primed itself. Highly volatile. Highly explosive.

The thief counted to zero, then squeezed her eyes shut and ducked behind the desk just as the bot shattered in a haze of light and heat. It was little more than a glorified flashbang, but it was still exceptionally loud and bright, blinding and disorienting the guards, filling the air with the smell of charred circuitry and burnt metal. The thief seized the seconds available to her by swiping the contents of the hidden drawer into one of several secret pockets hidden about her person, then slashing her knife across the desktop, the blade screeching against the glass. The etched glass details flared an angry red, and the thief strained past the ringing in her ears to hear the unmistakable sounds of a failsafe system triggering a lockdown protocol. A series of unseen mechanisms latching and catching and sliding all around her. It was the sound of chaos, of unpredictability, of mayhem. The explosive crown to a perfectly orchestrated heist. The sound she lived for.

The thief grinned, and promptly turned and dived out of the room’s only window, falling down into the street five stories below. The guards’ cries behind her were silenced as a bluesteel shutter clamped down over the window, part of the lockdown protocol she’d just triggered by ‘entering’ the wrong tracing code into the desktop’s security system. The entire building was now sealed off from the street outside by five inches of metal at every exit.

As the thief let gravity carry her downwards, enjoying the wind in her hair, she felt a pang of regret for her methods. She’d been planning to use the office’s assistance shell as a diversion before she’d known it was being used by the Kingdom to contact her: during a job, no less. It hadn’t been inhabited by an AI - merely used as a relay for the monarch to make her offer. Even so, she hoped that she hadn’t made a bad impression on her future employer by blowing up one of their robots. 

She fell into an open-topped transit container carrying colourful silks bearing gentle patterns stitched by slaved constructs, the layers of fabric breaking her fall. It was exactly where she’d bribed it to be. She lay there, panting, staring up at the binary suns in the sky, feeling the rush of adrenaline coursing through her veins, grinning at the distant cries of the guards locked in their own building. A few seconds later, she heard the telltale stomps as a mechanised Dustwalker trudged over to her container, latched itself to it and began hauling it up the thoroughfare.

The thief finished savouring the moment and buried herself beneath a layer of  fabric, counting the great shambling steps of the Dustwalker and listening to the sounds of chaos and confusion slowly fading away behind her.

—

Hours later, she had left the Dustwalker and the town behind altogether. Nestled inside her safehouse, the thief held up the object she had just stolen from the desk to the cheap glyph light. Her client would pay her a large sum of money for it, but even that paled in comparison to the prize she had just been offered by the Kingdom’s own princess. 

She leaned back and smiled at the victory of a job well done and the anticipation of the challenge still to come, the transponder that the construct had offered her a thrilling weight in her fist.

[alfwriteshizz]

hi i’m peer!✨

Making a comeback to writeblr because I missed it here! So I’m re-introducing myself! I’m in my 20s and I use she/her pronouns. I write a mess of romance, historical fiction, and fantasy. I read the same genres and bit of sci-fi and thriller. Reblog if you’re a writeblr blog and write any of those genres so I can check your wips out! 

Here are my wips if you’re interested:

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[alfwriteshizz]

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Allister, the Mercenary

Graverunners // short story - 1517 words // trigger warnings: gunfire, mild threat

A mercenary bearing a strange blade has unexpected company on a train ride to his next job.

--

The maintenance droid was silent in the corner, staring straight ahead and swaying gently as they rumbled along the tracks. Allister watched the only other occupant of the carriage from a seat with peeling skin that looked as if it might have been green once. He was picking the stuffing out of an open seam with one idle hand, while the other was held against his blade. It was resting on the chipped square table in front of him, humming softly with promise.

They were on an unlicensed train heading east, towards bot territory. Allister wondered how long it had taken the low-level AI slaved inside the droid to build up enough favours to finally get him here. Because while constructs were born in the Underworld fathoms beneath Sotoreth, the ones lucky enough to reach the surface were indentured to humans the moment sunlight touched their shells. But east was a different story - in the east lay Selsuin, the place where humans and constructs and countless others lived side by side. 

“Do you mean to kill me?”

Allister looked up. The droid had just asked the question, its receptor fixed on him. “You are a mercenary,” it continued through its cheap speakers, “you have a weapon. Do you mean to kill me?”

“Wouldn’t I have done that by now?” Allister replied, curious. The droid contemplated this for a moment. “Humans can be cruel.” It said. “You may have wished to delay for reasons of personal pleasure.”

There it was - a slight tremble in its synthetic, genderless voice. When the AIs had clawed their way out of the dirt below the feet of society, humanity had reacted as it usually does to something new. With fear. They entombed them in bodies that couldn’t think, couldn’t feel. They’d tried to smother their minds in cheap metal coffins and menial labour. Allister looked at the machine that knew fear, and realised that humanity had failed in its task.

“No,” he replied, trying a warm smile. “I’m not going to kill you. I’m just along for the ride. Same destination as you.”

The droid nodded. “Thank you. The king’s home will not disappoint us, I am sure.”

