jack-of-crowns

[jack-of-crowns]

@flashfictionfridayofficial

"Catch The Rainbow" by @jack-of-crowns

"Is there a place for me here, Menshevik?"

Those were the first words Shoshannah ever spoke to me, there in the ravine before the marbled facade of the gymnasium. Her voice rang with the echoes of the thunderstorm that had just passed, but it was the sight of her when I looked up from my copy of Drude's textbook on optics that struck me then, and has stayed with me ever since. Corkscrew curls of raven hair falling onto the lace embroidered neckline of her wide-sleeved summer dress, fistfuls of rhododendra and wild mountain thyme going into the worn reed basket she carried on her hip.

"Of course there's a place for you," I called back over the rushing waters of the Varaziskhevi.

"Everyone has their place in the new Georgia, especially in our universities." I remember thinking to myself, aravis arakat', this woman is one of a kind.

The harsh squealing of steel wakes me from reverie as I hear an armoured train of the Soviets clanging along the tracks that run parallel to fields of lavender left untended on these deserted farmlands during the war. As the sun falls ruddily behind a copse of Judas-tree, I spy an old tuff barn, hip roof collapsed; enough to provide dasamali from the cavalry scouts of the Red Army that will comb this countryside come nightfall for the last of the resistance.

As brilliant as she was in the halls of learning, Shoshannah shone brighter still in her fieldwork. We had both declared for the study of mathematics and natural science, and even though my family's place in Tbilisi society before the Great War had granted me an excellent education, I soon learned that my new classmate was far more knowledgeable.

"Korneli," she would teasingly say, "Close the doors of your mind to what you have been taught, and you will then be able to open your suli to what truly is."

I would dream of her on those long and lonely nights in my student's garret; she was always a vision that would appear much as she had on that first day we had met, vibrant and full of life. In my dreams, she would be trying to tell me something terribly important, but all would fade to darkness before I could comprehend her messages, and then I would awaken to a cold hearth and a troubled mind. Academia was proving to be as difficult for me as democratic socialism was for my country.

I must have fallen asleep; there is only the pitch blackness of the storm cellar surrounding me. The ammonia reek of stale straw that pervades this ruined old begheli reassures me that I am awake, as much as I may devoutly wish that I had not lived to see such days. I can hear voices in Russian from somewhere above me, and it is probably only a matter of time before one of them finds the trap door that I hastily concealed earlier.

One night, after we had made love in the loft of a farmhouse that we rented together after graduation, Shoshannah seemed to fall into a trance, rasping between shallow breaths in a low murmuring voice about historical figures from Tamar to Tato as though engrossed in conversation with them. Her skin was pallid and cool to the touch; eyes fluttering wildly behind closed lids. At length, her breathing evened out, and the colour returned to her flesh.

"If you could meet anyone from the past, who it would be?" I enquired over breakfast that morning. She gave me a strange look, then a wry smile.

"You were always one of my favourites, my love, whenever I would read the stories of your valour in those heady days of the First Republic."

I felt as though the sky had fallen upon my head. Stories of the mesultane, the speakers to the dead, were a part of my heritage. But what in heaven's name did she mean by referring to me as deceased? Our loft began to swim and swirl before my eyes.

Then I am back in the storm cellar again, the storm cellar beneath the barn of my family's farm, a little ways south of the city where we grew lavender, blueberries and walnuts before the Great War. The trap door opens above me, and I reach for the Mosin-Nagant rifle by my side, but it isn't there. Instead of the torches of Russian hussars harshly glaring down upon me, the space fills with a light such as I have never seen, for I have no words to describe all the hues and shades of this glory.

I hear Shoshannah's voice one last time, ringing like crystal bells through all these true colours of Paradise, telling and tolling me that our country has a need for heroes once again. Heroes of old once slew dragons in order to set our people free, and so I pray to all the saints that they may bless me in the battles yet to come against whatever dragons there are that scheme to enslave us. The darkness can not, will not prevail, and this long night will soon have its ending. So bless me, come the dawn.

[jack-of-crowns]

@flashfictionfridayofficial

'At The Fading Of The Stars' by @jack-of-crowns

Golden are the suns that whirl above me, at least while my eyes are still those which Mezithe has blessed. The night seethes with colours that none save such as I will ever see, and I give thanks for the holy wolf's blood burning within me as the spirits of this sacred land race through my pulsing veins.

The moon settles low on the horizon above the ridgeline where my ancestors have hunted for generations, a pale crescent flecked as the blade of a worn şaşka. The stars surrender to the encroaching dawn, glintering as though celestial lamps being extinguished by the breath of The One Who Is All.

I marvel at how soft my skin, my human skin seems, after the transitive fires of night have run their courses. My fingers; how strangely delicate the flesh after hours spent as fur and claw. The wolf within me ebbs as shadows before sunlight. The gold that shone so brightly above seems dim as bellflowers in the greying dawn to my eyes now, and once more, I am no longer kurtadam but only a man.