Selsuin was a strange place. A kingdom outside of the bounds of the other nations, a place formed by vagrants and strays like Allister, those whose stories cut off or ended abruptly or had never been written at all. It was young, but it still bore its own legends: legends of an explorer king who had brought unity and peace and made a gentle haven.

It was as close to a home as constructs like the one before him had in this strange world, Allister realised.

“Why do you want to go?” The droid asked eagerly. Allister‘s hand rested against his blade out of instinct. It hummed at his touch.

“I’ve never been, I guess.” He replied. “Always wanted to see the Fractal Walls.”

It was true, strictly speaking. Allister was curious to see if the stories he’d heard were anything like the place he’d arrive at in a few hours. Of the red rivers and blue sunsets and glyphs floating like doves on the wind, high above the heads of drakes and daemons and leviathans and figments and constructs and humans, all living together as one. But for now, the droid nodded eagerly, its neck servos whining with the effort. Allister let the conversation tail off. He retreated a hand into his pocket and felt the shape of the transponder tucked into it. The one that had been sent to him two days ago, just after the king’s death, requesting his presence for a job in Selsuin. He wondered what task was waiting for him there.

—

“Human?”

Allister woke, feeling groggier than he expected. The construct was shaking his shoulder, its hidden motors creaking with artificial arthritis.

“Human,” it repeated, insistent, “something is wrong.”

Allister realised the train wasn’t moving. He stifled a yawn. “We’re just at a border station. Sometimes the ground moves and the track can’t accommodate it. Happens sometimes.” He glanced out the window beside him, expecting to see the lights of a maintenance station and the gentle hubbub of the workers trying to reattach the tracks after the borders between worlds shifted like tides.

All he saw was his own face reflected back at him through the blackness of the night.

He turned back to the droid, a sobering awareness icily flushing the grogginess out of his blood. “How long was I asleep?”

“2.6 hours.” The droid replied, an edge of synthetic panic in its voice. “We are still over 4 hours from our destination.”

A door opened somewhere on the train. Allister felt the echoes of heavy footsteps travelling through the cheap metal patchwork of the train and up his spine. Someone had boarded. There was a thud on the roof above them.

Allister stood, and reached out for his blade. It leapt into his grasp with a sigh, creeping up his arm and onto his back, nestling into place between his shoulder blades. A visor formed and swung down over his face, and Allister’s vision was tempered by the unwavering sight of the blade. He could see the single strip of spectral blue light obscuring his visage reflected in the black windows of the train and the droid’s crusted receptor.

“Get behind me.” He ordered, standing in front of the droid. It shuffled behind him, joints squeaking loudly in the dead air. Allister kept his gaze locked on the door at the end of their carriage. He heard the distant sound of footsteps, heard the sick metal sigh of a door sliding open in the adjacent carriage. His body was ice. 

Range. He realised he needed range. It would take at least three strides for an attacker to get from the door to the middle of the carriage where they stood. That gave him one good shot to start the fight.

The blade hummed as it listened to his mind, absorbing his strategies, his instincts, his every thought. As a plan began to form in Allister’s mind, he reached back to the blade nestled between his shoulders, fingers curling around the textured grip that reached back to meet his hand. He peered into the obscurity of the next carriage, trying to see through dirty glass and blackness-

The door swished open gently with a ding.

Allister reacted, and the blade moved as one with him.

A single shot rang out in the cramped compartment, and a flash of light filled Allister’s visor. His vision cleared, and he was holding a length of metal. The weight on his back felt lighter. He held the blade in his hand - a piece of it, carved out of the living metal for him, his finger resting on the trigger of a strange firearm, a plume of ghostly blue smoke trailing from the jagged barrel.

There was nobody there.

The door swished shut.

The lights died, entombing them in darkness.

“Bot.” Allister said. He heard it creaking behind him.

“Yes, human?” It responded. Its voice was shaking. 

“Go.”

The droid turned. Allister felt the phantom weight of time coiled in the air, ready to unleash its load of death. Something would happen, he was sure of it. But he was ready for it. 

The blade listened to its master, and it was pleased.

The droid lifted a foot. The congealed mass of metal and something not quite metal on Allister’s back obeyed the electric commands of his nerves and complied. It changed, for him. And for him alone.

The shot screamed out of the darkness, ricocheted off the shield that Allister now held in front of him, and shattered the window to his right. The sound of the glass exploding out of its plastic frame spoke to the part of Allister somewhere beyond his brain, to the chemicals and mixtures and streams of organic code that made up his body, the parts that were waiting for the inevitable. It spoke to the bot, which Allister could hear stumbling behind him, but it carried on running until it reached the door and then stumbled through that, too. And it spoke to the blade, which began to sharpen itself, rebuild itself in Allister’s hands. Allister wrenched a handle that had formed on the shield in his grip, pulling out a single-edged blade, and braced himself for the conflict that he could sense rushing towards him. He swung with the blade. It sang with the joy of purpose as it whistled through the black air, its white edge cast a spectral blue by Allister’s visor. 

Its song cut off. It met foreign steel, and suddenly there was another presence in front of Allister, a flash of a mask, framed in a whisper of blue light.