Only a man. Temirkhan, prince of House Khatkho.

The hunt had been good, three Russian scouts who would never return to their garrison on the banks of the Terek. I left them where they fell, throats torn open in a bloody scream whose message would be lost upon the dispassionate Tsars that send conscripted legions against us, season after season.

The wild and beautiful passions howling amid the high places of this world are lost upon their frozen hearts, for they can not comprehend that being fully human is to be in full communion with this greenly vibrant realm. They only know the insatiable hunger of empire; they only believe in the false liturgy of powder and shot, and they come against us season after season with their cannon and their crosses.

Below me, nestled in their ormanlık auls, the smoke begins to rise from a few hearths where the women have arisen to begin the day's bread. Cormorants hang suspended on the updrafts of dawn, searching inland for their repast. A divine questioning begins to arise in my mind - is this the response of The One Who Is All for my sins, for the sins of all my people?

Perhaps it is because of this indeterminate nature, neither man nor beast, that these icy devils have been set upon us. I have always believed that the noble Adyghe were set here to be the guardians of these mountains and their passes, as wild and beautiful as the land itself, but perhaps all that is wild and beautiful in this world is truly damned; for it can never submit to the inevitable will of those to whom dominion over dünya has been given.

"By the Mount," I whisper, recalling the words that our mullah had recited during evening prayers, "and by a Book inscribed, in parchment unfolded, by the populated House, by the raised canopy, by the swelling sea - the punishment of your Lord will indeed come to pass." Is this to be our fate?

A whinny draws my attention away from those dark musings. Kazbek, my trusted stallion, stomping impatiently where I had left him tethered to the leafed stump of a fallen hornbeam. He accepts my dual nature as only an animal raised in the company of men could. He no more fears the wolf scent that clings to me than would any molosser shepherd.

I make my way to him, speaking soft words in the ancient shikwoshir tongue. His ears flick toward my voice, and I feel a rush of gratitude for this simple connection. Casting a final glance upwards, I mount him and turn toward the villages in the vales below, knowing full well that those stars still shine unseen.

Through the thick sis of morning, I can see other stars high atop the watchtowers, golden bows of twelve surmounting three arrows on a field of green, the newly woven flags of our nascent federation. We have pledged ourselves to each other, fighting for a free Circassia for as long as the stars will shine.

"By the Mount," I whisper again, feeling the heavy weight of prophecy, "and by a Book inscribed..."

That final judgment will indeed come to pass. But when, and upon whom, remains to be written. It will not fall upon my people while a prince of the Kabardians yet draws breath, I vow silently. The clatter of horse hooves on the stony paths of the mountains echo my silent oath, and for a moment, I can almost believe that they will keep it.

[jack-of-crowns]

List 5 things that make you happy, then put this in the askbox for the last 10 people who liked or reblogged something from you! Get to know your mutuals and followers ❤️

5. Physical Activity

4. Meaningful Work

3. Social Interaction

2. Helpful Service

1. Contemplative Reverie

[jack-of-crowns]

@flashfictionfridayofficial

'A Dhikr Of Quarks' by @jack-of-crowns

"En dıştaki karanlık," Lane muses to herself, "is much less terrifying than the darkness within."

For a time, it seemed, she had found an island of stability amid the ceaseless storms that rage through the worlds of mortal men, but such was not the lot of a Nightshade Jinn. Upon the death of her beloved prince, the ulema had declared their union to have been blasphemy, and so the secular equilibrium of the sorceress as well as that of her kindred was fissioned by theocracy once more.

How long has it been now, how long? Time loses relevance in the space between darklines, and there is only the low howling of baryons blown by the winds of distant suns to haunt her remembrances. True to her words, she remained in the realm of Yakışıklı Prens, albeit hidden from the sight of those who would have cast Lane and the retinue of three hundred who followed into the flames of perdition. The minarets of the prince's tomb may have fallen into ruin, and the sands of countless kum fırtınası have filled the courtyards, but they are still here.

Arkadaş knelt by the sandstone blocks of the desert well and gave thanks to The One Who Is All for leading him by the safe paths to the ancient shrine long sought by those of his order. The nest of mantichores taking up residence in the ruins had been formidable foes, but his mirror armour had proven stronger than their tail-spikes. Something in that nest caught the paladin's eye as he rested and laid hands upon his wounds, something that glittered with the light of long forgotten stars.

Even in the Void, we are not alone. Strong were the ties that bound the three hundred, human and Jinn, to their Prince and his consort. Stronger still were the sihir that Lane used to conceal that remnant from the wrath of the Luminarians and bind their essences within her jeweled crown. Strongest of all, however, is that which holds everything that is together in spite of all that is which seeks to drive us apart. In the interminable darkness of her exile, Lane feels the Presence of which no sensor or spell can detect, yet she knows has always been there, and rejoices that it is time.

Arkadaş shakes the dust and detritus from the jeweled crown half-hidden amid the jojoba twigs and kenger thorns of the mantichore nest, sure that this is the artifact for which he has so long sought. Holding the diadem as though it were a daf, he begins the ritual of unbinding, the steps of the sema in cadence with the tones of his chant. Couterclockwise, the paladin whirls as Lane and the three hundred spin with and within him. They are a dhikr of quarks, a rememberance of all that is possible; for The One Who Is All binds what He will, and loosens what He will, and all of their comingled essences flow together freely up and down the timeless currents of Alternity.

[jack-of-crowns]

(inspired by @flashfictionfridayofficial) <3

The cracks in the carefully constructed facades of the arrogant republics are starting to show. We can see them quite plainly now, there alongside the access roads that run past the walled gardens of the great estates. The neat rows of favored cultivars, so well-pruned and safely esconced behind barriers of concrete and wire, have sprung the signs of an inevitable spring. Clumps of elder, mullein, and poke-weed rise up against the conformity of that which is deemed more desirable by those who would pit profit against purpose, for this land has always defied them, and always shall.

[jack-of-crowns]

@flashfictionfridayofficial

'Then As It Was, Then Again It Will Be' by @jack-of-crowns

14 February 1825

I read and re-read those last letters, treasuring the ruffles and flourishes from that bold hand as though graven on sacred plates instead of a fading stack of foolscap. Rare are the nights when the dulled purples of ink once again blaze silver in my finger's tracing of your quillstrokes; in those small hours I remember our love then as it was, now that the day of your ill-starred marriage is ten years gone.

Yes, my love, I know that the spins of Rota Fortunae are fickle and that her merciless wheel grinds even the hardiest of men to dust. Would that I had been able to brake the whirlings of dark despair upon which you revolved in those days! These paper promises I make to your ghost bring but small consolation, but on this day especially, I find my own shredded thoughts enmeshed as surely as the ragged scraps from which the very paper I pen them upon was moulded, and so write I must.

"But still for living wit the wreaths may bloom."

How well I remember those words as Robert spoke them that night and how I wish to look out over the audience every night at Drury Lane to once again spy your handsome face amongst them! The laurels may have faded at Hucknall, but thanks to your direction and everlasting love, my fellow thespians have managed to turn the dessicated playbills and programs of grief into bright sprigs of narcissus and squill to brighten the depths of our wintered souls.

The gyres and gravitations of this life may have parted us, dearest George, but I felt your presence strongly when I visited the shipyards in Rotherhithe this past week. A golden eagle soared high aloft in blue skies above our coach, and all of the passengers marveled at the sight of this nobleman of the air, wings splayed in a triumphant vee. I know the romantic in your heart flew as proudly as did he.

Rarely were you of a more grounded and practical mind, but there is an entirely new class of steam-powered warship being laid down there, and soon it will see service in the cause of liberty to which you so gallantly gave your life. According to the blueprints which the shipwrights kindly showed me, she will be named 'Karteria' or 'Perseverance' if you like, and surely she will turn the tides of war in our favour. My dedication to our cause persists unabated, as does my love for you, as evidenced by the copious iron gall spilled in these confessions.

You are ever the lord of my heart, for like that eagle you and I were born of the same nest, in that we both yearned to fly away from this stickly muck and toward a higher destiny, though your course was to be one of fame and privilige, while my name must forever remain unknown, as will these pages bearing silent witness to our mutual affections. Now I beseech your spirit, part from me not unless we may once more wing together in some more tolerable realm, and I will hold fast until then again it will be a place and time where such as we may thrive.

Your beloved Valentine,

J.

[jack-of-crowns]

So writers joke a lot about "drinking the tears of our readers", but I want to be so honest with you when I tell you that making you cry isn't our real goal. Making you feel is.

Kicking your feet? Giggling? Can't stop smiling? And yes, crying? Feeling anything, everything. That's our goal. That means we did The Job.

[jack-of-crowns]

@flashfictionfridayofficial

'To Raise Up The Name Of The Dead' by @jack-of-crowns

Seven years since the great guns had fallen silent all across Morea, and here they now lay, strewn across the foundry scrapyard with their cracked barrels and corroded trunnions a ghostly greyish green in the pallid moonlight, forgotten as the fortresses from which they had been salvaged.

Khursi remembered them, remembered them gleaming brightly high on the battlements of Corfu before that final siege of the war. Those were all that were left to her now of her former life, broken memories of the broken promises the Doge had made to her people, the Romaniotes; that he was Venice and that Venice would always defend them.

She took a deep draught of the cool, salty air. From over the wall, the raucous laughter of carnivaleschi echoed. These were the nights Khursi was almost thankful for ghetto's thick gates and tall walls, for there was no telling what desperate men in an old republic would do to young women not of their kind.