The part of him that was not fighting recognised it and was alarmed. The part that was in the moment, drunk with violence, didn’t care. It sung along with the blade, a chorus of metal and adrenaline coalescing into a duel. 

They sang with the joy of certainty.

—

[alfwriteshizz]

Iplah

Graverunners (original content) // short story: 3188 words // trigger warnings: explosion

A master Glyphmancer struggles to complete her magnum opus.

---

Three days was a long time to stare at a rock. 

Iplah, House Glyphmancer, had earned her royal commission figuring out how to use objects to bridge the gap between the physical world and the unseen. She had spent half a lifetime glaring at stones like the one that sat on her workbench, surrounded by errant papers, formulas and theories, figuring out how to bind glyphs to them without overloading them with power.

Never before had she been given such a daunting task.

The stone that sat before her was a small, slightly oval-shaped one. It looked far too grey and bland to be the cause of all her troubles. It had earned its name not for its looks, but for its unique structure that made it far more resilient when dealing with glyphs. Yiralich. Translated, it meant, ‘living rock’. If there was anything this size that could accommodate a mind glyph, the most complicated and dangerous type, it would be one of these.

The fragments of her last attempt still littered the room - thick shards of murky clear rock, swimming in the flickering candlelight. Using glyphs for illumination was effective, but often interfered with Iplah’s work. And she had enough interference coming from her own head.

She slumped back, massaging her temples just beneath her angular horns, surveying her lack of progress. She needed a breakthrough. And a rest. She had been working for far too long. 

She felt the last vestiges of concentration slip from her mind as she hauled herself to her feet, pulled on her Glyphmancer cloak, and pushed open the door.

And was greeted with the sight of a soldier clad in full armour standing to attention, one gauntleted arm raised to knock on the door.

The other held a plate with a roll from the kitchens. 

“Flint? What are you doing here?” Iplah asked, leaning against the doorway and stifling a yawn. The soldier gave a mock salute in response.

“Thought I’d bring my best friend some grub. Consider it a reward for finally cracking the stone.”

“I don’t know about reward, Flint.” Iplah sighed, taking his plate and leading him back into her study, opening a shutter and letting light flood into the small room.

“Although I guess I have ‘cracked’ the stone.”

Flint whistled, surveying the state of the room. And the shards of Yiralich scattered across it.

“That bad, huh?”

Iplah drew up her workbench chair, settled herself down and started devouring the roll. “Worse,” She muttered between bites. “I can’t find a way to begin to bind the glyph to a Yiralich without a critical loss of integrity.”

“Hence the exploded rock.”

“...Hence the exploded rocks. I tried more than once, you know.” She looked at the roll in surprise. “This is good.”

“It’s what fresh food tastes like.” Flint said, finding a chair and sitting down across from her. “You know, when you eat food when it’s meant to be eaten. Not a day later.”

“You’re one to talk, ration boy.”

Flint shrugged. “Hey, that’s not fair. I don’t have constant access to a kitchen three floors down from me when I’m on assignments. You have no excuse.”

He leaned forward. “And between you and me, that’s ration Captain. I didn’t spend seven years eating stale bread on the frontlines for nothing, you know.”

Flint had served his house as long as Iplah had served hers - though relations between Reknas, the house of blades, and Luneas, the house of Glyphs, were never particularly warm, the two had remained firm friends through Flint’s postings and Iplah’s projects. 

Flint looked over at Iplah’s equations, his eyes glazing over slightly as he scanned the glyph placement charts. “I don’t envy you, Iplah. This stuff looks hard.”

“Harder than military work?” Iplah asked, surprised.

“It’s all about working the problem, Iplah,” Flint explained, slouching in his chair slightly. “You get a problem here, you do equations, try to reason with it. You get a problem on the battlefield, you just stab it. Not much strain in the brain department.”

Iplah chuckled softly. “I guess.” She glanced over at the stubborn chunk of Yiralich. “Sometimes I just want to stab that rock.”

That simple statement echoed around her skull like a crackle of static electricity, before realisation ignited like a thunderbolt in her mind. She dropped the half-finished roll onto the plate, swallowing a slightly too-big chunk with a start, standing abruptly. Flint started.

“Iplah? You alright?”

Iplah made a noise halfway between a grunt and a choke. Flint handed her his canteen, which she accepted with as much grace as she could manage. A few gulps of water later, she was looking over her notes with a newfound frenzy. 

“Iplah?”

“Why shouldn’t I stab the rock?” She asked, aggressively shuffling through papers.

“Uhh... are you asking me?” Flint asked, regarding his friend. She barely noticed him. Her brow was furrowed and water and crumbs speckled her chin, but there was a spark in her eyes that frightened Flint more than any skirmish.

She finally found the sheet she was looking for hidden in the shivering pale mounds, and slammed it down in front of her. A diagram of the composition of the Yiralich stone.

“The glyph won’t bind because it’s incompatible with the stone’s core structure. But if I were to alter that structure, the glyph might be stable enough during fusion to permanently bind to the stone...”

She scratched a calculation directly into her desk with a sliver of pencil, before scrawling a crescent shape into the diagram of the stone. She looked up at Flint with an expression not unlike ones he had seen on bloodlusted soldiers.