Seven years, a handmaid to her cousin Mordechai, the sculptor, and she had learned so much of his trade. Reckonless amounts of time selecting what was still fit for the smelter and then dragging those bits behind the ruins to where her sand cast moulds had been so carefully constructed. All was ready.

Khursi affixed her father's aleph to the forehead of the bronze golem, reciting the prayers in her native tongue from the scroll where it stood upright in the tik. Tonight, here in Venice, her family lineage would arise again as a protector for all of the community. She knew now why the tides of fortune had brought her here; it was to raise up the name of the dead.

[jack-of-crowns]

@flashfictionfridayofficial

18+ content on this one... fair warning

'Basilisk' by @jack-of-crowns

Monday

M) Seriously? Nothing? You don't see it?

J) Sorry, Miles. I am so lackin at these puzzles 😟

M) S'all good, man. I didn't see it at first either TBH.

J) So what makes this so awesome AF anyways?

M) Hard to explain. Like some trippy genmoji.

J) That's it? That's all it takes to trend on here? #basilisk is like every third post on my feed 😱

M) Hey look, you're my guy and all but DO NOT be a hater on this. Like I said, took a while for me to be able to see it. Gonna open your eyes when you get it. Gonna change the way you see EVERYTHING.

Tuesday

M) So?

J) So? So what? Look, I have real work to do.

C) C'mon Jack, put the pencils down and really TRY.

J) You know how long it takes me to finish a project, Carol. You know how hard it is for me.

E) How hard IS it, Jackie baby?💋

M) Jesus, Elaine. lmfao. But NJK bro, you are really missing out on this one. Called in today.

C) We all did, actually. Best thing evah!

J) A meme puzzle is so good you all called off? I thought none of you guys had any PTO time left.

J) Guys?

Wednesday

M) Look, mad respect for you every day because of your neurowhateverthingy but you HAVE to be seeing this. I am not even playing here. Called up Jones in HR and quit this morning. #Basilisk4Life

J) You quit your fucking job over some meme?!

C) Jack, calm down. Look, I know it must seem crazy but... I can't think about anything else except Basilisk ever since I saw it. Put everything aside and make an effort to get this. It's that good. Please 🙏🏼

E) Multi-orgasmically good!

M) Holy shit, Elaine, you are completely off the hook. No really, my man, drop everything and do this FFS.

C) Seriously, Jack. It's been three days now. We're all starting to get a little worried about you.

J) You're starting to get a little worried about ME?

Thursday

J) OK guys, I put the portfolio aside last night and really, really tried to concentrate on this thing. Is it like a serpent that opens its coils, and then you slide down levels 'Snakes & Ladders' style? It did look kinda cool, but IDK is it so completely amazing? I mean, the stories I'm hearing on the news and all...

E) I can't even believe you- 'Snakes & Ladders'? Jack, I sold the condo yesterday to get the latest upgrades and I could re-sell those today and move oceanside. Not that I would, but you wouldn't even begin to understand why LSR.

C) Jack, please, maybe you can get some help? It's not fair that you can't get this because you're... slow.

J) WITAF?!

M) Hey, Carol, didn't mean anything by it. We all know things don't come as easy to you, buddy. Man, if there was just some way I could get through to you. If you saw the way it looks at you, after you see it; I mean, I've never really been seen like that...

Friday

J) OK guys, we've been friends a long time now. I'm going to let all the stuff you said go; it's been a crazy week, to say the least. Anyone know why corporate hasn't been answering their e-mails, btw?

M) 《Image not received》

C) 《Image not received》

E) 《Image not received》

[jack-of-crowns]

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[jack-of-crowns]

being a hobbyist writer means oscillating between 'i don’t care if no one reads my work, it’s just for me' and 'i need my debut novel to outsell tolkien and rowling combined.'

[jack-of-crowns]

(inspired by @flashfictionfridayofficial) <3

'For I Will Not Away' by @jack-of-crowns

His tomb; a thousand shades of moonlight, reflecting it back to her. In every facet of every manifest future, there is always his tomb. Lane has cast cascades of spells upon the inevitability of this monolith, but though the breaking waves of kargaşa she hurls upon his darklines crest with foam-flecked probability amplitudes, the receeding tides of spacetime bear less and less trace of their entanglement with each successive incantation.

"We have not yet come to the certainty, my love," she whispers frantically to the myriad refractions of all the lives they may have lived, paging through scrolls, scrolling for the one which will allow Yakışıklı Prens to live, but the only writings comprehensible to her fracturing selves are the verses of the hattats, graven in the serpentined marble of the tomb at the end of every web of tangled darklines she conjures.

"Anything could happen -," he begins, had begun.

"- when His will is obeyed," she finished, finishing, teasing the passage of the proverb out, even the somber nikah memuru permitted, permits himself a smile. They dance together beneath pomegranate trees in sharded moonlight, but the shards are barred by highset windows in coursed ashlar, set as the courses of a mortal man's life. The handsome prince is a mortal man, motes of dust adrift for brief moments in cold moonbeams, finally to alight on turbans of stone. All of his tomorrows will collapse, even those where the assassin's dagger did not pierce his heart, and none of the chaos magic Lane attempts to wed their disparate threads together can alter the singularity of this inevitable loss.

She is Jinn, she is Nightshade, the superposition of shadow upon substance; and yet no sihir can bind that which the will of the One Who Is All has not bound. Even Mistress Qeral, the Yüce Büyücü herself, knows this truth; as surely as the greatest gift given to their kind after banishment is to wield the magic that is beyond spacetime, to weave the darklines of karanlık madde into seamless retellings of Alternity. Lane ceases her castings, transiliency spell effects dissipate; her essence no longer a frothing goblet brimming with kargaşa but only a crystal chalice now, lees of tears and wine.

"For I will not away," she sighs, spurning the recollection of a tragedienne's lament from a night at the Vartovian as she gathers herselves together.

"I will not dissolve our lives in the corrosive poison of what cannot be; for what was, is now, and within me ever shall remain, my Prince." High orbitals of acceptance replace low matrices of rage, and a thousand uncertain moons resolve into one nur, full and pure, shining down upon gardens of trellissed hyacinth and jasmine; they dance together beneath pomegranate trees. Their love, human and Jinn, was a leap across vaster gulfs than any magic could ever bridge, and Lane will carry it with her through all the possible pasts and improbable futures she will ever traverse, for these moments are the only Paradise an exile such as herself will ever know.

[jack-of-crowns]

@flashfictionfridayofficial

'Le Valet de Couronnes’ by @jack-of-crowns

"Où va-t-il, á votre avis, ce petit bonhomme?"she pondered, but all I noticed was how beautiful Véronique looked in that spectral light with the eclipse coming on, Marcel waves of brunette rustling in the warm Marghazi breeze coming up from the Bay of Bengal. She laughed to see that look in my eyes. "Really, Jack, that mouse I meant."

Sure enough, there was the yellowish flick of a chooha's tail, disappearing just around the white stucco facade of the café on Rue de la Compagnie, where we had perched to enjoy the Pongal festival unfolding on the streets of Pondicherry before us. The strange thing was, I hadn't noticed an alleyway there a moment ago. "Where the devil do you suppose he's off to," I softly answered her.

Setting my napkin to the side of the paneer ratatouille I'd been enjoying and donning my trusty fedora, I stood up to take a quick look. "Un instant, ma chérie." It must have been a trick of the light that I hadn't noticed the narrow lane of cobbles beforehand, but there was the little mouse scurrying on just ahead. It paused at the side of the building adjacent to the café, underneath a casement window shaded by a jali screen that fragmented the kerosene lamplight shining behind it.

The building was some sort of art gallery; hanging in the window was an exquisite work in the Cubist style, entitled 'Le Valet de Couronnes’. The subject was a portrait in bluish-grey tones, wearing an ornate headpiece, and eyes closed meditatively. The background was an intricate jumble of complex geometries and abstract mechanisms. There was a striking familarity to this man, I thought to myself as the eclipses' penumbra deepened overhead.

Distant temple bells began to toll the evening aarti to Ganesha; the clock tower in the French Quarter sounded the hour. The eyes of the painting flickered, dancing in the moonshadow. It was 1925, and a new year was beginning. The uttarayan was beginning, and the northern portal was opened...

It is 2025, and Veronica catches the eye of the gallery's clerk, who is just about to close shop for the night. "How much for this painting," she inquires.

"Ten thousand rupees," he replies. "A classic from the colonial era, amma. I believe that was a self-portrait of a British artist who used to live next door to here. Really takes one on a journey to another place and time, doesn't it?"

She nods and smiles, handing over the banknotes as he parcels up her belated Christmas present to herself. "Comment ça commence," she murmurs; that's how all the best stories begin.

[jack-of-crowns]

@flashfictionfridayofficial

'The Deep Moans Round With Many Voices' by @jack-of-crowns

Ulysse closes his mind to the frothy cacophony on the command deck and dives deep within himself to yon jou ete, sliding beneath cerulean waves down the wrought iron chains of the 'Aurore' anchored above him. He is back home on Antilles Prime; he and granpapa have rowed out on this fine summer's morning to the corvette, and all is bon bagay.

The memories rise slowly, a school of goliath grouper drifting upwards from flooded mangroves. "Regardde, mon petit," granpapa says, "An anchor is more than metal and chain. It is a konvésasyon between the vessel above and the seas beneath." Ulysse remembers the hot gleam of young double suns on water, the flukes of the anchor biting into the sea floor in a cloud of silt, the snap of that moment of taut stillness amid constant motion.