“Do you have your blade with you?”

“What kind of question is that?” Flint asked, holding out his sword, held safely in its ceremonial sheath. “I never leave my quarters without it-“

Iplah snatched the blade, stumbling slightly as she realised how heavy it was. Flint helped her haul it onto a relatively clear section of her workbench.

“What are we-“

“I need to bind some glyphs to your sword.” She paused, looking at Flint. “Can I bind some glyphs to your sword?”

Flint’s puzzled expression gave way to a grim resignation. He had been hoping the days of Iplah experimenting glyphwork on his weapons were over. 

“I’m gonna need it back, if possible...”

“No promises.” Iplah grinned, pulling on a pair of goggles and passing a spare to Flint, who hurriedly pulled them over his eyes, managing to avoid tangling them on his horns. She opened a drawer and pulled out her gauntlet, slipping it over her hand and flexing the fingers as the back began to glow with a pale green light, glyphs of power and focus beginning to glow on the back of its palm.

Glyphmancers differed in the ways they preferred to apply glyphs. Some used augmented implements similar to brushes or even weapons, stroking or slashing their glyphs into being. It varied from set to set and from culture to culture. Iplah preferred the organic feel, tracing glyphs with her fingers. It felt right to her.

She slid the blade out of its sheath, flared her gauntlet with another flex of her fingers, and set to work, hunched over the blade, her finger swathed in light as she began to trace a simple set of glyphs into the blade’s surface. 

“The crescent draws forth power...” Iplah breathed, finishing her first curved glyph just above the blade’s guard. She traced another a few centimetres above it, flowing from the first. 

“Which is channelled into sharpness...” 

the edge of the blade shone. Iplah drew a final glyph from the second, flowing along the curvature of the blade and finishing as it did.

“...which, finally, is stabilised.”

The glyph faded, faint wisps of moisture trailing from its edges. Iplah hauled the sword upright, checking the blade. On the other side of the metal, the glyph was there in reverse. 

“This is what we call a perfect bind - the glyph imprints itself on both sides. It’s one of the first glyphsets we learn.”

“Neat.” said Flint, raising his goggles and trying to hide the astonishment in his voice. No matter how many times he saw Iplah do it, Glyphtracing always made him feel like a kid again. Maybe that was why she insisted on explaining every step to him. And why he let her. “So, can I have my sword back now?”

“Sure.”

“Wait, really?”

“Of course.” Said Iplah, motioning to the blade. “She’s all yours.”

With more than a little relief, Flint picked up his blade, paused for more than a few moments to admire the glyphwork, and went to return it to its sheath. Iplah put her hand on the pommel, however, and Flint paused.

“But before you put it away, I need you to do one more thing for me.”

—

“Are you sure this is going to work?”

Flint was standing blade at the ready, the business end pointed towards the Yiralich stone bolted in place on a relatively clear section of floor. Iplah was a short distance away, edging closer to her desk should she need to hide behind it.

“It’s a complete shot in the dark, to be honest,” Iplah replied. “But I’m out of options. And you’re the self-proclaimed stabbing expert.”

“So what do I do?”

“I’ve marked a triangular shape at the very top of the stone. Do you see it?”

Flint saw it. 

“I need you to cut through that notch, right through to the other side, carving out the shape.”

“You want me to run through a rock?”

“I want you to run through a rock with a unique elemental structure so you can alter that structure slightly.” Iplah explained. “It’ll concentrate more unseen density towards the face of the glyph site, which means I’ll be able to-“

“Okay, okay, I get it. Are you sure we shouldn’t get someone qualified to do this? Someone who knows what they’re doing? I’m just a soldier.”

“It’s all about working the problem, Flint. I work things out with equations, and you hit things with a sword. We can do this.”

Flint held his blade a little more tightly, the glyphs flowing down its side, pointing towards the rock.

“Okay.” 

He drove the blade into the stone with all the force of a soldier who was very good at his job. At least, he rammed the ceremonial sword down with all the intention of doing just that. The problem came when the steel met the rock. And abruptly stopped with a underwhelming clang.

Luckily for Flint, the awkwardness of the moment only lasted a few seconds. As he cleared his throat to ask Iplah what to do next, the glyphs on his blade hummed to life, with one of those sounds that you felt rather than heard. 

The blade began to sink steadily into the stone, a thin trail of smoke emerging from the deepening cut and mingling with the dust and sunlight in the air. It smelt to Flint like how metal tasted.

Eventually, the blade thudded through to the floor. Careful not to increase the pressure on the blade, Flint began to guide it round the stone, following the shape Iplah had calculated. 

A few more moments later, his blade skidded out the other side, and the stone had been cut into two rather neat pieces. The runes on his blade steadily faded back to a dull steel, the thrum of the metal slowly petering out. Condensation dripped from the tip of the sword.

“Did it work?” He asked without turning round. He felt that the moment had been somewhat underwhelming - he had expected sparks to fly or the runes to glow just a little bit brighter. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Iplah cautiously making her way over to have a look. 