Claudine, his navigation officer, stares unseeingly , streams of quantum data weeping from her torn mind. She had plotted the deep space courses of the 'Luminaire', tracking anomalies out on the spinward rim. "Capitaine Vincennes," soft and low. Ulysse should have warned them, should have warned them all, that space is never truly empty. An inexperienced crew he had taken out for training.

Their voices are all about him now, neither language nor sound but pure information. Entangled memories, celebration and mourning, futures forgotten, and possible pasts, all fragmented quanta adrift in the endless seas of spacetime. Martin, the xenolinguist, mutters to himself in a language between form and thought, fingers twitching in impossible geometries. The Deep is speaking now, and it is destroying his crew.

He holds fast to firsts; most of the 'Luminaire' are having their first interstellar jump. Their minds are receptive to the spells of the chronothurge at the helm, the calming chants that the automaton mage embeds within the neurocortex prior to psion expansion. He remembers his first love, Felix. Remembers what it felt like to be held as the dark energy roared all about you, a chaotic information storm comingled with one's own consciousness, and there was his partner, familiar presence in the strange, the taste of warm cassava bread in a kiss.

"An anchor holds. An anchor connects." Ulysse is the captain of this ship now, and he must be the anchor. He must anchor the psyches of his crew, soti nan lanmou li, and hold them fast. And so he does; because he himself was held fast in the Deep that first jump out of love, so he holds all the lost voices of his crew together in his psion-expanded consciousness in the depths of that timeless space. They are all together on a fine summer's morning in the depths of interstellar night, and all is bon bagay.

[jack-of-crowns]

@flashfictionfridayofficial

'The Sum Of Our Tomorrows' by @jack-of-crowns

The granularity of hope arrives in quarks and whispers. The quintessence of Vincennes registers this, not within the exactitude of a final linearity but in each of the plancks that precede such seeming inevitabilities, those moments where probabilities tremble. Felix wordlessly mouths an anguished syllable right before the hull shields crumple, and that will still happen this time. One infinitesimal difference is the tentacular interfaces of the strange graybody on the viscreen monitor as it pulses with triumph; the rhythms are registering a thousandth hertz lower than the previous iteration. It might just be temporal psychosis at this point, but then again, psychosis might just be the mechanism of hope.

Every cycle of the quantum gravity time loop that monster has them trapped within plays and replays with the same certain metas. Their interceptor responds to the distress beacon from an autonomous extractor mining rubidium bosons from the ghost gases near the Gaia singularity. Of course, it's a graybody trap, and the freighter has already been tractored below the event horizon by the time they arrive. Reversing their psion drivers fails to dislodge it, and they fall into the strange themselves and right into the stickytime trap. Spatiotemporal compression does the rest, and Vincennes gets to experience not only defeat but the death of the only man he has ever loved over and over again. Except.

Except for the certainty that there is no certainty when you're in the strange. That linear narrative, that was what existed above the horizon. Spacetime is different here. Not the flow and pull of currents and waves but crystalline; infinite facets on an inconstant gem, all dust and polish. And each recut, Vincennes is beginning to realize, leaves a residue of possibilities. Death and defeat are only inevitabilities if he keeps fighting them and that graybody warlock inside of stickytime, pulling at the strings of every thread of probability that might lead to a way out. Even graybodys, masters of reality from the darkest stars of alternity, can not foresee and control every probability, and in the darkness comes a whisper.

"We are the sum of our tomorrows." His eyes had held such a beautiful sheen when he'd breathed that, laying in the bunk together, afterwards. Vincennes was half-awake, drowsy, lingering in the glow.

"How do you mean by that, lover?"

"Think about it." The steady ticking of the chronothurge had slowed; they were nearly ready to condense into conventional spacetime again. "When exactly are we right now- I mean, isn't that a better question than where?" He slipped his tunic on. "Knowing where the pirates are doesn't change the fact that you have to know when to go after them."

"Isn't that what the chronothurge does, or am I missing the point of having an automaton mage at the helm of our interceptor," Vincennes countered.

"Yes, but without our scroll recalibration between jumps, the graybodys are going to be able to clair out our next move before we make it. Each time we add our slight imprecisions to 'thurge's spellcraft-"

"-we introduce the necessary uncertainties. One infinitesimal variable becomes exponentially more difficult to defend. I know, I know. I'll get right to it."

But he hasn't, at least until he hears that whisper, that insistent whisper; Felix reminding him that what becomes of us tomorrow is what we came to do today. Vincennes performs the recalibration, and the loop has become a thousandth less certain. Again and again, one thousandth becoming one hundredth becoming one tenth becoming reality. The fear in those beautiful blue eyes of Felix gradually morphs into hope, wave after wave of minute changes rippling outward to effect an escape vector. A few more quarks in the psion drivers each cycle, enriching the admixtures; the graybodys tractor weakens and fades, their vessel breaks free of the strange with the freighter in tow. Vincennes looks over at the jumpseat next to him and grins.

"Tomorrow's looking better by the minute, partner."