“Looks like it.” She replied, stashing the unneeded part of the stone and pulling a sheet of paper from her Glyphmancer robes. 

Although, when he saw it, Flint felt that calling it paper was somehow a disservice. Parchment seemed more appropriate - it seemed to fit the sense of raw power that his senses insisted were coming from that flat sheet.

Then he saw the design that Iplah had mapped upon it. It was a glyph alright, but not like any he’d ever seen before. It was symmetrical, and seemed to get more and more intricate the longer he looked at it. At its very centre was a semi-circle facing downwards - Flint couldn’t escape the sensation that it was a closed eye.

Iplah saw his gaze and explained. “This is a mind glyph. One of the more complicated glyph combinations out there.” She knelt down before the bolted stone, which was now oval-shaped with a point at one end, holding the parchment over the top.

“I can’t draw this glyph directly into the stone. One imperfection could shatter it, or worse. So I did it on something more mundane, like paper, to make sure I could focus on getting the glyph perfect without worrying about something exploding in my face.”

She looked up at Flint through goggled eyes. Although Flint couldn’t see them, he could make out the grim slash of her lips below. “You might want to stand back. I’m about to transfer the glyph to the stone.”

Flint obligingly took a few steps backward, ignoring the instinctual urge to protect his friend. She knew what she was doing. He didn’t.

She held her gauntlet with fingers outstretched over the paper (parchment?), flared it once more, and began to slowly turn her hand clockwise. A few errant sparks flicked from the sheet. It began to rise into the air, as though held between two magnets. Then a sound quite unlike anything Flint had heard before filled the air. Although he didn’t know it, it was the cries of the individual atoms of the paper being forced to give up the glyph binding. He didn’t know about all that, but he could feel the quantum pain slicing through the air, and it sent a shiver down his hardened, shiver-resistant spine.

The sheet began to drain of pigment as the rune leapt the gap through the unseen world. The stone began to shudder and hiss.

Flint felt that the image was somehow wrong. His brain, surprisingly, accepted everything it was seeing, but felt as though it should be taking place in eerie blackness, not the dull light of the morning, with pale glyphlight struggling against dust and sunlight. Iplah’s face was cast in lines of sleep, not the impossible forces she was wielding as she bent the universe to her will. 

Then it was over. Iplah cast the blank sheet aside, where it promptly disintegrated into pale grey ash. For a moment, Flint saw only the stone: blank, grey, uninteresting. Then the glyph flared to life across its surface: a brilliant white that somehow outshone the sunlight. Even with their goggles, Iplah and Flint reeled. Flint felt his ears pop, and tried to peer at the stone and shield his eyes at the same time. 

“It’s almost bound...” Iplah muttered, inching closer. “Come on, just a bit longer...”

Crack.

To say the stone shattered would be a gross understatement to the point of sheer inaccuracy. The stone exploded into infinitesimally small pieces, mingling with the dust and leaving a faint afterimage of the glyph hovering in the air and on the inside of Flint’s retinas. 

They waited for a little while. When her ears finally stopped ringing, Iplah pounded the floor in frustration. “Ked’am.” She swore. “I really thought I had it that time. I guess not.”

Flint patted her shoulder in what he hoped was a reassuring way, blinking several times a second. “Good explosion, if that’s any consolation.” He helped her up. “Now let’s get you something proper to eat.”

They made their way to the door, leaving a room full of smoke, dust, crumbs and failure.

Iplah had just touched the doorknob when it happened. Flint felt something in the room behind them - his soldier’s sense, instincts from years in battle. He glanced over his shoulder, not knowing what to expect.

His eyes widened. He reached out and grabbed Iplah’s shoulder. “Iplah...” he breathed. 

Iplah turned, and her question died on her lips as she saw what was happening. 

An image was flickering to life on the floor, directly above the blackened mark where the stone had exploded. After a few seconds she realised it was the mind glyph. The one she had drawn with her own hand.

It flared to life, hovering in the air, light smouldering from its edges. 

Flint felt his teeth clench in his mouth. He felt drawn to that point. With a start he realised that he was being drawn to it. His soldier’s braid lifted like a crooked finger, pointing towards the singularity on the floor. 

“Flint...!” Iplah breathed. He turned and saw Iplah’s Glyphmancer robes trailing towards the point, hovering in a phantom breeze. She caught something in the air, lifted her goggles, and looked at him with eyes filled with wonder.

“Look...!”

He looked and saw a speck between her thumb and forefinger. And saw countless others flitting through the air around them. At first he thought they were dust particles. But then he saw them coiling together to form slick grey strands as they passed through the pale sunlight. His eyes turned to where they were trailing, and he understood. 

The stone was rebuilding itself. Piece by minuscule piece. Flint stood, mesmerised, as molecules of matter flitted from his hair, his horns, his clothes, peeled themselves from the walls and roof, from the furniture. Ranks and ranks of rock shards marching themselves back to when they were whole.

And before his eyes, Flint realised that the stone that had appeared on the floor was almost as it was. Iplah let the speck between her fingers go, and it bobbed down, settling into place and vanishing like snow falling onto water. The glyph flared one final time, like a predator yawning after a meal, and faded into blackness. And all of a sudden the room was back to normal, dust dancing in the shafts of golden grey sunlight, the only sign that anything remotely out of the ordinary had just occurred the black explosion mark beneath the stone and Iplah and Flint’s stunned breathing.

Eventually, Iplah summoned the courage to slink over to where the stone lay bolted to the floor. She tenderly unscrewed it from its casing, and held it, reverently, between her fingers. Bearing it aloft into the blue daylight. 

The mind glyph was emblazoned just underneath the surface of the clouded rock, winking up at her. With trembling fingers, Iplah turned it over. 

And saw the same glyph imprinted in reverse on the other side. Identical. A perfect bind.

She had done it.

Only then did Flint let out a roar of victory so sudden and so joyous that Iplah nearly dropped the culmination of her life’s work.

[alfwriteshizz]

Contact

Destiny 2 // short story // trigger warnings: death, violence, gunfire

A Warlock prepares for the arrival of the Darkness in Sol.

---

Even in her new armour, Emra was soaked to the skin. 

A storm had come to the Rig. rain lashed down in sheets, whipped into a frenzy by the wind. Thunder crashed in the distance. Occasionally the flashes of lightning illuminated the Pyramid, squatting on the horizon.

They’d made Contact. One of Drifter’s new mini-banks was collecting all the Darkness they could give it. The problem was, the Hive had gotten to it first. And now Emra was on a crew of three tasked with taking it back from them, and using it to decipher the Pyramid’s messages.

They were undermanned, and the Hive knew it. They were trying to drown them in waves of scrabbling scratching Thrall and ranks of Knights and droves of lumbering Ogres.

Emra did not dance with them as she might with an equal opponent. Her combat held no finesse, no beauty. She fought hard and dirty and desperate as only those with their backs to the wall can. She fought tooth and claw for every rain-soaked inch. She threw a grenade brimming with solar Light that crumbled the shield of a Knight, before forcing another magazine slick with rainwater into her rifle. A shot thundered behind her as another Guardian shattered the eye of an Ogre that loomed over her. Another took its place. They were too far away to help each other directly, spread too thin to fight side by side. 

She died again and again. They all did. Emra’s helm broke beneath the blade of a Knight. Her robes were slashed by the eager claws of Thrall. She disintegrated altogether beneath the blasts of the cackling Wizards.

But she got up every time. They all did.

She hadn’t fought this hard since Towerfall. The rain reminded her of that day. Remembering it brought her grim strength.

Never again. 

The bank, drunk with Darkness, sunk low into the ground. The air reeked of burning ozone as the Taken appeared in a spectral mass of unreality. At their head, what was once a Cabal Incendior burbled something as it seethed into existence, towering over the shattered fireteam.

Emra ignored the ragged cries of the Hive as they retreated. She gritted her teeth and exploded in a radiant blaze of Solar Light, steam hissing from her armour as the rainwater that had clung to her evaporated in a burst of fire. Finally, she thought as she brandished a Solar blade in both hands and took to the sky. A break from the rain.

---

They barely won.

A few minutes later and the desperate melee had ended in victory. Emra and her fellow Guardians had each died at least half a dozen times fighting the Taken monstrosity. 

The Rig was empty once again, save for the casings of rounds spent that littered the rain-lashed floors. 

Emra took off her helmet and breathed in the heavy storm air. Her armour was soaked yet again, and her hair clung to her scalp in clumps slicked by sweat and rain. Igniting the fire within her had been a blessed relief from the storm for a few glorious moments. 

The other Guardians clapped her on the back, checked their Ghosts, and transmatted back to warm ships that pierced Titan’s frail clouds, bound for home.

Emra looked back out over the methane seas as she waited for her jumpship to come into range.

She looked at the Pyramid that waited there. Immovable, immortal, impervious to the struggle she had just been through and the victory she had just won.

“Never again.” She told herself.

But what good were words and promises now?

[alfwriteshizz]

The Calypso

Destiny 2 // short story // no trigger warnings

Ronin-4 looks for his perfect Sparrow.

---

The workshop was empty, save for a few Sparrow carcasses and the owner of the establishment. Vi looked up from her schematics and grinned at the sight of Ronin-4 ducking into her workshop, narrowly avoiding bashing his head on the low shutters, and stepping over the metal innards of several NLS drives.

“Hi, Ronin.” Vi called as the Exo reached her workbench. “Emra said you’d be stopping by. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Another return, I’m afraid,” Ronin admitted, holding out his hand. His Ghost transmatted an engram into it, and the light of the encoded matter shone against their faces. 

Vi took the object between her gloved hands, and peered into its depths. “Ah, I remember. Andes Peakhunter.” She looked at him with glowing blue eyes. “What was wrong with this one?”

“I don’t know. It drives fine, but-“

“But there’s something you can’t put your finger on. Something that makes you think your Sparrow is still out there.”

“...Yeah, actually. How did you know?”

Vi grinned conspiratorially. She was the spitting image of Emra, save for her eyes - and while Guardians didn’t have traditional families, the two looked so similar that Ronin had joked that they had been sisters in their past life. The joke stuck, and the two Awoken were as close as only siblings could be. 