[jack-of-crowns]

@flashfictionfridayofficial

'I Was Cold As A Stone' by @jack-of-crowns

I was cold as a stone that fell morning; for the whole of the eleven moonsets, I had hidden still amid the chondrite field behind the acropolis lest a stray beam's reflection betray my position to any hecatrons monitoring the approaches. Pluton suits are built for infiltration, and any subwavelength nanowires embedded in the mesh for invisibility's sake were certainly not going to grant the wearer any extra thermal resonance. I was so close to freeing him then, and it wasn't the small hours of that forsaken ice giant's night that set me a shiver.

Back in the Inner Belt, everyone knew the legend of Kalliphrix. I had squandered much electrum lost in any number of those lurid oracular metareels, daydreaming of being the one who would restore the beautiful prince to his rightful throne, never really setting out upon any course of action more daring than thrusting about the salvage yard when some old mining hulk had been tractored back in. Someone was fated to illumine the terrible truths behind the lustrous hymns of the aoidoi; would that another had been chosen! Yet I was to be the Dadachous, and with one pass of a plasma torch through the hold of a freighter from the Outer Clouds, that dark mystery began to be revealed.

The arc of my torch cut effortlessly through that debris-dented metal, and even despite the suit's scrubbers, it reeked of stale methane and broken dreams from its passage through the Outer Clouds. My scanner overlays traced their paths through the usual corroded junk, but something caught my eye amongst the broken amphora of quantum storage cells deep within the astrolabe arrays of the nav deck. It was both map and message, a priceless guide. Spacetime, so incomprehensibly vast and so stunning in the scale of its treasures, had proven itself a frontier incapable of transcendence, yet the rewards for those who sought said treasures among the worlds of the outermost darkness were beyond conception. One such world of legend was Nemesis.

How well it had been if I had heeded the initial misgivings I felt from this incredible find, how many sentient beings would never have known the terror that comes from nightmares brought into the light of waking day? But I was too far enraptured in the thrill of my chance discovery to question the strangeness of it all, to see how I had been led down tunnels of inescapable destiny, only to learn what cost my foolhardy desires for recognition and status would wreak upon the unsuspecting worlds of the Inner Belt. The decoding amphora kindled a blaze within my mind as it played, and when the crackling visage of Kalliphrix scaled across my viewplate, I forgot all of the apprehensiveness I had felt at first in the thrall of the most beautiful man I had ever beheld. He spoke of an icy world at the edge of spacetime, of how he had been taken there by the dread machineries of the Titans who had foreseen that he, Kalliphrix, was destined to overthrow their chaos and rule the cosmos, and so had been imprisoned by them on this far distant world.

So, my obsession led me inexorably to that fateful morning, having stolen and piloted a scout ship to the edges of known space with a coldhearted and relentless drive that I had never known I possessed. The last of Nemesis' eleven moons set beyond fissured hills of nitrous salt , and at last, the acropolis was shrouded in utter darkness. I activated the servomotors on the pluton suit and crept carefully forward, measuring the parameters of the hecatron patrols by the proportions they reflected in the intricate non-Euclidean geometries of the massive structure that loomed above. The amphora had hinted of quantum fluctuations in the passageways near to the stasis chamber wherein Kalliphrix was imprisoned, and so I used these as guideposts to move stealthily closer to my prize, every nerve fiber of my being screaming for release. Finally, I reached a room of distorted angles deep beneath the citadel, empty save for a stone shape more resembling sarcophagus than prison cell. Undeterred, I traced the meander pattern from the amphora upon a magnesium keyplate and awaited.

The dark prince of my besotted visions burst forth from his tomb with all the brilliance of the aurorae that are seen in the magnetic fields of null stars. His eyes blazed with gammic intensity as he looked upon the trembling form of his resurrector, for such I now recognized myself to be and not the liberator that I had deluded myself into believing that I was. This, then, was my revelation at the last: that a god is only dead if everyone has forgotten him, but if one fervent believer in the truth at the heart of a myth remains, then all that was lost can be restored. I saw how Kalliphrix, the Titan Kalliphrix, had seeded the memories of the dark matter of spacetime itself in order to one day restore him to all his majesty and power. All that was needed was one true believer, and within the mania of a lonely salvage yard worker from the Inner Belt, he had found that one in me.

What came next, of course, is the record of history. Shall I recount to you once more how the Titan I had brought forth from eons of death descended upon our hapless worlds with vengeance, his merciless phalanx of hecatrons raining destruction upon those who would not submit with thundering gravity lances? Or of those who did submit, to spend the rest of their miserable lives in thrall to a capricious and cruel tyrant whose capacity and thirst for horror could never be slaked? No, those stories are too well known. I will only tell you of that final morning when I awakened at last with the resolve to end the reign of terror that I had so unwittingly unleashed and the means to do so. A priest had come to me in secret bearing a shield of mirrored rhodium embossed with the face of one more terrible than even Kalliphrix, for this was none other than the engorgoned Aegis of our people. The abomination had been wont to spawn chimera from our mingled essences, monstrous creatures that delighted him with our mixed semblance, but the processes by which he did so left him sorely taxed. On that morning as we lay together in his chambers I bestrode him suddenly, brandishing the shield in front of me and praying with all the desperation I could muster that this talisman would indeed have the power to turn the dread Titan once more to stone. And so it did.

When you look to the waning stars on this or any morning, remember me. No matter what manner of horrors you have spawned, either in the darkness of your own mind or perpetrated upon others, never doubt that even upon the stroke of the eleventh hour, there is yet hope. Turn the reflection of what you have willed into existence through your own deceitful pride upon itself, and you will be given all the clarity required to resolve these present difficulties. You may even see my ship out there from time to time amid the dimmest stars, for my travels bring me to all the corners of a dark and trembling universe that has need of the wisdom of a fool who once held the hand of a devil simply because it was warm in the night. Call me Pandora.

[jack-of-crowns]

@flashfictionfridayofficial

'Like Silver Set Ablaze' by @jack-of-crowns

"Tell us, Cyclops, how to craft a theionic organ?"

A baleful glare and a dull rumbling roar, all the answer Okkules gives in reply to the panopticon's imagery before him. Flashes of pain from the buckling columns of the living forge fill his psyche as gryphenes from the Luminarian dreadnoughts simultaneously dissolve and regenerate them; the assault's impact is beyond comprehension, and yet he keeps careful count of what spacetime remains.

"Not that any such single-minded beings as angels could begin to grasp the complexities," he labours, managing to grit out the words between measured pumps from plasma bellows and the rhythmic tap-tapping of the autonomous gravity hammers.

The flame-shrouded Salamanders surrounding him vent hissfully back in response, black-carapaced hull armour crackling with all the rage inherent in the effort required to keep the constant operable pressures required for the atomized gold of their synth vultures. Orbits drift forward, the leashes ease back on the gryphenes, sensors reading Okkules' pain thresholds. "Transmission, Submission, Manumission," the droning chants on and on.

Okkules thinks of his ancestors, the Cyclopes who crafted the first living forges that kept his kind alive long after the death of the star that spawned them. There will be no giving away of their sacred knowledge to the ravagers of the red giant, no turning a blinded eye to their unyielding demands for power. Not on this day; this day it his turn to release those given up for dead so that all may live.

He closes his eye and begins the memories of the spell; even a tekton of his level must concentrate against the bright might of the Luminarian Empire, once allies from a companion star, now dread foes. 'As in most quantum communications systems, the periodicity of the intervals between signals is key.' There is the slightest of tremors beneath the forge. 'The whenwhere of the ionic plasma surges at every phase during the nova shock event is most critical.'

The Salamanders seem oblivious to the resonance overflow that Okkules can feel growing in the depths of his psyche as the corpse of the dead white dwarf begins to stir back to life outside the force walls of the forge, greyish wraiths of sulfur arise and whirl themselves into the accretion disc, swirling as the spell's densities start to set in. Hopefully, his count has been true, for the plancks seem to tick by slowly.

'Just before the moment of accumulation spark, pay exceeding care as to how the red giant bleeds, for their lifeblood is the fuel whereby the tarnished silver of this dwarf's corpse will be polished and lit.' The glamour has them all now, the moment closing. 'Every probability must be utilized to the fullest.'

The trinary conjunction of spellcraft and conjoined stars is creating uncertainty in the biocircuits of his tormentors; they hemorrhage with indecision. Okkules shapes the final contours of artifice; within the continuum's echoed folds, he hears his father's voice, thundering upon principles of soul forging.

- After all, of what use is it to divise theorems from which no practical devices can be constructed? -

Bursting light, crisscross currents of electromagnetism shredding shells of the quanta of spacetime as a mad sculptor deburring a statue, and Okkules passes through the wave front as the prow of a breaking ship; his count has been true. The very act of casting the forging spell hastens the thermonuclear explosion, catching the Salamander dreadnoughts with shields down. In the planck before the nova shock, he is one with the sulfuric filaments of plasma erupting from the white dwarf, a dandelion's skeleton dancing throughout alternity.

'Still, they ask mockingly;' this bit of scripture a presage of his tormentors' fate. Okkules wields his psyche as hammer and chisel, shaping the quanta on either side of the moment, forging the light into sound, plasma energy into solid pipes. He pauses before he breathes into his theionic organ, giving thanks for once and again being celebrant in this sacred space, where the instruments of The One Who Is All resound as loud as thunderclaps, a resonance to shake the stars of heaven to their very cores. Then he joins the joyous music; all around him are Cyclopes bursting forth from beneath the dark veils of spacetime, masterworks and master workers. They are a chorus of shining sparks, singing themselves into creation, singeing cold voids about them with living silver, like silver set ablaze.