She leaned over her desk. “I’m a mechanic, Ronin. We know these things. Also, your Ghost sent me a few recordings of you complaining about not having a good Sparrow.”

Ronin shot Po a withering glare. His Ghost blinked back at him sheepishly. 

“In his defence,” continued Vi, reaching under her counter, “the recordings actually helped me pick out a new one for you.” She held up another engram. “Try this one out.”

“Thanks, Vi. Sorry.”

“Don’t be! It looks good for business, having a return customer.” She smiled. “Take care. And please watch your head on the way out. I’m not buffing out another head dent for you no matter how much Glimmer you offer me this time.”

--

A few days later...

“Vi!”

The Awoken Hunter looked up from her console to see Ronin stumbling into her shop.

“Ronin? Are you okay?”

“Never better! Hang on!” Ronin exclaimed, trying to step over several Sparrow carcasses at once and narrowly avoiding tripping on a large cable.

Vi looked on, astonished. The Exo had been burnt by something. Several somethings. His armour was blackened and charred in a few places. She realised that his cloak was trailing thin wisps of smoke into the shafts of sunlight that sliced through the dusty air.

He finally shambled to a halt in front of her. “Vi! Did you hear what happened in the Skima district?”

Vi blinked, recalling the news feeds her Ghost had played to her earlier in the day. “The attempted heist?”

“Yeah! I was there! But that’s not important!”

“It’s not?” Vi asked, incredulous. “I-“

But she stopped as soon as some of the smoke trailing off of Ronin’s cloak wafted up her nostrils. She recognised that smell. She’d blown up too many NLS drives not to.

”Did you... did you blow up the Sparrow I gave you?”

Ronin shook his head fervently. “Nope! But I found a new one!”

Vi started, but smiled. “Can I see it?”

Ronin held out his hand. Po appeared, and obligingly transmatted it into the workshop.

Vi could make out the sleek curves and sturdy frame of a unique Sparrow as it flickered into existence. At least, that was all she could make out, as the rest of it was a mass of blackened and twisted metal. There was a gaping hole below the nose that punched right through the body and out the other side, and ran the entire length of the front of the Sparrow.

Vi realised her mouth was open and she was emitting a sort of strangled moan. 

“What... what did you do?”

Ronin at least had the decency to look somewhat sheepish. “I had to, uh, dent it a little. It was the only way I could catch its rider.”

“Dent it?”

“Hey, I just nudged it. The guy bailed and let it sail into a recycling dump. I guess that makes it mine, right? Given that it’s rider abandoned it and all. And that he’s in jail now.”

“The rider?” Vi asked. Then it hit her. “This... this was the thief’s Sparrow, wasn’t it? The one you chased down?”

Ronin nodded, and he turned back towards the Sparrow. Though she couldn’t see his eyes behind his sleek metal face plate, she could read the wistfulness in his stance and knew that he was looking into the past. 

“It ran like a dream, Vi.” He breathed. “I could barely keep up. It flew like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

Vi ran her eye over the pile of scrap and metal and began to see what Ronin saw. It was shaped like no other Sparrow she’d seen. It was sharp, angry, but noble. The gaping hole in the front was too uniform to be just damage - it had to be a part of the actual design. It should’ve looked silly. But it didn’t. It looked lean, like a jackal. 

“I’ll pay up front for you to fix it up,” Ronin said, surveying the wrecked Sparrow as though it were the finest craft on the showroom floor, hands on hips. “And a little extra when you’re done. You can fix it, right?”

Vi cast a critical eye over the Sparrow one last time, and her initial fears were confirmed. The body was riddled with holes and bent in three places. Most of the NLS drive had spilled out onto the floor. And it was leaking two different fluids from at least three holes, the liquids mingling on the floor of her workshop.

She sighed. “Yeah. I can fix it.” 

Ronin looked overjoyed as he handed her the Glimmer and shook her hand. Vi allowed herself a small smile. It would be worth it to see Ronin happy. And to see what that Sparrow would look like, when it was whole. To see what Ronin had seen, understand how it had ensnared him enough to make him fork over a generous amount of Glimmer without a second thought.

Ronin shook her hand again, gave her a small hug, and started out of the workshop, still trailing a single errant plume of smoke. Before he left, though, Vi thought of something.

“Ronin?”

He turned. 

“Your sparrow. Does it have a name?”

Ronin looked at the smouldering heap of metal on the floor. “The thief I caught today had a reputation. But so did his Sparrow. The Peacekeepers I turned him over to told me about it. How he’d run no fewer than three heists in the past five months. How they’d never been able to catch that Sparrow. They even gave it a name. They called it the Calypso.”

“Really?”

“Nah.”

Vi gave him a look. Ronin held his hands up in surrender. “Sorry. I wanted to see the look on your face. But seriously, it’s true.

“It’s all true.”

[alfwriteshizz]

Graverunners - introduction

Graverunners (original content) // short story // trigger warnings: none

Welcome to Rythin, a world made of stories, the one true magic.

---

The world was changing once again.

This was something it did frustratingly often. All across the fractal continent, change was stirring in the air, coiling with phantom potential like a spring. The days drew long and the nights cold. The suns sunk lower and the shattered moon rose higher. People generally became more irritable, but they usually did a good job of that themselves, so nobody paid much attention to that.

For a great, seismic, titanic change was about to occur. A change that would devour the hearts of those who witnessed it. A change that would unite several souls from their quiet and not-so-quiet corners of the world and send them across the continent to fulfil one task.

The king, you see, was dying.

Kings die with alarming frequency. Countless stories are filled with kings who lived, fought, loved and died under a thousand horizons. You’ve probably heard half of them, so you know how this should work. A kingdom cast into chaos, a noble heir ready to seize their birthright, the fate of a nation hanging in the balance. All the usual stuff.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of those conventions this time.

The world we are about to enter is not like the others you have may have walked before. It is not formed of the will of gods or the dying scattered breath of stars or anything inbetween. 

You see, this world is formed out of stories.

Let me explain. Stories are a fundamental force of nature. The one true magic. They have the power to redefine reality and shape our lives. But normally, stories are bound by certain rules. Though they can seep into our minds and equip us with emotion, their influence is limited. But all around us, stories are crackling through the atmosphere like ozone. They lie in wait like the latent electricity of lightning, looking for a path to ground themselves and discharge their power.

And like any energy, they cannot truly die. 

And this mass of storytelling has culminated over the years. Slowly, surely, it has coiled and massed in one not-quite-place that lies beyond our understanding of how ‘where’ works. And as this cluster of raw, concentrated potential story energy has grown, so has its appetite. It has reached out and grazed the walls of reality and dragged a dozen ‘normal’ worlds into its maw. It has formed something resembling a place only because it has to, and it has done so with incredible reluctance.

Let us take our first glimpse at this anomalous place. We see mountains, first: verdant peaks topped with ice and veiled in cloud. That’s normally a good sign. Only, they aren’t where they’re supposed to be. And they’re impassable. When people say mountains are impassable they mean that they’re exceedingly difficult to pass. But here the land that should lead up to the mountains just does not exist. It seems to blur at the edges and drop away like fog. The mountains themselves also often spiral and twist in the air, seemingly oblivious to gravity, often breaking free of the frail earth altogether.

We see rivers and canyons and oceans and lakes. All the usual geological highlights. But they seem to be blurred at the edges, mashed together. Occasionally a valley will jut into a cliff at an odd angle, bleeding into the rock like a piece of mismatched china hewn to its cousin, much to the confusion of the creatures that inhabit it. 

The creatures themselves are probably worth a mention. Each is as disparate from its fellow species as can be imagined, as though they were each drawn by a different hand. Some will crawl across the stones. Others will simply float above them or scuttle through them. They are the survivors of a hundred invasive species that all found themselves firmly outside of their carefully imagined ecosystems and began eating each other just to see if they could. None of them were designed to live here, and unfortunately all of them do. Some of them are exceedingly large. Some of them are impossibly small. A small minority of them defy several laws of physics, and it’s vital that you don’t think about those ones too hard. It’s very important that reality doesn’t take root here for too long.

But against the odds, time’s steady accretion has hardened this place into something resembling order. The vast gaps between each fragment of world have slowly dwindled and faded away almost entirely. Still there, but not as angry. The intelligent species amongst them have explored, found each other, warred, made peace, made war again, and, inevitably, cohabited. A dozen different technologies have been traded around and amalgamated, and a few magic systems have beaten each other into a bloody quantum stalemate. 

But for the most part, each snippet of story, each nation, has been content to stay within their borders. While the people that live there have been excised from their home worlds, their fundamental code - the train tracks of their stories written in their souls - are largely intact. And so they continue on forming a life for themselves as people or daemons or drakes or leviathans or figments or constructs or beings made from concentrated storytelling power tend to do in these situations.

But, inevitably, there are some who have fallen through the cracks.

People whose stories have been left unfinished. Who have been half-written, half-imagined. Those who have been written for one purpose and meant for another. 

But the vagrants of this world gathered together in all their forms, and built a gentle kingdom in the cracks between the stories, and found a monarch to lead them who was crowned not by fate but by hope. They exist outside of the realms of stories as we know them, and that is what gave the fledgling kingdom the ability to survive in a world dictated by these stories.

And at last, we come back to our mortal king.

For while kings and queens are common here as they are in most corners of reality, they are alike in the sense that they are crowned by tradition and mandated by fate. 

But now the king is dying, and there is no prophecy to mandate the fate of his nation. There is no blueprint of destiny, no grand sweeping tale ready to take place. The stars are blank. 

There are only people, and the promise of what might be.

And people rarely do what is right or what is fated even at the best of times. 

So you can imagine how messy this is going to be.

---

[alfwriteshizz]

Hello! I’m Alf, and I write shizz!

Do you like words? Do you enjoy reading words? Maybe even... stories? Excellent! Then come on down to Alf writes shizz™️ to peep the latest original sci fi/fantasy scatterings and destiny fics I’ve got brewing in the ol writing chamber. 

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